-Jamie Jones

A couple of weeks ago, I sat in a packed auditorium on campus listening to David Rubenstein and Ken Burns discuss the founding of the country. The occasion was the arrival of three historic copies of the Declaration of Independence from Rubenstein’s personal collection. (By the way, the copies are currently on view at the Nasher Museum… the exhibit is part of Duke and Durham’s America 250 programming, which I highly recommend stopping in to see if you happen to be in town.)

I went to the event expecting a history lesson, which is why I was surprised to find myself walking out while thinking mostly about the young founders and innovators I engage with on a daily basis.

Throughout the discussion, Burns kept turning the topic back to George Washington. And as he did, one historical note he shared caught my attention. According to burns, in 1783, with the war essentially won, Washington stood in front of officers who were on the edge of mutiny due to unpaid wages. He began reading a letter, stopped, fumbled for his spectacles, and, as he did, explained to the angry crowd how he’d gone grey and nearly blind in the service of his country. By most accounts, the room instantly softened. The angry officers wept. The most powerful man in the new nation won the room by admitting he could no longer see well enough to read.

Simply put, he led with vulnerability.

Then Burns said something I’ve been thinking about ever since. He pointed out how George Washington didn’t know he was George Washington. In other words, he had no idea there would eventually be a dollar bill with his face on it, a capital city carrying his name, and a towering monument on the Mall. He didn’t want that kind of praise, and most of it would have made him uncomfortable. Instead, he focused on showing up and doing hard and often thankless work before going home to Mount Vernon.

Burns was equally blunt about the Declaration itself. The founders had a good idea. A good idea got them nowhere on its own. They had to convince a skeptical public, hold a fragile coalition together, and keep going through years when the whole thing could have collapsed. Perseverance, he said, was the entire game.

Almost every founder I meet is carrying some version of that same question: will this matter? Will anyone care? Am I the right person to be doing this?

Washington didn’t have an answer. Neither did the 56 people who signed the Declaration. Nobody gets the answer while the work is happening. You get it later… if at all.

So what do you do when you don’t know how the story ends?

You follow George Washington’s lead by staying vulnerable. Say the thing you don’t know in the investor meeting. Tell your cofounder you’re exhausted. Admit to a customer you’re not sure how the data got corrupted. Washington didn’t lose authority by telling soldiers he was going blind. He gained it.

Similarly, the founders I trust most are the ones who tell me what isn’t working.

You work with humility. If the goal is recognition, you will quit the moment it doesn’t arrive, which is most of the time. If the goal is the work, recognition becomes a byproduct you can take or leave.

And you keep going. A good idea is the price of admission. Everyone in the room paid it. The founders who make it are rarely the ones with the best idea on the table. They’re the ones still at the table three years later.

Washington became George Washington by never trying to be. He kept showing up to work he couldn’t be sure would matter. Odds are none of us gets a monument either. But the people whose work ends up mattering almost never knew it at the time.

-Jamie

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Worth Your Time

-Jamie Jones

We’ve all been there. You hit a stretch where you just can’t catch a break. And a few weeks ago, that was me. I had a lingering cold, a dog who was sick at night and keeping me up, a team member who resigned, and a partnership idea I was excited about that got politely poo-pooed. None of it was catastrophic. But all of it coming all at once definitely felt like a lot.

So when I stumbled on this piece on scientifically backed ways to recover from a bad day, I read it. The article offers a handful of simple ideas for regulating yourself and regaining perspective, which matters because the people around us (spouses, kids, teammates, the founders we support) get whatever version of us shows up.

I took a long walk through my neighborhood without my phone and paid attention to my breathing. The problems didn’t disappear. But I came back better equipped to deal with what needed to happen next.

Give it a read before you need it.

-Shep Moyle

A team of founders came to see me this week with an idea. They always have an idea…

The idea shows up first, like a puppy, and nobody has asked yet who’s going to walk it.

Since it belongs to them, I’m not going to tell you what the idea was. After all, it might be good. However, what they didn’t have was a problem. They had the outline of one… as-in the kind of thing you can say in a sentence while everyone in the room nods. So we spent the next hour taking that idea apart.

Who exactly has this problem? What does that person do about it today? What does this problem cost them in money or time or embarrassment? When did they last encounter the problem and what did they do the next morning?

Each questions turned up an assumption they didn’t know they were making. Ultimately, they left with more questions than they walked in with, which is what I count as a good meeting. And the whole time, I was thinking about stairs.

Why stairs? Well, there’s an essay by John Salvatier called Reality Has a Surprising Amount of Detail. He spent his teenage years doing construction on his father’s rental properties, and he opens with a set of basement stairs. Building the stairs seems easy enough. It requires two long boards, some steps, some brackets, and probably an afternoon of work. Or so he thought.

Then he starts building and discovers how wrong he was. The angle cut can’t be traced the obvious way. The lumber is warped (because lumber is always warped). The screws pull the brackets crooked. Any screws that are too long come up through the step and into your foot. He even captions the photo in the article “Those goddamn stairs.”

His point, of course, is much bigger than carpentry. Turns out, everything is like these stairs once you get close enough to it. More importantly, the details hide. Before you learn one of those details, you can’t see it. After you learn it, you can’t remember not knowing it. That’s how smart people get stuck, and it’s how they end up arguing for three hours about a board, which he and his father did.

A startup idea is the stairs before anyone has bought lumber.

I know this because I ran a party supply company for thirty years. From the outside, people assumed it was… well… a party. But it wasn’t. It was mostly boxes, creating new products, organizing the manufacturing/supply chain, and everything else I had to learn by operating the business every day. And I learned those things by attending more Proms, weddings and corporate events than anyone should have to attend.

So I told the founders in my office to do the same thing. Go stand next to your problem. Watch one customer live through the problem from start to finish. Then do the job yourself for a day and write down everything that surprised you, because the surprises are the business.

By the way, Salvatier’s essay is free on his blog at johnsalvatier.org. Search the title and it comes right up. It’ll take you ten minutes, so be sure to go read it before you write the plan… or the strategy… or buy the lumber.

-Shep

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Worth Your Time

-Aaron Dinin

If feels like every other week I find myself talking with a founder going at it alone. When I ask, “Why don’t you have a co-founder?” the answer I get is always the same: I’ve tried, but I can’t find one.

To which I usually respond: “Try harder.”

OK… I’m maybe not that blunt, but that’s the basic gist of my response. And it’s for two important reasons.

Reason #1) Building companies is simply too hard to do by yourself. You need someone going to battle with you, or you’re going to burn out.

Reason #2) If you can’t even convince one other person to get excited enough about your startup to build it with you, how are you going to convince anyone else your startup is worth their time/money/resources/interest?

