Some startup lessons we learned the hard way

1. Intuition isn't a spiritual, non-tangible thing. It's the highest form of competence. Therefore I should trust my intuition/gut 100% of them when I'm in my zone of genius and zone of competence (look these 2 zones up) 2. Every hire either accelerates a startup's growth or death. No employee has a neutral contribution. Before making a hire, we now ask ourselves "if I had only 3 months of cash runway, would we hire this person today?" 3. Pre product market fit, it's important to alternate between having a plan and being curious, and have a feedback loop (ideally customers themselves) that won't let you swing too much between the two 4. Founders make great angel investors 5. When in doubt, focus on the product 6. When in doubt, if you're unsure about your product, do anything in your problem space. It gives you new information. 7. Once in a while you come across a decision that has an extremely high consequence, for which you have extremely low conviction. It can make you lose sleep, feel an extreme amount of fear and stress, possibly procrastinate or turn to some form of escapism or a bad habit. It takes sophisticated mental model and a CEO peer group to stay sharp and not lose momentum. 8. Read "Thinking in Bets" 8. Get a CEO peer group from day 0. People who poke holes in your decision-making, ask you questions about your biggest upcoming decisions, listen to you think out loud incoherently, until you get coherent and make 10x better decisions. They save you weeks or months of inaction, or mediocre actions. There are many such peer groups, including www.learningloop.com 9. Every successful startup needs to grow 5-7% weekly or faster at some point, but most startups solving the world's hardest problems in energy, transportation, automation, healthcare, finance, education, culture, justice, defense, food, freedom and so on will take years to get to that rate of growth. Do not quit an important problem space that has tons of demand and value to be unlocked but takes a lot of time to succeed in, just because an accelerator told you they don't like your startup now. They don't like you now because their LPs can't like you now but will later. The keyword is now. Accelerators make money if your valuation is gonna jump in 3 months 10. Ignore most content produced by startup accelerators in the current decade unless it's useful to your current context and increases your decision making speed/quality 11. Ignore every VC post that starts with "The best founders..." whether or not it is in your favor. If it's in your favor, it may inflate your ego and distract you. If it goes against how you are, it may make you overthink and distract you again. They can't possibly know the answer. The only such statement that can be said with reasonable certainty is "the worst founders are the ones who commit crimes". Other than that, you can't possibly make a best/worse founder statement and actually be right. If we could, they'd have more unicorns & some Da Vincis, too