The Only Entrepreneurship Lesson You Need, with Do/Don’t Reading List

https://medium.com/startup-grind/the-only-entrepreneurship-lesson-reading-list-you-need-105d9e3bcf5a#.8fessbxhw

by becewumuy • 10 years ago

56 12 10 years ago

samsolomon• 10 years ago

I love the DO NOT READ list in this article.

Delivering Happiness: It’s solid, Tony’s a smart dude, but light on real tactics and not truly relevant to most startups. More for a corporate crowd I think.

I didn't feel like I learned anything from Delivering Happiness. People have looked offended when I tell them it was a poor book.

Anything by Gary Vaynerchuck: Gary’s a really nice guy and really smart, but I feel like most of his stuff is rah-rah inspiration and energy. It’s for people who haven’t started, or are trying to find that courage. Not totally, but 80% of it is geared towards those people, not directly operating entrepreneurs.

Spot on. I like Gary, but his books are mostly cheerleading.

The Fountainhead: Or Atlas Shrugged. Or any Ayn Rand book. I am not even going to make a comment on her philosophy — I don’t care. But I promise there is nothing in here that will ever help you actually start or build a business. It will help you fantasize…which doesn’t help build. And it’s no mistake that the largest concentration of Radians are in politics and finance — two industries built on destruction and taking, not on building.

Atlas Shrugged is among my favorite books, but definitely nothing applicable to people building a business.

hga6• 10 years ago

Atlas Shrugged is among my favorite books, but definitely nothing applicable to people building a business.

Well, it does give you a number of "don't do this!" or "watch out for this sort of person" or developments lessons, and the bit on laws for a society at our level of "development" is priceless:

"Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed?" said Dr. Ferris. "We want them broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against - then you'll know that this is not the age of beautiful gestures. We're after power and we mean it. You fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick, and you'd better get wise to it. There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one 'makes' them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted-and you create a nation of law-breakers and then you cash in on the guilt. Now that's the system, Mr. Rearden, that's the game, and once you understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with."

But, yeah, little positive that'll tell you what to do, the "invent a much better mousetrap" and, ahem, connect up with a market that needs it would seem to be a lesson is so obvious it hardly needs to be taught. But it does, as the author emphasizes, and there are many many books now that are really focusing on that.

hga6• 10 years ago

I really wonder about his criticism of The Innovator’s Dilemma. I'll certainly admit it applies to only a subset of startups, and it probably introduced the now totally ludicrous disruption meme, but the lesson with examples of companies that used inferior but cheaper technology to find and/or create whole new markets is certainly useful, and using your "disruptive" technology to eventually eat the lunch of the incumbents gives you something to eventually shoot for. All of which I think we seldom see in people who propose to "disrupt" something.

The lessons about how incumbents are constitutionally unable to complete against this also, if sufficiently true, ought to help tamp down some the rampant paranoia I've seen so much of in startups.

hga6• 10 years ago

I find it interesting that he slags The E-Myth, which is one of my highest recommended books, especially since he says "It’s about small business" which by definition pretty much all startups start as. I.e. the single most important takeaway I got from it was "make sure every essential hat is worn by someone". Which echos the advice in one of the items in DEC's official history book of sorts on the minicomputer era, that companies that succeeded did an adequate job of everything that was essential. I.e. you pretty much never bought DEC because of their mass storage offerings (and some of them were really bad after they got huge), but they didn't drop the ball on any of the essential things like documentation.

Which then allowed them to compete on things like CPU design (pity they screwed up being able to make the VAX fast), whereas many companies that failed simply didn't produce machines their customers could use.

Hmmm, this is both a disruptive technology, and one where product-market fit was relatively easy.

But other advice might be "sketchy", a lot of companies, especially of the HN variety, won't necessarily benefit from documenting them as if you were going to franchise them. But maybe some? Ride sharing and Airbnb's business models?

hga6• 10 years ago

The Art Of War: I LOVE this book, but again, not relevant on a day to day basis for most entrepreneurs.