Anyway… since I’m sure someone out there is searching for a co-founders (or, even worse, stubbornly going at it alone), here’s an article about co-founder dating that’s definitely worth your time.

-Aaron Dinin

While chatting with a neighbor the other day, I casually mentioned how excited I was for Fall Break.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “I thought you loved your job.”

“Ummm… I do.”

“Then why are you so excited about not having to do it?”

Obviously, he was teasing me. But he also had a point. I spend lots of time telling people how much I love teaching, how amazing my students are, and how fortunate I am to have a job that lets me spend my days doing what I enjoy. So why was I celebrating the precious hours I wouldn’t have to be in class?

For a moment, I was feeling a little guilty. Maybe I was being hypocritical? After all, if I really loved my job as much as I claimed, wouldn’t I be disappointed about the breaks? Maybe I’m supposed to be pacing my empty classroom during Fall Break, staring wistfully at the empty desks,and counting the minutes until my students return?

OK… that’s a bit much. But hopefully you get my point. How could I love my work and be excited not to have any?

On one hand, it shouldn’t be possible. If someone genuinely loves their work, they shouldn’t be able to pull themselves away from it. On the other hand, the issue could actually be the same one I used to struggle with when I was building startups.

Early in my entrepreneurial journey, my inability to stop working was the kind of thing I’d wear like a badge of honor. Nights… weekends… holidays, I always had another email to send or feature to code or networking event to attend. As a result, if I wasn’t working I felt like I was falling behind. Worse, I worried that wanting time away from my startup somehow meant I wasn’t passionate enough about it.

But looking back, I realize I was being ridiculous. After all, nobody assumes a professional athlete doesn’t love their sport because they take a day off from training. If anything, we understand how rest is an essential part of athletic performance. Muscles need time to recover and bodies need sleep and training without recovery is more likely to produces injured athletes than strong one.

Yet somehow, in the entrepreneurial world, we’ve convinced ourselves constant work is the ideal approach to success. We celebrate people who answer emails at midnight and we admire entrepreneurs who work through vacations. I bet sleeping under your desk can get you a promotion in some companies.

Sure, sometimes work does require extra efforts. Maybe you have a big deadline. Or maybe there’s a big crisis. But extraordinary effort is, by definition, beyond the level of “ordinary.”

And none of this means working hard is bad or I’m not going to get done whatever needs doing. It’s more a reminder that our brains need time away from difficult problems in order to do stuff like process information, make connections, and recover the mental energy required for sustained attention. Plus, our bodies need sleep, and even our relationships need time to be nurtured and supported.

By the way, I suspect people who legitimately love their work need this message more than anyone else (which, in part, is why I’m sharing it with a bunch of entreprenuers). When you love your work, convincing yourself to work more than your body can (or should) is easy. But that only lasts for so long. Eventually, your body’s exhaustion overtakes its ambition, and that’s when the real problems begin.

-Aaron

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Worth Your Time

-Aaron Dinin

Recently, I’ve been working on getting blurbs for a book I’ve got coming out in the Spring. As part of that, I’ve had to find other authors whose writing resonates with my own.

In that process, I stumbled across a book I haven’t thought of in a while. It’s by Daniel Pink and it’s called To Sell Is Human.

As the title suggests, it’s a book about helping people get comfortable with selling. And Pink wrote it because, for whatever reasons (or rather, for reasons Pink more appropriately articulates in his book than I’m able to do here), humans tend to feel selfconscious about it.

I used to feel that way. Heck, I still do. But I’ve gotten a lot better, and one of the things that’s helped me take that step was Pink’s book. I wanted to pass it along to all of you, as well, since I suspect I’m not the only one with that particular issue.

-Aaron Dinin

I was having lunch with a freshman and, as usually happens in these situations, our conversation turned toward potential majors.

I asked her plans and she said: “I’ll probably do econ. I want to do business, but, since Duke doesn’t have a business major, econ is the closest thing.”

I’ve been teaching at Duke for over a decade. And, for over a decade, I’ve been hearing students tell me econ is a de facto business major. Which, at least according to my understanding of economics, would surprise a lot of econ faculty. Economics isn’t “basically business.” Economics is a social science focused on things like incentives, markets, and resource allocation. In contrast, business educations usually focus on topics like accounting, marketing, operations, organizational behavior, leadership, and management.

Do they have some overlap? Sure. But they’re definitely not the same. I’d go so far as to argue other disciplines — like psychology or even philosophy — would better prepare students for the business world.

Regardless, I’m not sharing this story to argue for a better business major alternative or convince anyone not to major in econ. Instead, I’m sharing this story because it represents a larger tendency we all have of adopting other people’s assumptions without much meaningful critical thinking.

Whenever any of us steps into a new place and don’t know how things work we immediately start looking around for people who seem like they do. And then we copy them. But we very rarely stop to ask where the information came from. Instead, We just assume the people before us were smarter. And that’s a dangerous assumption… especially for entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurship is full of assumptions that survive mostly because everyone keeps repeating them. You’ve probably even heard some of them…

“You need a technical cofounder.”

“Two-sided marketplaces are impossible to build.”

“You have to raise venture capital in order to scale.”

And, to be fair, some of those things might be true. But others probably aren’t. More importantly, you can find the answer if you’re willing to spend a little time looking for yourself. In fact, a tiny bit of skepticism and a willingness to search for the truth on your own can become an enormous competitive advantage simply because so few people are willing to do that extra bit of work.

Yes, I realize following the herd is efficient. And we can’t personally verify every piece of information we encounter, which makes other people’s assumptions useful proxies. However, at the same time, when the stakes are high, maybe take a little time to add a touch of extra scrutiny. It could be the tiny bit of skepticism you need to figure out what everyone else is overlooking.

-Aaron

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Worth Your Time

-Aaron Dinin

In the same conversation with my student referenced above, she also asked how to become a better writer… particularly in the age of AI.

Immediately I suggested a book written by the person I learned to write from: George Gopen. And his book is called The Sense of Structure.

Professor Gopen was my writing professor when I was a Duke undergraduate, and his approach to writing changed my life.

The best way I can describe it is: “Design thinking meets grammar.” Which, I realize, probably doesn’t sound exciting, but trust me when I tell you it’ll completely change the way you see language. Specifically, you’ll see it from what Professor Gopen describes as “the reader’s perspective,” which is exactly what design thinking tries to teach entrepreneurs to do… see things from a consumer’s perspective.

By the way, yes, the book is expensive, particularly for a thin paperback. But go hunt down a used copy or check your university library. It should be there, and it’s worth a careful read. I re-read my copy ever couple of years, and, every time I do, I learn something new about writing.

