Hello my friends,
I'm happy to be here with you all today and I want to take a moment to celebrate life and us being here and having the opportunity to learn, to explore, to make friends, and to follow our dreams.
So before we start today I would like to invite you all to take five minutes of relaxation - some people call it meditation - but I just want you to take a break from your crazy and fast-paced lives to slow things down, take a deep breath, smile for all the amazing moments you have, for all the wonderful people in your life, for where you are in the world and for all the great things you have achieved.
Five minutes [it's only .35% of your day!!!]. Take a deep breath. Put the phone down for a bit and just be in the moment.
Be grateful for being here. One more day in this magical place.
Cool, I took the five minutes myself before jumping back into this week's article to humbly share with you all the great articles, videos, and audio I explored this week.
[In case you jumped your five minutes, I hope you reconsider and take a well-deserved break]
I think 20VC is the big winner this week with three high-quality podcasts of which I have a hard time choosing the top #1; so I suggest you spend some time exploring them and figuring things out for yourself.
20VC is a venture capital firm with a spectacular track record when it comes to their portfolio, but I think over the years they have positioned themselves as a leading platform where founders, late-stage operators, and executives in general can access insane quality content in a format you can explain to your grandma. The way Harry Stebbings - founder of 20VC and host of the podcast - conducts each and every interview is, in my opinion, state of the art - he keeps things simple, straight to the point, and has no trouble pushing for the information that his audience really wants to cover. It's definitely not a PR stunt for these guests and they have to show what they really know and communicate it in a way that the audience can learn, apply and see things for themselves in their own business.
Harry is also very active on Linkedin and Twitter and I recommend you follow his work.
So let's see what he has for us this week:
1. What is High Performance:
High performance is about throughput and output. Putting a great team together and then sustaining performance over multiple years is what defines high performance.2. Three things to look for in a career:
1. Whom are you gonna work with – can you learn from them?
2. Can you have an impact on the company that you're going to?
3. Does the company itself have an impact on the world?
If you can check all three, then don't hesitate.3. UberEats vs Doordash: Who Won?
"In the US, we made a bet on speed. DoorDash made a bet on the suburbs and they made a bet on selection. The biases that we had made us early on bet on the wrong thing. We've since corrected and we've got a huge selection in the markets in which we operate."
1.) Lesson from SVB #1: The Importance of Scenario Planning:
What is the right way to do scenario planning in startups? What is the difference between good vs bad scenario planning? What do the best scenario plans include and involve? What is the right way to communicate these scenario plans to your stakeholders?
2.) Lesson from SVB #2: The Importance of Financial Agility:
What does it mean for a startup to be "financially agile"? From a banking relationships perspective, what can startups do to be financially agile? How many accounts should a startup have? How much runway should be in each? Should startups bank with startup banks as well as traditional banks? Should startups have their money in sweep accounts and money market accounts?
This is a must-listen for all founders who are deeply connected to their product and how it evolves from the early version - and how important it is to get the customers who love your mission and your product.
“It's not important to win the argument. It's important for us to be collectively right.”
“What are the metrics that reveal true customer love? True Good x Fake Good? Churn.”
Successful Products are fundamentally different, not incrementally better!
"Customer loves first before we even talk about significant scaling”
“Are you able to stomach your own incompetence?"
“If you are executing and you don't know what you are executing towards you can not take the signal that's coming back at you and interact”
Jag Duggal
During the amazing podcast with Jag Duggal, he said something so simple, yet so powerful: "Priorities are not a plural" and I couldn't agree more.
Late last week, my good friends at Verve Capital published an article I've written exploring how early-stage founders should be obsessively focused on what's important and a priority if they want to have a chance of success.
I would like to thank my friends at Verve again for giving me the stage and the opportunity to share some of my ideas, and I have received some great feedback from people I know and also from people who have come across this piece but knew nothing about me or my work.
You can read the full article here. (it got 67 claps!!!)
When people ask me: what makes a great founder? I answer their ability to learn and execute quickly. I shouldn’t give such a glib answer, but I truly believe that when you start a company, you have to be open to destroying and rebuilding your theories over and over again.
Maybe I should rephrase it like this: a growth mindset with laser-focused execution to solve a problem and the ability to lead and inspire great people.
Daniel Silva
Bonus! [ How much do you know about Dopamine?]
According to Cleveland Clinic:
“Dopamine is known as the “feel-good” hormone. It gives you a sense of pleasure. It also gives you the motivation to do something when you’re feeling pleasure.
Dopamine is part of your reward system. This system is designed, from an evolutionary standpoint, to reward you when you’re doing the things you need to do to survive — eat, drink, compete to survive and reproduce. As humans, our brains are hard-wired to seek out behaviors that release dopamine in our reward system. When you’re doing something pleasurable, your brain releases a large amount of dopamine. You feel good and you seek more of that feeling.
This is why junk food and sugar are so addictive. They trigger the release of a large amount of dopamine into your brain, which gives you the feeling that you’re on top of the world and you want to repeat that experience.”
“When a gambler feels favoured by luck, dopamine is released”
The book Dopamine Nation, explores the interconnection of pleasure and pain in the brain and helps explain addictive behaviors — not just to drugs and alcohol, but also to food, sex, and smart phones.
Do you know what's behind Facebook's success? Dopamine. In the Guardian article from March 2018, Sean Parker, the 38-year-old founding president of Facebook, admitted that the social network was founded not to unite us, but to distract us. “The thought process was: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’” he said at an event in Philadelphia in November. To achieve this goal, Facebook’s architects exploited a “vulnerability in human psychology”
So where are we getting with this? The one and only Dr. Andrew Huberman shares Leverage Dopamine to Overcome Procrastination & Optimize Effort
Best from Linkedin
We were strong advocates of the seed stage for the last 10 years. We have backed 44 funds over 10 vintages with over 1000 companies that were added at the seed stage. - Read it here.
Last year Doug Leone - partner on Sequoia's seed/early and growth teams - joined 20VC for a masterclass on the biggest lessons from his 34 years at Sequoia staying at the top.
I broke down the 9 main lessons from the show: 🔥 - Read it here.[ Chamath Palihapityia ] Founders: If you have competing term sheets, what factors are important beyond price? Firm A has a lower valuation BUT a much better track record of realizing that value. Firm B has a history of paying up but fewer exits. Who do you choose? Read it here.
[ Henrik Werdelin ]The Kids Are Not Alright: My Exploration of the Deteriorating Mental Health of Our Youth - Read it here
Startup of the Week [Available in EU only!]
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