Eh, that depends on your ability to generalize some of its lessons to the world you live in, which I'm sure it beyond a lot of people at the usual stages in their lives when they're starting up companies, especially giving the distractions of that process. But as the author emphasizes in his his very first point, your core team of people is the single most critical thing, and paraphrasing Paul Graham in one of his essays (which the author generally and perhaps specifically recommends), if you use average "stuff", you're likely to get an average result, and the average result for a startup is FAILURE!

Plenty of interpersonal things can be directly illuminated by The Art of War, lots of that involves threats subtle or more direct, the lesson about "death ground" is vital, etc. But you might as well add the roughly equally short The Prince by Machiavelli and no doubt other books, at least these two are short (and make sure you get a good translation of The Art of War, I wouldn't trust any that weren't done by a military officer, and therefore I recommend Samuel B. Griffiths' version: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0195014766/).

More generally, how to you gain the wisdom to comprehend and put into place the lessons the author is teaching, especially if you're a callow youth? Reading (and rereading) "the classics" has long been a method for that, and one that works for me.

Emphasis on the re-reading, never stop learning, e.g. I'm on perhaps my 3rd pass of Churchill's The Gathering Storm, about the post-WWI period, it ends with him being appointed Prime Minister as the Nazi blitzkrieg falls upon the Low countries and France. First pass was in the '80s, 2nd I can't remember, and now I'm re-reading it about to turn 56 and learning even more from it, having, for example, learned a lot more about history, government and war all though the years.

wyclif• 10 years ago

I've read Delivering Happiness, and I thought his review made it sound like he hasn't. Here's what he says:

It’s solid, Tony’s a smart dude, but light on real tactics and not truly relevant to most startups. More for a corporate crowd I think.

But if he'd read the book, he'd know that it's not for a corporate crowd. It's for people who do customer service. That's what the entire book is about, and why it's so on point. It has nothing to do with tactical startup tips.

mooreds• 10 years ago

Hard to argue. However, he could have just short circuited the entire post and linked to http://pmarchive.com/guide_to_startups_part4.html

hga6• 10 years ago

Let me add my favorite book of war stories in finding product-market fit, reaching/educating users for whom the product is a sufficiently new thing they need that, in pursuing a business model that worked (do the numbers!), etc. This one is about a specific company, so it's a concrete and very real history vs. perhaps some of these recommended books more focusing on the theory, principles and applications, it could help reify those sorts of books. Disclaimer, I really like history and think you can learn from it ^_^:

Walking the High-Tech High Wire: The Technical Entrepreneur's Guide to Running a Successful Enterprise (https://www.amazon.com/Walking-High-Tech-High-Wire-Entrepren...). Pretty cheap used.

blueprint• 10 years ago

I posted this as a reply to Tucker's post:

Tucker — I’m glad to finally find a writer who calls out the uselessness of ideas and the importance of problems. Everything in this world operates by one fundamental principle plus the problems, just like in math. Answers are made by the problems/questions, and that means it’s actually impossible to get an answer without having the problem. That makes answers without problems not only useless but harmful. They make society become darker over time in that it’s harder or impossible for people to judge right and wrong, and everything becomes ambiguous when the problems are not visible. But this essential information is totally missing from modern education.

If you don’t mind two pieces of minor feedback I would like to see if I can contribute to you and your audience somehow.

Re: start with good people. We can judge whether a thing is good or bad based on whether it has a good or bad result. But what are the concrete criteria of good and bad? How can we distinguish the good people from the bad? I have learned the answer, but I’m afraid to say it here as it’s hard for the majority to understand and to accept due to its nature. The criteria of good and bad is how true it is. If a person is more truthful, let’s say 51% truthful, then they are able to recognize 51% of cases they encounter correctly, and will be able to act knowing things correctly rather than through ignorance. I have heard the percentage of the results they come to get in life is directly and exactly proportional to and a function of the percentage of truth in their consciousness versus falsehood, i.e. their degree of truthfulness. One big problem nowadays is how we can distinguish truth from falsehood. We not only do not know our own degrees of truthfulness but humans can’t really distinguish good, true teachings from bad teachings. It requires a truly Enlightened Being (i.e. a Buddha) or an individual with an extremely high level of truthfulness to be able to tell true from false when they see the matter. That brings me to my second point.

