Takeaways From Our 22 Extraordinary Horizons Summer Speakers
1. Marleen Vogelaar (Shapeways, Ziel)
Perhaps the most memorable takeaway was that there is no big turning point or insight when you’re creating a new company. Reporters, biographers and storytellers like to associate specific dates to major events.
But really, the major moments in your company’s history will happen progressively, over the course of several months of hard work and incremental learning.
2. Florent Crivello (Uber)
We asked him what it was like to work at Uber. He told us about their unique culture that encourages disagreement and bold initiatives, and how that’s helped them to remain lean and move fast even at scale.
He shared his story and how he started to code when he was just 13 and reassured our students by telling them that everything always breaks all the time!
3. Bing Cheng (YouTube, Google, Victorious)
We talked about Bing’s principles of success. His dream in life since he was 10 was to be the next Disney and Oprah.
He interned at Disney, realized that he could not go through the system if he was going to do big things fast enough, so went to YouTube which was the new platform for wonder around the world and then built his own way. Bing wants to help people 18–25 better self-actualize. He is creating his own religion. That’s his mission.
“When you die, what is the single thing you most want to have accomplished?”
Bing’s goal was to impact people emotionally, which is why he chose to work in entertainment. There’s nothing more powerful.
4. Fred Ehrsam (Coinbase)
Fred gave us an overview of Bitcoin and why it matters and will start to matter much more.
He also emphasized how the time he spent working on failing ideas for 4–5 months were very important.
He doesn’t believe that joining a startup is risky, especially when you’re young.
“You should just do it.”
5. Jake Paul (Team 10)
As a young social media celebrity and entrepreneur with 15 million followers living in Los Angeles, the distractions are everywhere. But Jake says no to almost everything. He doesn’t really go out nor does he drink that much. He stays focused. Which always involves sacrifice.
One of the moments when Jake really impressed the class most was when he showed us his weekly schedule printed out and taped to his wall. Every hour was planned and thought out. Ruthlessly. Between his Disney show, his company Team 10, his daily workouts and all of his other projects his days are very full but he somehow finds the time for it all by approaching his day with great discipline.
6. Jesse Beyroutey (IA Ventures)
Jesse centered a lot of his talk around the concept of ego constraints.
Behaviors that we have that make us feel like we can and cannot do certain things.
He encouraged us to keep asking why. For example:
“I can’t drop out of school…”
“Why?”
“Because then my mom won’t be happy.”
“Why do I think that? Why do I care about that?”
You should keep asking why until you end up repeating yourself and getting to the real core reason.
He shared anecdotes of personal experiments he’s run and told us about Vipassana Meditation.
7. Christina Sass (Andela)
Christina shared her founding story: she remembers listening to young people talk about how they couldn’t get jobs.
Everyone tends to feel unprepared when they graduate.
She knows that their training has to be world class or the business model won’t work. Christina tells Andela’s graduates that they are going to compete with Berkeley grads.
Wants to build up huge regional campuses in Lagos and Nairobi.
“Brilliance is evenly distributed, but opportunity is not.”
8. Ken Baylor (Stealth Worker)
Ken talked about cybersecurity and why it matters increasingly today.
People hacking into the democratic national national congress fund.Malware on Hilary Clinton’s laptop. Nobody’s giving this news the coverage it deserves.
He learned an important lesson in his career: don’t collect it if you can’t protect it.We should all encrypt our laptops and out stuff in general.
We have all been hacked. We should get something like LastPass as a password manager.
There are 1 million open jobs in cyber security in the country…
9. Robert Moore (RJMetrics)
In sharing his bootstrapped entrepreneurial story, he decided to talk about one decision every year.
Not going to talk about the things that went well. The mistakes he made are more interesting.
At the beginning, he made things and did crappy deals — wasn’t too experienced in business.
Robert talked about the huge amount of social pressure when you’re starting a business without funding and everyone takes a more traditional path.
He worked at Insight Venture Partners and discovered a lot of different times of businesses. Bootstrapped, not in the major cities… Venture Capitalists demonize those businesses but that’s their problem. As a founder you should not be afraid to do it differently.
He’s gotten into the habit of every day writing the highest leverage things he can do that day.
“What would he want / need to do if he could only get one thing done?”
“What is the most important thing for the business that I am uniquely positioned to do?”
