The Entrepreneurs Journal: Recent Episodes
Jacob Zinn
I'm currently participating in a startup accelerator. At the end of each day I will share my key takeaways and an overview of my progress, dilemmas, and wins for the day.
I'm not even sure spending this much time with people is effective, but today was definitely interesting.
Learning quickly is crucial. When trying to learn in order to solve problems, ensure that you start with a well formulated question. Exploration without an explicit question in mind is far less effective.
Investors, clients, and everyone else you share your idea with have one thing in common: they want you to show them your project. Telling them about it doesn't have quite the same effect.
No outstanding progress was made today. This realization should be incredibly rare, or how could we succeed?
In conversations today, we're realizing that our idea solves a real pain in the world. People want it to be real. Now I'm realizing that we didn't have that for our prior ideas.
My main takeaways for pitching a startup and refining the explanation of a complicated idea.
Resources:
YC - How to pitch your startup
Teamwork is tough, at least for me. The goal today was to perform tasks separately and at full capacity, then come together to align priorities and share findings.
The default state for a startup is failure. If things aren't executed violently and with extreme accountability by the founders... I'd expect bummer results..