Bottom Up / Top Down Validation

As we are gearing up for the launch of our inaugural accelerator cohort here at Singularity University, I had the pleasure of reading through literally hundreds of pitch decks and business plans from the startups which applied for our program.

Success (Makes You Stupid)

Scott Cook, founder and chairman of Intuit, once said: “Success is a powerful thing. It tends to make companies stupid, and they become less and less innovative.”

I would argue that this sentiment is not only true — it also spans far beyond the realm of…

Your Team Is Everything

At Singularity University I was in the incredibly lucky situation to build a team pretty much from scratch. I spent a significant amount of time and energy vetting literally hundreds of candidates before I settled on the wonderful crew I now work with.

Flying Pigs

When asked about the incredible success of Chinese smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi, founder and CEO Jun Lei said: “Even a pig can fly if it sits in the right spot during a whirlwind.”

Yesterday, on the way to the airport, my Lyft driver asked, upon hearing that I run an accelerator…

Marginal Gains

We humans have a tendency to overestimate the role of “breakthroughs”: Media feeds us this story of either the lone inventor or a group of people getting together, chipping away on a problem for a long time and than, one night, having the glorious Eureka moment. The moment when a startup goes from…