Superangel Weekend: Selected 7 from Founders to Founders

We listened carefully all founders on Superangel Founder Stories stage in Latitude59 and picked up 7 sources of knowledge and inspiration, which had changed thinking of founders on the stage. Use your weekend to read, listen or watch these golden nuggets.

We can start the list with “Start with Why”, which is a book by Simon Sinek and talks about the importance of thinking through “why” are you doing your startup and what consequences the answer has to the culture and marketing in your startup. The book was mentioned by Karoli Hindriks in her Founder Story as a lesson #2 in her list of learnings. If you want the short version of the book, watch TED video by the author Simon Sinek.

When you know your “why” then it is also easier to avoid dying as a startup. Although it might sound counterintuitive and provocative, but in early days of your startup your main goal is not to die. A reasoning behind this thought can be read from Paul Graham’s blog How Not to Die. This blog was brought up in Founder Story by James Isilay, CEO & Co-founder of Cognism in his which has grown it sales from 0 to 3 million. James knows what he is talking about as at one point he had to froze his startup and go back to consultancy job as he run out of money. And you have to survive on many fronts as a founder. James starts his speech with stating high divorce rate among startup founders. We asked James in Q&A what he does to make his wife happy. Listen to James’ Founder story to get his 3 tips on how to remain married despite all the hurdles.

Living tribute to survival and not dying was also the Founder Story by Kaspar Tiri, CEO of Wolf3D. He and his technical team started with a hardware startup focusing on making 3D scans of human body and creating ultra real digital avatars out of it. They were lucky to have an investor, who advised them on their grimmest day that your task as a team is to survive not matter what. Listen to his story how they have done a series of pivots and turned their hardware know-how into a successful software product.

The third piece of advice is for pre-scaling phase of your startup: Do Things That Don’t Scale written by Paul Graham. His main point is that startups take of not because there are great markets but because founders make them take off. In order to take them off, founders have to do things manually. Usually it means finding individual customers and getting them using the product or service and making them extremely happy about your offer. If you want hear a practical example about doing things that do not scale, listen to a podcast Masters of Scale. Episode 1. Brian Chesky, Co-founder & CEO of Airbnb and Reid Hoffman as a host. These two suggestions were made by James Isilay and Karoli Hindriks accordingly.

Fifth piece of advice comes for scaling phase. James Isilay suggests to read Ben Horowitz book “The Hard Thing about Hard Things”, which talks about surviving scaling and making hard decisions about people & culture as a CEO. Ben’s main message is that there is no silver bullet or one solution fits all situations. As a CEO you have to constantly learn and adapt your style to a situation. If you are not into a reading then you can watch video of Ben Horowitz talking about his book in Columbia University. He has also given a good interview with Ben Horowitz about his principles in Stanford University Venture Program. My personal favourite is Ben Horowitz talk about management in YCombinator Academy. Listen to this talk and you will learn, why one of the key skills of any founder is a skill of taking into account how critical decision is viewed from the eyes of whole company; and why Toussaint L’Ouverture is the greatest leader of all time according to Ben Horowitz.

Scaling and management go well together with our sixth suggestion: Patty McCord’s book “Powerful”. In this book Patty elaborates on how they built their principles of management and culture in Netflix and what is the thinking behind the original Netflix culture deck. To me it is interesting to see that Netflix culture deck is evolving and their current culture deck is a bit different from the original.

We will end up Superangel Weekend list with Gary Vee rant video “A 5 Minute Plea To Do”. It was another suggestion from James Isilay and basically suggest that do not spend too much time on reading books and blogs and watching videos and just go and do it.

Enjoy your weekend! You can also take some time and check out our 1-year high altitude training program Alpine House, where we help early stage startups to implement principles mentioned above and get to the next level. Apply here, if you have what it takes.

Summary of Superangel’s Weekend list

· Books: Start with Why by Simon Sinek, The Hard Thing about Hard Things by Ben Horowitz, Powerful by Patty McCord

· Blogs: How Not to Die and Do Things That Don’t Scale by Paul Graham

· Podcast: Masters of Scale. Episode 1. Brian Chesky, Co-founder & CEO of Airbnb and Reid Hoffman as a host

· Video: A 5 Minute Plea To Do by Gary Vee

· Superangel Founders Stories videos part 1: James Isilay, CEO & Co-founder of Cognism; Kaspar Tiri, Co-founder of Wolf3D; Karoli Hindriks, CEO & Co-founder of Jobbatical; Natalia Simonenko, Founder & CEO of Oyster; Ivar Kruusenberg, CEO & Founder of PowerUp Fuel Cells; Amiad Soto, Co-founder & CEO of Guesty

· Superangel Founders Stories videos part 2: Eric Lagier, Managing Partner of byFounders; Ida Tin, CEO & Co-founder of Clue; Péter Halácsy, CEO at Budapest School & co-founder of Prezi; Triinu Mägi, CTO, co-Founder of Neura Inc; Patrick Campbell, CEO & Co-founder of ProfitWell; Maarten Lens-FitzGerald, Global Head of Voice of Nodes