What’s Really Stopping You From Starting Your Startup?

Hey everybody, welcome to this Founder Institute event. My name is Jonathan Gritchen, co-founder and CEO of the Founder Institute. I, uh, I'm really happy to, to have you all here today. I do know that we have an international audience, so if you are joining in, let us know where you're joining in from. Um, I do know last I checked we had people from at least 4 different continents sign up for this event. And these are the types of things that we try to do with, with all of our Founder Institute events. So if you are there, please do interact. Let us know where you're joining in from, um, in the chat. Really, one of the best advantages of these online events at Founder Institute is for you to interact with each other, for you to share ideas, for you to meet other people that are trying to launch businesses around the world. So this is great. I'm already seeing, um, some people writing in here from, from all over the place, which is, which is awesome. So, um, just as a quick introduction, uh, I am the co-founder and CEO of the Founder Institute. I'm also a general partner at Founder Capital, which is the Founder Institute's global venture fund. And today we're here to talk about adopting an entrepreneurial mindset. Um, and in my opinion, especially now in this AI tools-driven world where specialized The kinds of skills, in a lot of cases, right, the kinds of skills that can be somewhat replaceable by AI are becoming less and less value, and the ability for somebody to act as more of an orchestrator around different skill sets and bringing things together, some of the soft skills as we used to call them, right, these entrepreneurial skills are becoming more and more relevant, not just to launch start-up businesses or to become a great entrepreneur. But even in the day-to-day work, if you're working at a large company, developing an entrepreneurial skill set is incredibly important. And again, I think with just this, you know, influx of AI tools and just how AI is changing every single industry, these entrepreneurial-type skill sets are going to become even more and more important, even if you have no intention of starting a company. Okay, just to be relevant in this future workforce, it's important to have an entrepreneurial skill set. So just as a quick agenda for today, first I'm going to go through my presentation, should take maybe 30 minutes or so. Hopefully I'll get a little bit under that. But then secondly, after that, we are going to have an entrepreneurial mindset networking lounge. Okay, so again, these events are live. So anybody, if you are joining in, I would encourage you, if you want to get the full benefit of this event, to prepare to join that lounge. Preparing to join that lounge means that you should probably be on a desktop or a laptop instead of a mobile. You know, being able to join via video, if you are able, is always more effective as well. But we have some exercises and stuff that we're going to have you do with other members and other people in attendance on this event. Which should hopefully help develop some of your entrepreneurial skills and help create some value and some connections for you right away. As part of this, we do also have two worksheets that we'd like you to download. The first one— and again, I'll go through these a little bit in detail as we go through the content of the presentation— but the first worksheet is really to try to help you put a lot of these learnings into action on your own time. And the second worksheet is for you to use during the the interactive lounge that we will have as we go through this event. So just as a quick introduction, if some of you don't know what the Founder Institute is, the Founder Institute is the world's largest network of startup accelerators, investors, and advisors. We've been doing this since 2009, founded in Silicon Valley. We've now launched over 8,900 portfolio companies. They've raised a lot of money, and we also have created a lot of portfolio value for these companies all around the world. Our mission is to activate entrepreneurial potential worldwide. We work with entrepreneurs at a much earlier state than most other startup accelerators and startup support organizations. We work with a lot of people when they just have an idea. We work with a lot of people when they even still have a full-time job and they're just sort of working on some of these entrepreneurial projects as a side project, right? And we, um, it is our mission to activate this potential because we see that this potential is all over the world and it can be unlocked. And all of the economic development studies show, whichever one you want to pull up, that the more entrepreneurs that there are in a region, the more social mobility there is, the more equality is, the more GDP there is, and the more jobs that are created. So that is really what we have devoted our lives here at Founder Institute is to activate this potential worldwide. So in doing this since 2009, you know, me personally and everyone at the Founder Institute, we've really just been engrossed in this exercise of helping to turn employees into entrepreneurs. And we've arguably turned more employees into entrepreneurs than any other organization around the world. I say arguably because it's sort of a statistic that's impossible to, to quantify. But I can tell you that the vast majority of people, the average age of somebody that comes into the Founder Institute is somewhere between about 30 and 34 years old, right? And I say somewhere, I don't have an exact number because it's, we operate in over 100 countries, right? So a lot of the cultures and things are different, but the vast majority of people that do come into our programs are employees, right? They've