-Shep Moyle

It’s the beginning of a new school year, and one of my favorite parts of September is welcoming back young entrepreneurs. I get to hear what happened to their ventures over the summer, what worked, what broke, and what new questions they’ve been carrying around. And since a good bit of that tends to show up via email, I thought I’d would share one that landed in my inbox this week.

The subject line was the title of this issue: “URGENT! Action Required!”

That subject line is usually reserved for spam or a billing notice. So I opened it. It was from a student entrepreneur I’d never met, and the venture appeared to be a few weeks old. The founder wanted to meet with me as urgently as possible… preferably in the next day or two.

But it didn’t really read like a request. It read more like a demand, which made me want to sit with it for a minute. I’m always curious and always willing to help, so I wrote back that I’d be glad to meet. But then I asked a question. Was this urgent for me, or urgent for them? I intended a little humor. The reply made clear that it was urgent for me to meet with them.

It reminded me of something I said to my management team at Shindigz for thirty years: Your lack of preparation and planning does not constitute an emergency on my part.

I wasn’t trying to be rude or uncaring when I said it. Instead, I was trying to teach discipline. When something arrived on my desk marked urgent, the first thing I did was ask how it got there. Almost every time, the emergency had been visible for weeks. Someone hadn’t asked the right questions early enough, or someone had hoped a problem would resolve itself, or — more than I would have liked — someone simply didn’t do the work. In other words, the urgency was real, but it just wasn’t mine.

That’s why I’m sharing the email I received. And, as we start a new semester and/or a new stretch of our respective entrepreneurial journeys, it’s a lesson worth sitting with.

Have you done the work before you ask for help?

Every founder should be able to answer a few questions before they walk into anyone’s office:

Have I identified the assumptions in my plan that, if wrong, kill the business?

Have I anticipated what the team and the business will need in the next ninety days, and do I have a contingency for each of those needs?

Am I asking for help at the right moment?

Am I approaching people in a way that makes them want to help me?

By the way, in case you couldn’t already tell, that last one is where this particular student’s email failed, and it’s also where I see the most room for improvement with founders of every age.

After all, time is the most valuable resource we all have We can raise more money. We can hire more talent. We can rebuild products. But time is gone the moment it passes, which means, when you ask someone for their time, you are asking for the one thing they can’t replace.

And because of the value of people’s time, the tone of an ask matters. A “must do” puts the other person on defense. In contrast, a “want to do” invites them in. The way to establish the latter is usually with a little humility.

For example, compare these two:

“I need to meet with you tomorrow about my venture.”

…versus…

“I’m a sophomore working on a venture in the campus food delivery space. I have hit a wall on unit economics and have done my homework on it. I am having trouble getting my CAC/LTV to pencil and I would value thirty minutes of your time in the next couple of weeks if you have it. Here is what I have so far.”

The second one tells me you’ve done the work, and it tells me what you want, and gives me a decent idea of how long it will take. These things make me want to say yes. Or at the very least, it makes saying “yes” easier.

And just to be clear, it’s OK to ask for help. In fact, asking for help is an important part of how entrepreneurs learn, and the best founders I’ve coached are relentless askers. It’s just that the people who ask well share a few important habits.

They ask specific questions. “Can you look at my pricing model?” gets a better answer than “Can I pick your brain?”

They show their work. They bring what they have tried, what they have learned, and where they are stuck. They make it easy to say yes. They close the loop. They come back and tell you what happened. Nothing makes me more willing to help someone a second time than hearing what they did with the first conversation.

Most importantly, they build a relationship before they need it. In other words, the founders who get the fastest help in a real emergency are the ones who did not wait for the emergency to introduce themselves.

That’s not to say if you don’t have a preexisting relationship with someone, you won’t be able to get the help you need. For example, I’ll meet with the student who commandingly emailed me. And when I do, my first piece of advice will be about about that subject line. And then we’ll get to work.

-Shep

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Worth Your Time

-Jamie Jones

Almost every conversation in my office hours eventually circles back to the same request — give me a sure answer: tell me my idea is going to work; assure me that I can land my “dream job,” paint the path for how I find happiness.

Everyone is seeking certainty. And honestly? I want those answers too.

Which is why I appreciated Simone Stolzoff’s new book, How to Not Know. How to Not Know follows people facing problems with no easy answers, like an economist trying to forecast the next market crash and an island nation confronting climate change.

If you’ve sat with the anxiety of wanting a response or lain awake craving someone to tell you how it ends, this book will feel uncomfortably familiar. It also offers practical ways to get better at not knowing.

Entrepreneurship is a daily exercise in not knowing. So is life.

-Jamie Jones

This semester I’m teaching Business & Basketball: The Revenue Playbook For Women’s Sports with Duke’s women’s basketball program. It looks like a sports course, but it’s really a sales course (students won’t register for a “sales” course, so we dressed it up).

Every student team is given some sort of real asset to sell such as single-game ticket packages for community groups, a jersey patch, NIL deals with small businesses around town, etcetera. They have to generate leads, qualify them, get an actual human being to take a call, and try to move that person to a “yes.” In other words, they have to make real asks and experience real rejections, which means it’s hard… and it’s supposed to be!

Last week I introduced them to Clay, which uses AI to scrape information about prospects and fill a funnel faster than the blink of an eye. Then I gave them the assignment of identifying and scoring fifty leads for their projects.

They did it. Fifty leads each, (mostly) on time. Three students in the room used something other than the tool I gave them, and they picked their tools based on what they were actually trying to find. Everyone else took the shortcut I put in front of them, which, honestly, I probably would have done too.

Then I read their lists. Oof!

One team had a lead in Durham. Durham, England. Nobody between the scrape and the submission looked up long enough to notice they were about to pitch community night tickets to someone an ocean away from Cameron Indoor.

The lists were full, but they were full of partial garbage. They weren’t aimed. Few could tell me why a particular name was on the page, what made that person a fit, what the ask would be, or what they hoped to learn by reaching out. Lead generation became free, and the second it was free, the thinking stopped. Nobody stood between the output and the decision.

Here is why that costs more than it appears to.

In sales, your funnel is not a scoreboard. It’s an instrument. You pick a specific person for a specific reason, you make a specific ask, and what comes back teaches you something about the process. Was it the wrong buyer? Was it the wrong price? Wrong moment? Maybe the wrong story? And that feedback is critical… it’s how founders get from guesses to an actual business.

But that feedback loop only teaches you if you put something deliberate into it. In contrast, fifty unqualified names into your sales processes produces fifty non-answers, and non-answers are unreadable. It means you can’t tell whether the pitch is broken or the list is, and what good is that?

Without any data, you simply repeat the same process again… and again… and again. The result, ultimately, is that, while you thought you saved time, you actually wound up wasting more of it. And time, remember, is your most precious resource.