Robert also does standup comedy, which has helped with going to networking events and going up to strangers. It also caused his brain to take a different and more productive shape, to be extremely open to the possibility that everything can be interesting.
10. Alex Konrad (Forbes)
Alex started by talking about Chris Sacca, the famous early stage investor that he profiled for Forbes. Back in the day when Chris worked at Google, he would just stay in Sergey Brin’s office, find excuses to hang out there and when big meetings would happen he would be there.
“The dream of an investor it to get rich helping your friends. To be there along for the ride.”
Chris Sacca’s best deals, those that made his career were never fiercely competitive deals. All his biggest companies were companies that no one else wanted to invest in.
The way he thought about it — I have a limited amount of time to meet with companies. How can I be better than my peers? By seeing something that they don’t. By not being afraid to bet on really weird, smart people.
Alex talked about exposing yourself to chance. He encouraged the class to go to SXSW, Summit, and all these important reunions. That’s where the “Jam Sessions” started, during which the whole crew — Gary Vaynerchuck, Tim Ferriss, Travis Kalanick — got to know each other well.
11. Bob Moul (Cloudamize)
Bob started at the bottom of the totem pole, running printers. He made friends with people and they asked him: “Do you want to try out for the other job?”
Experienced, talented, senior people were trying out for these jobs. He had no experience. During the team interview it was you against 8 people in the room. Bob said he didn’t even need to look at the list of other candidates, that he was going to finish number 1.
When the interviewers told him “We’re done” Bob answered “No, we’re not done. I’m not leaving this room until you give me one of the 10 jobs.”
From then on Bob worked his way to the top, smashing through doors with the same grit.
He shared thoughts on what makes highly effective entrepreneurs.
Unrelenting positive attitude
High energy / strong work ethic
High pain/stress/risk tolerance
Supremely confident but self aware (people who are tuned into themselves and can learn)
Wildly optimistic but always questioning
Tenacious but willing to pivot
Focus on results vs being right (are we solving the problem? Are we getting results?)
Accept full accountability
12. Danielle Strachman (1517)
14 years ago, Danielle knew she wanted to be a VC. Of course at the time that was completely out of the norm. Now everyone wants to be a VC.
Danielle encouraged us to just say yes to things and explore because life is strange and takes you to unexpected places. You may very well find yourself in a career that you had not anticipated. People switch around a lot these days — rarely do people hold a job position longer than 2–5 years.
Her advice for young people starting a company: ask yourselves, why are you doing this? Kids nowadays are jumping on the bandwagon without really caring about the problem it is they are supposedly solving. Like delivery apps… Danielle does not like them. Just get up and get those groceries yourselves! Solve real problems! A lot of people are starting companies because it’s cool to be an entrepreneur. Do it for more than that. Wait until you must start a company because you care so much about what you’re doing.
13. Michael Dearing (Harrison Metal)
We talked about cognitive distortions, this idea that everyone might be wearing goggles with certain kinds of distortions which affect the way we approach life and that founders have certain kinds of goggles that make them approach and take in the world in a particular way.
Personal exceptionalism for example, in that they take unexpected, wacky risks in their area of study of jobs. Also being highly opinionated with what is called in psychology “black and white thinking.”
Given the limited amount of time that Michael gets to spend with each founder, he asks about their life stories, about origin stories. How they made the choices they made, about their childhoods, about their lives, their failures and what they thought went well.
Exceptional people can’t hide from behind their paper trail of life decisions.
14. Peter Boyce (General Catalyst)
Every day is another opportunity to reinvent yourself. Peter’s high school friends are shocked that he is so well put together these days. He’s changed a lot and improved upon himself.
If you can, have a long term perspective to relationship building. You have the rest of your life to figure it out. Down the road what you do today will come back. It’s the karmic system, the pay it forward mentality.
You should always be learning. Over-index on things that matter.
Have a bias towards action and exploration.
15. Danny Cabrera (visit to BioBots)
We toured the BioBots office on Penn’s campus and saw how they print live tissue.
More and more, a small team with limited resources can have a worldwide impact.
They printed a real ear.
16. Dan Portillo (Greylock)
Dan is an expert on hiring / interviewing and talked about some things that people do well and poorly and how he thinks about building his team.
He likes asking people for the thing that they’ve worked on that they’re most proud of.
In thinking about which team to join, he encourages us to work with exceptional people, to look at founders and executive team. Have they had record of success? You should always shoot for being the worst person on the team.
