Book Summary: Lost and Founder

It is hard but it works – needs to be tampered with empathy

Consulting is limited by time and people – not scalable
Effective Product-focused business
- reach
- scalability
Start with a product informed by your consulting – real life problems others face

Great founders enable a vision
forget about being hands on most of the time
job scope changes every six months – for any road block encountered focus on sufficing the requirements instead of perfecting it
you rarely get to do what you love to do
be cognizant on when to lead and when not to – have the specialist do the job
Cultivate self awareness in strength and weakness – structure company to work around them
Attribute of founder is instilled with near-permanence in the organization while those of supporting team fluctuates
the hardest parts of the business is less a reflection about the business than about the person experiencing them
Build expertise before building network, build network before building company
Focus on and reward the behavior, let the outcome take care of itself

Authentic values force hard decisions – held to be more important than money
have real costs: Impede certain behavior and strategy
Values are discovered instead of set
Used as a yard stick for recruiting new members to the cause. Helps get pass the competence versus cultural fit dilemma

CTO should be those that should be oriented towards education instead of shielding you from the nitty gritty details (black box)
Use your value system as a yard stick
Hiring for diversity will make the mental model of the organization more holistic
Great managers / coaches might not be great individual contributors

Pivots Are expensive don’t make it a habit – only resort to this tactic when the original hypothesis is not longer valid
focus on the market and then find a field ignored by others because it appears unsexy. From there craft a solution
Err on the side of execution

Need to take money for the right reason
Investors interest will tend to get out of alignment overtime (return multiples and investment horizons)
80 percent of returns are by 20 percent of investments
They need at least a 10X to break even in a position for all the other losing positions they took
They don’t bring much value to the table
follow up with CEOs they invested in to understand how they react in a shit storm
Can help provide information on salary ranges

If you can keep your ego in check you can chase after smaller markets and don’t need VC money
Great ideas are born of mediocre ideas that become better by
- time spent iterating
- humility learning
- surviving
look for searches that indicate problems
- Google Adwords
- Moz’s keyword Explorer

Discounts are a doubled edged sword – while they might attract signups, these folks tend to have a higher churn rate

Schedule regular interactions with your user so that you can understand their habits. It helps you get to an empathetic position with them.

Feature set needs to be coherent enough to be able to deliver value
Early adopters
- have very different expectation as compared to early majority –
- hence more forgiving
- ok accepting MVP
Retention triumphs acquisition any day

Optimize for acquisition loops that reinforces the UVP instead of linear acquisition channels

Practice the discipline of focus.
Important to Focus and not waver around unnecessarily. Its a waste of resources
A very focused and simplified product offering will help users to more easily understand and adopt it
Helps keep teams lean as a by-product
- ROA improves dramatically
- helps avoid future layoffs
Focus on what will not change in the next 10 years