What's a common startup myth you've found to be untrue? Easily for me it's that the best companies raise venture capital. Once you talk to a few VCs you'll realize the best storytellers raise capital, it has little to do with how good your company actually is.

Jeff Bezos: “You don’t understand my audience” When Charlie Rose asks him if the iPad is a “Kindle killer” in this 2012 interview, Jeff gives an incredible response: “It’s a very different product, and I can give you an example. If I came to you and said: ‘Charlie, I love your show, but we’ve got to sex it up. We need fast cuts and vicious arguments between your guests.’ You would rightly say to me: ‘Jeff, I love you man, but you don’t understand my audience. We have a cerebral conversation here. It’s what we do, and it’s how we’re differentiated.’” He continues: “When people come to me and say: ‘You’ve got to have full-motion video and color on the Kindle.” I say: ‘Why? You think Hemingway is going to pop more in color?’… You don’t understand my audience.” Jeff goes on to explain that the vision for the Kindle is: a purposeful device for reading where no tradeoffs have been made—every single design decision is optimized for reading. And knowing exactly who his audience is gives him conviction in the Kindle team’s design decisions—even when everyone at the time was saying that the iPad would crush them. To drive home the point of just how different the audiences for the iPad and Kindle are, he points out: “The #1 thing people are doing on their iPads right now is playing a game called Angry Birds… The #1 thing people are doing on their Kindle right now is reading Stieg Larsson.” One of the laws of marketing is that if you try to make a product that appeals to everyone, it will end up appealing to no one. Jeff understood this as well as anybody, and this interview demonstrates that.

🗣️If you start a newsletter this year: 1. Make sure you include original content: data, your insights, your learnings, your ideas 2. Make sure you include original content 3. Make sure you include original content Different will win. You CANNOT reverse engineer originality!

The best advice I have for others based on the lessons I’ve learned this year: when the future is uncertain, really invest in yourself. The only thing certain about your future is that you will be in it.

It took 11 months and 181 investor meetings to raise @Vimcal's last round Fundraising at the bottom of the market... really sucked Here are 5 crucial things to know if you're raising in 2024:

4 loops that cause creative struggle:

Building a newsletter, similar to any creative business, can be quite a ride. Some days, you're incredibly confident about the content you're creating. On other days, you might feel lost, questioning the meaning of it all.

literally everyone wants to start a business but very few want to run one