Geoff Yang's Winning Entrepreneurs
· 2 min read
Another outstanding talk today from Stanford's famed Entrepreneurial Thought Leader (ETL) series, Geoff Yang from Redpoint Ventures.
Confession of a Stanford Sloan Fellow Series EP23
Another outstanding talk today from Stanford's famed Entrepreneurial Thought Leader (ETL) series, Geoff Yang from Redpoint Ventures.
Geoff is a great communicator. His talk covered a few topics, some of which were too familiar to me (but still refreshing to listen to). The one topic that left the most impression on me was his "common traits of winning entrepreneurs".
- Have a driving passion to change the world. Geoff always tries to find out what drives founders to succeed/do startup. It's hard to figure that out in the first meeting. Geoff will try to get a feel of that from a few encounters (like dinner).
- Recognize patterns while others see chaos...able to see the hidden logic that binds together multiple pieces in the universe.
- Have strong conviction and able to articulate it.
- Will a company into existence
- Genetically paranoid
- Recognize and support their own weakness
- Solicit advice, but make their own decisions
- Make decisions on incomplete information...fix the bad ones along the way
- Sweat the details
Geoff also mentioned Netflix's founder Reed Hastings' legendary 126-page manifesto "Reference Guide on Our Freedom & Responsibility Culture". It's worth sharing here:
Culture from Reed Hastings