been trained, they've been brought into this world through education and things like that to be employees and we take them and we have to sort of deprogram them a little bit to become entrepreneurs. So I think we know a little bit about the space. I think we know a little bit about what it takes for somebody who, you know, maybe didn't start a business right out of school or maybe doesn't consider themselves like a natural born entrepreneur, so to speak, right? To start developing some of those skills. And really what I've seen over the last, you know, 20-some-odd or close to 20-some-odd years working with first-time founders, employees, entrepreneurs, etc., is that traditional education conditions us to make excuses. Okay, now maybe that's a little bit of a negative way to look at it, but, you know, traditional education has really been built around sort of this, the ability to get you a job very quickly out of school, right, at a large company, essentially. And that makes a lot of sense, right? It's safe, help you get a job, then you can get a mortgage, you can get married, you get a white picket fence, all that kind of stuff, right? Makes total sense. And that's why most universities and most traditional education has all been making people very, very specialized, right? Because how do big businesses work? Big businesses are sort of like factories. They need— oh, we need somebody who's really good at email marketing. We need somebody who's really good at this, right? They're always look— looking at these specific sectors. Now, I say that it makes us, um, conditioned to make excuses because when you start to be educated in a very specialized fashion, whenever you start to encounter problems that aren't specific to the specialization that you were trained in, right, um, your natural, uh, response is to make excuses. And I don't— I think this is a very, um, common— I think it's a very human response, right? And, um, what we always tell entrepreneurs that we work with as well, especially first-time entrepreneurs, is, look, you either make progress or you make excuses. But traditional education, going, uh, training you in a very specialized way to work at a big company, has conditioned you to make excuses. Now, I don't want to be here like one of these Tony Robbins types and just be like, oh, like, get rid of all the excuses, OK? Because I can tell you that it's kind of impossible. I think excuses are extremely natural. So I'm not against abolishing excuses. I'm against just the whole idea, like, you can't avoid excuses, I don't think, right? Except for very, very few of us. Excuses are very natural. There's a self-preservation technique, and they're very subconscious, right? If you are ever presented with a challenge and it's a challenge that you are not trained to do, or you think that might be, again, very challenging, right, these— your mind will subconsciously start to make excuses to kind of— as a self-preservation, right? It gives you instant gratification because then you can offload kind of the responsibility for whatever the challenge it may be or whatever may come from it onto somebody else and not yourself. Okay. So the first thing I want to say here is that excuses are natural. Okay. I think it's a natural human condition. I also think, again, going through traditional education that has really been designed to prepare us to work in big businesses amplifies this as well. And I think where entrepreneurs and the entrepreneurial mindset really deviates from what we're— we've all been trained, you know, mostly in traditional education, is that entrepreneurs choose to overcome those excuses. Okay, it's— they understand the excuses are always there. It's not about ignoring the excuses or just not making excuses. It's acknowledging the excuse and overcoming it. And that choice, right, seeing it as a choice enables them to build really amazing things. And I've seen this 1,000 times, right? Excuses, they're just like viruses. It's the first time that you see one excuse, that's— and if that excuse, if you kind of accept that as an excuse in your head, it's going to start to permeate other parts of your work and keep going and going and going and going. And your ability to diagnose, right, kind of the first step is acknowledgment, right? Your ability to start to catch your subconscious on the excuse making, start to see the excuse making as a choice, right, is the first step to adopting an entrepreneurial mindset, right? And again, whether you're trying to start a company or you're just trying to do a better job at the big business that you're working at. So when we talk about excuses, right, now let's start to get more specific. There's 4 excuses. And we call this at the Founder Institute the Big Four Excuses that Kill an Entrepreneurial Mindset. And to try to make them as relatable as possible for everybody, I try to frame these excuses in a way on phrases, right, that maybe you've said to yourself internally, right? Maybe it's even in your subconscious, right? But just grouping them into four things that we hear a lot from first-time entrepreneurs that we work with, but also that, you know, I've had as a challenge myself and literally almost every single entrepreneur entrepreneur I've ever worked with has had a challenge themselves is overcoming each of these 4 excuses. So I want to go through each of these one by one, kind of look at them like the viruses that they are, right? What are the symptoms? What are some of the ways that, uh, the prescriptions that you can use to overcome them? So let's start with the first one, the "it's too hard." excuse, right? And some of the symptoms you may suffer from the "it's too hard" excuse, if you are saying things to yourself like, "It's too hard. It's not possible because of," you