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GREG ISENBERG
@gregisenberg 4 years, 3 months ago 846 views

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I interviewed 5 billionaires this week

I asked them to share their lessons learned on startups, life and entrepreneurship:

Here's what they told me:

A startup idea isn't "one" idea

It's a 10000 ideas, 100,000 decisions and 1,000,000 headaches

You will lose some friends. Kiss most of your high school friends goodbye

Certainties of life:

- Death
- Taxes
- Losing friends

A sign of wealth:

No longer needing an alarm clock to wake up

When in doubt, please don't send that angry email response

Wait 24h. Go for a walk

Angriness makes you drunk. Send emails sobers

Career advice:

Quit your job if it makes you exhausted (if you can)

Be grateful for your job if it fills you up with energy

Likable people win

People sense those good vibes. It does wonders for your startup, career or life

You will doubt yourself a million times

It's only natural

Constantly cut your losses

Harmful in the short term, lucrative in the long run

A sign of wealth: no envy, no fear

You can't build great products without being "at one" with the niche you're building it for

It's almost impossible

Deeply understand your niche or expect disappointments

Enjoy the process

Building a startup should never feel like a grind

Building a startup is a privilege

A satisfying life doesn't require much

Wonderful health, enjoyable work & a caring family & friends.

Success is inevitable.

Follow me on Twitter @gregisenberg to learn more about startups, internet communities or niches

It's free to follow 😝

More from GREG ISENBERG

GREG ISENBERG
@gregisenberg

Startups taught me more about life and business than I ever could imagine

Thread: 20 tips I wish I could give to my 20 year old self

Startups are simple:

There are good times and bad times

Good times: enjoy the ride
Bad times: enjoy the ride

Beware of pessimistic people

Pessimism is the worst disease

Professional lies we tell ourselves:

1. Your email inbox is getting stuff done
2. A full calendar is positive
3. Big meetings are the answer

You know better

FAANG give you credentials
Startups give you education

GREG ISENBERG
@gregisenberg

Here’s the story of how I (almost) lost everything building and selling my last company Islands to WeWork

I’ve never told this story publicly. Sharing it on Twitter because sharing is caring

Here we go…...

In June 2016, I was having tea in SF and realized “group chat is the new social network”

My thinking: everything would be verticalized

You’d have group chats around finance, around gaming, around work etc.

People want fluid, spontaneous communities/groups, not newsfeeds

I had previously sold a company. I created a short slide pitch deck

I raised $2m from some of the world’s best investors on an idea. From first pitch to money in the bank in 45 days

We had no product. No prototype. No users. Just a crazy idea

SF is sometimes magical like that. It was a privilege

We were off to the races

We built the product. We decided to focus on colleges

The idea: open up Islands on your campus, see group chats around you, form communities and create relationships

It was like Slack for communities. Focused on college

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GREG ISENBERG
@gregisenberg

I built communities that created 83m new customers in 2020 with this marketing framework

I'm curious your thoughts

A startup marketing manifesto:

Connect the disconnected

1. Find people who want to pursue a goal (ex: new immigrants in the US, learn tennis etc)
2. Accelerate them

This will do more for your business than you can imagine

Customers need to feel lucky. Like the chosen ones

Lucky to be a part of the community. Lucky to buy the product. Lucky to be a part of your story

If you nail the “luckiness” feeling, you can drive your marketing costs to zero

How to jumpstart & structure community:

- Masterclass for X
- Clubhouse for X
- Q&A platforms
- Small virtual events
- Gaming events
- Text your community’s leader
- etc.

Have a design aesthetic. Own it

Make sure your niche is in love with it

Daring design aesthetics pay dividends

GREG ISENBERG
@gregisenberg

My guide to startups:

I've lost millions, hired hundreds, raised millions and sold companies before the age of 30

Read this to become better:

Venture capital & PR are like drugs

Drugs can kill you or save your life

Use accordingly.

If you’re lucky: your startup will be copied. Don’t be mad

The best startup revenge is overwhelming product/market fit

Okinawa is an Island in Japan with the highest life expectancy. It's called "the land of immortals"

The secret: almost everybody gardens

Entrepreneurship is a marathon not a sprint. Be sustainable

Find your gardening.

A wonderful online course is so valuable its like you’re stealing from the teacher

A bad online course is a teacher stealing from you

Tip: scout out for wonderful online courses

A few dollar investment will completely change a life

GREG ISENBERG
@gregisenberg

Life is crazy. Today is a good day to stop and reflect

10 simple questions that CHANGED my life

(startup life, personal life)

Here they are:

Q: Can you really control that?

Smart people know what they can and cannot control

If you're living in the past, you're nostalgic
If you're living in the future, you're anxious
If you're living in the present, you're at peace

Q: Did you start today with a victory?

