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Entrepreneurship

Running a business.

Entrepreneurship is interesting because it is probably the fastest way (fast ≠ easy) to accumulate wealth in capitalism. But capitalism does not care you want to accumulate wealth because capitalism is just exchange of goods. It is about selling the right thing at the right time to the right buyer. It's seeing a need or a problem in the market that is painful enough once you solved it people are willing to exchange with you asset they have, most likely in the form of money.

Some like me might find entrepreneurship, capitalism, sales, marketing, etc. sound evil, sound like bluffing or deceiving. One way that is helpful to think about it is, it is all about exchanging value. For example, the marginal utility of an extra cup of coffee is low for a coffee shop owner, while the marginal utility of a few dollars relative to the coffee is low for the buyer, and it is a win-win situation where capitalism enables exchange of the two. The process of entrepreneurship and sales is to provide that solution to people, and find people that can benefit from the win-win situation. People that are aware and afraid of being deceiving are the one that won't sell snake oil, so don't worry.

And to look from the perspective of economics, entrepreneurs are the risk-takers. Compare to the labors, entrepreneurs take the risk of the business, in exchange for a potentially bigger reward. Bigger stick. Bigger carrot.

Related pages:

Resources​

  • Pmarca Guide to Startups (2007) by Marc Andreessen, a co-author of Mosaic, co-founder of Netscape, etc.
  • Book: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, Palantir, etc.
  • Lessons from Keith Rabois — A ton of lessons:
    • Product: identifying and solving ambitious problems, forging product market fit, setting business strategy
    • Finance: raising capital, working in/with venture capital, insights on markets, IPOs, and SPACs
    • People: assembling the founding team, building the team, managing time, finding undiscovered talent, hiring executives
    • Management: operating a startup, managing people, succeeding in early-stage investing, and more
    • Others: assessing founders, contrarian thinking, building a career in tech, succeeding in life
  • The ladders of wealth creation: a step-by-step roadmap to building wealth | r/Entrepreneur
    • More on the money side. How does creating a business help move up the wealth ladder and what does that mean
    • This was the post that inspired me to think about entrepreneurship from a different perspective
  • Entrepreneurship Resources | GitHub @charlax
    • Resources related to entrepreneurship (something like this Wiki)
  • Product-Market Fit (PMF) Isn't a Black Box
    • Dimensions: customer satisfaction, market demand and product efficiency
    • Levels:
      • Nascent: a few initial customers, focus on satisfaction
      • Developing: 20 customers, focus on satisfaction and demand
      • Strong: 100-200 customers, time to focus on efficiency
      • Extreme: product is repeatable and efficient, solving an urgent problem
    • Details case study on companies of each level, what to aim for, what it feels like and what to avoid
  • The Millionaire Fastlane | M.J. DeMarco
    • A book, have to ignore the title, the tone and language but take the concepts
    • Wealth is not an event but a process, get rich quick/fast ≠ get rich easy
    • Wealth is health, relationship and freedom, and money provides the freedom
    • Affordable means negligible opportunity cost, no regret if anything happened
    • Sidewalk: pay check to pay check is one accident to poverty
    • Slowlane: saving and investing is slow because it depends on factors that cannot be controlled or leveraged
    • Fastlane: building up assets value, construct a system that do the heavy lifting
    • Systems: rental > software > content > distribution (e-commerce, franchise) > human resources
    • Commandment of control, entry, need, time and scale
  • YouTube: Entrepreneurship Masterclass: $10K - $1M - Daniel Priestley | Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
    • YouTube: Mindset of A Multi-Million Dollar Entrepreneur - Daniel Priestley | Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
      • What are J-curve businesses, lead generation, marketing and sales
      • Lifestyle and mindset, ideation, scorecards and MVP
    • The steps of each stage of building a business, demystifying the thought process and the work required
    • Starting: Not a component labor, entrepreneur is the organizing force for the system
