Real Founder Lessons
The best startup advice from experienced founders...one real-world lesson at a time.
The pit of despair
(at minute 30:49)
Founder Lesson
The common belief is that you become a founder the day that you leave your day job to focus full-time on a new startup idea.
I’m beginning to believe that the path is more like this...
Step #1 You start off with a problem that you want to solve.
Step #2 You have a vision of what the future with . . .
Learn as much as you can before you write a line of code
(at minute 33:42)
Founder Lesson
I graduated college in 1994. Netscape went public a year later, kicking-off the beginning of the consumer internet. Most of the technology innovation over the following decade was about infrastructure - making sure most people had broadband to their homes, developing phones with real computing power & growing wireless . . .
Fall in love with the problem (not your proposed solution)
(at minute 56:39)
Founder Lesson
Most first-time founders (and even lots of experienced founders) begin to think about any startup in terms of a product/solution. Like Peter Rojas, the founder being interviewed in this podcast, I find myself constantly giving the advice to think of all new ideas in terms of the main problem that customers have. This advice . . .
A good startup education for anyone
For this post, I decided to switch things up a bit to give a little backstory on where I get most of the content for my blog.
I frequently have coffee meetings with first-time founders where they ask for advice on how to learn the basics of startups.
Here are the best four ways to learn about startups...
1) Best way . . .
The whole concept of a startup is that the business model isn’t proven
(at minute 30:01)
Common Founder Issue
Just a few years ago I had an epiphany regarding how the very early participants in a startup - particularly founders and initial “friends and family” investors - should feel about the likelihood of success of a new venture. Prior to this moment, I considered every phase to be pretty much the same as a startup grew. . . .
