Advice from Top 50 Founders and Entrepreneurs

Advice from Founders

“I think my biggest tip is just get started, I meet a lot of young entrepreneurs who have good ideas or bad ideas or some ideas and you don’t wanna be a person who just talks and talks and talks you have to actually go and do something and don’t worry about if it’s the perfect thing or not there is this myth of entrepreneurship that you’ll have the one genius idea and suddenly everything falls into place it doesn’t work like that it’s a hard slog there’s a lot of things to do wrong a lot of things you’ll do right the sooner you get started the sooner you’ll get somewhere you know one of the things that I tell people when they ask me for advice about what they should do when they’re wanting to start their own business or take a next step in their career is to actually start small I think a lot of people try to they kind of psyched themselves out or they get too overwhelmed with how big something can get but the truth is you really just got to start small and you got to prove it before you scale it if I had to choose one thing that really motivates me that I can recommend to a lot of young entrepreneurs it’s having that finding and understanding why you’re doing what you’re doing they’re having a sense of purpose because oftentimes I meet so many aspiring entrepreneurs and they have these great ideas but they don’t even know why they’re doing money should be a byproduct of what you love to do try to do something that you would want to do anyway whether it’s uh it doesn’t necessarily have to be a very successful business because when you do decide to become an entrepreneur and start a business chances are it’s not going to do it’s not going to become like a multi-million dollar business so at least do something that you love in the beginning so that even if it fails you’d still enjoyed it make sure you choose you know when you’re trying to decide whether or not an idea is good enough to pursue or a particular business is something you want to want to go forward with make sure that it’s the type of business that when you’re standing in the shower it’s the thing you want to think about for the next 10 or 20 years basically the theory is we’re all born thinking like entrepreneurs you know like when we crawl and we start and we fall you know we’re trying to walk we figure it out entrepreneurs always figure out you’re born thinking like an entrepreneur that you know what I’m gonna figure this out regardless and I’m gonna keep now often the challenges families and friends convinced you not to be an entrepreneur because when you say I’m going to change the world moving the most famous person I’m gonna save the seals they say don’t do that you it didn’t happen before it’s never having you’re gonna you’re gonna you’re gonna fail you can embarrass us I put the limiters on it they put the limit they put the blinders on you but true entrepreneurs will just keep figuring it out and you know what everybody wants to hear what they already believe to be true and so the last thing they want to hear is an original idea that contradicts their belief system so it’s very hard to even bring that kind of stuff up but those are the things those are the only things things that you believe that everybody around you doesn’t believe when you’re right that create real value in the world everything else people already know there’s no value created it’s just business as usual so it’s so important to think for yourself don’t solicit feedback on your product your idea or your business just for validation purposes be really careful about that you want to tell the people that can help move your idea forward but if you’re just looking to your friend coworker husband wife for validation be careful because out of love and concern a lot of people will express some concerns and it can stop a lot of multi-million dollar ideas right in their tracks in the beginning because if you build something for yourself if you build something that you love that you think is sufficiently epic if you make something that you love there’s probably not a billion people in the world that love it as well you need to focus on solutions not ideas all of us here are really creative and we come up with loads of ideas throughout the day and we become really excited about that as a dude we should start a company around that that’s when you actually go to the other side where you talk to over you you know find out what someone actually a problem a problem that they have and solve that is is when you know real value comes out and I think where is the opportunity the opportunity lies always lies in the place where people complain some people sit there complained you think if I can solve that complaint that’s the opportunity I would say that the lesson learned for me to anybody else out there interested in starting a business is please find something you’re passionate about because it’s so much work it’s so much time it’s so much effort but if the subject matter is something that you you genuinely love to be involved with it’s it’s not going to be that big of a drag and it’s not going to be that bit much work it’s going to be incredibly exciting and rewarding because to your point you’ll feel like you’re living your the life that you’re meant to live be great at one thing the world will reward your knowledge of a very narrow field be world class at one thing forget your weaknesses because somebody is going to eat your lunch at the stuff you’re not good at and I got can’t stress this enough choosing your partner’s has got to be maybe the most important decision you’ll ever make whether you know personally and love or otherwise in business you can change your idea you can pivot your company you can’t change your partners without starting over and so I see so many people rushing into these relationships I mean you should really give that a lot of thought this is something that hopefully you’ll last years so today you should think okay my co-founders do we do we cover a lot of surface area do we have different skill sets and is it somebody that that I trust fundamentally and that’s those are really really really important questions to ask yourself because if so they give a really strong foundation to go forward and you have to decide if you’re going to be a slow-growth company or get big fast company because any time you try to straddle those two lines painful things happen to you everybody thought we were crazy we probably were crazy but having a dream like that that resonates