know, insert whatever constraint you want to put in there, right? Whether it's money, whether it's time or whatever, right? It will cost too much. It will take too long. And, you know, this one, honestly, I think is pretty straightforward. It's just, You know, if it were easy, if entrepreneurship were easy, then everybody would do it. There is a term that we use at the Founder Institute with a lot of the founders that we work with, right? And we call this the entrepreneurial wall. All right. And it usually is where most people, especially first-time entrepreneurs, when they start to embrace being an entrepreneur, they have these ideas and they start to actually devote and make progress on those ideas. Eventually they will hit this first wall. And it's usually a chicken and egg situation, right? It's usually like, oh, I can't raise money until I accomplish X, but then the rest of everybody's telling them that you won't raise, that you, or you will think I need to raise money in order to accomplish X, but then everybody else will tell you, oh, well, you won't raise money until you accomplish X, right? That's the entrepreneurial, that's sort of the paradox, the chicken and egg situation. And what I hear a lot of people say in those types of situations where, you know, well, in the perfect world, I'd be able to do X, Y, and Z. And just get that out of your mind immediately, right? This perfect world does not exist. Everybody has constraints, right? It's that creativity. It's that ability to deal with that chicken and egg situation. It is that initial wall. In the beginning, right? It's almost like if you're a runner and you know that, hey, if I can get through that first mile, I'm gonna get that second wind, right? But I have to push through that initial wall, right? An entrepreneur's job is to execute, which means overcoming obstacles. And I can assure you that anybody here, um, every entrepreneur I've ever worked with, they hit that initial entrepreneurial wall at some point, right? Some hit it right away, Some it takes a little bit of time, right? But people either take that wall and they use creative ways to get around it, or they take that wall and they retreat and they say, you know what, this isn't for me. Um, and I'm going to quote here Jason Calacanis, uh, is one of the initial investors in Uber, one of the most supportive FI mentors. Um, and you know, he's, he does This Week in Startups and all types of, uh, shows, and he has this illuminated sign behind him, which is sort of his tagline. It says, "Do the work," right? And that's the biggest piece of advice that I can give you to overcoming that wall. And I know maybe it's not the most practical advice, but I could tell you it is the advice that yields the most results. There is direct correlation between how hard you work and how successful you are. A lot of times when I see people who are not able to scale that initial entrepreneurial wall, It's because they're not willing to do work that they think is below them, right? As an entrepreneur, you need to do things that don't scale. You might need to pick up the phone and call somebody. You may need to walk into somewhere and just cold sell somebody, right? Yes, maybe you didn't go to school for that. Maybe you have a PhD and you think that's below you, but you have to do those things. You just have to quote unquote do the work. Sometimes it may feel humiliating. Sometimes it may just take a lot of time, but you have to do the work. And you start to realize that if you don't think that things are beneath you, if you, if you embrace things that are uncomfortable, you have far more control over your outcomes. So let me give you an example, right? Let's say that— and I hear this a lot where people are at that entrepreneurial wall, and they'll say, okay, well, yes, I agree with you, I agree with the strategy, all this stuff, but, but they're not going to agree to that. Like, they already told me they won't do it, right? And they come back and they say, okay, I failed. So I'm gonna go stop building this company. I'm gonna go do something else. All right? And that's the wrong approach. The right approach is to say, okay, well, what would it take for them to agree to that, right? What would it take? Are they trying to connect to some other person over there? Could you provide that connection? right? It doesn't even have to be related to your own project, right? What other things can you do, um, to help turn that no into a yes, right? And again, it's a lot of times people are like, wait, but I'm trying to build a business here, you know, and now you're telling me to do this other thing. I'm like, guys, that is the work, right? That is literally the do the work. If, if you can't get from A to B because this one person is not saying yes to something right now, how do you get that person to a yes, right? And get creative. It doesn't necessarily mean, oh, I'm gonna add 6 features to my project or something, right? Maybe it means that you need to provide them connections to somebody else. Maybe it means that you need to provide them, you know, value in some way that maybe is not like the core competency of your business, but that is your current challenge. So trying to overcome You know, getting over that initial wall is what blocks a lot of people from starting companies. And I can tell you too that, you know, in the beginning, this is the biggest thing that I see where people fail, right? It's at that initial wall. And they try to follow kind of like business playbooks and say, okay, well, I'm going to just add these features or I'm going to lower my price. And yeah, sometimes that is what it takes. Right? But you have to push yourself out of your comfort zone in the beginning. If you're not pushing yourself out of their comfort zone, you're