Back in 2017, I had the amazing opportunity to be one of 20 young Australians selected by Startup Catalyst to receive a scholarship for their Future Founders Mission to Silicon Valley. On this trip I had the opportunity to visit dozens of tech companies including Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc and learn from senior people within these organisations. At the time I was constantly jotting down little notes, and I thought I’d take some of them and write them up as a post now.
Topics
Ideas
- You’ll have more tries if you pick a market right. Really challenge yourself to imagine if there’s a lot of customers who will be willing to pay money. You can get things wrong but if you guess right about the market size then there will be acquisition options. Be realistic about growth and market size
- Customer discovery is important: make sure you meet a need and the market is big enough to support your business.
- Don’t get too emotionally attached to your idea/business and let it become your identity – being too attached can lead to you making bad decisions.
- For every yes you get, you’ll hear no at least 100 times. When getting started, people will reject you many times. You need to learn not to take it personally, just keep trying.
- Execution is important but so are exploration and discovery.
- If you just have one machine learning algorithm you don’t have much, people with more money or data can kill you. It’s how you use machine learning to make your product better, stickier etc or if you can build up more data than anyone else and sell that data. It’s more how you can use machine learning to make your product better than machine learning in itself