The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
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Lonsdale: Early-Stage Startups Must Hire Raw IQ Over Domain Expertise
“I'd much rather hire for talent and ambition and hard work than hire for expertise. So almost, and there's exceptions, right? So if you have a company that's already really working and already really scaling, and there's like a machine that has to be run, you …”
Lonsdale: Incubator Multi-Company Models Are Far Less Likely to Succeed
“A lot of people like to incubators cause they're like, oh, I don't want to do one company. I'm going to do 10 companies. And like, by the way, that's like much less likely to have big success cause you're not focused.”
Evaluating Top Talent Requires Being Within Two Standard Deviations of Their Ability
“Is you can't really appreciate a talent unless you're within two standard deviations of it. So you think of talent as being on a normal curve for any typical, typical skill. It could be for math, could be for podcasts, whatever it is. And like, so you kind of …”
Lonsdale: Blended Reasons Mean Founders Have Not Found Core Strategy
“Usually there's like one reason that dominates everything else. And that's just the nature of the world is that when something's successful, It's kind of like the power law rule, right? Like in a venture capital, like fund, even there tends to be one thing tha…”
Lonsdale: Young founders should partner with people holding unfair advantages
“One of the unfair secrets of business is the more success you have, The more it's like a platform for a bigger thing you can do next time. And that's just the way it is... And that's why, like, I think when you're young partner with someone else who already ha…”
Lonsdale: AI-Augmented BPO for Local Governments Could Generate Tens of Billions
“I think a BPO, a business process outsourcing thing for certain tasks for local government that are augmented by AI could be like just a huge business to basically help them with this. And I, right now it's not a standard way they work, but I could see if you …”
Lonsdale: Founders cannot lead with substance alone when approaching institutions
“I get a lot of young people maybe underestimate the substance is important, but it's, you can't lead with substance because substance is not taken seriously. So you have to have the substance to win, but you have to have all the trappings of why they're taking…”
Lonsdale: Early commercial partnerships often cap startup upside and hinder iteration
“A lot of startups, when you're getting going, you want to like, you get really excited about some partnership on the table and you think it's going to really help you. But a lot of partnerships will cap your upside. A lot of partnerships will limit your abilit…”