In the case of my students, they only have a singly basketball season to accomplish their goals. Founders have their limited runways. Either way, a funnel packed with unqualified leads might feel like progress, but that’s only true until you realize you spent all the weeks you had sending emails but learning nothing.

I gave my students that feedback, and then I sent them back to the drawing board. However, I also let them use the lists they’d built, meaning the outreach going out this week will mostly land in silence. While that’s not going to generate good results, I’d rather that happen with a ticket package for a class assignment now than with a company later, because it’s an important lesson to learn.

The lesson, by the way, isn’t just a lesson for them. It’s a lesson for all of us about how to leverage AI. It can speed you up, but, if you’re not thoughtful about it, it can also dramatically slow you down. In the case of an AI sales lead-gen tool, sure, it can produce plenty of sales leads, but there’s a difference between good leads and bad leads. Even when AI can fill your spreadsheet, it’s still your job, as the human, to intercede and decide which leads are actually good.

In the past, fifty leads might have taken a week, but that week forcing you to decide who was worth the effort. Now it takes four minutes, and every minute you saved gets spent later, waiting to hear back from people who were never going to answer.

-Jamie

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Worth Your Time

-Aaron Dinin

This article explaining and celebrating Radical Candor conveniently scrolled into my life shortly after a conversation with a couple of very enthusiastic but very naive founders.

They were telling me about their idea, and every time I offered a critique, they responded by saying, “Well, we talked with so-and-so at such-and-such company, and they told us they loved our idea!”

Finally, I had to tell them those people didn’t actually love their idea. Those people were just being polite. Unfortunately, giving polite feedback to entrepreneurs rarely helps them. What helps entrepreneurs is honest, candid, caring feedback, and this article does a great job explaining why.

Actually… I should be honest… it does a decent job explaining why. But, in this case, decent is good enough.

-Aaron Dinin

As I write this, I’m just finishing a conversation from my actual office hours. A student came by asking for advice on how to use social media as part of the sales strategy for his startup. And he asked lots of questions about what kinds of content he should make, how often to post, whether he should hire “influencers,” and so on.

We spent the next 20-30 minutes talking about his target customers and exploring different content formats, as well as covering some basic editing tips. When I finished, he started at me for a few moments. Then, with an obviously disappointed look on his face, he said:

“That’s a lot of work.”

“Yup,” I told him. “It sure is.”

I clearly hadn’t given him the answer he’d been hoping for. Even though he came to my office asking for advice, I suddenly realized what he really wanted was a shortcut. I guess he imagined I was going to reveal some secret combination of platform, posting schedule, and algorithm trickery that was going to make social media a magic sales machine for his startup. But instead, I basically gave him lots of homework. And, the more I think about it, the more I find myself believing “lots of homework” is a great description of entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurship is basically just homework, but with one big difference: Nobody is going to hold you accountable.

Nobody is going to be checking whether you did it. Nobody is reminding you about the deadline. Nobody is taking points off because you skipped a part or didn’t show your work. You either do it or you don’t do it. More importantly, if you don’t do it, nothing happens.

I’m pointing this out because it’s why, from the outside, entrepreneurship often looks magical. When we’re not involved in the daily grind of something, all we end up seeing are the results… the founder raising millions of dollars or the creator with hundreds of thousands of followers. What we don’t see are the thousands of boring, repetitive, frustrating little tasks that made it all happen. And we definitely don’t see all the failures and mistakes along the way.

All those things are the invisible part of success. Unfortunately, they’re also the parts of success you simply can’t skip. Sure, having a good strategy is helpful. So is having a great team. And sometimes, you just need a bit of luck. But eventually, startup success is simply the byproduct of a giant pile of homework nobody is making you do.

In other words, if you’ve been looking at someone else’s startup and wondering what magical insight they discovered to get where they are, I’ve got some bad news for you: There was nothing magical. They just did their homework.

And then they did some more homework.

And some more after that.

Because… yes, startups are a lot of (home)work.

-Aaron

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Worth Your Time

-Aaron Dinin

In a second office hours conversation today — with a different student from the one who wanted a magical social media acquisition process — a student asked me to name the best book I’ve ever read about sales. But, he was building a SaaS business, so, instead of sharing the best book I’ve ever read about sales, I shared the most helpful book I’ve ever read about customer acquisition.

By the way, did you notice how I went from “best book” to “most helpful book”? That shift was intentional. The book I’m recommending this week definitely isn’t the “best.” As-in it’s not particularly well-written or enjoyable to read. However, it was the first book I ever encountered that helped me understand what customer acquisition actually is.

Getting customers isn’t about networking or schmoozing or “chatting people up.” Customer acquisition — especially in the SaaS space — is about building a reliable, predictable machine. And the book that taught me that is called Predictable Revenue.

To set your expectations properly, this isn’t a book that’s going to teach you how to do your own customer acquisition. Instead, it’s the story of how Salesforce originally scaled it’s business… which is something that happened a long time ago. In other words, a lot of the strategies and techniques are out of date, so ignore all of that. Instead, focus on the machinery of it all. The original Salesforce growth team iterated and iterated until they found a process for getting customers that they could easily repeat over and over and over again. And that should be your goal, too.

-Aaron Dinin

Last week was Duke I&E Fest, our annual beginning-of-the-school-year event where roughly a thousand students show up to explore all the entrepreneurial classes, clubs, programs, and opportunities scattered across campus.

While I was wandering around the event talking with students, something kept happening that, when I stop to think about it, shows the dramatic arc of entrepreneurship over the last few decades. For whatever reason, this was the first I&E Fest where dozens of freshman came up and told me some version of, “I came to Duke because of entrepreneurship.”

To be clear, I don’t mean this as a way of bragging about Duke’s entrepreneurship program. I was surprised by it because, 25 years ago, people just didn’t go to college to be entrepreneurs.

Literally… I was a freshman arriving at Duke 25 years ago (I started in the Fall of 2001) and Duke didn’t even have an entrepreneurship program. Just as importantly, I’m not sure “studying entrepreneurship” would have made much sense as a concept. Entrepreneurship was something you did after quitting your real job, which means telling your parents you wanted to spend college learning how to start companies would have probably sounded less like a curriculum and more like an expensive strategy for becoming unemployed.

Obviously that’s not entirely what entrepreneurship meant. People have been starting businesses for a long time. I imagine they’ve basically been doing it since our first cave ancestors were trying to trade mammoth tusks for tiger skins. But the general concept of entrepreneurship has, until rather recently, occupied a very different cultural position.

Fast forward a quarter century from my freshman year, and I’m standing in the middle of campus meeting 18-year-olds who chose where to attend college partly because they wanted access to entrepreneurship education.

