What's difficult? What's difficult is changing your attitude. Instead of speed dating your way to interruption, instead of yelling at strangers all day trying to make a living, coordinating a tribe of 1,000 requires patience, consistency and a focus on long-term relationships and life time value. You don't find customers for your products. You find products for your customers.

Desirability, Feasibility, and Viability

What have you been thinking about lately?
What have you been working on lately?

Are they smart? Can they get stuff done? Can you work with them?

The ideal founding team is two individuals, with a history of working together, of similar age and financial standing, with mutual respect. One is good at building products and the other is good at selling them.

Fred Brooks, in his essay No Silver Bullet identified a three-part plan for finding great software designers:

1. Systematically identify top designers as early as possible.

2. Assign a career mentor to be responsible for the development of the prospect and carefully keep a career file.

3. Provide opportunities for growing designers to interact and stimulate each other.

Even if you’re not going to start a startup right away. If you’ve been in your job for awhile, you should quit. Google was really comfortable. I knew all the people. It’s important to do things that will make you uncomfortable. So there’s a couple of other points.

By letting people pay whatever they wanted. That’s damned important information.

To sell to customers you need to understand them: how they work, what they do and what problem you will solve for them.
You can’t understand customers from inside your building.

There are lots of people who wanted to do one thing but then got "practical" and did something else "first." The idea was that they'd be successful and sock away money doing the practical thing, and after that they could go back to the thing they loved. Bronson was sure that, among the hundreds of people that he interviewed, someone would actually have been successful with this strategy. It sounds so reasonable, after all.

But he encountered exactly zero people who pulled it off. Everyone who tried got sucked into the "practical" career and were never able to extract themselves from it. Too comfortable, too many expectations from friends and family, too easy just to keep doing what you're doing.

An expert is:

* One who has tried, who has practical experience in a field.

* Conversely, one who has been tried has a few wounds to show for it. If you don't have a glorious failure or two under your belt, you're probably not ready to be an "expert" for others hoping to avoid the same thing.

* One who has acquired comprehensive knowledge and continues to learn about a field.

* One who has authority as appointed to them by the community for having demonstrated they know their stuff.

* One who experiments - taking the field further. I call them thinkers and tinkerers.

Your execution determines how people think about you.

There’s a phenomenon in advertising called Client’s Disease. Every client is in love with his own product. The mistake he makes is believing that, because he loves it, everyone else will too.

They won’t. The market doesn’t know what you’re selling and doesn’t care. Your potential customers are so busy dealing with the rest of their lives, they haven’t got a spare second to give to your product/work of art/business, no matter how worthy or how much you love it.

1. Homework not present at the start of class would not be accepted. However students were only graded on the best 20 out of 27 possible homework sets. 2. All homework sets were cumulative. Generally 1/3 was the current day's material, 1/3 from the last week, and 1/3 from anywhere in the course. Those thirds were in increasing order of difficulty. 3. Every class would start with a question and answer session to last no less than 10 minutes. 4. Every student could expect to be asked at least one question every other class.

Of the many who spoke at the memorial, it was Lakshmi Pratury who put it best when she said (and I paraphrase) that in our life we spend too much time agonizing over things related to work, almost forgetting to celebrate and savor the little, countless moments of joy and happiness. And that’s what life is all about.

What is awesomeness? Awesomeness happens when thick — real, meaningful — value is created by people who love what they do, added to insanely great stuff, and multiplied by communities who are delighted and inspired because they are authentically better off. That’s a better kind of innovation, built for 21st century economics.

Let's together make the University (Colleges and Schools included) a better place to learn. It is amazing what we can do together if we collectively set our minds to it. Let's start with improving our ability to engage and inspire our students to learn :)

Be human, act like a startup. Say something you can understand.

“Sprezzatura” is an Italian word that means “to hide conscious effort and appear to accomplish difficult actions with casual nonchalance.”

Best practices in product management for early stage web companies from Dan Olsen's talk at fbFund REV (the Facebook Fund's incubator) on July 24, 2009.