Based on what I know today today, I estimate that entrepreneurship is one third talent, one third luck and one third wisdom. Talent is not teachable and, at present, is… Read More »Part 9: Entrepreneurship = Luck + Talent + Wisdom
Sell when your company has achieved its mission. Sell when you have run out of ideas. Sell when the buyer offers a price that you feel reflects the company’s full… Read More »Can you teach entrepreneurship? Part 8: When to sell?
Success in a startup requires skill in big sales. It is not widely known or accepted but big sales (e.g. which include hiring employees, getting investors and selling expensive products), require a… Read More »Can you teach entrepreneurship? Part 7: Be a master of big sales
A startup’s market size must be big enough to justify any upfront investment. Applying this logic suggests $5 million is a very minimum empirical market size for software startups. The same… Read More »Can you teach entrepreneurship – Part 6: Mastering Market Size
Raw entrepreneurial talent and a diverse founding team correlate strongly with improved startup success rates. In this blog, I’ll provide evidence for this claim and propose a way to measure the quality of a… Read More »Part 5: The Dream Team
Over the last while, I’ve frequently heard that serial entrepreneurs have a higher probability of success. Mistakenly, though, I’ve taken this statement to mean that entrepreneurs improve by learning from past… Read More »Part 4: Prior startup experience may not help much
Have you ever tried to make a decision by writing down, weighting and then rating a few different factors you felt were important? Maybe it was while picking a job,… Read More »Can you teach entrepreneurship? Part 3: How to make better decisions
In this part, I’m going to combine some rules of thumb to predict the success of a startup. The model will be based on three of the four characteristics that Peter Thiel feels are… Read More »Part 2: Check-boxes for startup success (inspired by Peter Thiel)
Based on taste tests, it turns out that experts are very bad at predicting the future price of fine Bordeaux wines – so realised Orley Ashenfelter, a Priceton economist. As… Read More »Part 1: Entrepreneurship is like evaluating a fancy bottle of wine
Giving advice on startups is really hard and I think this difficulty is frequently overlooked. It’s hard to advise on startups because, in the startup environment, you rarely see the same thing much more… Read More »Can you teach entrepreneurship, part 0: The importance of seeing things much more than once