gonna hit that initial entrepreneurial wall, and that entrepreneurial wall probably screens out— I don't know, my experience— probably 80% of people. Okay, so just know that you're not the only ones that will hit that. Um, the second thing on the, the not so hard— the it's so hard thing, right, is that, okay, it will take too long It will cost too much. And this is one that's a little bit easier to deal with, right? The way that you should think about this is to just talk about what is V1, right? It's natural in our brain when we start to think about the products that we want to build, we start to think about the vision that we have, right? We start to think about products that are years down the line, right? Like hypothetical products where now you have all these customers over here and they're talking to all these customers over here and they're doing all of these things, right? In the beginning, none of that stuff makes— is super relevant, all right? So in the beginning, think about what is V1. And what I always preach is that momentum is your friend. Momentum is something that is contagious, right? Watch any sporting events, right? If some big thing happens in a sporting event and that momentum, right, people get energy and that energy turns into something. It's not quantifiable scientifically, but it literally turns into something. It's the It's the same thing with any entrepreneurial projects. It's the same thing with any startup company. So instead of trying to think about how to get to where you want your product to be in 5 years, plot out the next milestone, right? And then just reverse engineer what it takes to get there. And when in doubt, make it simpler and simpler and simpler. Put on the blinders to get to that next step, okay? Where a lot of people get bogged down is they say, okay, but won't this cause this problem and this problem, this problem, this problem? And it's like, look, those are all assumptions, right? Worry about that stuff later. We like to call these Friday problems, right? And I guess it doesn't really make sense if it's Friday, but the idea is that, yes, you know what, that may be a problem later, but you don't need to think about that now, right? Thinking about that now doesn't help you, and you'll get more information so that maybe you'll learn it's not even a problem, or you'll learn other ways to deal with it, right? So don't worry about those downstream problems just yet. Just start Moving. Momentum. And then finally, just set a postmortem date, right? Because the other thing that I see that bogs people down is, is every time, like, they reach out to somebody or something, they think, okay, let me analyze how that went and do X, Y, and Z, and, you know, so I can improve on the next one. You know, what's a lot more efficient is to say, okay, look, I just need to move quickly right now. Momentum. You know, in one month, I'll go back and collect all my notes and do all this kind of stuff. And then I'll improve, right? But don't try to do that on the fly. All it's going to do is slow you down. So let me give you an example that happened on my team not too long ago, right? It was like, okay, let's create a new course for X. So we were planning out like a new boot camp. We saw that people wanted to learn this new thing, right? So what would be the wrong way to create a new course, right? A new training course for some topic? It would be, okay, well, let's get— let's build the curriculum for this course. Then let's launch the whole website. Then let's launch a full marketing campaign. And then let's get 100 people into the course, right? This left side is how a lot of people have trained to do these things, to do these things in traditional education. And it's how your typical big company will address this right now. Instead, let's look at how do we lower what all the levels of those achievements are, and how do we focus much more momentum, right? So instead of building full curriculum, say, hey, let's establish the key details, right? Who's the target market for this? What would they learn? What are the outcomes? Okay, let's launch a landing page, right? Let's start to collect payments. Let's do a low market effort campaign. Let's just start sending out a couple emails and a couple social media campaigns, right? If people start to pay for it, Right? If we get 10 people to enroll in the course, then we'll start to go do things like build the full curriculum, launch the full website, launch the full marketing campaign, etc. Right? That's the way you need to think as an entrepreneur is focus on much more realistic, smaller outcomes. And then, you know, and then go from there. So The second excuse that we have here is on, is the I don't know how excuse, right? And this one is, it hasn't been relevant for a long time, but wow, is it getting even more relevant now. But let me just say that some of the symptoms of this excuse, so you may suffer from this if you say things like, I don't know how, I'm not an expert in that, I didn't go to school for that, or I can't afford somebody to do that. Right. As an entrepreneur, you always have to be learning. If there was one thing, one sentence that I would say about the entrepreneurial mindset is that entrepreneurs are always learning. All right. They don't— they know what they don't know. They don't make assumptions. And we know some of these things because in the Founder Institute, we work with people before they have business ideas. Right. In a lot of cases. So the way that we do admissions at the Founder Institute is through a social science assessment. And we've then used the social science assessment over time, we've correlated the results back to see how all the people that went through the Founder Institute, how they did it in the real world, how much