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Essays

1/ Startup = Growth by Paul Graham explains that for a VC-backed startup, the only essential thing is growth, sustained and endless growth. Consider this before raising money from VCs to understand if your business, market, and personality are suitable.

2/ And two great ones also by Paul Graham. Startup in 13 sentences and The hardest lessons for startups to learn

3/ If you are thinking about a new startup idea, read “Choose good quests”. It will give you a framework for what a good endeavor is.

4/ On how to be successful by Sam Altman

5/ Here‘s a summary of YC’s principles centered around building something people want (PMF). I particularly like: writing code and talking to users, avoiding fake work, focusing on only one metric in the early days, valuation is not equal to success, and being nice.

6/ About taking risk and play big games to generate outlier outcomes. “How to Live an Asymmetric Life” by Graham Weave

Books

7/ Zero to one (2014) is a must-read book. I read it again a few weeks ago. This time my attention stopped on two points. First, 1) when being a founder in a power-law world, being hard-working and smart is not sufficient. Too many founders are working extremely hard toward respectable, mediocre outcomes without realizing. Therefore, it’s important to realize that your personal financial outcome could be superior by joining the next outlier startups at their series A or B round rather than building your startup as a founder. However, I believe it’s still worth being a founder as the financial outcome is not the only motivating factor for entrepreneurs. Second, (2) I found the chapter “You are not a lottery ticket” particularly interesting. Especially the antithesis of luck and skills as the main drivers of success in our industry.

8/ Read Almanac of Naval Ravikant (2020). I want to highlight here only two points. First, the concept of (1) leverage and how it enables you to work or earn beyond 24 hours per day. Working with leverage outworks working hard “by a factor of one thousand or ten thousand”. In today’s world, “forget rich versus poor, white collar vs, blue, it’s now leverage versus un-leveraged”. We are taught to be smart and work hard but not to find our own leverage. Leverage can be obtained by managing people, capital, and products with no marginal cost of replication (eg. books, media, code). Second, (2) “playing long-term games with long-term people” is another superpower. Make sure you are genuine in compounding business relationships.

9/ The hard thing about the hard things (2014) by Ben Horowitz presents well which are the vicissitudes tech entrepreneurs will need to endure during their journey.

10/ The Pmarca blog archives of Marc Andreessen share some important concepts to always bear in mind as an entrepreneur. I want to highlight one. Given the low probability of generating outlier outcomes as a founder, “you have to be able to just get right back and keep going… If your startup fails, try another one. If that one fails, get back into a high-growth company to reset your resume, skills, and experience. Then start another company. Repeat as necessary until you change the world”. Secondly, (2) by looking at data Marc sees that “quality of outputs does not vary by age” and instead we should be focusing on trying more times (“instead you should just focus on generating more at-bats, more outputs”). In fact “the period in Beethoven’s career had the most hits also had the most misses… so maximizing quantity is much higher payoff”. Therefore to increase the quantity or number of attempts, to generate outlier outcomes, we need to spend more time (either due to precocity and/or longevity) and increase our productivity

11/ I had fun reading the “Gambling man” (2024) by Lionel Barber is the first Western biography about Masayoshi Son. It’s not a must-read book, but it shares a great example of thinking and acting big. What struck me the most about Masa’s life is: (1) Is unlimited self-belief and capacity to resurrect and come back harder each time, even after losing 98% of his wealth (it reminds me of the quote “Never underestimate a man that overestimates himself”), (2) His different understanding and relationships with risk. He is not afraid of taking big bets and overpaying, even by several US$ billions. Common wisdom might define him as reckless and intuitive. People who know him appreciate his vision, ability to see value beyond risk & reward and always coming back from defeats with more money for bigger bets

After having built the product (and achieved an initial but sufficient version of product market fit), founders will need to build the company. Don’t borrow all the best practies from the corporate work, some are not applicable to early and late stage startups.

Essays

1/ “Founder mode” by Paul Graham explains well how being a manager in a corporate differs from being a manager in a startup, even a later-stage one.

2/ All revenue is not created equal is a famous essay from Bill Gurley. This is a must-read essay to undersatnd how to create a business with “quality revenue” and therefore receive the high 10x revenue multiple.