Isn’t that a crazy shift? I even had students tell me their parents encouraged them to attend I&E Fest. That’s right… being an entrepreneur has gone from the thing parents thought meant you were unemployed to the thing that parents think is going to help you get a good job.

And what’s most interesting here isn’t just that entrepreneurship is popular. To me I’m fascinated by the way entrepreneurship has become institutionalized. Every major university now has entrepreneurship faculty and courses. Some have minors, some have majors, and/or certificates, incubators, accelerators, and competitions. A decent number of schools even have entire buildings dedicated to the subject. Which is significant because universities tend to play an important role in legitimizing fields of knowledge. Once something gets departments and professors and curricula, it means society has basically agreed it’s a “real subject.”

By the way, I’m not saying this is necessarily good for entrepreneurship. In fact, I feel like there’s something inherently strange about universities formalizing a field built around questioning established systems and conventional wisdom. In a sense, entrepreneurship has always been more about figuring out how to operate outside the rigid structures of school than be a part of them.

Still, I&E Fest was an interesting window into how much the world of entrepreneurship has changed. A generation ago, entrepreneurship was something universities barely taught, and today it’s the reason lots of students are choosing their universities. And while I’m not entirely sure what that says about where entrepreneurship is headed next, it clearly says something important about where it sits in the world now versus where it was, and, as an entrepreneurship educator, it’s definitely a fascinating shift to watch.

-Aaron

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-Aaron Dinin

Today, rather than linking you to some big long essay or book, I wanted to share a simple story I like giving students in my entrepreneurship classes at the start of the semester.

It’s called “The Story of the Chinese Farmer” by Alan Watts:

Once upon a time there was a Chinese farmer whose horse ran away. That evening, all of his neighbors came around to commiserate. They said, “We are so sorry to hear your horse has run away. This is most unfortunate.” The farmer said, “Maybe.” The next day the horse came back bringing seven wild horses with it, and in the evening everybody came back and said, “Oh, isn’t that lucky. What a great turn of events. You now have eight horses!” The farmer again said, “Maybe.”

The following day his son tried to break one of the horses, and while riding it, he was thrown and broke his leg. The neighbors then said, “Oh dear, that’s too bad,” and the farmer responded, “Maybe.” The next day the conscription officers came around to conscript people into the army, and they rejected his son because he had a broken leg. Again all the neighbors came around and said, “Isn’t that great!” Again, he said, “Maybe.”

The whole process of nature is an integrated process of immense complexity, and it’s really impossible to tell whether anything that happens in it is good or bad — because you never know what will be the consequence of the misfortune; or, you never know what will be the consequences of good fortune.

-Shep Moyle

“What’s wrong with me?” That’s a question I got three weeks ago from Jason (not his real name).

He’s a CEO I coach who’s wildly successful with multiple exits, big houses, serious watches, cars that get covered for the winter, and so on. And he built every bit of it himself.

Forty minutes into our session, Jason stopped talking about his next deal, went quiet, and asked: “What’s wrong with me? Why am I not happy?”

I didn’t answer right away. I recognized the question. I’ve asked it myself, standing in the middle of everything I ever wanted.

It reminded me of Morgan Housel’s new book that I happen to be reading, The Art of Spending Money. His argument is that making money and spending money are two different skills, and almost nobody who masters the first ever learns the second. And one line from the book immediately resonated with me: “What actually matters is the gap between what you have and what you want.” This is a book about making the most of what you already have while figuring out for yourself what is worth wanting.

Jason’s pile grew for twenty-five years. His wants grew right along with it. But while his net worth kept moving up and to the right, the gap never moved an inch. Nothing is wrong with Jason. He spent his whole life building gaps. Nobody taught him to close one. I ran Shindigz for over thirty years. Money was a scoreboard, and a fair one — it funded payroll, it told me whether my decisions were right. Wanting more wasn’t a flaw. It was the job.

Then came the having. Homes. Boats. Planes. Stuff. Each one gave a smaller hit than the last, and the hit wore off faster. The first felt like a trophy. The fifth felt like a transaction. Then, eventually, like a job. Every house needs a roof. Every boat needs a haul-out. I thought I was buying assets but I was really buying maintenance plans.

Eventually I realized how the thing that built my company — never being satisfied, never accepting a plateau — is the same thing that ruined how I was spending the money. We spend decades treating “enough” like the enemy. Then the wire hits, and the wiring stays. We just keep score with square footage instead of revenue.

So what did I ultimately tell Jason?

Nothing is wrong with you. Your machinery works fine. But it’s aimed at the wrong target. Then I gave him homework. I told him to look at your last five big purchases and answer honestly: who were they for? His were all, one way or another, for an audience. The audience never shows up. Nobody admires your car the way you imagined. They’re too busy picturing themselves in it.

Then I told him what has actually held value for me after thirty years of running the experiment: the classroom. The coaching. My family. Not one of them was a purchase.

I explained all this to him, then I said, “You spent your career closing the gap between where the business was and where it could be. And sure, that made you rich. But it will never make you happy. That gap only closes from the want side.”

Jason’s working on it. So am I.

-Shep

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Worth Your Time

-Jamie Jones

A company raises more than a billion dollars over fourteen years, builds a product loved by millions, grows revenue to nearly half a billion... and then the ending takes a turn nobody would have written a decade ago.

Is it a story about raising too much money, too fast? A story about shifting investor appetites? Or is it about an emerging technology overtaking the current standard? Maybe some combination of all three.

This essay* by Scot Wingo and the NC Tweener Times walks through what just happened to Airtable. I won’t spoil the plot, but it’s worth a scroll.

Read it, then tell me what you think and how you interpret what it means for how entrepreneurs should be thinking about fundraising and navigating the current software landscape.

*it’s free but you may need to provide your email to access it

-Aaron Dinin

Last week the Duke I&E faculty helped kick off the school year for the new daytime MBA class at Fuqua with a three-hour workshop. The workshop started by helping students identify meaningful problems, and, by the end, dozens of teams had working prototypes built with AI coding tools that they pitched to the entire group. In other words, it was a very active and “hands-on” lesson, which is typical for how most of us like to teach.

However, before we started, I was chatting with one of the new students and asked how the program was treating her so far.

“Great,” she said. “It’s been fun and easy because the real classes haven’t started yet.”

Obviously I wasn’t going to let that go. “What do you mean, the ‘real classes?’” I asked.

She laughed and tried to walk it back, but clearly she’d meant the kind of stuff most people imagine when picturing business school… lectures, spreadsheets, cases, exams. I shrugged and said, “Maybe this will be an opportunity to widen your definition of what learning looks like.”