money they raised, the value of the companies that they created, etc. And long story short, right, one of the key personality attributes that correlates with entrepreneurial success is curiosity, right? It's people that are intellectually curious. They love learning new skills. They derive energy from learning new things, right? They, they know, again, what they don't know. They intrinsically value the input of others. They're not argumentative when speaking with other people about their ideas. They're genuinely curious. What do you think of my idea? What am I doing wrong? What am I doing right? Right? These are the types of people— this is one of the core personality traits that we see correlate with entrepreneurial success. So just quickly, if you guys want to get your report and see how you do on our Entrepreneur DNA assessment, you have the ability to do so. And anybody that applies to any Founders Institute program also gets the free report. But, you know, really, again, entrepreneurs are always learning. And let me break down 4 ways that they're always learning here, right? Obviously, as I just said, they have this intrinsic, you know, kind of craving for new knowledge, right, and being curious. But they do a lot of other things too. So number 1, they self-teach themselves the basics. You can become baseline proficient in basically any skill now with just a few hours and internet, right? And honestly, I was just editing this before this event and I added, you know, Claude and Gemini and Reddit Answers, which is a great tool that hasn't been out for that long, right? And honestly, it's just a few hours now. It might be— I was considering dropping that to under 1 hour, right? You don't have to be the world's greatest expert on any of these subjects as you start to build out your business. You just have to become baseline proficient. And there's really no excuse anymore for you not to be able to use basic online tools like this to become baseline proficient in any of these skills, right? If it's email marketing, if it's sales campaigns, it's creating a pitch deck, doesn't matter. Use any of these tools, you can become baseline proficient in these things. Really, really quickly. Um, the second thing is that they learn from others, right? They seek out opinions from people that are smarter than them. All right, this is where a lot of people will get advisory boards. They'll try to find mentors, right? A lot of the best entrepreneurs, again, they know what they don't know, so, um, they have humility, right? They're not trying to always be the smartest person in the room or anything like that. They're trying to find other people that they can learn from. Um, and then the other thing that I would say here too is that they acknowledge that, uh, no problem is novel, guys. I say this over and over again. Every day I talk to a new entrepreneur that says, oh, but you don't understand, like, my situation is like so different because of X, Y, and Z. Just like, no, your situation's not that different, okay? Maybe it's novel in your exact use case, but even then, it's— that's pretty rare. By the way, right? Um, but you can always look at other industries, other dynamics, see what other people have done to, um, solve some of the same problems that you're trying to solve in other industries with similar dynamics and things like this, right? Um, again, it's learning from others, and that's just diving into the internet and looking at the stories. Uh, one of the biggest, uh, most effective hacks that we have for a lot of founders in our Founders Institute programs is to reach out to other entrepreneurs that failed trying to build a similar business to you, right? Amazing resource. Not only did they learn more from failure than somebody might learn from, um, success, but they also are usually passionate about some of these problems because, uh, you know, they devoted years of their life to it. So again, um, entrepreneurs, good entrepreneurs, being— having that entrepreneurial mindset is learning from others. The other thing which is kind of similar is listening, right? Scientifically, if you're speaking to somebody, all right, so if you say something to somebody, then now they start speaking back to you, you can think faster, interpret the information they're telling you 4 times faster than what they're— how they're speaking to you. You, right? Their communication. So basically, you have a 4x advantage on hearing what they're saying and responding, right? This is a superpower. It is an amazing superpower. Unfortunately, uh, it— and this is kind of the default, especially with a lot of first-time entrepreneurs, right? They get into this entrepreneurial mode and they somehow get this mindset where, oh, to be a great entrepreneur, I sort of have to feel— I have to like project just confidence all the time. I have to— people need to talk to me and think that I'm smarter than them, right? And it's the opposite, right? You need to take this superpower to listen, not to reply. Most people take that 4x advantage to start formulating a response about why what this person's saying is wrong, or why what this person is saying doesn't understand that your business, or whatever it is, right? Actually Listen, be empathetic, right? Use that extra advantage to listen, not form a response. Ask a lot of questions. If somebody says something that you think is, is so ridiculous and, you know, they clearly weren't listening to you, that's fine. Ask them, dive into it. Why, right? Maybe you're not communicating it well enough. Probe for deeper stuff. Don't take things personally. Your goal as an entrepreneur, again, if you want to have that always learning mindset, is to try to put yourself in that other person's shoes. All right, so don't listen with the intent to reply