Timeless Mission 3: ENTREPRENEURSHIP

The market changes… Technology changes… Principles don’t! Where can we find some timeless content on entrepreneurship?

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Timeless Wisdom

5 min readFeb 4, 2018

Dear Timeless peeps,

Special issue this week! Speaking to you will be FJHendrix, who already added some amazing pieces to our Timeless library. Besides an avid blogger and consultant, he is also co-founder and CEO at GetSleek. (Sleek is one place to work with many applications, focused on consultants & freelancers.) I’m a fan.

This week we’re diving into entrepreneurship: something that has always excited me in some way — although I’m definitely not a natural born entrepreneur or businessperson…

However: the way I see it, being entrepreneurial equals being alive; so the principles here apply to almost anything you set your mind to. Go for it FJ!

Are entrepreneurs born or made? Let’s dive in!

Hi everyone,

I’m FJ.

Mainly influenced by my own mistakes in 2017, I have selected some gems on the subject of this week: First Time Founder Advice.This topic is clouded in vagueness and the content is extremely difficult to grasp if you have not started a business yourself. Plus from my experience, although very much available, people tend to ignore most of it.

Key take-away: being a founder is hard! It’s basically doing all kinds of things that are outside your comfort zone.

My Personal 5 favorites for First-time Founders:

It’s Time to Fire the Business Plan for Good
Ash Maurya (2016), 9min read
Don’t start a company by writing a business plan. It doesn’t make any sense. Answering questions that aren’t relevant yet with a limited amount of data. Plus they are out-dated before they are even finished and rarely read or updated. Ash has a different way, which might work for you. More importantly, practice the key take-away: “De-risk your biggest assumptions first.” Plus get the book!
How to Start a Startup
Paul Graham (2005), 10min read
Start a business by talking to & interviewing customers. It’s probably the most ignored advice. Don’t fall in love with your idea. Fall in love with your customer.
The post contains some advice on other topics as well, but talking to customers should be your main take-away.
Do things that don’t Scale
Paul Graham (2013), 8min read
Yes, Paul is here twice because he’s so accurate. Do everything you can to prove as fast as possible that there is demand for your idea. Interview customers. Make an MVP for one person. Don’t even think about scaling issues yet. The best situation ever is where you can’t handle demand and everything breaks. Trust me, it won’t go that way.
The Art, Science, and Labor of Recruiting
Vinod Khosla (2015), 15min read
People hate hiring (or finding a co-founder.) It’s difficult and prone to error. Ignoring financial constraints, anything you can do, somebody out there will always be more amazing at than you. So hire. But who, why, when and how. Well that’s what this article is about. “Even if you follow every piece of advice in this document, you’re never going to always get it right. Shit happens.
How we structure our work and teams at Basecamp
Jason Fried (2016), 9min read
Startups often have a ‘no rules’ attitude. Forget that. Every venture (even a 1-man endeavour) needs rules & responsibilities to allow productivity. Great people don’t create a great team. As a founder, you are the coach and you create the rules. Document them and follow make sure to follow them to the letter. Basecamp’s way is a great inspiration: “We’ve come to discover that nearly everything important can be done in six weeks or less. And done well.”

Didn’t find an article on it, but my general tip: STAY FOCUSED — on getting customers. There a million things that I consider distractions from networking to building stuff you don’t need yet to marketing activities or even raising funds you don’t need.

There is more…

I had to ignore a ton of interesting links to get to these 5. I compiled a list of the guru companies and people that write on startups & first time founder advice. However, limit the number of sources that you use to get advice from. Too much advice is distracting and confusing…

First off, many many thanks to FJHendrix for this inspiring contribution!

Now the ball is in your court again…

Which piece would you send to an entrepeneur, intrapreneur, or anybody looking to build something of value? What advice could help them on their journey? How can we be more entrepreneurial? Smarter entrepreneurial? Wisdomish entrepreneurial? :-)

Upload your ideas in the database; or give a rating to one of the articles above. I’m psyched to see what you guys have in store! :)

Adios?

Most certainly not. You will hear from me exactly one week from now with an update on our third Timeless Mission (no spam in between, I promise).

Your fellow Timeless geeks,
Gilles & Thomas

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Why Timeless?

As you may know, we’re trying to find and preserve truly valuable content on the web. The first blog post gives some more context on the idea of an open database of “wisdom”. In short: we’re trying to separate the signal from the noise on the web. We’re not looking for the next hype or trend; we’re looking for principles that can be applied in many different circumstances.

Gameplan

First and most crucial step: find the wisdom. On today’s over-crowded internet, ruled by the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and other hype-machines… this could prove hard enough.
Here’s the plan:

Every week, I start things off with my 5 personal favorites on a certain theme.
Productivity, Decision Making, Health, Creativity, Entrepreneurship, Relationships, … y mucho más!
If you have great material on this subject, you can upload it into the database. Sharing is caring!
We check out each other’s favorites and rate them on their timeless value.
Subject by subject, we build up “hit-lists” of wisdom to preserve and expand.
Maybe most importantly, we all learn a shit ton of each other in the process.

Visit the first version of the database: Timeless Wisdom