Ep 11The Best Tips for Starting Your Own Business
"I'm never going to be a founder, but your course has already changed my marriage"
Dean Noam Wasserman
The Best Tips for Starting Your Own Business
with Dean Noam Wasserman
Follow your heart, but check it with your head. (quoting Steve Jobs)
More moments · 3
Try this · top 3
Quotes
“Failure is very underestimated in the pain that it causes. And it's expensive.”
“The difficult conversations are avoided until the elephant grows and tramples everything else that's around there.”
“You want to find it out during the dating phase... when you can hit the undo key.”
“Execution is by far the dominant thing that's going to make the idea happen.”
“When we're coming in with friends and family, we're starting in negative territory.”
“I want to be both rich and king. (how first-time founders often think, before learning they must choose)”
Takeaways
- 1 Founder mistakes come from common biases: overconfidence, only seeing the best case, avoiding conflict, and choosing people just like you.
- 2 In his data on about 20,000 US tech and life science founders, teams performed better on average and solo founders varied more. 84% of ventures had more than one founder.
- 3 The three Rs founders most often get wrong: relationships (who you start with), roles and decision making, and rewards (the equity split).
- 4 About 80% of teams that split equity equally discussed it for an hour or less. Quick, equal, fixed splits often backfire when contributions turn out unequal.
- 5 Ideas are worth less than founders think. Most face real competition, and the ability to spot a miss and pivot matters more than the first idea.
- 6 Both quitting too soon and holding on too long are real risks. Passion can cloud how you read the market, your own skills and your family's ability to go without a paycheck.
- 7 Teams of friends and family were the least stable in his data, even less stable than teams of strangers. Trusting someone as a friend isn't the same as trusting their work.
- 8 Rich vs. king: you usually have to choose between control and building the most valuable company. Bootstrapping keeps control. Investor money speeds growth but brings a board.
- 9 Founders are most likely to be replaced as CEO right after big wins like finishing the product or raising money. About three quarters of those replacements were firings.
- 10 Hiring: 'fit' often means picking people like you. Past behavior predicts performance, and hypothetical questions don't.
- 11 The same lessons apply at home. A student used the course on roles and fair splits to fix how he and his new spouse shared chores and decisions.