Tomorrow first day of LearningStartup hands-on course for aspiring entrepreneurs at DemocenterSipe, Technology Transfer foundation in Modena.
Looking forward to it!
Just published!
Now it’s the turn of part-time startuppers. If you are one of them, mind you!
Best-case scenario you are wasting your time on a half-baked project that you think you can make fly with a couple of good moves. Nope, it’s not going to work, sorry. Oh I see, if you only got that seed capital… and you don’t understand why ‘they’ don’t even listen to you.
Still, you always think of that friend-of-a-friend who made it and obtained funding for his part-time startup activity. This makes for a…
…much worse scenario. He managed to convinced some investor to fund his great idea. Strange, he puts in a part-time effort and gets full-time cash. He must be a genius, or else… Wake up! You don’t want that money either! It’s money from investors who not only don’t understand his business (like in an earlier post), they don’t even understand their own business!!!
Worst-case scenario is the natural consequence. The business doesn’t work, and investors keep pumping money in a venture for the fear of losing what they invested there already. Clearly they never heard of the ‘sunk-cost’ concept. Additionally, with all that money and very little time put into the startup by the startupper, it’s easy to fall in the trap of hiring too early, which is terrible! Not only for the money, also for the people that got hired. The part-time startupper is making them waste time.
You’re not like that, are you?
Your startup is not looking for money. Not only.You part ownership of your business with an investor in exchange for… what?
Money of course, but not problems! You want an investor who can bring some value to the table, not only cash! And to do so, the investor has to know your sector, not only that s/he heard of it, you are looking for deep knowledge and experience. Otherwise you’re doomed.
Well-intentioned investors can take down a business just out of sheer incompetence of the sector (and for some, also incompetence of their job) and in the process burn a lot of money under the false rule “I put the money I must be able to take decisions.” Bad for their money, but worse for your business.
For as much money that such an investor offers you, you don’t want it!
Hi blakemasters I discovered you essays from Peter Thiel classes by chance (as usual). It’s great work and great content, congrats! I want to read them all. Read & reblog
Reblog from blakemasters
Here is an essay version of my class notes from Class 1 of CS183: Startup. Errors and omissions are my own. Credit for good stuff is Peter’s entirely.
CS183: Startup—Notes Essay—The Challenge of the Future
Purpose and Preamble
We might describe our world as having retail sanity, but wholesale madness. Details are well understood; the big picture remains unclear. A fundamental challenge—in business as in life—is to integrate the micro and macro such that all things make sense.
Humanities majors may well learn a great deal about the world. But they don’t really learn career skills through their studies. Engineering majors, conversely, learn in great technical detail. But they might not learn why, how, or where they should apply their skills in the workforce. The best students, workers, and thinkers will integrate these questions into a cohesive narrative. This course aims to facilitate that process.
I. The History of Technology
For most of recent human history—from the invention of the steam engine in the late 17th century through about the late 1960’s or so— technological process has been tremendous, perhaps even relentless. In most prior human societies, people made money by taking it from others. The industrial revolution wrought a paradigm shift in which people make money through trade, not plunder.
The importance of this shift is hard to overstate. Perhaps 100 billion people have ever lived on earth. Most of them lived in essentially stagnant societies; success involved claiming value, not creating it. So the massive technological acceleration of the past few hundred years is truly incredible.
The zenith of optimism about the future of technology might have been the 1960’s. People believed in the future. They thought about the future. Many were supremely confident that the next 50 years would be a half-century of unprecedented technological progress.
But with the exception of the computer industry, it wasn’t. Per capita incomes are still rising, but that rate is starkly decelerating. Median wages have been stagnant since 1973. People find themselves in an alarming Alice-in-Wonderland-style scenario in which they must run harder and harder—that is, work longer hours—just to stay in the same place. This deceleration is complex, and wage data alone don’t explain it. But they do support the general sense that the rapid progress of the last 200 years is slowing all too quickly.
(Source: blakemasters)
I just read this essay from Peter Thiel class, very fascinating.
I have a secret or two, how will I make money out of them?
Thank you blakemasters:
Here is an essay version of my class notes from Class 11 of CS183: Startup. Errors and omissions are mine. Credit for good stuff is Peter’s.
Class 11 Notes Essay—Secrets
I. Secrets
Back in class one, we identified a very key question that you should continually ask yourself: what important truth do very few people agree with you on? To a first approximation, the correct answer is going to be a secret. Secrets are unpopular or unconventional truths. So if you come up with a good answer, that’s your secret.
How many secrets are there in the world? Recall that, reframed in a business context, the key question is: what great company is no one starting? If there are many possible answers, it means that there are many great companies that could be created. If there are no good answers, it’s probably a very bad idea to start a company. From this perspective, the question of how many secrets exist in our world is roughly equivalent to how many startups people should start.
(Source: blakemasters)
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A very interesting post by @JBurgstone on the flaws of the Lean Startup movement. And he’s not the usual naysayer. Burgstone is author of Breakthrough Entrepreneurship and real-life (successful) entrepreneur.
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LearningStartup sponsored the 24x1-hr long-distance waterbike record in Trieste.
Learning Startup at Mujalonga 2012 - 10 km in 50’48”