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August 5 - September 23, 2019
Unless they invest in the difficult task of creating new things, companies will fail in the future no matter how big their profits remain today.
The paradox of teaching entrepreneurship is that such a formula necessarily cannot exist;
In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable.
Startups operate on the principle that you need to work with other people to get stuff done, but you also need to stay small enough so that you actually can.
Positively defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future.
when you pay people to be your customers, exponential growth means an exponentially growing cost structure.
Don’t try to create a new market prematurely. The only way to know you have a real business is to start with an already existing customer, so you should build your company by improving on recognizable products already offered by successful competitors.
The fatal temptation is to describe your market extremely narrowly so that you dominate it by definition.
All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.
If you’re less sensitive to social cues, you’re less likely to do the same things as everyone else around you.
Simply stated, the value of a business today is the sum of all the money it will make in the future.
Most of the value of low-growth businesses is in the near term.
Nightclubs or restaurants are extreme examples: successful ones might collect healthy amounts today, but their cash flows will probably dwindle over the next few years when customers move on to newer and trendier alternatives.
Every monopoly is unique, but they usually share some combination of the following characteristics: proprietary technology, network effects, economies of scale, and branding.
As a good rule of thumb, proprietary technology must be at least 10 times better than its closest substitute in some important dimension to lead to a real monopolistic advantage.
The perfect target market for a startup is a small group of particular people concentrated together and served by few or no competitors.
As you craft a plan to expand to adjacent markets, don’t disrupt: avoid competition as much as possible.
What secrets is nature not telling you? What secrets are people not telling you?
If you’ve invented something new but you haven’t invented an effective way to sell it, you have a bad business—no matter how good the product.
Good enterprise sales strategy starts small, as it must: a new customer might agree to become your biggest customer, but they’ll rarely be comfortable signing a deal completely out of scale with what you’ve sold before.
instead, personal sales made it a multibillion-dollar business.
customer acquisition costs and customer lifetime value make every other distribution channel uneconomical.
An entrepreneur can’t benefit from macro-scale insight unless his own plans begin at the micro-scale.
But a valuable business must start by finding a niche and dominating a small market.
