Lesson 2: Rocket fuel for growth
3 ingredients you don’t want your competition to know.
Last week I wrote about how crafting a trajectory of your own is the most fundamental step early-stage founders can take in order to become great. In my 2nd piece of this 6 part series, I want to share with you three ingredients which act like rocket fuel that can accelerate any founder’s growth.
“You are the average of the five founders you spend the most time with” - The first ingredient that makes up the rocket fuel formula is to constantly surround yourself with founders who are better than you. Running a successful startup is extremely hard; there are so many intricacies involved such as raising capital, attracting talent, finding product-market-fit, to building a company culture that’ll sustain itself. By surrounding yourself with founders who have raised multiple rounds or operate companies that are 3x to 5x your startup in size, you will undoubtedly inherit their mindsets and principles that helped them succeed, growing much faster than if you’d been on your own. And this doesn’t stop with founders you only have access to physically; with the rise of social media and democratized information, some of the best founders in the world are sharing their knowledge and know-hows which you can continue to learn from in perpetuity.
The second ingredient is extremely ordinary so often overlooked - reading. How can this mundane task be an ingredient for rocket fuel? The secret lies in the asymmetry of time it takes to gather knowledge to produce a piece of useful writing versus the time it takes to consume that piece of writing. When a knowledgeable founder/PM/VC/specialist writes about their learnings and failures, it likely took them months or even years to produce, but by internalizing their lessons instead of manufacturing them yourself, you acquire the same insights in a fraction of the time. And by continuously reading and learning from those that came before you, you’ll accumulate so many years of knowledge disproportional to your experience which makes it seem like you traveled back in time.
The last ingredient which helps propel a founder’s growth to maximum velocity is to constantly embrace feedback from the world. This means welcoming feedback from the market on your product, feedback from your team about your leadership, and feedback from other founders and VCs on how to become better. This helps to align your perspective to reality, and only by having a true perspective of your surroundings can one actually progress. All too often I see founders dwell in their own version of the world and launch products that nobody wants, missing their targets, and unable to prevent unforeseen setbacks. Results are driven by interacting with the real world, so the earlier founders step out of their cocoons and transact with the real world, the quicker they’ll grow.
------
Next week I’ll be sharing my 3rd piece out of my 6 parts series on becoming a better founder. Tune back on the 18th of Jan and if you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave it down below!
Jack
Image credit: SpaceX
