Homework for Founders
Startup founders are (or should be) busy people. They’re hustling to build a company, solve a problem, and sell a product, and they’re trying to do it before the next person thinks about it or does it.
So, how do you accelerate their progress without overloading them? How do you make them more efficient, less prone to errors, and more experienced in a shorter amount of time?
Tim Ferris loves to talk about learning at superspeed. He says that you can learn to be good — world class, even — at nearly ANYTHING in 6 months to a year. He’s used his method for weightlifting, languages, cooking, and helped lots of other people use it for lots of other stuff, too.
Here’s his recent podcast on the subject.
His basic methodology revolves around these principles: deconstructing the skill you’re trying to learn, designing a selective, compressed curriculum for yourself, scheduling your learning, and setting up stakes or consequences for yourself. He suggests interviewing uniquely successful people for the insight needed to deconstruct your desired skill.
You might be wondering… What does this have to do with Velocity? Or startups in general? After all, our entrepreneurs might already have the technical skills to build their product, the sales experience to pitch to investors, or the marketing tools to generate a lot of users.
However, especially for first-time founders, it’s unlikely that they have ALL of the skills they need.
(Disclaimer: I’ve never started a company, so I’m learning from ground zero.)
That’s where Velocity comes in.
We’ll interview people who’ve had success scaling a business from small to large. Or navigated tricky legal agreements to form the best structure for their company. Or broken into a nearly-saturated market with excellent branding and social strategy, or outpaced every competitor with hustle and fundraising. These are our success stories, helping each founder deconstruct the skill of, well, building and running a good company.
But, obviously, we don’t have access to every top-notch entrepreneur in the world. That’s why we have HOMEWORK! It may seem silly, and an extra burden on already overworked entrepreneurs, but I think the experiences of high-level successful people can really inform each founder’s learning process, much more quickly than they would learn fumbling through their own pitfalls.
So here’s our reading and listening list-in-progress. Let me know what you think, what you would add, and what you didn’t like. We aren’t in the business of wasting anyone’s time… after all, these are startups!
BOOKS
- Zero to One by Peter Thiel
- Lean Startup by Eric Ries
- Rework by Jason Fried
- Mindset by Carol Dweck
- The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande
- The Hard Thing about Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
- The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg OR Hooked by Nir Eyal
- Speak Human: Outmarket the Big Guys by Getting Personal by Eric Karjaluoto
- The Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steve Blank
- Lean Analytics by Alistair Croll and Benjamin Yoskovitz
