There are 2 paths to success:

1. Be Top 1% in the world at 1 thing
2. Be Top 25% in the world at 3 things

Top 25% is achievable by most people.

The problem is most people focus on being Top 1%.

Work on combining “3 pretty goods” and stay at it.

It’ll pay off big.

I interviewed 100 legendary investors, founders and executives.

Collectively, they have created over $1 trillion of value for the world.

Here are 20 practical career lessons they shared with me 👇👇👇

Always strive to simultaneously be overrated and underrated.

Contrary to popular belief, being overrated is good. It opens doors and gives you credibility.

But don’t let this go to your head. Stay hungry, humble and hardworking.

Most people overinvest in expiring skills & underinvest in permanent skills.

Expiring skills are tactical; their relevance diminishes with time and technology

Permanent skills are evergreen and create disproportionate impact

E.g. communication, judgement, trust, empathy

Get comfortable with being uncomfortable

If you get advice from enough people, the advice will cancel out.

You can find 2 smart people to take opposite sides of the argument on virtually every topic.

Focus on developing your instincts and trusting your own intuition.

Surround yourself with open minded people vs. close minded people

Open Minded People:
- Ask genuine questions
- Insatiably curious
- Listen attentively

Close Minded People
- Make statements instead of ask questions
- Focus on being right
- Speak more

There’s a lot of bad advice out there on how to pitch your startup.

Last year, I invested $1M+ and heard 200 companies pitch.

Every great pitch I've heard nails 5 ingredients.

In this thread, we'll go through each to help maximize your chances when fundraising

Let's dig in👇

1/ Every pitch should have 5 ingredients:

- Problem: Is this an issue
- Solution: Do you have the fix
- Market: Is this a big enough issue
- Business: Can you make money
- Team: Are you the people to do it

The best pitches nail all 5. Good ones hit 4. Subpar hit 3 or less.

2/ PROBLEM

The problem statement is an explanation of why a set of circumstances is painful for a set of users.

There’s one word in that sentence that is most important: painful.

If your problem is not painful enough, it's a vitamin.

The best startups are pain killers.

3/ SOLUTION

The solution statement is an explanation of how you address the pain felt by your users. If you don’t have the right solution, you won’t get customer traction.

Customers don’t buy your thesis on the pain point. They buy the actual thing that solves their pain point.

4/ MARKET

In tech, only businesses that have outsized potential get funded.

To have outsized potential, you have to either be in a:

(a) small, but rapidly growing market or
(b) large existing market that can be resegmented

If not, the business is not venture backable.

Hot Take:

The metaverse is going to make everything more extreme.

Here’s how the world is about to go on tilt and what it means for you 👇👇👇

My friend @ShaanVP had an awesome thread on the metaverse a few weeks ago.

He set a clear, understandable definition of the metaverse:

The metaverse is a time, not a place.

It’s when our digital life is more important than our physical life.

If you believe in that definition (I do), then it pushes an interesting second order question.

What happens when that shift occurs?

I think everything gets a lot more extreme.

Why?

The world doesn’t get any bigger, but our surface area of exposure increases exponentially.

We have more insight and visibility into everything that’s going on.

This will put more pressure on the proverbial pressure cooker.

Here are 10 examples:

1. Opportunity

As more economic activity moves online, constraints and barriers go away.

You can be 10,000 miles away and considered as a candidate for a job.

Measurement pushes away from inputs (politics, facetime) to outputs (deliverables).

This week I interviewed someone who:

- Built a $1.5B company as COO
- Sold a $1B company to Microsoft
- Invested in 25 🦄🦄🦄🦄

Here’s 10 timeless lessons from one of the greatest tech entrepreneurs of our generation:

is a legend and man of many titles:

Founder, Executive, Investor, Coach, Filmmaker.

He’s also a down to earth guy that’s incredibly generous with his time.

This convo was a follow on from a dialogue we started earlier this year.

Alright...onto the lessons:

Lesson #1: Startups should NOT “do things that don’t scale”

The whole point of technology is to find an elegant, scalable approach.

The sooner you do that, the better off you are.

When you glorify doing things that don’t scale, you end up with a startup that doesn’t scale.

Lesson #2: You can’t do it alone, no matter how great you are.

To win big, surround yourself with:

A. Other greats
B. Role players
C. A system that brings out the best in everyone.

All three of these are equally important and allow organizations to thrive.

Lesson #3: Silicon Valley is no longer a place. It’s a way of doing business

20 years ago SV was the home for innovation.

Today it's now spread to many other places.

Risk Capital + Knowledge + Support = a more inclusionary and global ecosystem.

That's a great thing.

The ultimate hack to 10x your career:

Enter the Side Door.

Let's break it down 👇👇👇

Let’s set the stage. Imagine you’re in college and it’s Friday night.

It’s been a long week and it’s the party of the year at the local bar.

Awesome - you’re all set to go.

You get there and run into a huge problem.

There’s a massive line outside.

You do what most people do.

You stand in line in the freezing cold for an hour.

You’re tense and starting to worry.

You frantically call a friend of yours who managed to get in.

- Is there room inside?
- Any way you can talk to the bouncer for me?
- Is my (questionable...at best) ID going to get me in?

You leave your destiny up to the fate of the universe.

This is what most people do with their careers.

They take the front door AKA they do what everyone else is doing.

And what happens?

Well they get the same results as most people.

It’s hard to stand out and get the job you want.

While he considers you weak and inferior,

and takes no precautions against you,

you are using the time to catch up and surpass him.

This soft, permeable form of invasion is often the best,

for the enemy has nothing to react against, prepare for, or resist.

[Great courtiers] are magnets of pleasure — people want to be around them because they know how to please, yet they neither fawn nor humiliate themselves.

The credit for an invention or creation is as important, if not more important, than the invention itself.

You must secure the credit for yourself and keep others from stealing it away, or from piggybacking on your hard work.

When your own reputation is solid, use subtler tactics, such as satire and ridicule to weaken your opponent while making you out as a charming rogue.

A Viper crushed beneath your foot but left alive, will rear up and bite you with a double dose of venom.

An enemy that is left around is like a half-dead viper that you nurse back to health.

Time makes the venom grow stronger.