The inappropriate attention to detail, the hard truth and how to become rare and valuable.

Happy Saturday.

I wrapped up a fantastic week in Tulsa yesterday, more details on that soon. I’m in Guymon, OK tonight and en route to Taos, NM tomorrow. If you’re on Snapchat, add me — my username is resultsjunkies. I’m posting the unedited version of the tech tour, maybe you’ll find it interesting.  

1. “most of the things we’ve funded are mostly crap and largely worthless.” [Link] [Tweet]

Ignore the clickbait headline and pay attention to the rest of the article. There’s a reason why Chamath’s been so successful.

2. “The hard truth is: Trump only cares about Trump.” [Link] [Tweet]

This is a fascinating read from one of Trump’s defectors, I’m surprised it hasn’t gotten more media coverage though. Why is that?

3. “VC is crap for most startups.” [Link] [Tweet]

Having met 20+ companies in 1:1 office hours in Tulsa last week, it seems that the lack of early stage venture capital forced a number of companies to bootstrap their ways to $1M+ in ARR. That’s pretty cool.

4. “Don’t finalize the logo before you come up with a business plan that works.” [Link] [Tweet]

My favorite line: “Hiding takes many forms. Inappropriate attention to detail is a big one, because it feels like a responsible thing to do.”

5. “You have a bigger opportunity than ever before to build a long-lasting, fundamentally important tech company.” [Link] [Tweet]

Remember when you used to buy business books to get advice like this?

6. “Every company will be a tech company — or it won’t be around.” [Link] [Tweet]

This: “The people who have problems that we need to solve do not live in San Francisco and New York — they live in New Orleans, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Charleston, San Antonio, Nashville, Raleigh-Durham and Birmingham.” (Ahem, tech tour anyone?)

7. “you don’t start at rare and valuable, you start at answering every email.” [Link] [Tweet]

There’s no shortcut for experience. In our parents’ generation, that experience was a function of the number of years you’d been around a particular industry. Today, your experience is a function of the number of things you’ve tried.

8. “Many startup businesses – tech or otherwise – fail.” [Link] [Tweet]

The default state of your company is failure and you, the founders, are the only ones that can turn it around. Read this and avoid making common mistakes.

9. “There’s a strategy behind the economies of scale that can be created through larger co-working environments.” [Link] [Tweet]

Why are people surprised by this? If you’re a landlord / real estate professional, coworking spaces represent an entirely new product for your buildings. Without coworking spaces, today’s tech-enabled workers would likely never step foot in your building until they needed a larger space… which they might never need at all.

10. “Our phones are also diaries, confessional booths, repositories for our deepest secrets.” [Link] [Tweet]

Our phones are the future to our individualized healthcare: “All my life, my doctors tended to be vague, making my bodily functions seem ultramysterious, when in fact they are just individualized, and easily understood with the assistance of software.”

Firehose

You can get the full stream of the things I read, it’s all on Twitter — follow me: @paulsingh. Sometimes I write stuff too. You can always find me on Slack, apply to join.

Have a great weekend!

-P

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