Are you crazy enough? When to ignore your mentors

Having been on both sides of the table on this many, many, times.. I have a strong appreciation for the gray area between driven and delusional.

Steve’s tests are a great mental model for gut-checking, but I *will say this*: most good mentors will recognize driven genius when they see it, and are happy to step back, let you run your experiments (that’s all they are, right?), and drum up actual *data* to prove them wrong.

If an experienced mentor is really digging his/her heels in and insisting that I’m headed down the wrong rabbit-hole, it would give me pause enough to design an experiment to test his/her hypotheses.

Are You Crazy Enough?
What we suggest to teams in the classroom is the same as I suggest to teams in real world startups – after customers and experienced people are telling you it won’t work –

  1. Are you passionate enough to still believe?
  2. Can you explain after why getting out of the building and hearing all the negative news you still want to persevere?
  3. Will it change the world enough to make it worth the trials, travails and pain in getting there?

If so, ignore the other voices. The world moves forward on those who are dissidents. Because without dissent there is no creativity. A healthy disrespect for the status quo coupled with passion, persistence and agility trumps everything else.

- Steve Blank

Entrepreneurship always comes with a healthy dose of reality-distortion, but it’s dangerous to rely on it any more than is absolutely necessary. There’s no reason to relish delusions of grandeur: grand data is more fun :)

Startups and Secrets - Class Notes from Peter Thiel’s CS183

blakemasters:

Here is an essay version of class notes from Class 11 of CS183: Startup. 

“Capitalism and competition are antonyms.” That is a secret; it is an important truth, and most people disagree with it. People generally believe that the differences between firms are pretty small. They miss the big monopoly secret because they don’t see through the human secrets behind it. Monopolists pretend that they’re not monopolists (“Don’t regulate us!”) and non-monopolists pretend that they are (“We are so big and important!”). Things only tend to look similar on the surface. 

The power law secret operates similarly. In one sense it’s a secret about finance. Startup outcomes are not evenly distributed; the follow a power law distribution. But in another sense it’s a very human secret. People are uncomfortable talking about inequality, so they either ignore it or rationalize it away, and it becomes a secret.

The distribution secret also has two sides to it. Distribution is much more important than people think. That makes it a business secret. But it’s a human secret too, since the people involved in distribution work very hard to hide what’s going on. 

II.  The Next Secret

Probably the biggest secret—bigger than monopoly/competition, power law, or distribution—is that there are many important secrets left. This used to be a convention forty or fifty years ago. Everyone believed that there was much more left to do. But generally speaking, we no longer believe that. It’s become a secret again.

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Awesome read. I’ve believed this for a long time - though Peter states it much more eloquently!

I have to say I disagree with some of his perspectives on secrets.. at least the way they’re explained here: I think secrets are more subtle than depicted, and I think “knowing” a secret in the sense of a startup company is many times more akin to “knowing” an art, like Kung Fu, than “knowing” a fact, like the boiling point of water. It is not trivial to copy brilliance.

About that Chip on Your Shoulder… (via @msuster)

- chip on your shoulder, “I’m going to change the world, just try and stop me” = good.
- chip on your shoulder, “Investors are all lemmings and I’ll prove it”  = not so good. Even when you don’t say it out loud – it shows.

Another gem from Mark Suster. Make sure to read the whole thing.

When I started investing I forgave this attitude and sympathized with the fact that many investors really don’t have a clue as compared to the entrepreneurs who pitch them. Like Mark, I like entrepreneurs with the “chip on the shoulder”, folks with a lot to prove.

Fortunately I realized that being upbeat, undaunted, and undeterred in the face of abject failure is a key success factor for any entrepreneur. Holding onto baggage / scar tissue portends distraction at best, failure at worst. Reminds me a bit of Peter Thiel’s (awesome) lecture on wars.  

Failure is an opportunity: to learn, adapt, “pivot”, and -most importantly- bounce back with spring in your step. Always look for the gold lining.