or argue or make yourself look smarter or whatever. Listen with the intent to actually learn and walk in that person's shoes. And then finally, the last thing that entrepreneurs do to learn is that they compound that learning, right? So When you look at a startup business, honestly, startup businesses with the lack of resources that they have against all the big marketing budgets and stuff that big companies have, they really shouldn't have, um, they shouldn't be able to disrupt industries as well as they do, right? But one of the key reasons why they can is because they can learn so much faster. Big businesses, um, big businesses can learn You can look at their learning curve, it's gonna be nice, slow, and up and to the right, okay? But they're always going to be hamstrung by bureaucracy, levels of approvals, and things like that. Whereas a startup, they don't have any of that. So if you are trying to learn more about your customer, right, you, without that bureaucracy, your learning curve literally needs to be more compounding, right? It needs to be more like a hockey stick. Otherwise you're not going to be having any advantage over the big companies with all of their bureaucracy that you're trying to compete against. And what we call this at Founder Institute is the compounded learning cycle, right? So number one, anytime that you're taking on any new challenge and you want to do it with an entrepreneurial mindset, number one, figure out the baseline proficiency, right? Get on ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Google, Reddit answers, whatever, right? right? Become baseline proficient. Doesn't mean that you sit there for hours, just spend 20, 30 minutes becoming baseline proficient, right? What, what have other people done? Then you start to test new ideas, right? Actually test those ideas in the market, test them on real people. Then you determine, okay, did that experiment succeed or fail, right? Why did it fail? Why did it not? You internalize that learning, and then you take that learning and that helps you create a new baseline of proficiency, which is higher than your last baseline, right? And then you run another experiment, and that's how you start to get this compounded learning curve, right? It's sort of like compounding interest. It starts slow, and then over time it starts to grow and grow and grow, right? Um, if any of you, you know, are familiar with Lean Startup methodology, this is very much what what Lean Startup methodology is about. But even Lean Startup methodology, guys, is very much just focused on the scientific method, right? It's just your ability to acknowledge that you don't know what you don't know, that you're making a lot of assumptions and run experiments quickly, right? But making sure that every time you run one of those experiments, you're internalizing that learning so that the next experiment that you run is at a higher level baseline proficiency and knowledge, right? And you keep doing it again and again and again and again. And, you know, again, these are things that you can start to implement in your day-to-day work right now, whether you're launching a company or not. So these last two are a little bit faster, and then we will get to the networking portion of the event very soon. But thank you guys for a lot of the questions and comments that you're putting in here. And I know a lot of you asking, yes, I'm going through a lot of things here, guys. You will get the deck PDF after this event, and you will also get a video after this event as well in the next day or two. So the third excuse is the I'm scared excuse. So you suffer from the I'm scared excuse if you say things like, I'm scared, I don't want to fail, it's never been done before. It's too risky. And this is where entrepreneurs take that failure, right? So, um, being scared is really a function of failure. Entrepreneurs take that failure and they reframe it, okay? They understand they're not afraid of failure. Nobody likes failure, right? They're not afraid of failure. They just understand that failure is part of success. And Roger Federer, widely considered to be the greatest tennis player of all time, right? If you look at all of the matches that he played, right, and if you look at tennis, there is a match, there's a game, there's a set, and then there's points, right? The goal is obviously to win the match, but each match is is made up of sets and games and points. He literally, the greatest of all time, only won 54% of the points that he played, right? And a point is literally the lowest, the denominator of tennis, right? It's just like, oh, I hit the ball to you and then I hit out of bounds, you won that point, all right? The greatest of all time only won 54%. And I highly recommend Google it. He did a great commencement speech, I I forgot what the university was, uh, not too long ago, right? But really, you know, the, the greatest athletes, the greatest entrepreneurs, they understand that failure is inevitable. Um, so they don't avoid failure, they embrace it as a utility. They understand that failure is the most effective way to learn, right? They acknowledge that everyone fails. You can't avoid it. And by actually try avoiding failure, you're avoiding the most valuable and effective way to learn, right? If you're not failing, then you're not aiming high enough, you're not pushing yourself enough, you're depriving yourself of that learning. And when you start to see failure more as a utility, right, you start to become a better entrepreneur and you start to become a better risk taker as well. So risk-taking is something that we track, you know, it's definitely one of those like kind of personality traits that we see correlate very strongly with entrepreneurship. With entrepreneurs, definitely too, like