- Finding the right words is the hardest but most critical thing a founder needs to do in order to vividly capture and express the vision you are aspiring after.
- the right words elicits the right metaphors and mental context of recipients limbic brain thereby drawing forth the desired emotion
- sometimes it’s inevitable that the founder sits and serenade himself in a space for years before the vision could be clearly articulated and expressed
- think about the critical missing components that could kill a concept
- It takes time to exhaustively decide its inevitable to invest is an idea
- take a viable strategic corridor and seek variants of that to invest in
- monetize through parents in K12
- Taking on professional capital before product market fit causes
- undue stress
- too much effort to explain to investors why pivot
- psychological lock in to trajectory
- Moonlighting on the side is a low risk and cheap way to validate/invalidate a concept to product market fit
- don’t see everything as a nail that needs to be hammered
- do not let building something become a natural reflex
- seek to deeply understand a problem space before deploying any resources on the solutions side
- seek exposure to uncorrelated markets
- small cap companies are the first to react to a down turn
- see Russell index versus strong ones like Nasdaq / SNP
- When trying to ride a macro trend, it is more efficient trading commodities than stocks in various companies as you won’t have to deal with micro events specific to the companies.
- When 3 or more person calls you a unicorn even when you are not one
- its not about you, its about what they all need
- straddle up and prepare to ride the wave
- the joker profile is less a manifestation of the character of the person playing the role than the underlying organization dysfunction that is being managed
- Every team has its own set of dysfunctions
- Questions that can’t be resolved inevitably surfaces to the CEO
notes, learnings and reflections for future self reference