You quoted D.T. Suzuki about Buddha’s teaching. The problem is that it has been thousands of years since Gautama Buddha came to this world. Have you heard of the game of telephone? Or seen what happens when a photocopy is taken of a photocopy? When Buddha appeared he told people the truth that he could see with his own eyes at the time. However, those who heard what he said had a huge gap in level of consciousness between them and him. So they couldn’t see and understand the truth precisely and couldn’t transmit it precisely. As a consequence they changed the meaning slightly and lost or deteriorated some of the truth. Over thousands of years, the Truth Buddha taught has been changed or deteriorated significantly. But one big problem is that before we learn what Buddha’s teaching actually is we don’t realize why the existing Buddhism is quite different than his real teaching. A second big problem is that it’s really quite impossible for people who believe in a lie (who have falsehood in their consciousness) to be able to understand Buddha’s teaching correctly. So this is a barrier and it is why I was initially anxious about posting this. I want to tell you that meditation, the five precepts, the eightfold path, and the four noble truths are not Buddha’s actual teaching. His teaching can be summarized in only two parts — very simple things actually–but throughout all of the thousands of meetings I’ve had with Buddhist monks they have never been able to answer what Buddha’s real teaching is. Firstly, Buddha never claimed he was enlightened through meditation, which makes sense because it’s not possible to produce enlightenment through meditation, itself. It would be like saying a tree could produce seeds by making leaves but no fruit. Meditation throughout all of history has never produced an enlightened being. Real enlightened beings can see and say the truth or answer any kinds of questions on the spot with totally concrete answers that can be verified. However people who rely on meditation alone can only give answers without problems. Secondly, the precepts. Buddhist monks can’t keep the precepts even from the moment they wake up in the morning. The precepts all generally have in common the theme “don’t lie”. Yet, they claim they know Buddha’s teaching and/or they claim they are doing their diligence to find it out and to inform it correctly to society. The reality is different. They not only don’t know Buddha’s teaching but they really don’t want to know either. What is the difference between their teachings and Buddha’s real teaching? Look at the four noble truths and the eightfold “path”. The Noble Truths don’t actually have the truth in them. For example, life is not suffering, itself. Life has every way in it. If you live knowing life, life can cause itself to be pleasurable. If you live without knowing life, life exhausts itself. The noble truths also talk about the “end” of suffering. They say that’s Nirvana. However every living creature receives influence from its environment and every living creature suffers — even those who have experience Nirvana many times. Nirvana means that the individual finishes/ends all of the agony and illusions. But when the Buddha went to a cold environment he still felt cold. When he didn’t eat, he felt hungry. When he went to a hot environment he still sweat. These things feel a certain way and constitute what he called suffering. How about the Noble Truths’ “way” to end suffering, the Eightfold Path? This one is funny. There’s literally no way in the eightfold path because they are all answers without problems. The way starts from the causes that exist in the problems and goes to the answers. But without teaching being based in problems/questions there is literally no way of life to follow in those teachings and they can no longer be used for the purpose of a living being. They are only useful for the dead.

I have too much to say about the above. But I wanted to tell you the fact that Modern Buddhism is very, very different from what Buddha actually taught. Monks just put what they wanted into the scriptures. These days how can we verify the difference between monks’ words and the words of the Enlightened Being? We can’t, really, and Buddhism these days has devolved into nothing more than a religion. As a result they’re involved in causing society to deteriorate. Seeing this reality, who could possibly agree with me? And which monks would want this truth to come out? They rely on people for donations to survive. That’s one reason they recommend meditation. If someone sponsors them to meditate enough maybe they will be Enlightened? But it’s nothing more than deception.

