Origin Story, and Startup Success Puzzle
"You cannot prevent the birds of sorrow from flying over your head, but you can prevent them from building nests in your hair." - Chinese Proverb
WhatsApp Groups are Starting to Mirror Life: On a lazy Sunday afternoon, I opened my extended family WhatsApp group, and sent some belated birthday wishes to the relatives with whom we had no property disputes. It’s the digital equivalent of touching the feet of elders. Your parents would sternly remind you on personal chat, to wish Bhopal-waalibua (aunt) on her birthday, lest she takes offence and brings up a 25-year-old incident to spite your mother.
Origin Story: James Frey found no takers for his novel, so he repackaged it as a memoir, his story, which became the No. 1 bestseller A Million Little Pieces. Biographies and memoirs are America’s second-favorite book genre. Ronald Reagan tried to curry favor with Israeli leaders with a story about how he helped liberate Nazi death camps in WWII. He didn’t — did his military service in Hollywood. P. Diddy built an empire on allusions to his criminal past, but he attended the same prep school as the founder of Sequoia Capital before attending Howard University. Fabricated military service is apparently so common that Congress passed a law against it.
https://www.profgalloway.com/origin-story/
The Biggest Non-Excelable Part of the Startup Success Puzzle: In the twenty-five years that I have been evaluating startups, I have met thousands of founders, from all backgrounds, ages and approaches. Professionals with thirty-year careers behind them. Just-graduated teams. Single-founder teams. Raised an obscene amount of seed financing but still no idea, no direction teams... Running both B2B and B2C models in one-company teams. Will only hire family teams. Stealth forever teams. Second-time teams but only out of sheer boredom. Will sell at the first instance teams. Founder living in the US because their children are still in school there but the market is in India teams. Can raise capital but cannot execute teams. Can execute but cannot raise capital teams. The A team in B markets. Frugal teams, listening teams, arrogant teams, been-at-it-forever teams. The list is long. But when I look back at the journeys and outcomes of investments made, the mistake I made the most often was to decipher team strength by processing a barrage of signals about all founders and advisers and angels but not by focusing at a microscopic level on the Key. This bit me hard when the startups where I felt comfortable with collective founder strength were in fact hiding the lack of a strong Key. What was supposed to be a Formula 1 vehicle turned out to be a car in a carousel. A weak Key means no one is pulling the load forward. Everyone is working hard and there is plenty of activity, but no one is losing patience. No one is throwing up their hands in frustration. No one is screaming at 2 a.m. about delays that should have been avoided.
https://www.foundingfuel.com/article/the-biggest-nonexcelable-part-of-the-startup-success-puzzle/