Hi everyone, Happy Monday! (Is it Monday? Idk I have lost track of day and time)
After the previous newsletter, I sent out, a friend of mine texted me and asked me a question. That question absolutely shocked me and I felt embarrassed, she asked me - “Shlok, Have you ever written a newsletter about a Woman?”
I realized the flaw in my thinking that I have written 20 newsletters and none of them has ever been about a strong awesome woman.
And that is why today I am writing about Jessica, let me give a brief about today’s Titan, Jessica Livingston before I share 1 interesting story, 2 quotes to think about, and 3 short lessons from her for you to read this week.
Jessica Livingston (@jesslivingston)is an American author and a founding partner of the seed stage venture firm YC (Y Combinator)
Her YC co-founders nicknamed her, “the social radar”. She was one of those you just couldn’t get anything past. If something seemed off or out of character, She noticed and made inquiries. She was always trying to figure things out based on subtle social cues.
In early 2007, Livingston released Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days, a collection of interviews with famous startup founders, including Steve Wozniak, Mitch Kapor, Ray Ozzie, and Max Levchin.
She is also one of the financial backers of OpenAI, a for profit company aimed at the safe development of artificial general intelligence.
1 STORY FOR YOU
Most likely to succeed?
I played soccer when I was younger. And when I was in the ninth grade, we had an away game at a school called Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass. And the place seemed so unbelievably fabulous that I decided right there on the spot that I was gonna go to school there. Little did I know though that this decision would have bittersweet consequences. In my old school, I’d been a big fish in a small pond. I was a straight-A student and good at sports. And when I got to Andover in the fall of 1986, it seemed like everyone was straight-A students and good at sports. So I got really discouraged and basically gave up.
I defaulted to being a mediocre student and did nothing impressive or noteworthy for the next decade. It was like my own personal Dark Ages. And it’s a bit embarrassing to reflect on, to be honest with you, but I think it’s important to mention because when journalists and biographers write about successful founders, they often focus on early predictors of success in people’s formative years. And for me, you know, I didn’t have these things and I didn’t at least have any of the conventional kind of predictors, and no one would have voted me most likely to succeed.
2 QUOTES FROM HER
“You’ve got to be investing today in what your future’s going to be 5 or 10 years out.”
“People like the idea of innovation in the abstract, but when you present them with any specific innovation, they tend to reject it because it doesn’t fit with what they already know.”
3 LEARNINGS FOR YOU
Know if you’re default alive.
Growth isn’t enough, though. You can have a good growth rate and still die, if you run out of money and can’t raise more.
The critical question is whether you’re what we call “default alive” or “default dead.” Default alive means if your expenses stay the same and your revenue continues to grow at the rate it’s been growing, you get to breakeven before you run out of money. Default dead means you don’t.
We now ask all YC founders to begin their investor updates to us by saying which of the two they are. As well as telling us how the startup is doing, it’s a good way to yank the founders out of denial. Because being about to run out of money is another of those dangerous problems founders are often in denial about. You’d be amazed how many founders don’t even know whether they’re default alive or default dead.
Measure your growth.
If you have a good growth rate, which in a startup means at least 10% per month, you’re on the right track. And if you don’t, you’re missing at least one of the two ingredients I mentioned. You’re either making the wrong thing, or not focusing enough.
There’s a famous sentence we often quote at Y Combinator: You make what you measure. Pick a number you want to grow, and focus on that. The best metric to choose is good old fashioned revenue. There’s no better test of whether you’re really making something people want.
Focusing on growth also prevents you from being in denial, which is a big danger for startup founders. For some reason, a lot of the problems you face in a startup tend to provoke denial. Maybe it’s simply because these problems are hard.
Founders who are making the wrong thing are often in denial about it. Founders who are wasting their time on inessential stuff are often in denial about it. Denial is the silent killer of startups. But if you hold yourself to growth targets, you can’t remain in denial. The numbers, good or bad, are staring you in the face.
Unless of course, you’re in denial about the need to hold yourself to growth targets. And that, believe it or not, happens all the time. We constantly hear founders saying, “We’re not focusing on growth right now.” There are times when that is the right thing to do, but I don’t even need to tell you how things usually turn out after we hear that from founders.
There’s no one successful mold for a successful founder.
Just because you might only see a certain type of founder in the news, that doesn’t mean you need to turn yourself into that. Do what you’re genuinely interested in and try to play to your natural strengths.
A startup is so much work that you’ll give up if you’re not genuinely interested in it. Don’t pay attention to the mainstream’s opinion of what you’re doing, whether it’s your skills, your idea, or whatever. Unless they’re your users, their opinion does not matter. Although do pay attention to the opinion of your users. They’re important.
Reading links -
http://www.paulgraham.com/jessica.html
https://blog.ycombinator.com/jessica-livingston-shares-9-things-she-learned-from-founding-yc/
https://blog.ycombinator.com/how-not-to-fail/
https://foundersatwork.posthaven.com/
That’s it from me, until next Monday! Be safe and stay indoors :)
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