The Wisdom Wall
12 quotable lessons, heuristics and mental models. Every one is playable at the moment it was said. No fortune cookies allowed.
“they have felt like that if there was any crack in their armor, any, any reality in what they had to say, That they lose support, investor support, team support, whatever. Right. Um, and so they oftentimes not only found themselves drifting into a lot of, of not so great mental places. Right. But they gradually found…”
“a lot of people become founders and they really, they've never really led anything. They, they have been managers. They may have even been people managers, but they've never actually been entrepreneurial or intrapreneurial, uh, inside of a large company.”
“founders tend to be of above average intelligence. So rationalizing stuff is not hard for the average founder”
“a maxim of psychotherapy is that if you, if you start, you move down rapidly into the valley of the shadow, so to speak, and if you stop at that moment, stop the therapy, you're actually worse off Than if you'd never begun. And I think that there's a lot of truth to that in, in being an entrepreneur, being a founder,…”
“my experience with very large Fortune 1000 CEOs and CFOs and people like that are that they are chess players. For the most part, I mean, there's always going to be some variance and all this, right? But in general, an entrepreneur is not a chess player. Right? Um, an entrepreneur is a full contact, um, pick your sport…”
“we have tended to lionize, uh, what it means to be an entrepreneur, what it means to be a founder, uh, with very, very little discussion of the reality of it. And the fact that what we're lionizing represents way less than one percent. Of the situation, right? The so-called I'm killing it, right? Or we're killing it…”
“one of the greatest things that people struggle with as founders is the need to manage what oftentimes is a huge gap between confidence and reality.”
“getting your ICP really straight is super crucial, and the market timing is even more crucial.”
“if you don't understand the, the causal linkage between the money that's, that you're spending and the value that you're getting back and how long it takes for you to get it back, um, you can find yourself Uh, cutting today. Achieving goals today that cost you dearly in year two, year three, year four. Um, marketing…”
“Every time you play hardball, you are You're, you're virtually guaranteeing that the person that you have played hardball with will have an opportunity to return the favor.”
“anyone can manage for the short term, and anyone can manage for the long term, and anyone can manage for the medium term. Those are easy. What's hard is doing all three at the same time.”
“When I see an entrepreneur want to begin to use our analytics platform to model risk factors and cause and effect and all this kind of stuff, right? It's typically because if they make the wrong choice on something, it can really hammer their cash flow in some really bad ways. And so that's the risk, the main risk that…”