Lost and Founder Quotes

“if possible, build your expertise before you build your network, and build your network before you build your company.”
― Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

“Emotional comfort with one’s colleagues was a better predictor than IQ, than years of experience, than the strength of previous work, than literally any and everything else researchers had hypothesized about.”
― Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

“Managing Is a Skill, Not a Prize”
― Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

“Of the most successful startups, nearly everyone has a clearly identifiable marketing flywheel that brought awareness and traffic from the right audiences and helped those people convert to a sale or a signup at the right time.”
― Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

“Great Founders Don’t Do What They Love; They Enable a Vision”
― Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

“Take Maya Angelou’s advice: when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”
― Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

“Bing’s gotten much better since then, and is now as good as or better than Google on most queries, but that MVP hangover has stuck with the brand for years and, in my opinion, continues to dampen the prospects of what should be a very decent option for web searchers.”
― Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

“The problem with MVPs, and with the “something > nothing” model, is that if you launch to a large customer base or a broad community, you build brand association with that first version.”
― Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

“Or it might be to eradicate student loan debt and class stratification worldwide by building an affordable educational platform with the rigor and brand respect of Harvard at”
― Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

“No matter what stage of life your organization is in today, my advice is to have a written, transparent road map. Plans change. The value of a team with a shared plan doesn’t.”
― Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

“Establishing a vision for the foreseeable future and a company mission for the long term, even if they need refinement over time, will better enable focus”
― Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

“One of the biggest causes of early-stage business failure is lack of real buyers hungry for your solution.”
― Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

“The benefits of focus are too great to ignore, hidden only by the resolve needed to stay on target.”
― Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

“When you’re an early-stage startup founder, your job is clear—find “product:market fit”
― Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

“other issues can inhibit growth as well, most commonly market size, cost of customer acquisition, and product scalability.”
― Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

“Percentage rate of growth, not raw dollars added, is the metric by which venture-backed startups measure themselves and are, from the outside, judged. Growing at 30 percent year-over-year at our stage is considered the minimum level for an “interesting” business in the venture world”
― Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

“Fewer people, more focused on just a few things, could do more than a much larger team pulled in myriad directions.”
― Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

“identify and reduce waste (of time, materials, people, or investments) fast, because it’s easier to see said waste when you have less to concentrate on;”
― Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

“The people who multitask the most tend to be impulsive, sensation-seeking, overconfident of their multitasking abilities, and they tend to be less capable of multitasking.”
― Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

“You can, sometimes, teach a cat to walk on its hind legs. You might even be able to teach it to bark. But that doesn’t make it a dog.”
― Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

“We have the power to change the ways we react and the way things make us feel.”
― Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

“When we’re freed from the mythology that we control outcomes and asked instead to concentrate on behaviors, we have a powerful tool to fight against negativity and anxiety.”
― Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

“People LOVE change (when it’s about changing others). People HATE change (when it’s about changing themselves).”
― Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

“It’s hard to make logical connections between these personal, emotional experiences and the output or quality of work at the company.”
― Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

“We build up tolerances to criticism, acceptance of faults, appreciation for idiosyncrasies.”
― Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

“social sensitivity, “the ability to perceive, understand, and respect the feelings and viewpoints of others,” was strongly correlated with high-performing teams.”
― Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

“being great at the work yourself and being a great manager of the people doing that work is largely disconnected.”
― Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

“We are the arbiters of our own future:”
― Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

“Investors. Media. Employees. Fellow entrepreneurs. Startup enclaves. They push us to “go big or go home.”
― Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

“If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late. —Reid Hoffman, March 2011”
― Rand Fishkin, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World