Happy Friday.
It’s been nice to get some downtime in DC this week. We’re heads down planning the 2017 tour and knocking out a huge backlog of investments. (If you’re still waiting on an email from me, sorry!)
In case you’re wondering, here’s a quick wrap-up of our visit to Fort Wayne, IN last week and the audio from a radio interview.
As a reminder, these are the top 10 clicks across my tweets this week. You can always get the full firehose here.
“Here lies the billable hour. It died a slow and predictable death, brought about by natural causes.” [Link] [Tweet]
Everyone charging by the hour should be worried about what will happen to their jobs — and the broader industry — over the next few years.
Lawyers and accountants should be fine though since there’s always a need for someone to keep you out of jail and count your money properly.
2. Things I will tell my kids if they become entrepreneurs [Link] [Tweet]
Love, love, love this but everyone has to be thinking like an entrepreneur.
When I was going through school, there was a job waiting for me when I graduated. For people graduating today, they need to be prepared to create their own job.
3. “get to $1,000/month in revenue and then worry about everything else.” [Link] [Tweet]
Until you have a little bit of revenue (or, in some cases, at least a little bit of traction), nothing else matters. So stop thinking about logos, domain names, business plans or anything else. Just sell.
4. “Hustle doesn’t mean working 24/7. That’s a sure way to burn out and lose.” [Link] [Tweet]
There are two kinds of entrepreneurial people you want to work with in your life:
- Smart and hard-working. These people tend to be the best at build service / consulting companies.
- Smart and lazy. These people tend to be the best at building a company around a product.
I prefer to invest in the latter.
5. “In 10 years Goldman Sachs will be significantly smaller by head count than it is today.” [Link] [Tweet]
Personally I’m a techno-optimist, in the sense that I believe technology grows the overall pie and provides over time, great opportunity for human beings in terms of quality of life, economic mobility and so on.
6. “One of the biggest challenges in tech is not being right. It’s being ten or fifteen years too early.” [Link] [Tweet]
As with most trends, you want to be early and right or late and right. Everything in the middle sucks.
7. “I began to see it everywhere I looked: too many startups like to play startup.” [Link] [Tweet]
Once a startup has $1 of revenue, it should never be called a startup again. You should be starting a company to actually build a company, not to be a startup forever.
8. “Let now be the time where we stop fantasising with the facade of overnight success and start hustling” [Link] [Tweet]
We’ve been fortunate to meet a lot of extremely successful people building huge companies in out-of-the-way places. The best part of those meetings, however, is listening to the founder’s real stories of the “10 year overnight success.” (Heading into 2017, we’re going to experiment with videos and other content to help share those stories.)
9. “I had the luxury of this decision because I had decided to invest in myself. So, I doubled down.” [Link] [Tweet]
I’ve been self-employed ever since. Monetarily, was it the best investment I could have made? If I had been interested in working at P&G, I doubt it. But, in terms of freedom to follow my curiosities and carve my own path, yes, 1000x.
When it comes to your professional life, always choose yourself. Always invest in yourself.
10. “No one needs another piece of business software. No one.” [Link] [Tweet]
This is the #1 problem technical people have with sales: people buy solutions, not products.
No one cares how many features you have, how many lines of code it took or how “passionate” you are about the business.
Solve problems. People will pay you for it.
Firehose
You can get the full stream of the things I read, it’s all on Twitter — follow me: @paulsingh.
-P