I have $5k and 5 months to build my startup in SF (Week 4)

My learnings/ideas/reflections this week are about productivity and a few interesting thoughts/stories I’ve come across, which I note down in my notes app.

Let me explain them:

High bias-to-action.

I always thought this meant doing the overcomplicated stuff really fast. But, I’ve realized this meant doing the simple things today.

This might be simple, un-sexy and boring but if you’re not willing to do it now, you won’t be willing to do it for the next 10 years.

And if you aren’t willing to do it for a decade and become the best at it you’re wasting your time.

So, I’m trying little experiments. Writing content posts like these are one of them.

An example I’ll give is I was thinking of starting a full fledged podcast. Instead, I’m just focusing on having coffee chats, recording them and posting clips from it that I think are cool.

Will it look good? no, but I want to see if I’ll do it regardless.

MVPs isn’t for startups only — its a lifestyle. I’m learning to always think about the minimum viable progress I can make on an idea.

Ted Turner - The Media Mogul

Been reading his autobiography, which is super interesting.

If anything his story so far has showed me that I don’t have to be a genius to be successful, I can just be willing instead.

He says “early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise”

Posts like these are my minimum viable “advertisements” to attract people with similiar interests.

Stanford

Nvidia’s founder just gave a guest talk at Stanford. I’m going to try and attend a few of these, which is again unbelievable.

Course is CS153 at Stanford - Guest speakers include Jensen Huang (CEO, Nvidia), Matthew Prince (CEO, Cloudflare), CEOs of Reddit, Vercel etc. + CTOs from Microsoft, Palantir and more

More than the education, I’ve always found the network and resources of a university to be more important and valuable.

Bomber mafia story

Very interesting read, I’ll probably write a separate post for this one.

Main takeaway: Just like the Bomber Mafia dreamed of changing war with precise bombing, startup founders have big ideas to change the world.

But having a great idea isn’t enough—it has to work in real life.

The Norden bombsight was an amazing invention (a method of precision bombimg that used a lot of data), but it didn’t always work as planned, just like new technology in startups.

I’ve learned that you can plan with as much data, but in real life there are data points you can’t account for.

Adaptability is key.

Rest have to do with fitness and personal productivity.

Pro tip about sleep - plan to wake up at the end of 90 min cycles. So in 4.5 hours, 6 hours etc. And start reading 15-30 mins before.

Anything I should add? Hit reply, and let me know! Always looking to learn.