Starting every day with a victory sets you up to win

I don't care what it is:

- Make your bed
- Make a wonderful coffee
- Hug your wife or children

No such thing as a small win. It's a win!

You'll win more, if you start winning early

Q: What are you optimizing for?

#MFSA
1. Money
2. Freedom
3. Stability
4. Ability

The world rewards those who are focused

Perfectly prioritize

Are you being optimistic?

Guaranteed: more luck when you're optimistic

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Frank Rotman
@fintechjunkie

1/23: One #startup trap to avoid (founders and VCs) is to fall in love with a value prop that can’t be delivered IRL now. Good diligence will surface disconnects but they’re often brushed under the rug by #VCs who believe fixing delivery over time will be fine. Unpacked:

2/23: The foundational reason why this matters from day 1 is that building a franchise of loyal customers is difficult for any #startup to pull off but the challenge is amplified if the #startup has to rebuild its franchise as it scales.

3/23: Broken or unfulfilled promises lead to customer behaviors that have real consequences. Poor ratings and reviews. High customer service costs. High complaint volume. Low engagement. High attrition/returns/cancelations. Low organic growth.

4/23: Undoing damage takes time and sometimes is nearly impossible. Convincing inactive customers to “retry” your product isn’t easy. Overcoming bad reviews can be a Herculean task. And resources will be thrown at fixing past sins at the expense of new functionality.

5/23: And guess what happens when #VCs dig into questionable early performance numbers? These conversations tend to revolve around caveats, apologies and synthetic analysis that bakes in significant improvements (many of which are still “unknown” in nature).

sumitgarg.eth
@sumitupgarg

I read two-and-a-half decades worth of Jeff Bezos’s Amazon shareholder letters.

It’s like a mini MBA.

Here I’ve pulled out a free guide for startups, investing, marketing, and “web3”🧵

(It’s a thread, not an ebook)

First, why the focus on web3?

It’s the mid 90’s. A 30-year-old Jeff Bezos is trying to raise money for Amazon. And investors are wondering,

“What’s this internet thing?”

Fast forward, the year is 2022, and folks today are wondering,

“What’s web3?”

Now, a little background…

In 1994, Bezos quit a well paying job to start Amazon.

It wasn’t an easy decision. But Bezos used his famous “regret minimization framework.”

In other words, he didn’t want to be 80 and regret not doing what he really wanted to do.

But what did he want?

Bezos didn’t set out to disrupt retail from the outset.

He simply wanted to come up with a business idea based on the internet and then let the internet grow around it while he kept working on it.

Today, that idea is worth $1.7 trillion and counting.

Moving on to the lessons…

Each year since 1997, Bezos has written an annual letter to Amazon shareholders.

These letters reveal a great deal of lessons and secrets behind his massive success.

So what are they?

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Stephen Langtry
@StephenLangtry

Autshumao (AKA Herri die Strandloper [beachcomber]) was a Khoe chief. Around 1630, he agreed to accompany a visiting ship to Bantam in Java where he learnt much about Europeans, including their languages, such as English and Dutch. (1/10)

On 6 April 1652, Jan van Riebeeck was received at the Cape by the Autshumao and his people. In the 8 months after van Riebeeck’s arrival, he built a fort on top of Autshumao’s settlement. (2/10)

This was van Riebeeck’s view of his hosts, recorded in his diary on 13 May 1656: “It won’t do to say they are merely wild savages… For the more they are known, the more impertinent they are found to be…” (3/10)

In 1658, all civil relationships between the Dutch and Khoe had deteriorated and war broke out when Autshumao reclaimed cattle that were unfairly taken from his people by the Dutch. (4/10)

In 1659, after losing this war, he and some followers became the first prisoners on Robben Island. The following year Autshumao and one other prisoner escaped by stealing a rowing boat, which got them to the mainland. (5/10)

Atharva Kharbade
@athrvakhrbde

Part-II
Startup Bharat: @naval & @balajis

The full Clubhouse session in text

Thread Continued

16/

Naval: It's funny because right now there's like that dude, where's my flying car mean, which is like, we were promised flying cars, but instead we got, 280 characters, 140 characters, and there's some truth to that. But at the same time, We're going to get our flying cars.

17/

We have drones that are flying overhead. How long before those things are carrying larger and larger payloads, but carry humans all the way. Maybe not, but there's lots of other electric plane companies coming.

18/

We have electric cars, we have rockets. If you can look at like bird and lime and so on that electric scooter revolution, that's a bigger deal than people think.

19/

One of the big problems with a developing country like India is you just have horrible pollution and traffic. But you can see how over time that in the West, a lot of non-electric vehicles are being replaced by electric vehicles not because they're cooler or necessarily...

