>If you have someone who needs to learn how to quickly, you don't teach them theory
Elon would disagree: "One bit of advice: it is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree — make sure you understand the fundamental principles, ie the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to."
> Follow the recipe, then don't follow it.
Yes! At first I found it super helpful be ultra-precise: read the recipe twice, use a digital thermometer exactly, measure everything, etc. Then you learn what "good" is by tasting, then you can start improvising and substituting. True of how to learn a lot of things I think
Agree that's the true minimum viable set, and you can cook a lot of things with just that. But I think if a novice cook was trying to work through the cookbooks I recommended, they would find it frustrating not to have some of the other stuff I recommend. My "minimum viable" is sort of "your lack of X won't be a substantially annoying obstacle from completing most of the recipes in these essential books"
Agreed! But, I think very novice cooks should rigorously follow recipes, learn what a good result is across a wide variety of dishes, then learn how to substitute things or change up recipes. Or rather that's what worked for me.
Hi folks, Tyler here from Earnest Capital. I'll be leading one of these Mastermind Sprints and happy to answer any questions or hear suggestions here.
Basically like a lot of folks we've been looking for ways to increase our motivation and stay productive during gestures at everything
Mastermind are great for collective accountability and learning from peers, but my experience has been that they are often too unstructured and open-ended. So we've created a more structured, focused, time-boxed, and mentor-facilitated version. We beta tested it over the Summer and founders loved it so we're opening it up to broader applications.
Focused on bootstrapper type founders/businesses though we're open-minded about that.
investors like me are at a basic level middlemen. We have to raise capital from other sources and then invest it in founders. So it's not so much a questions of what kind of returns we're 'happy' with as it is, what kind of returns will enable us to keep collecting more money that we can turn around and use to back founders. If I was already a billionaire deploying my own capital, it would be a different story (and I'm actually a big proponent of folks investing with lower return expectation because I think entrepreneurship is an inherent social good) but that's not our situation.
> is all just ear candy and hype without evidence
the only evidence i can think of would be reviews from other founders who've worked with us. They are a super nice bunch and are generally happy to have a chat if you're curious. Here's one founder quoting another on the non-cash benefits of working with us: https://twitter.com/_rchase_/status/1233074457406771208?s=20
>Maybe earn trust with founders before asking for or expecting extra icing?
100% Agreed.
the untold secret of bootstrapping to date is that is has often been done from positions of privilege: family money, savings from a very high paying career, spouse's salary, inheritance. Very hard to make broad generalizations since the companies are often privately held and under the radar (so no statistically significant data) but my experience is that the case far more often than you would think.
On the other side, I see many many founders essentially twist their business plan into something VCs want to see because accelerators/VCs are the only source of capital for early stage tech companies.
Ah yes, fair. I'm not sure there can be a true solution to "we have to see your data before know if we can invest or not"
Our approach here is 1) we always give value before we ask for anything. Some strategy, resources, writing prompts, and anything else we can think of on a topic.. THEN we say "hey if you want to share your thinking on this here's how" 2) it's 100% optional. Founders can go through the entire process, get feedback from the community, hopefully improve their strategy, without ever sharing anything with us.
Yea, for founders going down a traditional VC path, there is some what weird but actually sensible logic to the idea that "being good at pitching VCs" is actually a useful skill to filter for. If I'm a Seed VC, assessing how well the founder will do at raising from Series A-F investors is actually part of the game.
We do "funding for bootstrappers" so most founders that work with us don't really plan on needing to raise more capital (it's not prohibited or anything, just not Plan A). So we and they don't really care about how "good" they are at playing the game of pitching.
Can you say more? We explicitly do ask, at the end of each section, if founders want to (optionally) send us the results to build up their profile/"application"... so there's some above board data collection happening.
What's your main concern re: data collection with SS and/or trailhead?