For the next three hours, the room was a loud, chaotic mess as people were discovering — some for the first time — just how powerful AI coding tools are (as well as their many shortcomings). It was, in other words, a good entrepreneurship class where students got to experience a bit of the the startup spirit.

Afterwards, while Amy (my co-facilitator) and I were debriefing the session, the same student I’d been chatting with before class, found me again. “I owe you an apology,” she said. “You were right — I learned a ton. I guess I do need to rethink what a real class looks like.”

I loved hearing her say that. Partly, of course, because being right is always fun. But mostly, one of the underrated perks of my job is surprising students in a way that excites their academic curiosity. In this case, the student was having her expectations around learning reshaped in realtime, which is amazing to see.

We’re trained to think of learning as a transfer. The person at the front of the room knows something, explains it, and everyone else in the room writes it down, memorizes it, and regurgitates it.

To be fair, for lots of material, that approach to learning can work. But it’s not a great way to learn entrepreneurship. I can spend weeks explaining customer discovery, and describing product-market fit, and teaching people how to test assumptions. None of it is as effective as spending 45 minutes actually trying any of it.

To be clear, I’m not saying every class should turn into an elaborate build-a-thing, or that lectures and spreadsheets aren’t “real learning.” I’m just pointing out that learning comes in more shapes than we usually give it credit for — particularly the kind of learning that doesn’t look and feel like “school.”

-Aaron

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-Aaron Dinin

I’m cheating a little this week by recommending two pieces instead of one. They are Eugene Wei’s “Status as a Service” and “Seeing Like an Algorithm.”

I was just recommending them to a group of CMOs I’m teaching this week, and they seemed worth sharing with all of you, too.

Yes, both pieces are long and dense. Also, parts of them are slightly dated because social media platforms evolve so quickly. However, if you want to understand why social platforms behave the way they do (and specifically how algorithms shape user experiences), these are still two of the best deep dives I know.

-Aaron Dinin

It’s orientation week at Duke, which means I’ve spent the past few days bouncing between lunches, receptions, panels, and other events welcoming freshmen to campus. And across all those conversations, I keep getting some version of the same question:

“How did you get to the career you have now?”

To be fair, students have been asking me this question for years. But until recently, I mostly assumed it was polite small talk… basically the career equivalent of discussing the weather with a stranger in an elevator because neither of you knows what else to say.

But, this year, I’m starting to think I’ve been wrong because I’ve noticed the question isn’t happening during awkward silences. Instead, I’ll be having a perfectly delightful conversation about classes or Duke basketball or where someone is from, and suddenly the student will redirect everything toward my career.

“So… how did you wind up doing what you do?”

To be clear, I don’t mean they’re being rude. They’re not cutting me off mid-sentence or anything like that. But they’re definitely being urgent, and they seem to think I have some secret treasure map to career success that I’m playing coy with by refusing to share it immediately.

Not that I can blame them. These students are showing up at college at a time when the entire world seems to be warning everyone that AI is eliminating all the entry-level jobs, reshaping every industry, and, in general, ruining whatever career aspirations they might have been carrying since second grade. Surely that feels terrifying.

Unfortunately, the only answer I have for them is wildly unsatisfying. I basically just tell a rambling story about my own career journey, which is really just a very long way of saying the only honest answer…

Time.

Sure, I have a career now that I’m proud of and enjoy. But it’s not the career I had when I graduated. Nor does it look anything like the career I imagined.

Instead, I’m officially old enough that I graduated from Duke before the freshman I’m meeting this week were born, which means I’ve been working on my career longer than they’ve been alive. And, on Day 1 of that career — the day after I graduated from Duke — it didn’t look like much of a career because I graduated without a job.

I’m not recommending that strategy. But I like to think it does a good job of making my point.

Simply put, careers don’t get “figured out.” They accumulate and evolve. You take a job, learn some stuff, meet some people, discover what you like and don’t like, and slowly but surely you move to another opportunity, then another, and another until gradually, and usually without realizing it, you build something that appears coherent and linear from the outside.

For what it’s worth, the same thing happens with startups, too. New entrepreneurs tend to imagine a startup journey as a linear path with a clear instruction manual. But that’s not how it works. Even the famously “fast” entrepreneurial successes took years. Heck, being fast is a big part of what makes them famous… the speed is the notable aberration.

That’s also true for everything important in life. Careers work that way. So do companies and relationships and families. All the most important things in life grow strangely and almost always a lot more slowly than you think or hope. But, eventually, and if you’re lucky, they grow into something you’ve enjoyed.

More importantly, there’s no instruction manual on how to get there. Or, if there is, I’ve certainly never seen it. All you have is time and your willingness to keep pushing forward.

While I realize that’s not a particularly helpful answer for an 18-year-old staring down an uncertain future, it’s the most honest one I can give.

-Aaron

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-Aaron Dinin

For the past however-many-years, whenever I go to the gym I listen to a podcast. However, I’ve recently pivoted toward audiobooks. Maybe it’s because I got tired of listening to people in their 500th episode struggle to fill the space. Or maybe it’s because I discovered I could download free audiobooks from my local library. Whatever the case, it’s been a fun change.

Or rather, it was fun until I made the mistake of listening to a book called When Breath Becomes Air, which also happens to be the book I’m recommending this week.

I can almost hear you through your screen: “But Aaron… why are you recommending this book to us if it was a mistake for you?”

The mistake wasn’t choosing the book. The mistake was where I chose to listen to it.

When Breath Becomes Air is a memoir written by a young and highly promising neurosurgeon who, around 35 and right as he was about to approach the pinnacle of his career — the one he’d spent so many years working toward — suddenly developed stage four lung cancer.

I don’t think I’m spoiling anything by telling you it doesn’t end well. Now, imagine what I looked like trying to lift 80 lb dumbels over my head while weeping.

Despite that challenge, it’s an incredibly moving story, absolutely worth a read (or listen), and I thought it was a particularly relevant text to share alongside my above story about new Duke students feeling anxious over their careers.

Yes, careers matter. But some things matter more. And When Breath Becomes Air is a good reminder of that very important lesson… even if it’s a lesson you probably shouldn’t try to learn while doing curls.

-Aaron Dinin

Classes at Duke start soon. And before they do, campus is going to fill with freshmen showing up for “orientation week".”

I&E loves orientation week. Yes, part of that is because we enjoy welcoming all the new students to campus. But there’s also a more entrepreneurial reason we put lots of energy into being visible during those first few days.

Freshman orientation represents what I like to call a “golden moment.” As the name implies, these are the moments where entrepreneurs are best able to generate the gold, and they occur whenever someone is actively looking to change an existing behavior. This bias toward change helps entrepreneurs overcome one the hardest parts of acquiring customers, which is convincing them to stop doing whatever they’re already doing.

