Short check-in this time with two pieces of timeless advice for startups during a recession and one about how too much advice can be impractical.
As I'm talking to founders in various stages of the business I can only imagine the overwhelming amount of information they need to absorb to make the right decisions and keep things moving.
YC founder Paul Graham's essays are credible and time-tested. These are the ones I'm rereading:
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For years I've been telling founders that the surest route to success is to be the cockroaches of the corporate world. The immediate cause of death in a startup is always running out of money. So the cheaper your company is to operate, the harder it is to kill.
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When I talk to a startup that's been operating for more than 8 or 9 months, the first thing I want to know is almost always the same. Assuming their expenses remain constant and their revenue growth is what it has been over the last several months, do they make it to profitability on the money they have left? Or to put it more dramatically, by default do they live or die?
To calculate if you’re default alive or default dead, use this tool:
❸ The advice paradox
Everyone has something to say. There are about 500k - 1M books published each year. Self-publishing not included.
The ultimate question of any advice, rules, or traditions is:
What do you ignore and why? No one can ever follow all the good advice they hear.
This is the advice paradox: no matter how much advice you have, you must still decide intuitively what to use and what to avoid.