Entrepreneurs must continually make choices in situations where they don’t have all the information they need. They have to make choices into the fog of the unknown. To meet this constant uncertainty, entrepreneurs use action-based trial and error to test specific hypotheses. They place small bets and respond to the outcomes. To grow and change…
As a Silicon Valley VC, I love to invest in internet franchises that possess strong “growth loops.” What’s a growth loop? It’s a feature of a business that yields compounding value—value that multiplies over time—rather than one-off gains. Think of a flywheel: You turn the flywheel once and it keeps spinning on its own. Momentum builds…
What do you do when it’s only the second quarter and you’re already out of chips? Or it’s Valentine’s Day and someone was expecting flowers three hours ago? Or you’ve got a Zoom pitch to a new client starting at noon and you haven’t shaved in a week because you haven’t shopped for razors in…
Today’s young people haven’t been ruined by social media. They’ve been equipped to unleash the power of a new technological era. The class of 2022 finds itself graduating into a surprisingly strong work environment, especially compared with its immediate predecessors. For the moment, employers are hiring again, and the labor market is relatively favorable even…
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…
When you hear a member of Congress talking about the tech industry these days, there’s a good chance it’s in a negative context. Republicans rail against the companies that have enabled everyday citizens to project their voices with a freedom and scope that even presidents could not have matched just a couple decades ago. Democrats rhapsodize about dismantling some…
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…
When I first started sharing the concept of blitzscaling, then later wrote a book about it, I was primarily focused on a very specific business context. For start-ups looking to achieve leadership positions in emerging and highly competitive global markets, it makes sense to prioritize speed over efficiency in the face of uncertainty. Over the last few…
Bitter political partisanship continues to divide America. Devastating wildfires, floods, and hurricanes leave no part of the country untouched. Rapid technological innovation has altered global business patterns and relationships, and left individual workers, companies, and even entire industries wondering what the future holds for them. Now throw in a global pandemic. It’s not an environment…
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