they will prioritize best-case over worst-case scenarios, right? What you really want to do is hunt for exceptional outcomes, looking for the places to take risks. Because again, if you start to understand that failure is a utility, right, then you start to say, okay, well, I should take more risks, right, if the rewards merit those risks. And the art of calculated risk-taking, the most simplistic way that I can break this down is that you can manage risk really, really easily if you can start to build what we call these if-then plans, um, where, uh, there are milestones, and that if you reach the milestone, uh, it makes it very, very easy decision for you to then keep going, and it justifies the risk, right? And if you don't reach that milestone, it makes it very, very easy for you to also say, conversely, okay, it's not worth the risk. Let's move on to the next experiment. So let me give that example again, back to what I was saying before with, okay, if, if we wanted to create this new course, right, the uncalculated risk would be to again build the full curriculum, launch the full site, launch a full marketing campaign, get all these people, right? If you had this idea for some training course, you'd be devoting an insane amount of resources be extremely risky, right? Just based on what, your intuition or something like that? Or you could go buy it in a more entrepreneurial fashion, right, where you calculate the risk, you create an easy if-then decision, right? Let's just— let's not build the full curriculum, let's just build sort of the skeleton is what we call it. Let's launch a landing page where people can actually pay for this. Let's do a low-effort marketing campaign and Based off all of those things, if 10 people register and pay for this product by this date, then it's an easy decision for us to then do all the things on the left, right? Again, it's making those, um, if-then decisions very easy by validation. This is what entrepreneurs do, um, you know, and a lot of times this is how startups either get built or they don't. Right? This is a lot of what we do in the Founder Institute programs. And we tell a lot of people not to start the businesses that they're thinking about because the experiments that they run prove these if-then statements wrong. So again, just the art of calculated risk-taking. Create if-then statements that make it really easy for you to validate that risk. And then the last one is the "it's not ready" excuse. So it's not ready, it's not perfect, it's embarrassing, and things like that. And what I would say here, guys, is that, you know, your level of attention, like most people just don't care what you're doing, to be honest with you, you know. And I still suffer from this to this day. Trust me, guys, like it really, really bothers me that the text on this slide is too close to that line on the bottom compared to the other slides. It really, really bothers me, like little design tweaks and things like this. You know, even yesterday I was writing a LinkedIn post and I'm like, oh, this isn't like perfect, right? So it's something that definitely takes time to overcome. But the reality is that the level of attention and care that you give to anything that you put out in the world is like 10x more than the number 2 person. Person, right? Like, and perfection is the enemy of progress. Uh, this is, uh, kind of one of the taglines that we use, uh, within Founder Institute as well. And, you know, it all really boils down to that entrepreneurial mindset. It's like, it's— you don't know what you don't know. So, um, if you assume that you know what perfection is, right, you're wrong. Only your customers know what perfection is. You're so close to your product and every single thing that you're doing that you're going to sort of treat it like your baby, right? But most other people, it's like one of 100 things that they're going to see in that day, so they're not going to pay this the same level of attention to it, all right? And don't misunderstand me, I'm not saying like create crappy products or anything like that, um, but I am saying that in the beginning, you know, again, um, getting back to what I was saying before, it's just all about momentum. Right? Don't let perfection be the enemy of progress. You just have to move. And probably the most famous quote in this space is by Reid Hoffman, one of the top investors, founder of LinkedIn, right? And what he said here was that if you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late. And just for some context, he said this probably, I don't know, my guess now, like 2014 or so. Right? And that was before all of the vibe coding tools, all of the no-code tools that we have now where you can get products out quickly. And I think that with all of those tools, this becomes even more and more relevant. So in summary today, having an entrepreneurial mindset, it requires the ability to be able to identify, diagnose, right? So acknowledge and identify that you're making excuses. Diagnose those excuses. Choose to overcome those excuses. And those 4 excuses: it's too hard, I don't know how, I'm scared, and it's not ready. So, uh, we do have this worksheet I shared in the beginning. I'll share it again now. This is a worksheet that I want you guys to take on your own time. Team NFI created it. It's great. It's going to start to walk you through all of those 4 excuses, right? And to help you in a systematized and very structured manner start to overcome those excuses. So you'll get these links in the, in the post-event emails as well, along with the video and the deck to this event. But I highly recommend you download this because it will help. This is something that you can do on your own time to start improving your entrepreneurial mindset. But what we're now