Nivi · October 24th, 2008
Naval recently presented A Quick and Dirty Guide to Starting Up to Girls In Tech:
(Slides: A Quick and Dirty Guide to Starting Up (pdf))
Here are some of my favorite quotes from the presentation:
“We are faced with insurmountable opportunities.” – Pogo
The most important thing: idea intelligence connections experience determination.
Ideas, and therefore NDAs, are worthless.
“… as in all matters of the heart, don’t settle.” – Steve Jobs, on picking co-founders
Co-founders are the biggest failure mode for startups.
“If you are facing in the right direction, keep walking.” – Buddha, on focusing your time in a startup
Markets are relatively efficient, so your first product is probably wrong.
If there’s demand, we’ll turn this into a slidecast.
Topics Execution · Founders · Markets · Presentations · Starting Up
I disagree about not needing conference. Web 2.0 Expo helps you ‘get the web’. Being there live helps the info seep into your being deeper than just watching it on youtube. Otherwise, awesome slide, thanks for sharing.
Excellent! Lots of wisdom there about things other than startups.
It would be interesting to hear Naval’s talk (was there one?) which he illustrated with this deck.
Yay for Determination! Our startup is now a couple of months old, and the only reason we got from idea to funding and to 6 persons is determination (actually, I’d go further and call it passion).
Interestingly this is the same conclusion Jessica Livingston (of Y-combinator) comes to in her book Founder’s at Work, which has interviews with founders of 30 companies such as Adobe, Lycos, Flickr, Hot or Not. Pretty much the only thing all of these entrepreneurs have in common is perseverance.
I also really liked slide 22’s instruction to build something hard and thus defensible and then develop proprietary distribution for it. Solid gold advice.
SKMurphy » Overnight Success // Nov 15, 2008 at 12:48 am
[…] negotiations are delightfully practical and lately they have provided some excellent advice on bootstrapping and customer development. But many articles and blog posts are designed to convince an entrepreneur […]