Startup Ven Diagrams and Blinders

Stanford is full of classes instructing students how to launch a startup. There may be overlap in those teachings, but there is power from noticing where these ven diagrams of knowledge intersect. If five different teachers from different walks of life have said a founder should “get out of the building”, then you probably should step away from your computer and talk to your users. During the Family unit, I heard many opinions I have heard before in both industry and the classroom. These opinions are the ones that resonate with me, because everyone agrees these topics are critical to building a successful startup. Sam Altman reiterated a point I had heard a year ago from a venture capitalist: look for the future trends: don’t look for a derivative. A great investor sees the growth of the sharing economy when other investors are looking for the next Facebook. Today, there are myriad of Uber derivatives marketing a sharing economy product for a 50,000-person consumer segment. These “Uber for Dogs” are unlikely to experience explosive growth that will in turn catapult my growth. Instead, I’ve started thinking about what industries I am interested in and believe are about to experience large growth.

Transportation has captured my attention since Google debuted the autonomous cars a couple of years ago, and Michael Dearing’s commented cemented my belief in the space’s importance in the near future. Transportation has already proven to be a disruptive technology. The car revolutionized city planning and individual independence, and the plane has made any location in the world less than two day’s journey. I believe the next wave is imminent. Hyperloop aims to disrupt public and cargo transportation, and autonomous cars could potentially eliminate car crashes, which kills 1.3 million people per year. Transportation is a particularly interesting industry because of the effects its development has on other industries. If autonomous cars become commonplace, car ownership may decrease. There are approximately 800 million parking spaces in the US, which is approximately the size of New Jersey. With reduced car ownership, we could redevelop this massive sum of land to new, more useful purposes. Parking is just one of many industries to be affected by autonomous vehicles: a sign that it really has a chance to be a high-growth, disruptive technology.

I always knew to look for a disruptive industry, but these past lectures have led me to put pen to paper on what I think those industries are. I also have taken many classes that talk about what founders should focus their energy on. For instance, founders need to focus on product-market fit, hiring, vision, and team dynamics. I was surprised, then, to hear all of our speakers focus on what founders should not think about. For instance, Sam Altman claimed that founders should ignore everything but their users. This means doing things that don’t scale to ensure your product delights those early adopters. Write hand-written thank you notes, speak to all of your users, and find product-market fit. Don’t focus on publicity, the business plan, and defining a management structure. I believe the best approach is for founders to approach priorities through the lens of both blacklists and whitelists. By combining a blacklist and whitelist of priorities early founders should have, founders can focus their efforts on the fires that really need attention. Most fires will not kill a startup, but distractions can. Until your family finds that product that users really love, your company has no legs to scale. As for the rest: let them burn.