3/ The famous “How to operate“ by Keith Rabois is one of favourite. I particularly like the concepts below:
(i) It’s vital not to confuse motion with progress. Identify witch input actions matter the most in generating outputs.
(ii) Delegating vs. micromanagement and are you delegating without abdicating? Keith solves these two dilemmas with 1) the “Task relevant maturity” from Andy Grove (book below): you should not have one management style, but you should adapt it to each individual based on the maturity or experience they have related to specific tasks. In addition, you can also use a 2×2 matrix with your level of conviction vs. the consequences of the decision.
(iii) Categorizing your team members into “barrels and ammunitions“. Barrels can start and lead key projects independently, end-to-end and can generate output. The more barrels a company has the more projects the company can implement.
(iv) Lastly, my favorite point is to insist on focus. In PayPal, Peter Thiel was asking people to focus on only one thing. People rebelled and felt insulted to narrow their scope to only one metric or one problem, but this is key as people tend to avoid addressing the hard problems. If the organization never addresses the hard problems then it will drastically reduce its potential and it will become a mediocre company.

4/ Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager is a well known essay by Ben Horowitz. It’s a quick and pratical list of dos and don’t. Everyone working in a startup should read it.

Books

5/ About Product management – Principles of product management (2019)by Peter Yang is a small and quick book highly actionable and easy to implement. A must-read for everyone working at a startup. While it’s not as renowned as the other books, it helped our team to understand better how product management works and how to interact with the Product department. This can help to solve the typical issues and frictions that emerge when a startup starts to grow and needs to find its own framework to manage the product roadmap effectively. Lastly, I believe Product managers will learn from Peter’s frameworks and tips obtained after years of working with Roblox, Meta, Amazon, and more.

6/ Working backwards (2021) explains Amazon’s management principles. My favorite is to manage the business by input metrics and not by output metrics. I also find useful the use of written narratives instead of power points, the structure of the Weekly Business Review (WBR), the use of a bar-raiser interviewer, and thinking about the business and the product by “working backwards” from the desired customer experience.

7/ I enjoyed Scaling people (2023) by Claire Hughes Johnson, the former COO of Stripe. It ‘s a collection of some of the best leadership and management tools that every business person should master. If you want to learn more about OKRs, read Measure what matters (2018) by John Doerr. If you want to add another management book don’t skip the well known High output managment (1983) by Andrew Grove.

1/ Predictable revenue is a must read for B2B Sales teams. It delves into outbound lead gen, prospecting, and overall sales management. It’s a 183-page book full of strategies and actionable tactics. You will also find some good principles of overall managment at the end.

2/ More to come…

1/ Founders need to understand what VCs’ incentives are and, therefore, how VCs think and act. This will help your fundraising process and in managing relationships with your shareholders. Starting reading the Secrets of Sand Hill Road (2019) of Scott Kupor

As a manager and leader, you will need to overcommunicate. And, writing is one of the best ways to communicate. In addition a benefit of clear writing is that it drives clear thinking.

1/  About writing – “The pyramid principle: Logic in writing and thinking” (1985) by Barbara Minto is a book everyone needs to read. It’s about the fact that clear writing comes from clear thinking and structure. The book starts from the concept that we think bottom-up but we need to communicate top-down. It then presents several tools to organize our thinking and writing. All the frameworks in this book will help you to make it easier and more enjoyable to absorb new concepts.

2/ The video “The King of Internet Writing: Paul Graham” shares ten lessons on how Paul Graham structures his writing. As a founder and leader, you need to write a lot. In addition, writing is one of the best tools to clarify your own thoughts.

3/ (Coming soon. Under discussion)

About people and leadership

1. “People won’t remember what you said or did to them, they will remember how you made them feel” – Maya Angelou 🍀🍀

2. “A leader is a dealer in hope” – Napoleon

3. “Lear to understand how people are thinking and feeling and how to influence that“. This quote aligns with “How to Win Friends and Influence People”

4. “If you want to understand someone, figure out the narrative they tell themselves about themself. If you want to change your behavior, change your narrative. If you want to change someone else’s behavior, offer them a more compelling narrative they can tell themselves” – Shane Parrish

About clarity and focus

5. “Face reality as it is, not as it was or as you wish it to be.” – Jack Welch 🍀🍀

6. “Common sense is not so common” – Voltaire 🍀

7. “Conventional wisdom is not always the best wisdom” 🍀

8. “Don’t confuse motion with progress” 🍀🍀

9. “There are so many people working so hard and achieving so little.”- Andy Grove 🍀 