with people changing the world achieving something big it turns out that’s what pulls you through the hard times every company has a heart as hard times every company has setbacks and it’s having that that that mountain in the distance that you’re trying to scale that is what gets everybody through and if you’re really trying to achieve something then so to say hey here’s my vision and I’d like to say be obstinate about your vision but be really flexible about your tactics what does that mean it’s sort of like think big act small what that means is it’s important to have a vision of where you’re trying to go how you get there is a series of experiments now you can call them a failure is when they don’t work but they’re learning experiments where you try things see what works try the next thing if you’re gonna start your own thing you know maybe you have a grand grand vision of like all the different features it’s gonna have and all the different you know revenue lines you’re gonna do and you know keep keep that vision but do one piece of that first and do it really really really well it’s so much better to do a few things well then many things poorly people really love simplicity so if you look at the problems with large software like Microsoft Office every feature in Microsoft Office somebody wanted at some time but what happens is over 10 or 20 years the thing gets so huge it’s overwhelming so the discipline of great product design is to figure out what are the important cases for the long term and to have the discipline to say no to some things that are good it’s easy to say no to things that are bad but great product design is saying no to some things that are good generally speaking you should resist the temptation of having too many features it’s all about either solving a problem or providing a value to a user so there are a number of decisions that we make every day and on a product side there are billion different features that we could make so the hard part is really choosing which ones to focus on which ones to build and you only have a finite number that you can’t actually execute on so for us a lot of it is just listening to the community and more importantly understanding you know what features they’re asking for but why are they asking for these specific things what’s the root problem they’re trying to solve or goal that they’re trying to achieve and a lot of that is based on actual behaviors so not just what they say but what they do you can’t ever sort of balance two completely contradictory things as a means of hedging you have to decide what are you going to believe in and put all of your energy behind that and that’s that’s the those are the kinds of strategic decisions and trade-offs that you make every day as an entrepreneur and it’s important that you create the level of clarity and conviction to go after an opportunity that isn’t hedging you know lots of different ideas or lots of different approaches because that’s the surest way that you’ll never be good at it sort of anything and I find even with myself that it’s really hard to do a Minimum Viable Product this minimum that you’re constantly thinking no no it really has to have this other partner really has to have this and then you over build and then you have to unbilled and D build which is very disappointing so doing a Minimum Viable Product is really important and it’s even more minimum than you think it is you’re really trying to solve a new problem in a different way you have to come to problems with beginner’s mind right not knowing something can be a very powerful tool in to accomplishing it because you don’t know that it’s not possible that’s what doing a start-up is not realizing that something is impossible and doing it anyway we get to create any company we want right we get to create the reason for its existence we get to create the rules of the game and who we hire and how we hire them and who can stay and who can’t stay right it’s beautiful and so I just would encourage everyone that as we all contemplate life to try to question the assumptions that we live by and the default options are to us and expand our thinking to wonder what we really can do with our lives and what our leaders look like first and foremost leaders always have a heard people always like following leaders maybe it’s their charisma maybe it’s their personality maybe it’s because they’re so in belief of what they say that you have the ability to convince people to buy into your vision not just for a paycheck it’s something more than that because great leaders they’d only have a herd they fight for their herd and the herd knows that that’s your job as entrepreneurs these are not employees that do your bidding these are partners that you should bring into your space and you should be treated like that and they should be treated like that with respect and with dignity but ultimately the biggest thing and I spill still spend from a third to a majority of my time on is hiring nothing has the impact of getting the right people around the table and you can’t manage your way out of a bad team values are who you are right you don’t have personal values professional values it’s really what you stand for and again there’s no black and white answer here there’s no right or wrong value but if you’re building a team or building an organization you want to understand your identity and then it mostly impacts hiring it impacts the way that you decide to add people to your team otherwise you can become very very split in terms of what your mission is and so some of the best advice I got was from Paul Graham one of the investors in stripe who talks a lot about unscalable strategies for user acquisition and say for example you helping each user personally sure that won’t scale as you grow to a very large size but when I start up is just starting out it really helps you have an advantage as a small and nimble company if you’re going to have a breakout startup you’ve really got to think about how you can innovate on distribution not just fondant right and the biggest mistake I see these days that I see brilliant startup founders who are brilliant product people and they’ve really thought about their product but haven’t really thought about how they’re going to make it grow and then they launch their product and it’s like crickets chirping no one no one’s using it and they’re kind of flummoxed as to what to do is they’ve never really spent time thinking about it and they just kind of assume that if you build a good product everyone’s