Compensation doesn’t matter that much in your first few jobs. Find a job that will expand your network — he has met POTUS and CTO of Facebook in the past few years. You will be amazed by the things your network can do.
Work with great people and do a really great job. Be worth more than you cost. Should be an order of magnitude difference. Do the work. 22–23 year olds talking about work life balance — that’s nonsense.
People switch jobs every 2 to 3 years. Future jobs will come from your network. Identify and develop mentors. Guard your reputation. First thing before you take a meeting should be to back channel the individual.
17. Mike Maples Jr (Floodgate)
Mike talked about how he approaches investing. It’s all about Power Law.
“The number 1 startup in any given year generates half the profits or more… And the top 10 companies out of 10,000 generate 97% of the profits.”
Startup investing is all about finding those top 10 companies in 1 year. There is nothing else. It would be irrational to focus on anything else and to compete with the remaining 9,990 companies on 3% of profits.
“You should either start one of these top 10 companies or join one.”
Mike seeks to invest in Thunderlizards, radioactive eggs that have the potential of swimming across oceans, growing into powerful beasts and ravaging cities. He looks for founders with that explosive potential.
18. Dennis Mortensen (x.ai)
Dennis is the CEO of x.ai, an automated scheduling assistant.
He believes entrepreneurship is a lifelong career. You should not just jump in when you feel it, but instead commit to it for the long term. You should be aware that there will be many failures but also big wins.
Dennis believes there will be big changes in the User Interface of products. The major paradigm shift will be that software will not be the technology that just assists us in doing the job, but will actually do the job.
X.ai is leading the way into that new age.
19. Chris Cera (Arcweb)
Chris had something in his own gut that told him he could never tell investors: “I lost your 500k” even if they knew that’s the risk of Venture Capital. He didn’t want to raise money.
Today he still owns 100% of Arcweb. He doesn’t pay himself a lot and he has very little turnover in his employees — they are extremely loyal.
TechCrunch, VentureBeat, all those tech publications are the porn of entrepreneurship.
Chris loves building a company in Philadelphia. He understands that no Snapchat or other fancy consumer company will come out of here because there’s no Andreessen Horowitz to give it $1 billion pre-revenue. But there are massive industries here. He chose finance and healthcare because they are here. Philly is a B2B town. Penn Medicine and others are billion dollar companies, but no one talks about them.
He likes to walk by buildings in Philly with his team and say: “We’re still not in there. How do we get in there?”
He thinks Philly has the best combination of quality of life and business opportunity.
20. Laks Srini (Zenefits)
As the co-founder of one of the fastest-growing companies of all time, Laks discussed the complexities of scaling fast.
When you hire someone, you have to deal with a lot of BS. He has a 30, 60, 90 day rule in hiring people, making sure they reach certain milestones.
It felt like every day the company was going to die. Everything you could imagine broke.
You’re never as great as they say you are. You’re never as bad as they say you are. Just put your head down and focus.
Find people that you really like working with to do the hard things with.
21. Moisey Uretsky (Digital Ocean)
Moisey shared his story and was very open about the fact that it’s been very messy. He’s made a lot of mistakes.
He strongly believes in finding answers in books. What is the right book to read at the right time? It’s all been done so look for the answer in books. There’s no point in making the same mistake twice.
Moisey is a big fan of Burning Man and encouraged us to remember how uninhibited a 3 year old child is. Everything you were told to do or not to do was made up by some person.
We all developed our fears and should learn to let go of them.
22. Farhan Thawar
Farhan embodies the growth mindset . He changed the way he approached people he surrounded himself with and always wants to make sure that he’s the dumbest person in the group.
Back in school, he made a point to take the hardest classes, because that’s where the smartest people would be. He started seeking out challenges and difficulty unlike most people.
Farhan also believes in having a very focused approach to work. In the company culture that he’s developed, when you work, you work and when you rest, you rest.
He works from 9 to 6 in person. At 6:01, he leaves and doesn’t do work but focuses 100% on his family. He knows he’ll be much more productive and happier by taking real breaks.
Walk or sprint. Never jog.
Thank you to Isabella Gong of Horizons Summer 16 for her notes and help in putting this post together.
Thank you for reading.
If you found value in this post, please share the love by clicking the ❤ button so more people can see it.
Horizons is a technology school that finds the most promising young people around the world and gives them all the advantages they need to launch their successful careers in tech.