gonna do today, given that this is a live event, is have this entrepreneurial mindset lounge. So for any of you guys that joined the event early, you saw that we're using a platform right now called Airmeet. You can join here, and it's almost like an online poker room if anybody played poker, but it is a bunch of different tables. You can jump into different tables, and you essentially jump into these different group chats. So we thought, What better way to start have you, having you start to overcome some of those excuses than to start addressing two of them today, right? No time better than the present. Perfection is the enemy of progress, right? Look, let's just do it right now, um, and start to overcome the I'm scared and it's not ready excuses. And here's how I propose that we do this. Okay, so we have this other worksheet. And this is the startup idea worksheet. This is a worksheet that we use for some of our other events at the Founder Institute. And the idea behind this worksheet is to make it as easy as possible for you to start communicating any business or startup idea that you have. Okay, and the way that we do it, this was very much inspired by— I may be dating myself here, but at least when I was growing up as a child, there were these books called Mad Libs. And Mad Libs were great because it was just like fill in the blank, you fill in the blank, and then all of a sudden you'd have this funny story, right? This is the same idea except here, fill in the blank, and now all of a sudden you have a somewhat coherent startup pitch that people can understand. So what we'd like you to do is download this worksheet right now, okay? And during this feedback lounge, what we want you to do is actually start sharing your ideas with other people, um, on this event. Okay, why? Because we want you to get over— I'm scared. Okay, maybe you're scared. This might be your first time pitching. That's fine. It's not ready. It's probably not ready because you probably haven't prepared for this, right? And that's all fine. That's kind of the point. Everyone else here is in the same boat as you. Okay, so download this worksheet. So a couple other quick things about this lounge, um, I mentioned this at the top of the event, ensure that you're on a desktop or a tablet with Chrome or Firefox. I know there is a mobile app for Airmeet, but we have gotten some complaints in the past, and sometimes it doesn't work as cleanly. Okay. Download the worksheet and jump around some of these different tables. And, you know, the idea here is that you jump into one of these tables. Okay. We're gonna have some people on the Founder Institute team here jumping into tables as well, but we don't have enough people to, like, moderate each table. So it's going to take some self-moderation here a little bit. But the idea is to jump into these tables and start talking about what is the ideas that you have, right? And I know here it's saying my company, but you can just say, look, my idea, right, is to help this audience, right, solve this problem with this kind of like secret sauce. Right? So just start sharing your ideas in a way, um, and again, everybody here is in the same boat, okay? So if you're not confident in your idea, trust me, everyone else is not confident in their idea either, right? Be open to feedback. Start talking about what it is that you're doing. This is literally one of the first things that we have entrepreneurs do in Founders 2 programs is stop trying to be perfect Start talking about your ideas, start getting feedback. The more you get feedback, the more your idea improves, the more you actually start to then get collaborators on your ideas. The people that talk about their ideas are the ones that are able to find co-founders, that are able to find first customers, right? Not the ones that are sort of just trying to, to make it perfect in the background. And the last thing that I'll say here too is just don't be a jerk, right? So Nobody likes a time hog. We're not going to be able to be in every single one of these tables moderating everything. So try to stick to a couple minutes per person. You know, again, if somebody is giving you feedback on your idea or giving you other ideas, you know, listen. Use that extra superpower you have, right? 4 times X superpower. Listen with the intent to learn, not to argue. And let's all provide honest and constructive feedback. Okay, so thank you guys for joining. I really do hope that some of the lessons that I've given you here today are helpful in your journey to adopt more of an entrepreneurial mindset. Really, my goal here was to share with you, you know, those 4 main excuses that I have seen just be the biggest impediment to all of these employees that we have worked with over the years. and helping them become entrepreneurs. We work with Fortune 500 companies as well in helping a lot of their employees become better internal entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, right? And if you can start to break down those 4 excuses, uh, systematically— and trust me, it's not easy, okay? It doesn't come natural, as I said. Like, it takes time, um, but, uh, start to break those down step by step, and I promise that you'll start to see better results either in your personal entrepreneurial journey, starting a company, or even in just being entrepreneurial, more entrepreneurial in your day-to-day work at any large business that you may work in. And I also strongly believe that with all the AI tools that are coming, these entrepreneurial skills are going to become even more and more relevant across every part of our economy. Not just, uh, for people starting businesses. All right, thank you guys so much. Have fun in the networking lounges, and I hope I'll see you on an FI event soon. Bye, everybody.