Recently, I got to chat with another highly-accomplished Olin alumni. He’s had a wide variety of experiences — he started out in management consulting before cofounding and selling a startup, and he now heads up Product Development at a large public company.
Because of his clear expertise in the field of startups, as well as his pretty broad path, I asked him an array of different questions aimed at probing into all the different parts of his journey.
I’ve isolated my top 2 takeaways below:
1. Want to be a first-time cofounder? Don’t.
Of course, there are many successful first-time cofounders in history, so I don’t see this as a strict rule of thumb at all. Nevertheless, my mentor brought up a few salient points, borne out of personal experience:
- First-time founders make an inordinate amount of mistakes, all of which severely hamper your chances of bring the startup to a successful exit.
- A great way to overcome this is to instead join a small (30 > people) and fast-growing (“rocket-ship”) startup, where you have close access to the founders. That way, you can maximize learning, and avoid making huge rookie-level mistakes on your own first startup attempt.
If he could turn back time, my mentor would have actually preferred this route — his first startup had a successful exit but was fraught with initial difficulties due to founder inexperience.
2. Near perfect success demands near perfect discipline.
For my mentor, he visualizes his support core as a 3-legged stool, with the following legs: sleep, exercise, and healthy eating. This support core energizes him, and he never compromises on it. For example, he religiously sleeps 7 hours a day (even during his entrepreneur days!), and if he fell behind he would fanatically try to catch up.
The other thing he mentioned was that he cuts his entertainment down to a minimum, including activities like hanging out with friends, etc. For him, it isn’t a question of trying to juggle an active social life with a high-flying career. He just decided that cutting the social aspect short would help him to optimize for everything else.
Conclusion
Point number one really sticks to me. It’s sound advice and often overlooked. Point number two really impressed upon me the need for extreme self-control to achieve extreme success. I’m not sure if I can achieve that within the next year or so, but I’m definitely going to try.
