To start or not to start, that is the question for the final week of the Stanford course: How to Build Successful Startups.
It’s been crazy 3 weeks to juggle with my day job, the last push for a 20% project, mentoring 2 startups in Taiwan & doing the course of How to Build Successful Startups. Luckily I survived to excised what the Siri co-founder & a Parallel Entrepreneur, Adam Cheyer suggested: “do more than you think you can”. It’s actually fulfilled as we completed with a happy wrap. I strongly recommend you to take the course especially if you’re thinking about to start or join a new venture because:
- The instructor, John Kelley created a great learning experience with a good combination of practical frameworks, great guest speakers with a lot of insights & realistic exercises to sharpen your skills.
- Great classmates with diverse background & experience. I also learned a lot from them, got useful feedbacks & connected with quite a few.
If there is just one thing to take away from the journey, it is a heuristic to decide if to start a new venture? As the book: Straight Talk for Startups suggests, you always want to be clear on why this, why you & why now. Also, when the context changes, you need to revisit your whys to pivot from the learning. When things get tough, you can gain courage by believing your whys. And when you’re rising to the top, you need to remember why you start.
Why this
I like how Jeff Bezos puts it: “ Create More Than You Consume”. A startup has to create new value and/or a new way to capture value. Typically, a startup has a better chance on a small but with high growth potential opportunity. Because such opportunity is still too small for the leading players as the disruptive innovation theory illustrates.
Why you
There will be something you care dearly about. That is your superpower to do the impossible by the opinion of others. You can start by looking for problems & empathizing with the user’s pain points. If you persist, you will find your way to build a cathedral. When you show the vision & progress of a calling instead of “laying bricks” or “making a living “, more missionaries will come.
Just be careful of a few “wrong” answers, that professor George Parker shared: vanity, greed, fear, impatience, underestimation of the risk. Be honest to yourself & it’s fine if your is one of them. Only there are many better alternatives to pursue them. But, founding a startup is likely a bad choice.
Why now
“Fortune favors the prepared mind.” — Louis Pasteur
Timing is the top factor to make or break a venture. It’s indeed impossible for anyone to “make it rain” on demand. Nevertheless, there are two tricks to make the time working better for you.
- Swinging only when you feel lucky as Warren Buffett’s secret to investing. To do that, you can use Cheyer’s tools: tends & triggers. Remember, you always have a choice on when to start, when to pivot, when to scale & when to take money from VCs…
- “Preparing your lucky break” as Straight Talk for Startups suggests. It’s difficult to distinguish skill from luck because there is a winner in every coin-tossing game. But, repeatability may be a practical touchstone. Your odd will increase by repeatedly cracking similar problems with new approaches. With enough learning, there will be a day, that you might get “lucky” on an adjacent goldmine.
“But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run, we are all dead.” as John Maynard Keynes said. Therefore now is the only time matter, and the next phase is the only change you can still start today.
Full Disclosure
The opinions stated here are my own, not those of my company. They are mostly extrapolations from public information. I don’t have insider knowledge of those companies, nor a whatever expert.