      • Concept: non-J curve business aiming for 2K for 5 sales each month
      • Audience: who is frustrated, an event, a scorecard, a focus group, does anyone show up
      • Offer: slide deck, presentation, brochure, present it face to face, do at least 30 customers
      • Sales: providing the least resistance path to overcome the obstacles and criteria to move from the current reality to the desired reality of the customers. Professional sales are not pushy
      • LAPS: leads → appointment → presentation → sales
    • 100K: key person influencer, building a personal brand, making differentiation and publish content
    • Grow the asset, media, intellectual property, software, etc., things that scale
    • Bigger carrot and bigger stick as en entrepreneur. Rough roads end smooth.
  • Developer Marketing for Early-stage Startups | Posthog (HN)
    • Things to be aware of pre or post-product-market fit
    • E.g. "Hacker News is a double-edged sword", "beware of the attribution mirage"
  • The Collapse of Silicon Valley Bank | The Pragmatic Engineer — Paywall (it's a bonus issue in the newsletter)
    • What happened from the perspective of tech startups founders
    • Back run leading to the downfall and how this affects startups' liquidity
    • Expenses on payroll and vendor costs, and the effect on employee-of-record (EOR) payroll companies like Rippling
    • Implications: moving funds to multiple bank accounts and bigger banks
  • Ask HN: What books helped you in your entrepreneurship journey?
  • Who tends to become an entrepreneur? The Generalist (HN)
    • Founders tend to be generalists, supported by a community, previously under-compensated, survived a difficult childhood, more prone to mental health issues and more
    • My question is what about entrepreneurs for smaller businesses and businesses that failed?
  • Explaining tech's notion of talent scarcity
    • Different corporates/industries have different distributions of talent (normal, Pareto, bimodal)
    • Some compete for A-players, some aim for uniquely gifted workers at particular tasks, and some have talents that are difficult to explain or replicate. All these affect the corporate culture and the management style
  • Where do great ideas come from? | The Generalist (HN)
    • Environments with good incentives, tolerating failure
    • Outsiders with a beginner mindset
    • Through collective reasoning as well as exceptional superstars
    • Brokers: people that connect structural holes, gaps in an organization's network
    • Strong intrinsic motivation: motivated by independence and desire for an intellectual challenge
    • People who have gone through the increasingly larger knowledge burden to operate at the frontier of knowledge
  • 4 Mistakes to avoid to build a better business in solo (HN)
    • It's about finding the right market to sell to, specifically for solo business
    • Small businesses that don't require scale, charge high prices, target businesses, and target a small market
  • How startups lose spark | John Qian (HN)
    • When the team is small, design, ideation, implementation and launching are all fun and exciting
    • When the team is >100, things start to get boring and slow
    • Might not be preventable, but don't accelerate the death, keep it fun like a startup instead of copying large companies
  • Start a business, not a startup | Overthinking Money
    • 4 Parts of why starting a business, instead of a startup (i.e. a venture-capital-backed business)
  • Ask HN: What are some easy ways to earn some side money?
  • Ask HN: Tips for Solopreneur?
    • Tips on: being solo turns down investors, about milestones, locations, VCs vs. bootstrapping, etc.
  • Never say "no", but rarely say "yes".
    • Charge extra for something that doesn't fit
    • Set the condition of yes such that if the counterparty says:
      • "yes": you are happy because the terms and money are so good
      • "no": you are happy because it's not a great fit anyway
  • Superlinear returns | Paul
    • Returns are superlinear, half as efficient means 0 customers not half the customers
    • Focus on growth rate rather than absolute numbers, look for exponential growth, work that compounds
  • The ideation flywheel | Stackfix
    • A mental model for choosing startup ideas to pursue
    • Focus on the problems first, collect problems, rank them, define the problems with real users
    • Focus on the problems rather than the solution, the problems exists around peoples life, not the solution
    • Idea Maze: possible solutions, constraints, how the maze changes over time, look for 10x improvements
