Welcome to another edition of our newsletter. You’ll receive the best practical startup advice straight to your inbox every week.
In this week’s edition, we discuss:
- Why you shouldn’t always trust billionaire’s advice.
- The founder lessons found in Uno (yes, the game).
Let’s get to it.
When seeking advice on an app he was building, Aaron Dinin, PhD met two entrepreneurs. One was a billionaire entrepreneur, the other was a young upstart. Whose advice should you follow?
You said the billionaire, right?
So did Aaron. The result? In his words,
Within a few months, I shut down the company, throwing away all the time and effort I’d put into building that one killer feature the billionaire told me I absolutely needed, and I moved on to other projects.
So the answer to the question is, not always. When you’re deciding whose startup advice to follow, don’t focus on how much money the person has made. Focus, instead, on what that person has learned and, just as importantly, how recently the person learned it.
Read here: I Trusted a Billionaire, and He Destroyed My Company
Nir Zicherman, Global Head of Audiobooks at Spotify and Co-Founder of Anchor, discovered an unexpected intersection exists between the lessons it took him years to learn as a startup founder and the lessons he discussed with his daughter during a thirty minute game of Uno.
These lessons for how to be a successful startup founder include:
- What you hold is only valuable if the world needs it.
- Always keep track of what your opponents don’t have.
- Hold onto your wilds for a rainy day.
- There is always a tradeoff to be made between focusing on now versus focusing on later.
- Being one card away from winning doesn’t mean you’ve won.
Read here: Nir’s deep dive into these lessons