If not meditation, how can people experience Nirvana and how can they attain Enlightenment? Gautama Buddha didn’t explain much about this. However he kept pointing out “what exists” (facts) and how the world operates and told people to learn it. That’s because he knew that “what is” is the way to make people be Enlightened. The problem is that people can’t recognize “what is” before they’re Enlightened. And without an Enlightened Being to reveal facts as they are, who or what can we learn from without pure trial and error, much like Gautama did?

Your article, having been able to distill success into three steps/aspects, reminded me very strongly of the answer to that question which I got from a man who claims that he attained a Perfect, supreme Enlightenment some 30–40 years ago in 1984. He has since passed away but he left his teachings for free. I wanted to share his short explanation of the four steps by which Enlightenment can be achieved, here. I hope you can read and enjoy it and that you can get something great out of it. — -

First, ”To achieve Enlightenment you must first be free from lies.” That is, truth must appear. Having to get rid of lies to achieve Enlightenment means having to open your eyes to truth.

Second, ”You have to see ‘what is’ ” Where is right and wrong?

Right and wrong don’t exist in words, they are appearing through ‘what is’. When a good thing occurs its a good thing and when a bad thing occurs it’s a bad thing. No matter how good we say something is, if we don’t know ‘what is’ it’s difficult to make something good happen. So you have to see what is. You have to know how ‘what is’ comes to be. You have to know how the law of cause and effect is making ‘what is’ better or worse. You have to know the meaning inside it. Third, ”There must be conscience and courage.”

I constantly emphasize that there is nothing as difficult or as lonely as revealing ‘what is’ in the world. The lives of the saints in the past was like that and we can also see that in our society there were many people with the correct way of thinking who tried to make the world better who were like that. If you want to make the world better you have to teach ‘what is’ but those who tried to teach ‘what is’ properly were all abandoned in the world. So it means that if there is no conscience and courage, no matter how much they have opened their eyes to ‘what is’, they can’t do anything about it.

Fourthly, ”There has to be endless love inside oneself”

There has to be endless love to go to others and teach them. There has to be conscience and courage to endlessly want to go to others and teach them. It won’t happen if either one of these two are absent.

https://tathagatablog.wordpress.com/2008/11/01/the-way-of-en...

tlogan• 10 years ago

This article should be on "Don't reading list".

"Start With Great People" is wrong advice. If you knew who are great people you would be rich anyway. Also "Make Something People Want" is stupid - maybe one of worst advices. You will know "what people want" is only and only after you succeed.

The only and only thing which matter is: "do build it". Right now. No books, no reading blog posts, no HN will help you. And if you are reading this post - you already failing. :-)

hga6• 10 years ago

"Start With Great People" is wrong advice. If you knew who are great people you would be rich anyway.

Totally disagree, especially since there can be great value in putting together a team of "great people", even if you do little else besides give them the tools they need to "get shit done", which is how he boils down the selection criteria.

I myself did that in starting up a student run computer center back in 1980, when computer resources were dear; I myself didn't have much time to contribute to it due to Real Life putting me in a full time job, but having procured everything (machine and peripherals, room, a few dollars for the needed electrical work) they did almost all the rest. Similarly I've saved at least one company by recognizing a "human resource" need and finding and selling the position to that person (LMI was the first example).

This stuff doesn't self-organize, especially since we're not talking about the domain of rent seeking.

And there's a whole technique of customer development that you evidently are not aware of that at least gives you a fighting chance to "succeed". Without following something like it, it's pure luck, often just being at the right place at the right time (think Jobs, SV and the dawn of more polished microcomputers, or, heck, Ken Olsen being a grad student working on a Whirlwind successor).

You say "do build it", but do you have any inkling "it" is anything anyone wants??? If it's something that requires more talent or time than you can devote to it, how do you get others to lend you their time and/or money to "build it", and if you have no idea if anyone wants it, how can you morally justify wasting the resources of others?

smoyer• 10 years ago

That's a pretty brutal opinion of Guy Kawasaki!

The Only Entrepreneurship Lesson You Need, with Do/Don’t Reading List

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