Lessons for entrepreneurs 🎓- Tech news in summary 🙇- Weekly dose of life-changing facts 🧪
Curiosity is what keeps us from feeling finished
Episode #88. Hey Sunday reader 👋🏼
This Sunday, The Timestamp is here again for you! Get your weekly dose of summaries from the articles, books, or podcasts you may have missed in tech & culture.
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#1. Accept uncertainty » Guidelines for entrepreneurs
This week, Patrick Kervern from Umanz is back with a set of 14 takeaways from this following video featuring Scott Belsky aka cofounder of Behance and 99U.
1- Sometimes in entrepreneurial success stories the press like to capture only two things: beginnings and ends. They forget one crucial thing: the messy middle than can last years.
2- But the messy middle has many lessons to teach. The first one is that as an entrepreneur you have to build your own illusory "positive slope" and make up your own rewards when there are none. Capture some non-financial rewards for yourself and the team. They are testaments of progress and bring texture to the journey.
3- So much of a successful journey is staying long enough to figure it out. Two things are essential in the messy middle: endurance and optimization.
4- Enduring is learning to manage uncertainty. Avoiding insecurity works (like checking google analytics 10 times per day). Learning to disconnect. Finding ways to short-circuit non-financial rewards for your teams. Stepping out of the confines of your roles. Doing the ducking job to make the product great as a forcing function.
5- Be aware of organizational debts. The sums of decisions that were never made.
6- Resourcefulness can be better than resources. Creativity loves constraints.
7- To optimize, invest in your product and in your organization at the same time. A/B test your product but also A/B test the way you work. Tackle big audacious problems, not nuances.
8- Hire Constructive teams. Teams of builders. Only work with teams where discussions evolve by a step function.
9- Innovation happens at the edge of reason. Innovation is an edge that becomes a center. Diversity of teams and experiences and perspectives is where edges happen. Give unreasonable insights on the chance of succeeding.
10- Value conviction over consensus.
11- Great opportunity doesn't have ‘great opportunity’ in the subject line.
12- Gain confidence from doubts. When everyone thinks you are crazy. You are either crazy or you are onto something.
13- Learn to identify the final mile. It's a different playbook altogether. People start to act differently and think differently. Egos change. The piece of advice is wherever you are: stay in the early innings.
14- Curiosity is what keeps us from feeling finished.
Thank you Patrick for all those lessons shared. It really grasps what entrepreneurship is today 🙏. I am also sharing here a twit that you featured in your newsletter Umanz:
#2. Catching up with Morning Brew
This week has been a bit too intense on my side, I guess this might have been the same for you. Here are a few takeaways I grabbed from the Morning Brew newsletter, a lot happened on the tech scene this past week! Here are a few headlines they detailed further in the Morning Brew:
FTX from $32billion to zero, “the world’s second-biggest crypto exchange, filed for bankruptcy days after a plan to sell itself to rival Binance for $1 dollar (a far cry from its recent $32 billion valuation) fell apart. The exchange’s meltdown took the net worth of founder Sam Bankman-Fried—aka SBF, who positioned himself as the public face of crypto—from $16 billion to $0. He resigned as CEO”.
Meta shrinking. “Meta laid off 11,000 staffers on Wednesday, with the company dragged down in large part by CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s commitment to building a metaverse that possibly no one else wants.”
Softbank is in trouble. “Masayoshi Son, SoftBank’s founder and chief unicorn hunter, said yesterday he’d step back from the day to day after the firm’s signature Vision Fund reported a $10 billion quarterly loss.”
Art enthusiast Paul Allen broke a record. “The auction of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s art collection this week brought in $1.6 billion, making it the biggest art sale of all time. But that record haul doesn’t mean it was a savvy investment. Despite Allen being an extremely wealthy and discerning art collector, he recorded an average annualized growth rate of just 6.2% over 18 years for the pieces he previously bought at auction. That’s actually lower than the S&P 500’s growth rate over that time span, Axios notes.”
#3. Interesting facts from Not Boring
Packy McCormick builds every week a weekly dose of optimism by writing his newsletter called Not Boring. Here are a few takeaways I borrowed from him this week:
To lift more people out of poverty, The Center for Growth & Opportunity at Utah State University, one of the leading research centers, is publicly advocating for the Abundance Agenda, and it recently published a list of abundance recommendations to Congress. They listed 3 categories of recommendations:
Technology: increase competition, improve the FDA, broadband access for all, remove barriers to transportation innovation, and expand employment flexibility,
Environmental Stewardship: faster clean energy with procedural tweaks, resilient grids, proactive wildfire management, and land conservation,
Immigration: expand immigration to boost entrepreneurship and build a better pathway for skilled immigration.
The urgency to eat less meat. “According to the UN Food & Agriculture Organization, emissions from livestock account for a startling 14.5% of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions (compared to just 3.5% for aviation). Even if all energy production switched to 100% renewable power today the emissions from animal agriculture alone would still push us past the 2-degree celsius warming threshold.”
Combatting obesity is not easy. Be aware that over 40% of the U.S. population is obese while 3% of the population suffers from an eating disorder called “binge eating.”
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