    • Not solvable or not worth solving → linear ideation: look for upside of what's discovered and starts again
  • Confessions of a Middle-Class Founder
    • From the perspective of a "middle-class" founder, looking for money, pitching to VC, late 2010s world to 2020 COVID
    • And now still waiting for the exit opportunity
  • The Fairytale Narrative: Structured strategic planning
    • Strategic Objectives: we must advance, the problems to be solved and goals to achieve
    • Obstacles: but something is in the way, some events that trigger the adventure in fairy tale
    • Main Activities: so we do something, how to overcome obstacles and achieve the strategic objectives
    • Measures: and until victory, how we know whether we are making progress
    • Not doing: what did we leave out so that we can do the even more important and urgent things
  • Why are we surprised that startups are so freaking hard? Every.to
    • Athletes don't often say the years of training is harder than they thought in post-game interview
    • Why successful businesses founders say it is harder than they thought?
    • People get attracted to the specific niche, special missing piece in the market
    • But there are more tedious problems, struggles and competitions a company will eventually needs to deal with
  • What I Wish Someone Had Told Me | Sam Altman
  • What's not going to change in 10 years? | Jeff Benzos
    • It's hard to answer what's going to be like in 10 years
    • It's easier to answer what's not going to change in 10 years
    • Continuously improve for things that genuinely matters, e.g. cheaper price, faster delivery for Amazon
  • How to trade software for small money
    • The pricing model of software could be SaaS, license per server, by seats, by installation, proprietary features, support and consulting, sponsorship, etc.
  • How to Price a Data Asset
    • Axioms: value of data depends on use case and the user, value is additive and rivalrous
    • Implications: standard way of pricing fails, e.g. by seat, by volume, by API calls, etc.
    • Price by access, or wrap it into a service, or monetize usage rights, or a data flywheel with constant stream of new data for recurring value
    • Legibility of the dataset is the key
  • VCs aren't your friends
    • VCs aren't teachers or mentors. There is no second chance. They are investors not a coach.
  • Building products is an unforgiving grind
    • Tests for finding product market fit
  • Hacking sales as an introvert
    • Language: framing the offer to what appealing
    • Delivery: zoom setup, tone, body language
    • Story hacking: fit the offer into customer's story
  • Lessons from my First Exit
    • Long read of a story of the sale of TinyPilot, bootstrapped, founder ran, 4 years hardware company
    • What went well, what didn't and what surprises
  • The cold email handbook | Matt Redler
    • Why cold email works
    • Infrastructure required: multiple domains, redirecting, SPF, DMARC, DKIM, warm up inboxes, etc.
    • Writing the email: who to send and what to write, more examples and tools in the guide
  • Evaluating ideas | Reddit
    • Channel/distribution > problem > solution > business
    • What people can be reached > Is there a painful problem > Is there a better solution > Is there a business out of the solution

      Don't sell what you can make, make what you can sell

  • 3 Financial Plans You Need
    • C-60: 60% confidence, the base plan, growth and burn stays the same, the target to hit
    • C-10: 10% confidence, the stretch goal, assume 10-20% more revenue, the place for bonuses and celebrations
    • C-90: 90% confidence, worse case scenario, assume 20% less revenue while burn stays the same, make sure there is a 16+ month runway
  • The profitable startup | Linear
    • Profitability is to survive without investors, ability to focus on vision and mission
    • Hire slowly and intentionally, keep small and focus team, measure revenue per employee
    • One article linked in the blog: Ramen Profitability | Paul Graham. A startup doesn't have to be making money in the way it ultimately will, but it should be making some money that is enough to buy ramen
  • 50 things we've learned about building products | PostHog (HN)
    • A list of lessons which link to more articles
    • Building great, small, efficient, transparent teams with ownership and trust
    • Ship fast, release quick, get real world feedback and validation
  • Ask HN: How are you acquiring your first hundred users?
    • Build good product, price differentiation, more modern/accessible/affordable
    • Reach out to personal network or carefully selected niche of network

Ideas: