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When building a startup gets hard, where should we turn?

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Nathan Stevenson about 1 year ago

Evan what a great piece of writing - you capture the in-the-moment pace and action of startup life, the excitement, passion and deep dark depths. It has the pace of a Ben Mesrick book, while somehow touching on the metaphysical and philosophical aspects of what truly motivates us. As a snapshot of the good, the bad and the divine in American entrepreneurialism it is outstanding.

Beth Adele Long about 1 year ago

Compelling, as always. One (apparent) contradiction piqued my curiosity: you say that "All of this activity was driven by instinct, not data," and then a couple paragraphs later that "when Anand first joined, he spent months in back-to-back customer calls." All those customer calls, in my mind, constitute an incredibly rich set of data -- qualitative, rather than the quantitative data we usually obsess over in tech circles, but data nonetheless.

My interpretation is that their early activity was driven by instinct, which itself was necessarily informed by qualitative data generated through customer research and not by quantitative data that could be represented in charts and graphs. But that interpretation may be skewed by my own beliefs! Am I tracking with the spirit of the piece, or do you believe that the instincts that drove their early activities were genuinely independent of the qualitative research?

Evan Armstrong about 1 year ago

@bethadele Good question! They committed to the GTM use case and felt that it was right before Varun started to do all those calls. That belief is the thing that justified him suffering through all those calls haha. But you are totally right, those calls constituted data that they used to refine the product.

Bill Blackmon about 1 year ago

Great piece thanks!

@dnnl8017 12 months ago

Great piece. Since starting my own journey in entrepreneurship this year, I've become a believer in the "divine self" and trusting you in your intuition. We are put on this earth to create something uniquely ours and it's important to discover that rather than trying to mimic others' definition of success.