For example, you can build the greatest car in the world, but if I bought a new car six months ago, good luck selling me another one. Your product quality isn’t the problem. Your timing is.

Or consider a significantly cheaper product than a car. Imagine opening the greatest pizza restaurant anyone has ever experienced. If you open it in a town where everyone has been happily ordering Friday-night pizza from the same beloved neighborhood place for 30 years, you’re going to struggle getting customers. And it’s because those customers already have a solution they like. Before you can sell them your pizza, you first have to convince them to change a habit. And convincing people to change their habits is usually expensive.

But that’s not the case during golden moments. Golden moments remove an enormous part of the friction in customer acquisition because the customer has already decided something needs to change.

By the way, this dynamic is a huge part of what made Google such a valuable advertising platform back in the heyday of Internet search. Someone searching “best pizza in Durham” is basically announcing, “Hello! I’m currently trying to figure out where to get pizza.”

That person is in a golden moment, and smart pizza restaurants will pay good money for access.

Freshmen arriving at Duke are in the same part of their “customer journey” as it relates to the kinds of things they’ll be doing once on campus. They’re coming from all over the world. They don’t know where they’ll eat lunch, which clubs they’ll join, where they’ll exercise, what classes they’ll take, or how they’ll spend most of their time for the next four years. Their old routines have disappeared, and they’re actively constructing new ones.

That’s exactly when Duke I&E wants to meet them.

In contrast, if we wait until junior year to tell a student about our entrepreneurship classes and programs, that student might already have two majors, extracurricular commitments, research projects, leadership roles, and an entire social ecosystem consuming their schedule. At that point, we’re asking them to replace something in order to take our classes, which is a difficult sale.

But during orientation… that’s when we’re helping them fill empty space. It’s why we work hard to show up early and be visible. We want entrepreneurship to be one of the options they consider while they’re in the process of making decisions about how they’ll be spending time on campus.

And I’m sharing this little piece of operational insight with all of you because you should be thinking the same way for your business. Whatever you’re selling, stop thinking only about who your customers are. Start asking when they’re most likely to become customers. What happens in someone’s life immediately before they need what you sell? What event disrupts the existing behavior? What makes someone suddenly reconsider the solution they’ve been perfectly happy using for years?

Find those moments because they’re golden. They’re the moments that will dramatically decrease the cost and challenge of acquiring customers.

-Aaron

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-Amy Wyron Robinson

I really liked Ben Lang’s system for getting a job at a startup he shared this week, especially his advice to start adding value before you’re actually employed.

It brought me back to my own startup experience. Not a single startup role I’ve ever had was posted on a job board. The opportunities came from thinking about what the founders were probably dealing with, developing a point of view on how I could help, and then getting in the door to show them (showing up with a “first 90 days” deck before anyone ever asked).

That feels like good career advice, but also a pretty fundamental and transferable entrepreneurial lesson: don’t wait for someone to give you a job description. That may never happen. Find a problem worth solving and show that you can solve it.

-Amy Wyron Robinson

I had the same conversation twice in the last week with two different founders. Both are building geographically based service businesses. Both had traction in one market. Both wanted to know the same thing:

“How do we decide where to expand next?”

It’s one of those deceptively simple startup questions. If you could go anywhere, where do you go first?

I told them a story from my time at Moovit. We were building our global expansion strategy and borrowed a page from Waze’s playbook by asking ourselves one question: What would Uri do?

Uri Levine, Waze’s co-founder, has a superhuman talent for making complicated things feel extraordinarily simple and obvious. We knew that Waze had made a list of cities around the world and ranked them based on a handful of criteria to determine where to launch next. So we took the same approach.

From our seed round to Series C and beyond, there was a mega spreadsheet living on my Google Drive with some atrocious name like Global Expansion Plan Final FINAL DO NOT DELETE (3). It contained every city we were considering and, in many ways, became the roadmap for the company’s growth.

Uri’s framework was (un) surprisingly simple: Pick five criteria that actually matter. Three is too few. Ten is too many. Five-ish is just right.

For us, at the time, those criteria included things like population size, smartphone penetration, and public transit usage. For a different startup, the criteria will be different.

Once you have your criteria, score each city from 0 to 5 on each criteria.

And lastly (here comes the part that has stuck with me ever since): Multiply the scores. Don’t add them.

Why multiply?

Because if one of your essential factors gets a zero, the entire opportunity becomes a zero. You cannot addition your way out of that big round zero. One missing ingredient matters way more than four other strong ones.

Uri told us this was one of the biggest mistakes people make. They add everything together and end up convincing themselves that strengths compensate for missing fundamentals.

I’ve used this framework for far more than startup expansion.

When my husband and I were deciding where to move our family post-Covid, we built a similar spreadsheet. We listed cities. We chose the handful of things that mattered most to us: professional opportunities, quality of life, weather, proximity to family, and a few others. We scored each city on each criteria, multiplied the results, sorted by total score... and that’s the short version of how we ended up in Durham.

The point of the exercise was never to discover the “right” answer (there usually isn’t one!).

We just needed to create enough clarity to act.

In the game of entrepreneurship, and the game of life, we almost never have the luxury of complete information before we have to make big decisions. You don’t know which market will take off until you launch something. You don’t know whether you’ll find community in a new city until you live there.

Waiting for certainty feels more “responsible”, but more often it’s just another form of procrastination.

What would Uri do? He would likely tell you to get crystal clear on what matters, make the tradeoffs explicit, build a system, and then go take bold action.

But there’s one final step that’s just as important: when the spreadsheet gives you an answer, you must pay attention to how you feel.

Did you hope a different city would come out on top? Were you secretly disappointed? Relieved? That’s information too.

Spreadsheets can organize facts, but your gut reaction is based on pattern recognition grounded in lived experience (some might call this wisdom). Both are valuable.

After we finished our spreadsheet analysis, Uri sent us a note I’ll never forget that said something like:

“Hope you enjoyed the exercise. Now go launch in Brazil, Italy, Turkey, Mexico, and Chile.”

Sometimes years of pattern recognition earned the hard way are worth more than any spreadsheet. The trick is knowing when you need the spreadsheet to sharpen your thinking, and when you can just trust the part of yourself that already knows.

-Amy

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-Jamie Jones

A few months ago I was complaining to a friend about not having enough hours in the day to finish everything I needed to do. But instead of offering some clever productivity hack or recommending a fancy time-management app, he suggested I read Arnold Bennett’s How to Live on 24 Hours a Day.

I thanked him, bought the (short) book... and then, somewhat ironically, didn’t get around to reading it for several months.

Now that I finally have, I understand why he recommended it.

