Michael Staton frames entrepreneurship as a hero's journey and walks through early-stage founder priorities: finding product-market fit, validation over endless doing, and learning broad skills like design and coding. He recommends The Lean Startup and Steve Blank's work.
Chapters
This I actually thought of while I was here at Draper, which is how to frame, how to frame entrepreneurship as a hero's journey. Right. So, obviously, you have to build your team of heroes. I think you guys have, like, a similar mural somewhere. You have to find a door to a parallel universe where rules do not apply anymore. This is the post-product market fit era. If you find product market fit, You essentially find a door to a parallel universe where suddenly there's magic and wizards and you can fly. You have to find a beanstalk, which is a way to rapidly grow and kind of defy the laws of gravity. Or you can find an alchemist, which is a way to make a lot more money than everybody else doing similar things. Then at that point, you have to use your crystal ball. You have to hit plan, otherwise you get asked to leave your own company as the CEO. You have to build a fortress with a moat. You have to become defensible. And then you also have to enter the land of unicorns and dragons. You have to create a company that is valuable enough to create returns for your investors. If you haven't heard the phrase dragon, it, there was a response to the unicorn craze said, actually, we're looking for dragons. And dragons are companies that can create returns for the investors that invest in them, not necessarily meaning that they're a billion dollars. And then you can do whatever you want. You can, you know, bathe in your own cookies or whatever you want. So my message to most people in the early stage is that I want to see them doing the work to become a better founder. When I, when I watch founders over time, I'm less interested in, are they booking revenue? Did they hire somebody? Do they have a clever strategy? Did they build a cool product? What I want to see is somebody becoming a better founder. And so, in that, unfortunately the printer didn't work, so I couldn't print you out this workbook. But the workbook has a lot of exercises. Anyway, this is a quote that I really like. Basically, if you want to teach someone, give them a tool which will, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking. So, the act of, of me presenting here to you today is to help maybe get you guys to think a little bit differently, to pop some neurons, and to have kind of new pathways. So, a lot of early-stage founders start out talking about their capabilities as a, as a leader. They talk about how passionate they, they are, or they come across as very enthusiastic and If they could only just hire more people and raise more capital, suddenly everything would get done. But what I find is actually in the earliest stages, you are the company, right? Sometimes if you're lucky, you have 2 people, 3 people. If you have more than 5, you're too complex. Never, never bet on a startup with more than 5 people. But basically, you have to learn how to personally do every aspect of company creation. Yes?
Yes, I have a question. Here they teach us a lot to do research and validation.
Yes.
Sometimes I think it's better to go do things.
It's better to what?
To do, just remember to build your company without all those research. Sometimes they conflict with what you're trying to do. It's good to have— to put your feet in the water and know where you're going. But at the same time, I believe you have to do things. And that idea kind of conflicts with what I believe a business should do.
OK. Do versus validate.
It's not versus, but it's at the same time doing.
Yeah, so the Lean Startup movement, have you guys, is The Lean Startup part of your required reading? What about The Startup Handbook by Steve Blank?
Yes.
Right? So what has happened if you're in a, first-time entrepreneurs often have kind of trouble emotionally understanding the probability of failure, right? If you've started a couple companies, if you've been around, if you've invested in 70 companies, you watch failure play out, and it becomes a different emotional understanding of failure, right? And a lot of these kind of teachings in The Lean Startup and in kind of Steve Blank's work, as well as others, Disciplined Entrepreneurship is another book that I recommend you reading. It's about how to lower the risk that you will fail. Right? And most startups fail because they don't find a market. Well, sorry. They don't find, qualify, and build a market. Let's put it that way. Right? So, most startups fail on not finding product-market fit, not actually achieving growth trajectories. And that has to do with whether or not the market actually sincerely demands your product in the way that you believe they demand your product. And so a lot of these exercises, and actually I recommend a lot of the exercises as we go through this, feel like a waste of time because you know that the market demands your product. Well, every founder knows that the market demands their product. And founders often have a unique ability to do what I call founder rainmaking, which is not actually scalable. So, I have a slide on that later. And so, a lot of these discovery and validation processes, from an investor point of view, is actually highly necessary, because we have to have a sincere belief that the market does in fact demand what you were trying to do. Right? What you were trying to bring to them. The— you know, I said that as a founder you basically have to do everything yourself, and I recommend learning as much as possible so that you can do everything yourself. But then within that, I often say that design and visual communication are probably the skills that you need the most frequently as you get your company off the ground. How many of you guys have had to build a slide deck? Okay. How many of you have had to build marketing collateral for customers? How many of you have had to design a website? Yeah? Okay. Cool. So, how many of you have had to design your own product, either make mockups or Photoshop, all that kind of stuff, right? Okay. So design and visual communication, visual communication and leadership, I think, are the skills that keep coming up, and they never go away. Right? At some point, you may not have to make your own deck. You may not have to design your own product. But your ability to guide those processes and hire the right people and set expectations for that are extremely important. I also do recommend that everybody learn how to code. If you haven't learned how to code, just bite the bullet. It'll take you 6 months. Do it.
What advice would you give to a student who's just starting out?