going to find it and the reality is it’s a big web out there and that’s absolutely true you know I think what I see right now is people wrap up their sense of success and identity with their prowess and fundraising and comparing themselves against how their peers are doing I think that’s really the wrong way to look at things in it and it leads to kind of non optimal outcomes for instance I don’t know if the valuations that companies are getting today is necessarily healthy for the company themselves and for us again you know our inability to raise capital actually forced us to be very disciplined in how we think about the operational metrics of the company and that’s allowed us to you know be pretty successful and I think that’s what people always have to ask themselves do you believe in the concept of what you’re doing do you believe that there’s really there there you can figure out the right you know product package or the right way to reach users if you believe that then you don’t keep scrapping because usually there’s a way so it’s about this movement forward now what you own not your education or your pedigree not pile of resources you might have at hand not your network just going after this thing and knowing that as you do that you’ll find what you need you’ll make your way over around and through and I think the best entrepreneurs that I’ve met are able to do that because they have the strong vision and they know that it’s worth it to keep moving forward larger more established entities can’t move as quickly as you can and success and scale and size all fight against this and I would encourage you for the longest possible time as you sort of start your own companies to look for ways to stay agile so you know the most important thing you can actually advise yourself or anyone else ignore your mistakes what is your problem you’re good at some things just go do that the number one thing you should worry about is am i doing the things that I’m good at when you start with a your company you’re gonna have a lot of anxiety and stress and fear and your job is to transfer Matt into self-confidence and to give you kind of that you know the ability to say I have clarity I trust myself I have a feeling for my vision I can see that happening I work with entrepreneurs all the time that kind of shift from you know anxiety to trust that’s the most important thing that that they can go through bidding really great companies just takes a lot and it’s good to not try to do it too fast it’s really really really good to be ambitious obviously but it’s not that great to be too hasty be lucky I think when I give that advice be lucky it’s a little bit glib but I think there’s also looking out for those opportunities and being conscious and being aware and looking for opportunities to be lucky because you can definitely put yourself in a position where luck isn’t going to make any difference it’s not necessarily about the the exit or the outcome it’s it’s about the journey so it’s for me it’s just I think you just you just need to enjoy that aspect of it it’s you know because it’s not always an easy ride it’s a lot of ups and downs along the way but as long as you’re personally fulfilled by that experience and genuinely enjoy what you do then it makes it worthwhile I think you know if you know why you’re doing something and what it is that you’re trying to get then it’s a question of being very very open to failure and I’m and just you know trying again and again and again until you get it the beauty of failing is if you’re open to admitting the failure and learning from it you probably won’t fail again in that one department and you’ll know what to expect next time and that just makes you stronger and and more accurate with the risks that you take a rule of thumb is to only worry about the next order of magnitude so when you have 100 users worry about what the company looks like can it survive to a thousand a thousand ten thousand and so on and so forth if you’re worrying about the millionth user and their experience and how your technology is going to scale when you have 100 users your your point the wrong direction but we realized it pays to be a cockroach and by that I mean it pays just to not stop and just to not die like we thought you know everything along the way it tried to kill us right like all of our friends were like startups are dumb you’re dumb your ideas are dumb and we kind of just looked at all them and said whatever and built codecademy so it pays not to quit go talk to people who failed at what you’re doing and who are no longer doing it there always are those people so you started to startup you know you look at the history of your space I’m so surprised how many people I talk to is founder who have no idea the history of their own space and there’s some night there’s some nice naivete to that in the sense that like you’re gonna do it differently and and there’s some truth to that but like when you get down to to making it work and now you’re into it already you’ve kind of stylish what you’re doing you have some problems then I’d go talk to all these people who failed because you’ll uncover all sorts of interesting things that you could try you know I looked at lots companies and why I thought they don’t succeed over time we’ve had a more rapid turnover of companies and so what do they fundamentally do wrong like why are those companies all do wrong and they usually interests they missed the future and so I think for me I just tried to focus on that and say what is that future really gonna be and how do we create it I think great entrepreneurs must have the curiosity to to kind of metaphorically see around the corner what’s coming what can I anticipate that other people don’t see and then you must have the courage of your convictions to execute the strategy I do believe that organizations human organizations are inherently unstable they will fall over and you have to work to keep them upright but they fall slowly most people don’t notice it they let their success high blind them they don’t see it falling over the following takes place low but collapses quick you have to do constant assessment you have to look for the hard truths there’s a lot of conventional wisdom out there built up over time and built through all the learnings from all the companies and this may be fully applicable to most of the companies out there but before it’s applied to your organization I highly recommend that you question it because it could be absolutely fatal for your success.”

