"Some men learn all they know from books; others from life; both kinds are narrow. The first are all theory; the second are all practice. It's the fellow who knows enough about practice to test his theories for blow-holes that gives the world a shove ahead, and finds a fair margin of profit in shoving it." - John Graham
How much to read as an entrepreneur
11–20 of 32 posts
Re: How much to read as an entrepreneur
#12Reading is incredibly important. I am not talking here about startup related material, but wider than that. Startups operate in shifting currents and global trends.
Sources like the Economist, HBR and Foreign Policy are useful. Reading quality analysis is never wasted time. Even if you disagree with it, it forces you to think about why you hold a position.
Re: How much to read as an entrepreneur
#13"Some men learn all they know from books; others from life; both kinds are narrow. The first are all theory; the second are all practice. It's the fellow who knows enough about practice to test his theories for blow-holes that gives the world a shove ahead, and finds a fair margin of profit in shoving it." - John Graham
I totally agree with this. Reading can be a huge help, but only when you apply it and test things out.
Re: How much to read as an entrepreneur
#14Some specific things you should make sure you don't read too much about:
- Anything about venture investment or finance related to fundraising, company valuation, liquidation preferences, etc. Your investors will tell you everything you need to know.
- Management. There's really nothing here you need to know about. Hire fast, fire fast, have a ping-pong table and catered lunches. It's that simple.
- Product development and project management. You are a visionary and everything you are doing is novel and innovative, so don't waste your time on these subjects.
- Computer science. Really, it's nothing like it was 20 years ago when the only language was FORTRAN or whatever. Everything you need to know about building software you can learn from attending a talk or two at a conference, provided it doesn't interfere with networking. Just make sure you only go to node.js-related talks because everything else is old, outdated, and useless. Also, don't even bother worrying about databases. MongoDB is the only thing you need.
- Marketing. This is especially useless since product is everything. Just build your product, put it online, make the app live in the app store, and go back to iterating on your product. They will come.
You can get any knowledge you need related to any of this by just building a business. Since you are clearly going to be the next Steve Jobs, you don't have time to waste reading useless things.
Re: How much to read as an entrepreneur
#15A rule I've found helpful is generally to read nothing except what applies to your current or next step or two. Otherwise you risk reading stuff you can't act on, and forget by the time you need it. Instead bookmarking and categorizing using a tool like delicious/diigo gives peace of mind that nothing will be lost and when I need it, it'll be there.
This is what I'm doing too. Even if marking not-immediately-useful things as "toread" means 99% of the time that I'll never read them.
Re: How much to read as an entrepreneur
#16Some specific things you should make sure you don't read too much about: - Anything about venture investment or finance related to fundraising, company valuation, liquidation preferences, etc. Your investors will tell you everything you need to know. - Management. There's really nothing here you need to know about. Hire fast, fire fast, have a ping-pong table and catered lunches. It's that simple. - Product developme…
One small quibble:
- Computer science. Your only job here is just to make sure that you have a cofounder who is a ninja. You need to get deep on this, make sure they're the real thing. If you need to, consult with faculty: http://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/en/people/historiographical-institu... Only a real ninja will make you a millionaire.
Re: How much to read as an entrepreneur
#17I don't know. How healthy should your diet be as an entrepreneur? These questions are silly.
haha, you seem to be closest to the point
Re: How much to read as an entrepreneur
#18Some specific things you should make sure you don't read too much about: - Anything about venture investment or finance related to fundraising, company valuation, liquidation preferences, etc. Your investors will tell you everything you need to know. - Management. There's really nothing here you need to know about. Hire fast, fire fast, have a ping-pong table and catered lunches. It's that simple. - Product developme…
I suppose good sarcasm should take the reader a second to figure out. Well done.
Re: How much to read as an entrepreneur
#19Some specific things you should make sure you don't read too much about: - Anything about venture investment or finance related to fundraising, company valuation, liquidation preferences, etc. Your investors will tell you everything you need to know. - Management. There's really nothing here you need to know about. Hire fast, fire fast, have a ping-pong table and catered lunches. It's that simple. - Product developme…
I suppose good sarcasm should take the reader a second to figure out. Well done.
Agreed. Fortran 20 years ago? I like Fortran and was using it 20 years ago. That said, that was only because I was working for an astronomer.
It did take me a moment to catch the sarcasm.
Re: How much to read as an entrepreneur
#20I think the key here is to not take time away from more important things to read. When you are sitting in front of a computer there are a million things you could be doing to push your startup forward. What I've done a lot of recently is play the audio of articles (using Apple text-to-speech) while exercising, stuck in traffic, etc. Allows me to "read" a ton while not taking any time away from normal work time. I alm…
Text to speech? I wish Apple would allow me to do that with my ebooks.
Have you tried VoiceOver? On iOS, turn it on by triple-clicking the Home button, then two-fingered swipe downward to start speaking continuously until the end of the book.