In this keynote, Doug Mellinger shares practical guidance for early‑stage entrepreneurs. He emphasizes securing top advisors and professional firms (e.g., Big‑4 accounting firms, Wilson Sonsini) who will invest time and resources, and making early investments in infrastructure with disciplined budgeting and tracking to improve predictability. He advocates for a yearly strategic‑planning cycle that proactively guides pivots rather than reacting to crises. Mellinger stresses lifelong learning, reading broadly, and attending conferences outside one’s industry (TED, Milken, TEDMED) to spark interdisciplinary innovation, citing the Weizmann Institute and XPRIZE as examples where cross‑field collaboration yields breakthroughs. He concludes with a story about J. Paul Getty’s three “rules” (wake early, work hard, strike oil) to illustrate entrepreneurial persistence: when a venture fails, the entrepreneur can regroup, re‑drill, and try again, especially when youthful low personal burn‑rate allows for higher risk. He congratulates the audience for their connection to Tim Draper and wishes them success in finding their own “oil.”
Chapters
That goes to getting the best advisors also. When I started my company, and what you'll find is many of the big firms, the Big 4 accounting firms or the Wilson Sonsinis or the others, many of them will invest in you. Not necessarily money, but they'll invest their time and resources. Aim for the best in everything. Aim for the best people that you can possibly get, aim for the best advisors you can possibly get, and make the investments in your infrastructure early. Have budgets. You know, you're going to build plans. Continue to build out budgets and track against your actuals because over time you'll be able to bring from budget to actual more in line, and that becomes your predictability. Strategic planning. People start off with these business plans, but then they put them away because they never come true, and then they don't revisit the strategic planning. Get into the cycle of every year doing an update to your strategic plan, taking a step back for a couple of days to see where you should be moving your business, because the pivoting shouldn't be just in reaction. It should be because you're proactively taking these decisions. The last 3 things that I was going to say, and then I'll just want to get into more of a conversation with you, or the last 2 things. Learning never stops. Andrew Carnegie said, those who don't read are barely ahead of those who can't read. I believe that. I read Everything I can get my hands on, brochures, newspapers, magazines, going around the web looking at different stuff, and I like to read about lots of different things. I like to go to conferences that have nothing to do with the industries that I've been in, just so I could see how different people are approaching problems. The Weizmann Institute in Israel, which is this incredible university, what they found was the sparks of innovation have oftentimes come not from the people who are the biologists working on a biology problem, but it's the biologist talking to the chemist, to the mathematician, to the physicist who said, well, here's how I would approach that problem, and bursts of innovation happen. The XPRIZE Foundation, if you guys have ever heard of that, what they find over and over again is the people who win the prizes are typically people that aren't coming from the industries that they're trying to solve the problems because it's somebody coming with a different mindset. You need to make sure that you're doing that by going to things like TED and to the Milken Conference and to TEDMED and, and to all these other events that'll give you very interesting different perspectives and just network with lots of people from outside the realm of what you're doing. The last thing I'll say is a story that one of my mentors gave me early on. He knew a very famous businessman named J. Paul Getty. J. Paul Getty boiled his success down to 3 things that he did. The first one was he woke up early. The second is he worked hard. The third thing is he struck oil. When he first told me this, I laughed and I was like, what are you talking about? And he said, I want you to go back and think about that, and when we get back together, we're gonna talk about it. And I went back and I was thinking, what is he talking about? I just didn't understand where he was coming from with this. What I ultimately concluded was that, you know, as entrepreneurs, we all get up, we write these business plans. And what is a person in the oil business doing, especially back then? They'd be walking around going, I think there's oil there. They created a plan of how they're going to get it, they bought all the equipment, they started drilling, and a lot of times they'd get down and nothing was there. And so the question for the entrepreneur is, are we going to just pull up our rig because our business plan didn't work and just going to go home? Or are we going to take a step back and say, what went wrong? Let me figure out where I should— where I missed it, And let me go back and dig again. And that's where, you know, one of the sayings I like is that businesses or ventures will fail, but an entrepreneur will never fail. Because you can always go on and do the next thing. And one of the great things about the age that many of you guys are at in starting your business is that, you know, we can live on macaroni and cheese for a long time. And when you don't have kids and a wife and cars and houses and other things, You don't have the burn rate personally. You can take risks and chances and do things that you just can't do later in life. And so I think it's awesome what you guys are doing. And being able to be in a program like this is phenomenal. And the fact that you got connected to Tim Draper and that whole group is just tremendous. So I wish you all the best and hope you find lots of oil in your lives. Thank you.
