John Lilly outlines three rules for entrepreneurs: make things and ship products, choose people you want to work with, and do work that makes your soul sing. He references Tom Kosnik, Reid Hoffman, and examples like Uber and early Twitter to show how these principles drive long-term growth and the ability to change the status quo.
Chapters
So I have 3 rules and it's kind of the framer, the framing. Here's the first thing, make things and a lot of them. You make things as long as you can, be a maker. The best thing about Stanford is it teaches you how to do things and put products into the world and the people that I interact with, the people that I like being with now are the people who really can see things and be product people and can make things. Themselves. The second two rules actually both came from Tom Kosnik, I'll talk about him in just a second, and they've stuck with me for 20 years now. These are not quite his words, these are Reid Hoffman's words. What Tom said when I was— Tom Kosnik said when I was just coming out of Stanford in 1995, is he said you need to figure out the people who you want to be on your team. You need to look around at the 22-year-olds, 23-year-olds, 24-year-olds who are coming out of Stanford now and they're in Silicon Valley now, and figure out the ones you want to be— you want to work with and play with and collaborate with because 20 years from now you're going to be running Silicon Valley. And that really stuck with me and it affected the way I think and it affected the way even that my interactions with Reid. So I'm a partner with Reid Hoffman who founded LinkedIn at Greylock. He and I have collaborated in a number of ways. His version of it is find your tribe. Figure out who is on your side, figure out who is not on your side and be super clear about it and invest in the people who are on your— in your tribe always. Like don't— it's not a static thing, so keep renewing and keep bringing people in, but really, really invest in it. And so I think I can't say this super strongly enough, but like the people who you work with are just about everything. I'll focus on recruiting and collaboration through my whole talk, and what you'll see is that I'll weave some of the same people in, even though I work with new people all the time, I'll weave some of the same people and the same influences like Tom Kosnik and Tom Byers through the whole— through my whole talk, it matters It's everything, I think. And then the third thing is something that Tom said was do what makes your soul sing. And what he meant is that do stuff that speaks to you. So changing the world is hard. Mostly people don't want change. Mostly the status quo is the status quo because people are kind of comfortable with it and it's easier to keep it the way it is than to change it. Being an entrepreneur is super hard. Nobody wants— like nobody wants Uber except for Uber at the beginning, right? Nobody wants Nobody wants to communicate in 140-character soundbites except for Ev and Biz when they started it. And so you have to make the world the way it is. There are vested interests that want to keep the world how it was. And so because it's hard and because it's constantly hard and because people are telling you you're a moron and why things won't work over and over and over again, it's important to do things that really speak to you and feed your soul and help you grow over time. And I think I think that— I think we forget about growth a lot of times. I think we now say, well, you're 20 or 22 and you dropped out of school and you should be able to run a multibillion-dollar company. And I think— I say that kind of tongue-in-cheek, but I submit to you that many people believe it. But I think we forget that growth is human and growth is key. And so finding things that make your soul sing, that speak to you and you love, and that grow you as a person over time is the thing. Those are my rules, that's it. Everything else is a detail.
