Uninvent is designed to help startup founders build successful companies and stay healthy and sane while doing it. Please see the overview in Welcome to Uninvent and links to past and future chapters in Uninvent Table of Contents.
“The most important skill for getting rich is becoming a perpetual learner. The old model of making money is going to school for four years, getting your degree, and working as a professional for thirty years. Now, you have to come up to speed on a new profession within nine months, and it’s obsolete four years later. But within those three productive years, you can get very wealthy.”1
— Naval Ravikant
“The really great news is that being a “learn-it-all” has never been easier … you can learn about new things 24 hours a day, no matter where you are or what you do. All you need is the internal drive and insatiable curiosity to understand why the world is evolving the way it is. It is all out there for you to touch and feel. None of it is hidden.”2
— Bill Gurley
“I am always doing things I can’t do; that’s how I get to do them.”
— Pablo Picasso
You do know what you don’t know
It’s the end of the day on Friday, so you look at your to-do list for the following week. It’s daunting.
On Monday, you have your first board meeting with your new Series A investors. You’ve never managed a board meeting, but hey, how hard can it be? You’ve bookmarked a dozen blog posts and podcasts about managing a startup board and plan to dive into them on Saturday morning.
On Tuesday, you have an all-hands meeting where you’ll try to calm your team down about a tech giant who just entered your market. You need to get up to speed on the competitor’s product and pricing. You don’t have McKinsey & Company to solve this, just a few hours on Sunday morning before your Barry’s Bootcamp class.
On Wednesday, you are interviewing marketing consultants to help revamp your messaging. You aren’t a messaging expert (thus the consultants), but you need to learn some basics, or you’ll have no clue how to interview them. You look at the three thick books about messaging sitting on your desk. OK, you aren’t going to read them by Wednesday, but you are going on a long mountain bike ride on Sunday, so you tee up some podcasts on startup messaging that you can listen to at your favorite podcast speed (1.8x, naturally).
Lately, you’ve been having a classic stress dream—where you are back in junior high school, walking into the final exam for a course where you never attended a class. But it’s no longer just a stress dream. It’s your reality even when you are wide awake.
Your subconscious is telling you that you need to Become a Learn-it-All.
Learn to earn
Most of us walk around with a model of the world in our heads, where we go to school to learn the prerequisites to enter a profession and get our first job. Our employer then provides experience and training to master our current job before getting promoted to the next job, the next, and the next.
Whether or not the world ever worked that way, it doesn’t now, even less if you work for a startup. No one is coming to help you, and it’s all up to you.
At a startup, you are building a product no one has built before, trying to win a market that’s never existed, and doing tasks you’ve never done before. If you survive long enough to graduate to the next phase, your knowledge gap opens up again. You can never fully master what you need to know. All you can do is race to learn quickly and hang on for dear life as your startup takes off like Tom Cruise holding onto the plane in Mission Impossible.
You have to compress a career’s worth of learning into just a few years, with no professors or corporate learning department to help you. It’s entirely up to you to learn things like:
How to get product/market fit
Until you’ve built your product and have customers who use it, love it, and pay you, you don’t know if the core idea for your startup is any good. You need to get in front of customers, get their feedback, share it with your team, act on it, see what happens, and then do it all again. The faster you can drive this test/learn/iterate cycle, the more likely you will succeed.
How customers find and buy your product
Every market is unique in how buyers find, evaluate, and budget for solutions. Every market requires different value propositions and business cases. Even if you come into your startup with strong sales and marketing experience, you must relearn what you know for this market.
How to hire and manage people
Once your startup gets some level of product/market fit, who you hire and how you manage them will drive most of your success. If you’ve been in a management role in a previous company, you have a leg up, but lessons from larger companies don’t translate well to startups, where you have to recruit with no brand, no recruiting department, and no beefy compensation to throw around.
Strategy, planning, and operations
Running a fast-growing startup requires finance, planning, information technology, strategy, legal, security, and compliance knowledge. The knowledge you need grows at every phase of your company, and gaps can put the company at risk.
Yourself
Startups are so hard that they always become a journey of self-exploration. You’ll discover how you respond to stress, handle failure, face bad news, and process difficult feedback. These require grit, introspection, and possibly coaches or therapists to help you process your new reality and adjust to handle it. You’ll need to learn new things and unlearn some of what you thought you already knew. You need to uninvent yourself a bit before you can move forward.
Nothing I’ve said might sound controversial, so your reaction might be a mix of “sure” and “tell me something I don’t know.” However, there is a large gap between knowing what to do and finding the time and discipline to do it. Otherwise, we’d all have six-pack abs and clutter-free houses.
So, how do you become a “Learn-It-All?”
Adopt a learning mindset
Becoming a Learn-It-All starts, like most things, by embracing that you need to do it and that it will take time and energy.
You might have an impressive education, excellent work experiences, and raving reviews from your ex-bosses. You may even have experience at previous startups, but the gap between what you know and what you need to know is still vast. You’ve never built or sold this product to these buyers. You’ve never operated in this financial market. You’ve never managed this team. You must drop your ego and face the learning challenge with humility, accepting that today’s version of you will not get your company where it needs to be.
But don’t become so humble that you beat yourself up about the list of things you don’t know. Almost no founder, even the most successful, goes into their startups knowing a fraction of what they need to know. Don’t criticize yourself or let Imposter Syndrome set in. Channel that energy into learning.
You must also adopt the mindset that learning only happens if you make it happen. You don’t have a boss to train you. No corporate learning department will spoon-feed you courses or seminars. No professor will force you to attend class five days a week. You have to get up every morning and get busy learning.
Curate the best resources
A great thing about the modern era of startups is the surplus of information available. You can find books, blogs, videos, podcasts, and tutorials about every aspect of starting and running a company. Uninvent’s footnotes link to many of the best resources.
Get into the habit of curating content that resonates with you in the form factor that works for you. If you have blocks of time while working out or traveling, podcasts might be right for you. If you learn best through video, YouTube is your friend. If you like to read before bedtime, queue up a stack of books and articles.
This is not a one-time glut of information you must absorb as a prerequisite to starting your company. Think of it as an ever-changing buffet of knowledge you’ll consume over many years. (I’ve been curating my reading list for 30 years. If I live to be 100, I might even get through it.)
Talk to customers
Books, blogs, and podcasts (and, ahem, Uninvent) can help, but they can only cover topics common across startups, like fundraising, recruiting, and managing people. They can’t teach you the most valuable information of all, which is what your buyers’ problems are, what product will solve them, how you reach customers, and how you win.
These insights are specific to your startup and are proprietary, valuable, and hard-won. You should expect to work hard to get them, and that hard work starts with talking to as many prospects as possible, trying to sell them your product, and getting feedback on what it will take for them to buy. You’ll start these conversations before you even incorporate your startup, and even after you are a large company, you’ll still have them.
The world is full of founders who can tell you how to craft a fundraising deck or get accepted to YCombinator but who can’t tell you who their customers are or if their product solves their problems (or, more likely, doesn’t). Don’t be one of those founders.
Devote time
Learning takes time and energy, so you must find a way to make space for it if you expect it to happen. Find a routine that works for you that you can maintain indefinitely.
Some founders do well by devoting time daily to learning, like a morning routine of scanning blogs and Substacks. You can set aside time before bed to read books or watch lectures. You can set up a queue of podcasts and audiobooks to listen to while driving or working out.
Some founders do better with binge learning. They might set aside an entire Saturday to do a deep dive into their competitors, spending the time watching product demos, reading analyst reports, and poring through user documentation. They might spend a whole weekend working through something like the First Round Review or a Stanford course on entrepreneurship.3
However, the best learning method is usually “just in time,” when you need the information to accomplish a specific task. For example, if you are creating a fundraising deck for an upcoming pitch to a venture capital partnership, you’ll be so focused on the task (and panicked about the impending deadline) that you’ll easily muster up the energy to look at dozens of example pitch decks for ideas.4
As is the case for most things, founders who have their shit together have an advantage. A founder who starts working on their pitch deck two weeks early, sets aside time for learning, and seeks feedback on early drafts will probably nail the pitch and walk away smarter. The founder who builds their pitch deck at midnight the night before their first meeting won’t learn much, will flub the pitch, and will walk away frustrated and fundless.
Build a brain trust
Much of the best learning happens via your network, so collect people who have something to teach you and are willing to do it.
You can seek out other startup founders with whom you can share tips and tricks and build an informal founders’ network. You can add advisory board members with expertise in areas where you need help. When you hire consultants to take on projects, you can ask them for extra time to teach you the concepts behind the work they delivered.
Most of all, learn from the people who work with you. Everyone on your team knows something you don’t, so don’t hesitate to let them teach you. Some founders don’t do this because they worry it undermines their authority. It might seem weird to ask the Head of Sales you just hired to teach you Sales 101. You might assume your role as a leader is to know it already or pretend you do. But you don’t; they know you don’t, and they’ll love being asked.
Grade yourself on a curve
Yes, you are back in school but be realistic about what a passing grade is. You don’t need to get straight A’s. You can’t know everything about everything, so you need to focus.
You only need to be an expert in a few areas. One of them is your customers — who they are, what they need, how they buy, what product features solve their problems, what messages attract them, and why they’ll buy from you and not a competitor. You can realistically be the smartest person in the world on these topics. The best startup founders are.
But you can often lower the bar for functional or technical skills like sales, marketing, fundraising, positioning, messaging, pricing, managing a board of directors, or the hundred other things you could learn. Startup learning is full of 20/80 rules, where a little effort gets you most of what you need to accomplish a task or manage the people who will. Learning a topic has an initial steep learning curve that usually provides the bulk of the value.
And remember, you aren’t competing against superhumans but against other startup founders who are usually as clueless as you are. You and your competitors are all trying to figure this out. Whoever is the best Learn-It-All will probably win.
This is one aspect of what we’ll talk about next: “Be the Adult in the Room.” (coming soon).
This is yet another great Naval Ravikant quote on building wealth and starting successful startups, which you can find in The Almanack of Naval Ravikant.
I first heard “Be a Learn-It-All” from Bill Gurley, whom I used to work with. His must-read essay, “Why Youth Has an Advantage in Innovation & Why You Want to Be a Learn-It-All,” explains why startup founders have to be learners. Bill’s talk at the University of Texas, “Runnin’ Down a Dream,” covers some of the same ground in the context of building a career.
The First Round Review is an excellent collection of writing on startups, and you can find many courses on startups at Stanford and other universities, including CS183 (Peter Thiel) and How to Start a Startup (Sam Altman). The good news is that these are free. The bad news is that you have zero excuse not to take advantage of them.
TechCrunch has a good series of pitch deck tear-downs, and the web is awash in sample pitch decks and recordings of demo days and pitch competitions. Avoid Shark Tank and watch those instead.