Advice for Entrepreneurs

“Do something you’re very passionate about and don’t try to chase what is kind of the hot passion of the day, people say you you have to have a lot of passion for what you’re doing and it’s totally true and the reason is is because it’s so hard that if you don’t; any rational person would give up it’s really hard and you have to do it over a sustained period of time so if you don’t love it if you’re not having fun doing it you don’t really love it you’re going to give up so just go and do it try learn from it you know you’ll fail at some things that’s a learning experience that you need so that you can take that on to the next experience and don’t let people who you may respect and who you believe know what they’re talking about, don’t let them tell you it can’t be done because often they will tell you it can’t be done and it’s just because they don’t have the courage to try it I think people that look for great ideas to make money you know are nearly as successful as those who say; okay what do I really love to do what am I excited about what I know something about you know what’s kind of interesting and compel it it’s very rewarding when you work on something you think it’s going to make a big difference and yeah it’s a little bit harder but I think I think the passion that one might bring with it brings so much more energy to that that you’re more likely to succeed you have to have an emotional investment in what you’re doing if you don’t love what you’re doing failure is pretty much guaranteed success is not guaranteed by any means but failure is much more likely if you don’t love what you’re doing if you know exactly what you want to be you need to spend as much time with people that are actually that already you know one of the things that I do is I question a lot of things and you can do that in a good way in a bad way but hopefully if you try to get people to motivate why they’re doing something and their way of thinking you know the worst thing you can end up with it’s a situation where you get told well this is the way it’s always been that’s the worst ever that’s a non-answer instead ask yourself you know given everything you have today is there a way we can make this better and so when we’re coming up with ideas you know we always ask ourselves what kind of new market is is creating and then also what what part of my day and in what problem is it solving and so I’ve gone as far as taking an entire catalogue of my day from the moment I like open my eyes and writing down every single thing I do and then asking myself like is there something here if you’re not coming up with ten ideas a day that’s why I have this thing I’m not coming up when I’m filling up this page every single day then my idea muscle will atrophy and I started this in and I still do it every single day like you have to come up with ideas every single day or the idea muscle atrophies the good news is after about six months of doing that you’re like a machine like people get surprised at how many ideas you could just have anywhere but understand that naturally nobody is interested in your idea the world can care less you have to persuade them and you have to show that you’re the one person out there that can do it when it comes to changing the world what I learned from Steve Jobs is if you believe in a Macintosh if you believe in iPhone iPod iPad if you believe enough then you will see it because other people will believe in it other people will create software other people will create products so you need to foster the belief in what you are dreaming so that it becomes a reality which is very different than saying I don’t expect anybody to believe it until I see it you need people to believe it before they can see it don’t necessarily think that you have to have the homerun in the huge Apple Computer on your first start I spent a long time in my life with skills just building little devices for fun for fun is one of the key things because that drives you to think and think and think and make it better and better and better than you ever would if you’re doing it for a company build things at first for yourself that you would want for some firing — you know take things to the next level or — even surpass their wildest dreams there’s always going to have to be an element of luck but I think more important is putting yourself in a business that can be ubiquitous that that Kim that really doesn’t have limits because otherwise there’s always going to be a grind to it but if the business if it can’t be something that you can visualize every business using or every consumer using it’s going to be tough to scale to be big enough or to have the perceived value you want an idea about what you can say I know it sounds like a bad idea but here’s specifically why it’s actually a great one you want to sound crazy but you want to actually be right because when you’re trying to differentiate when you’re trying to do something different there’s going to be that gut moment that gut sense is this right is this not right if you’re not if you’re not having doubt you’re not pushing the boundaries far enough don’t think about how do I get really how do I get big fast that will happen if you actually build something super meaningful and super important so don’t think about you know what is the quickest way to success think about what is the best way to building something important that the world really needs this little idea explains why some organizations and some leaders are able to inspire where others aren’t let me define the terms really quickly every single person every single organization on the planet knows what they do % some know how they do it will you call it your differentiating value proposition or your proprietary process or your USP but very very few people or organizations know why they do what they do and by why I don’t mean to make a profit that’s a result it’s always a result by why I mean what’s your purpose what’s your cause what’s your belief why does your organization exist so when we see a kid with a lemonade stand it’s different than when we see a vending machine selling lemonade even if it’s exactly the same product because the story around it is what people are paying for so when I meet small business people all I ask them is not what’s their balance sheet what’s their story why should I pick you why do I care about