10. “It’s more important to do the right thing than to do things right” – Peter Drucker 🍀

11. “Everything that is valuable is hard. Everything that is hard is not necessarily valuable“

12. “You don’t need more time, you need more focus.” – Shane Parrish

13. “Focus on what doesn’t change” – Jeff Besoz

14. “Things that work tend to work pretty fast.” – said also by Elad Gil when reffering when testing new tactics in product and distribution

15. “Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.” — Steve Jobs

16. “Darwin paid special attention to disconfirming evidence, particularly when it disconfirmed something he believed and loved” – from Poor Charlie’s Almanck

17. “Constraints drive innovation and force focus. Instead of trying to remove them, use them to your advantage“

18. “Complexity increases because adding is easy and removing is dangerous.”

About resiliance

19. “Courage isn’t having the strength to go on. It is going on when you don’t have strength” – Napoleon 🍀

20. “Life begins where your comfort zone ends” – Neale D. Walsch 🍀

21. “Adversity introduces a man to himself.” — Albert Einstein 🍀

22. “A man is great not because he hasn’t failed; a man is great because failure hasn’t stopped him” – Confucius

23. “It’s hard to beat a person who never gives up” – Babe Ruth, American baseball pitcher 🍀

24. “Never underestimate a man who overestimates himself” – FDR and frequently told by Charlie Munger

25. “If you’re going through hell, keep going“. – Winston Churchill

26. “There was nobody to tell me how I should run, or what work I should be doing or not be doing. In the end, I did it my way” – Steve Jones, Marathon World Record, Chicago 1984

27. “Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.” – Dale Carnegie

28. “When the winds of change blow, some people build walls, and others build windmills” – a Chinese proverb

29. “Enjoy the process along with the proceeds, because the process is where you live” – Charlie Munger 🍀

30. “Pressure is a privilege” was famously said by Billie Jean King

31. I asked (Don Valentine), “Why does it not get any easier?”. His answer, “Why should it?” – Michael Moritz

About ambition

32. “The founder’s job is to fight the entropy of ambition” – Tobi Lütke 🍀

33. “Truly for some men, nothing is written unless they write it” – Lawrence of Arabia

34. “Ad maiora” (towards greater things) – a latin expression 🍀

35. “Alea iacta est” (the die is cast) – Julius Caesar

36. “The penalty for being average has never been so severe. The payoff for being extraordinary has never been greater.” Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired
 
37. “You are only as good as your last trade/investment/company” 🍀🍀

38. “The man who thinks he can and the man who thinks he can’t are both right“. (Which man are you?) – Confucius. A similar quote was said by Henry Ford

39. “Shoshin wo wasuru bekarazu” (never forget the beginner’s mind) – a Japanese proverb about the “shoshin” mindset 🍀

40. “Change before you have to.” – Jack Welch

41. “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change” – The Leopard

About wealth

42. “Diversification may preserve wealth, but concentration builds wealth” – Warren Buffet 🍀

43. “Wealth is built during the boom times. Reputation is built during the down times” 🍀

43. “Exponential curves are the key to wealth generation. […] You also want to be an exponential curve yourself. It’s important to move towards a career that has a compounding effect—most careers progress fairly linearly. […] Most people get bogged down in linear opportunities. Be willing to let small opportunities go to focus on potential step changes” – Sam Altman

45. “Rich People plan for three generations. Poor people plan for Saturday night.” — Warren Buffett

46. “Play long term games with long terms people” – Naval 🍀

47. “If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat” – Jean-Paul Sartre

48. “Conviction must beat consensus” – Alex Rampell, a16z 🍀🍀

49. High conviction, high concentration 🍀🍀

50. “Price is a trap” (when investing)

51. “Most people overestimate risk and underestimate reward. Taking risks is important because it’s impossible to be right all the time” – Sam Altman, “How to be succesful”

52. “Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.” – John Maynard Keynes

53. “What most people don’t have a handle yet, is that exits are cyclical. Throughout my career, you have these 15-year widows, where close to half of the exit profits are made in an 18-24 months window.” – Mike Mable.
This is the business of VCs: Take advantage of really constrained liquidity windows. Basically, wait 15 years to monetize from a window of just a few months

54. “I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest but are learning machines” – Charlie Munger

55. “A serious surfer doesn’t plan to go surfing next Tuesday at two o’clock. You go surfing when there are waves and the tide and wind are right” – Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia