When it comes to building technology products, Keith Rabois says that forging a company is much more difficult than forging a product.
Why? Because forging a company means dealing with people, and people can be irrational.
How to Raise a Seed Round for a Startup [The Complete Guide]
I learned from Ron Conway that fundraising should be something a founder does quickly and gets back to focusing on the product.
It’s just a small step in the process of building a company, and a founder should just get it done and over with quickly without obsessing over it too much.
5 Things You Should Know According to Eric Schmidt When Building a Startup [The Opportunity Cost]
Eric Schmidt has an impressive list of everything he has accomplished in business. One of the things that is striking about him is his ability to lead people.
Eric talks about hiring at a tech startup, and he points out that it is important to hire people who love what they do.
Tactical Advice on How to Spot a Great Founder According to Reid Hoffman [The Network Philosophy]
Reid Hoffman says that when we think of what our perception is of a great founder, we usually think of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, etc.
He talks about the panoply of skills required for a founder to be great at what they do, and how we often correlate that with the founder being a genius.
This Unique Characteristic in Founders Makes Ron Conway Immediately Invest [Decisiveness and Speed Matter]
Ron Conway, one of the most prolific internet technology investors, looks for a bunch of characteristics when picking founders to invest in.
He’s been investing since 1994. He has invested in well over 700 startups. He decided that he would only invest in internet software, and he’s stuck to it.
Picking and Managing Winning Startups [The Art and Science]
In the competitive startup world, success is never guaranteed.
As most startup founders and venture capitalists would probably agree, there is no surefire way to build a successful business, no matter how good, unique, or practical an idea is.
This Is the Holy Grail of Early Stage Investing [Proprietary Deal Flow Is Not Dead]
Proprietary dealflow is the holy grail of early-stage investing. The more I study the venture capital asset class, the more I realize that there’s a reason the VC business is a relationship business.
You don’t get proprietary dealflow if you don’t know people who may build the next big thing, or if you don’t know people who know people who might be working on the next big thing.
Dangers of Cognitive Bias and Overthinking as an Early Stage Investor [You Can Avoid the Trap]
Every person has “hard-wired” cognitive biases that make them more likely to favor convenience, oversimplification, and self-confidence. This means that we all have the potential to make bad decisions.
If you want to be a long-term successful startup investor, you need to learn to recognize and overcome the cognitive and psychological biases that lead people to make poor investment choices.
Jason Calacanis’s Ideas on How to Invest in Technology Startups [Earlier Than VCs]
If you want to cut through the BS and learn how to talk to founders, Jason Calacanis says that being a journalist is a good idea.
It is one of the paths into venture capital, and in fact, Jason Calacanis was based in New York when the internet started taking off.
This is Garry Tan’s Billion Dollar Idea Framework [3 Questions]
Have you ever wondered why some technologies succeed and why some fail?
Garry Tan has a framework he’s used to understand what’s needed in order for a technology to go mainstream and become an ubiquitous brand or service that everyone and their mother finds out about.