what you’re doing and if you start giving me all this inside baseball statistics about why you’re percent better than some other competitor I’m already glazed over because that’s not part of the way I see the world that I have to want this to exist in the world I have to not so it’s a similar rule just say if this was successful and I had nothing and I got no and I was not involved and I got no money off it or wasn’t what I wanted to do well and that’s a great check I think to know if you really feel good about the idea and can be passionate about it one of the things I advise entrepreneurs to do is when you have an idea so a classic entrepreneurial impulse is to hold the idea close to you’re not gonna tell because all the ideas so special right that’s almost always a mistake go talk to why is that a mistake it’s a mistake because your actual real competitive advantage is not that you have this idea that you have locked away in your closet which may or may not be accurate and you have no idea which it is your actual competitive advantages if you’re assembling the intelligence around does this idea work what is the right team what is the right learnings and we’re essentially in motion the hardest thing to do is start you have all these ideas and everyone has an idea but it’s really about executing the idea and building the idea and attracting other people to help you work on the idea that is the biggest challenge but the way to begin is to get the idea out of your head draw it out you know talk about it program it if you’re a programmer or make it if you’re building something you don’t have to be the best but you have to be dangerous right you have to learn just enough to be dangerous to build an idea concept it and show it to the world and then it turns out there are lots of other people including all employees that work at Instagram who are much better at doing all that stuff than I am but you’d need to find people who can you know be drawn to the idea that you build and and then they end up taking it and on and make any of it but yeah one way to conceptualize what makes a good product is you know good engineering is part of it good design is part of it but really it’s one way I think about is at least is maximizing the probability that someone shows up at the front door of you know your store or your website or or whatever it is and ends up with a solved problem and oftentimes the best methodology is to start with the perfect experience of just one person get that right and then figure out how to scale something great instead of scales I mean not so great and then trying to improve it that’s really hard to do and so I think when you are starting a new business you uh you don’t want to go after giant markets you want to go after small markets and you want to take over those markets quickly constantly seek criticism a a well a well-thought-out critique of whatever you’re doing is as valuable as gold and you should seek that from everyone you can but particularly your friends if you’re not utilizing an online community then you’re at a disadvantage to do are you can be asking online communities what they think about your ideas or if they have any advice with what you’re working on not only will you hear from people who are passionate about the subject but you’ll be hearing from people all around the world each with their own experiences and stories that can help you and there are a lot of people from whom we can learn a lot and I think like you know the one piece of advice is like don’t underestimate anyone you come across everybody like whether they’re you know a blue collar worker waiting for the bus or they’re you know helping you at your they’re the server bartender at the restaurant or they’re a lower-ranking employee I mean the smartest leaders I’ve ever seen have always gone around the room and asked for everybody’s opinion most startups that fail do it ultimately because they did not make something that people wanted they made something that um you know that they thought people would want but they were either in denial about it about you know whether it was actually any good or somebody else came along and made something that people wanted even more the best piece of advice that we’ve figured out is we’ve been the course is not to not to let other people will distract what you’re doing there’s always haters I’d say your idea is stupid this idea is never going to work don’t even bother doing that because someone else is going to do it before you do and if we listen to all those all that feedback there living all that negative through that we were never built things we’re never a prototype things and that’s how we really got to where we are we saw things that we wanted to build we just went out and built them it turns out when you build stuff that you like to use um there’s a good chance that there’s thousands other people that want to use it too and so it’s not just about doing focus groups it’s not just about you know double-checking your vision it really is about integrating this concept of testing our ideas rigorously throughout the product development process out the marketing process even as we scale up but what you really need to do is think about what is the smallest possible test that I can run for this idea for this concept for this theory get it out there and get customers using it because your customers are going to be the ones to tell you if it’s really working or not like like there’s almost just expectation that you have to have in your mind this this sort of I’m gonna change the world sort of make a dent in the universe kind of kind of ambition right but it’s actually okay early on to just kind of solve small problems in layers until you actually get to a point where you have to capacity to do that what this all comes down to is doing something exceptional for your users whether it’s in community whether it’s in connection or whether it’s in design this is our big advantage as a startup is that we can actually get away with doing this we can make this the core part of why we’re doing business I think you should be spending your money on on on teaching and sharing and so that might mean hiring a writer too perhaps instead of a marketing person you know and start writing and start getting people to listen to what you’re saying you can’t talk about yourself all the time because no one’s going to come back