Make Market Realities Work for You No matter how much heart and hard work you throw into something, no matter how good your intentions, no matter how strong your convictions—if real customers don’t want what you’re offering, you’ll go out of business. In the immortal words of Alec Baldwin’s character in Glengarry Glen Ross, “Third…
Ten years ago, when Ben Casnocha and I published The Startup of You, we wrote that we have entered the Age of the Inconceivable, an era in which things we previously couldn’t even have imagined happen again and again and again. Now that we have updated and are re-releasing the book a decade later, this is…
I’ll be speaking with Michael Dell at a Village Global event later this week. The event is private, but since I was impressed by Michael’s latest book, Play Nice But Win, I want to share some of my thoughts about it with a wider audience. So here are five key takeaways that resonated with me from Michael’s highly entertaining…
J.J. Abrams on How Sci-Fi Fuels Innovation
How Startups Can Compete with Industry Giants
The first truth of entrepreneurship and investing: The biggest new ideas are contrarian. They go so deeply against commonly held assumptions that they seem not only risky but flat-out ridiculous. They’re the kind of ideas that draw a lot of “Nos.” And this makes sense: The fact that an idea goes against conventional wisdom is…
How Academic Pursuits Impact Entrepreneurship
Applying High-Level Thinking to Real-World Business
Today, Aurora and Reinvent Technology Partners Y announced their agreement to merge. In my own view, this is awesome news — because I’ve been an investor in Aurora since February 2018 when I co-led its Series A round for Greylock and joined Aurora’s board. At this point, it’s well understood that creating AV technology is an extremely challenging undertaking – especially…
Ethical Considerations in Building Artificial Intelligence
Most of us love a great founding story. Whether it’s the founding of a corporation or the founding of a nation, we’re drawn to the dramatic stories where everything began. But I came to realize something, as I reviewed the past four years of Masters of Scale interviews in preparation for writing the new Masters of…
Airbnb’s Playbook for Flourishing Amid Crisis
Knowing my background in philosophy, Brad Feld and Dave Jilk recently invited me to contribute a foreword for their new book, The Entrepreneur’s Weekly Nietzsche: A Book for Disruptors. It’s now available andI highly recommend it; click here to get your copy. Here’s the foreword I wrote for it. Nietzsche is a troubling and troublesome philosopher. In different decades…
How Strategy Games Teach Valuable Business Skills
How to Make Better Decisions, Faster