MATT GRAY
@matt_gray_

Today is my 9th anniversary of building Herb.

4 years earlier, I was working a sales job at Kraft Foods.

Today, Herb crossed $420K MRR.

Here's the Vision Board System that helped me scale:

P.S. If you like proven systems, you'll love my weekly newsletter (it's free).

1 actionable tip to grow your online business.

Join 40,000+ subscribers

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$GunduHuduga| \u0c97\u0cc1\u0c82\u0ca1\u0cc1 \u0cb9\u0cc1\u0ca1\u0cc1\u0c97|\U0001f549$

GunduHuduga| ಗುಂಡು ಹುಡ...
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#SatiSavitri #RealLifeExperiences #BharatDarshana

Bharat Darshana publishes a small monthly magazine which has some very interesting puranic anecdotes and snippets.

When I picked up this month's magazine, I was intrigued by a story which I want to share as below

1/

This is a real-life incident as narrated by Prof. Krishna Bihari Pandey titled "Sati Savitri"

Sati Savitri is a well known puranic figure from Srimad DeviBhagwatham and Mahabharatha as one of those who fought with Yama to save her husband.

2/

This story is a modern real-life experience which mimics the puranic account in it's own unique way.

The story occurs in 1975 with Prof and his wife in Delhi with professor working as a researcher in university. Prof's family is in Allahabad in a large joint family

3/

Once Prof gets to know that his mother is not keeping well. He goes to his native and brings his mother. With dedicated care of his wife, his mother recovers quite remarkably and regains full stamina and strength

Mother-in-law & Daughter-in-law go out for shopping frequently

4/

Life's going smooth until one day when they receive a telegram that Prof's father is not keeping well.

His mother is distressed about the situation and requests her son to take her to the native. Prof is a little angry due to frequent travels and turns it down

5/

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Brian Cates
@drawandstrike

Trump is gonna let the Mueller investigation end all on it's own. It's obvious. All the hysteria of the past 2 weeks about his supposed impending firing of Mueller was a distraction. He was never going to fire Mueller and he's not going to

BREAKING: President Donald Trump has submitted his answers to questions from special counsel Robert Mueller
— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) November 20, 2018

Mueller's officially end his investigation all on his own and he's gonna say he found no evidence of Trump campaign/Russian collusion during the 2016 election.

Democrats & DNC Media are going to LITERALLY have nothing coherent to say in response to that.

Mueller's team was 100% partisan.

That's why it's brilliant. NOBODY will be able to claim this team of partisan Democrats didn't go the EXTRA 20 MILES looking for ANY evidence they could find of Trump campaign/Russian collusion during the 2016 election

They looked high.

They looked low.

They looked underneath every rock, behind every tree, into every bush.

And they found...NOTHING.

Those saying Mueller will file obstruction charges against Trump: laughable.

What documents did Trump tell the Mueller team it couldn't have? What witnesses were withheld and never interviewed?

THERE WEREN'T ANY.

Mueller got full 100% cooperation as the record will show.

$Corey Haines \U0001f4a1$

Corey Haines 💡...
@coreyhainesco

I think I'm giving up on mainstream marketing content.

I'm giving up on social media consumption too.

So little substance.

Need to devote more time doing. More time creating.

Who needs another "5 ways to boost growth" post? I click and am disappointed every time. Not again.

I don't want to poop on content marketing, but marketers need to step it up.

Or at least, founders need to know that doing something is not always better than doing nothing.

Why is content marketing not as effective as it used to be? An innumerable amount of factors...

But one things for damn sure.

Things have to change.

Two of the chief sins:
1. Unoriginal research/story/study/etc
2. Not having anything more to add that's meaningful

Why blog/podcast/vlog/etc about something that's already been said? Already been done?

Do we really need another interview with founder of x hot startup? Do we really need another ultimate guide about facebook ads?

Not all content is like this...

Sometimes, you get an occasional piece that truly leaves you better off than you were before. That doesn't make you want to skim.

An original case study. A first time interview with a founder. An honest account of an experiment. An explanation of a change, shift, or realization.

Richard James
@RJSHutton

I think a plausible explanation is that whatever Corbyn says or does, his critics will denounce - no matter how much hypocrisy it necessitates.

One of the oddest features of the Labour tax row is how raising allowances, which the media allowed the LDs to describe as progressive (in spite of evidence to contrary) through the coalition years, is now seen by everyone as very right wing
— Tom Clark (@prospect_clark) November 2, 2018

Corbyn opposes the exploitation of foreign sweatshop-workers - Labour MPs complain he's like Nigel

He speaks up in defence of migrants - Labour MPs whinge that he's not listening to the public's very real concerns about immigration:

He's wrong to prioritise Labour Party members over the public:

He's wrong to prioritise the public over Labour Party