for that we get to talk about things that are relevant to your industry or ideas that you have and start to build that audience up I do think that one thing that’s important is especially if you’re a founder or a technical founder is to realize that you can’t do everything and even if you can you shouldn’t you should find a great partner no matter what it is that you’re doing and you should look for someone who is very high intelligence very high energy and very high integrity and you need all three of those you can’t compromise them any one of them otherwise you’ll end up with either someone who’s not smart which is you know good or someone’s not hard-working which also doesn’t have it or the worst case is you end up with the smart hard-working crook who ends up working against your interests and integrity something that takes a lot of time spent with someone to figure out the most important thing when you’re working with people early is that you guys line up on on what your goals are that’s that’s really that sounds really basic but you can totally it can be fine you can want to build a small business that makes money and you don’t have to go to an office every day or you can want to build a huge company you can want to build Google but I think you have to be really really aligned on that when a lot of corporations have they might call them core values or guiding principles or so on but the problem is usually they’re very lofty sounding they kind of read like a press release the marketing department put out they sound just like their competitors and maybe you learn about it on day one of your job but then it becomes this meaningless plaque on the lobby wall well we wanted to come up with committable core values and by committable meaning we’re willing to hire or fire people based on those values completely independent of their actual job performance the definition of values is they’re the behaviors or principles that you religiously adhere to within your company annoy say religious I mean that no amount of data will sway you in it from from those principles and the degree to which that you have the courage to maintain your conviction around those ideas is the degree to which you’re going to be successful over the long term a company is simply a group of people and as a leader of people you have to be a great listener and you have to be a great motivator you have to be very good at praising and looking for the best in people and you know people are no different from from flowers if you water flowers they flourish if you praise people they flourish and and that’s a critical attribute of a leader so I kind of like half jokingly with with a lot of people say that you know my job is basically like to be to be the assistant for the rest of the company like my job is to make sure that like you have what you need that it’s and and basically you have everything you need to kick ass like that’s my job if you don’t have that then let me know because I’m not doing my job you know there are a lot of things that are outside of your control a lot of external circumstances will depend like determine the success of your idea whether you know the market timing is right for this new kind of service or whether people you know whether a customer like the economy’s right for for for your kind of service right whether you meet the right people who will finance your company many many external circumstances are like outside of your control and like but will affect the outcome and if you have to like be ok with that another quality that I think is important is kind of being flexible minded or open-minded I’m not saying you shouldn’t have a vision for for your idea or your product but you need to be open to changes so many things go wrong when you’re starting a company and often I think people ask you know what mistakes should you avoid making and you know my answer that question is don’t even bother trying to avoid mistakes because you’re going to make tons of mistakes right and the the important thing is actually learning quickly from whatever mistakes you make and not giving up right and I mean there are things every single year of Facebook’s existence that could have killed us or made it so that it just seemed like moving forward and making a lot of progress just seemed intractable but you just kind of bounce back and you learn and nothing is impossible you just have to kind of keep running through the walls the two things we really zero in on a people are you know two things they sound simple they’re not being very difficult courage and genius courage is the one we talk about a lot because it’s the one that people can learn you know courage courage which is to say not giving up in the face of adversity you know just being absolutely determined to succeed you know is something that you can you can like force yourself to do it can be very painful you can force yourself to do it the genius part is a little bit hard to force yourself to do you courage without genius might not get you where you need to go but genius without courage almost certainly won’t and I think the reality is just you know not quite so glamorous there’s sort of there’s not we side to being an entrepreneur and also just more importantly with what you’re actually spending your time on is just a lot of hard work saying I mentioned this but you’re basically just sitting at your desk heads down focused answering customers customer support emails doing sales figuring out hard engineering problems so it’s really important that you kind of like going with with eyes wide open optimism has a place but I think even more so for the first time entrepreneur you need to be pragmatically pessimistic what I mean by that is you need to define all the worst-case scenarios in terms of financial loss time loss etc look at what you will learn if that happens and accept and come to terms with that before you ever start if you don’t do that and you go straight into battling the world trying to conquer the world with rose-colored glasses on the first time you hit a major hiccup you’re gonna become really demoralized and you will quit if you don’t love it you won’t make it through the long period of pain that is inevitable so make sure that you take care of yourself during the process make sure that you take care of your mental health your physical health while you’re doing it because it’s a long road.”