The book was published in 1908, but it feels surprisingly modern. Bennett’s argument isn’t that we need to cram more work into every waking moment. Instead, he challenges the assumption that our days simply “happen” to us. Time, he argues, is our most finite resource, and we tend to spend it far more passively than we’d ever tolerate spending our money.

If, like me, you’ve been feeling like your calendar has been running your life lately, I think you’ll find Bennett’s century-old advice surprisingly relevant. After all, the tools may have changed dramatically since 1908. But the number of hours in a day haven’t. We’ve still only got 24. Are you making the most of them?

-Shep Moyle

Editor’s Note: Last week, Jamie wrote about quitting your job and going “all in” on your startup. In case you missed it, we’re sharing a link here since, this week, Shep takes a look at the other side of quitting… knowing when to quit your startup and move onto something else.

I had a recently graduated MBA student reach out to me with a tricky question about his startup. And this wasn’t a student with a half-formed idea or a weekend project. This was a smart, talented, experienced professional who’d spent nearly two years building a real company that had four founders working remotely around the globe. As a result, alongside the standard firehose of investor conversations, product decisions, and team tensions, they constantly found themselves in late-night Zoom meetings and early-morning customer calls.

By this point, they’ve done many of the things we tell entrepreneurs to do. They have a product, they’ve sold it to customers, and they’ve listened to the market well enough that they’ve been able to successfully learn, pitched, refine, and keep going.

And now, after investing lots of time, money, emotion, and personal identity into their company, the question they wanted help with was painfully simple.

“How do we know when to quit?”

I paused on the founder’s phrasing. It wasn’t, “How do we know whether the business still has a path?” or “How do we evaluate the evidence?” or “How do we decide what’s next?”

It was: “How do we know when to quit?”

The emotion is what makes these decisions so hard for founders. They’re not just analytical. They’re personal. Deciding when to quit is wrapped in ego, identity, loyalty, sunk cost, and fear. Quitting sounds like failure. Quitting sounds like weakness. Quitting sounds like letting down your co-founders, your investors, your customers, your family, and maybe most painfully, the younger version of yourself who believed this thing was going to work.

I began my response the way I often do when I get asked this particular question. I told him, “The fact that you’re asking the question is clue number one.”

To be clear, that doesn’t mean the answer is automatically to stop. But it does mean something inside you is trying to get your attention. Entrepreneurs are famously good at ignoring reality when persistence is required. I’d even go so far as to say it’s part of their talent. But it can also become a trap. After all, there’s a difference between resilience and denial… grit and ego… believing in a vision and refusing to read the scoreboard.

So we went to the facts.

If I walked in as a board member or investor, what would the numbers tell me? What evidence do we have that this should continue? What do we have to believe to be true for this to become the company we imagined? What is the actual probability of reaching our short-term and long-term goals? Not the hoped-for probability or the founder-pitch probability. The honest one.

In this case, the world had changed. AI tools were emerging that fundamentally altered the competitive landscape, the customer need, and the urgency of the problem. At the same time, some important things hadn’t changed. The sales cycle was still long. Customer decision-making was still slow.

Then I asked a more personal question: “How does this venture serve your goals now?”

That’s a question we don’t ask enough. This student (and his cofounders) had already gained enormous value from the experience. He’d already learned strategy, fundraising, selling, pitching, customer discovery, team leadership, product development, and the reality of building a scalable enterprise. In other words, he’d certainly become a different kind of professional because of the attempt.

So the question became: What do you still have left to learn? Are you energized by the next mountain? Do you wake up excited for the next two years of this specific fight? Or are you staying because stopping feels embarrassing? Don’t confuse unpleasant decisions with hard decisions. Hard decisions require the analysis and the insights required for understanding. Unpleasant decisions are ones where we know the answer — we just don’t want to face the emotional consequences.

All businesses have a lifecycle. Some are short. Some are long. Some need a pivot. Some need more capital. Some need a different team. And some need an honest ending.

I know this personally. I made the painful decision to close my 97-year-old family business. I wasn’t because there wasn’t market or we were losing money or because we couldn’t have sold it. I closed it because I knew, if I was honest with myself, I didn’t have the fire in the belly to commit the next ten years of my life to making it work. I had already invested 32 years as an owner, CEO and Chairman. I had all the financial rewards and ego i could have ever imagined.

Was it difficult to make that decision? Absolutely. Was it the ending I imagined? No. But it was the right decision for me and for my family.

That’s the lesson I wanted this student to hear. You’re not quitting; you’re choosing. You’re not failing; you’ve gotten clarity. You’re not letting people down; you’re deciding what chapter of your book you want to write next.

Businesses come and go. Markets make sure of that. Products come and go, too. And people move on. And strangely, the world keeps spinning. What remains are the relationships, the scars, the lessons, the courage, and the person you became because you tried.

Because of that, entrepreneurship isn’t just about knowing when to persist. It’s about knowing the difference between persistence and denial. It’s about being brave enough to face the facts, and even braver to face yourself.

Sometimes the most entrepreneurial act is not starting the company. Sometimes it’s knowing when to let it go, take the learning, and go find the next mountain to climb.

-Shep

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-Jamie Jones

This week the White House released “Science: A New Golden Age,” a report that outlines a perspective (and series of recommendations) on the U.S.’s science investment priorities.

I’m not sharing the report because I’m expressing a policy opinion; I’m sharing it because this document is a map of where the money, talent, and infrastructure behind American innovation may be headed next. As an entrepreneur and innovator, you likely live downstream of these decisions.

The best founders I know are always looking for where the puck (and money) is moving. This report is a roadmap of exactly that.

-Jamie Jones

A recent alum asked me to hop on a call last week to walk me through a startup he’s building. He’s four or five months in — far enough to have had a handful of customer conversations (not nearly enough, if you ask me) — and he’s doing all of it around a full-time job that pays the bills. He walked me through what he’d built, and near the end came the question I get more than almost any other:

Should I quit my job and go all in?

I’ve learned to slow down when I hear that one, because it’s rarely the question people think they’re asking. On the surface, it sounds like strategy — runway, timing, risk. But most of the time, someone asking whether to go all in isn’t asking me to help them think. They’re asking for permission. To be told they’re brave.

It reminds me of students I wrote about recently who, underneath all their sharp questions for a visiting CEO, were really just asking her to promise everything would be okay. It’s human. But it’s also a tell — because “go all in” almost always carries a charge of impatience, a hunger not just for the business to work but for the identity of being a full-time, no-safety-net founder. And that hunger is a bad advisor.

Here’s what surprises people: the bet-everything founder is mostly a myth we tell after the fact. When Joseph Raffiee and Jie Feng tracked more than 5,000 people over fifteen years, the ones who kept their day jobs and built on the side were about a third less likely to fail than those who leapt. Adam Grant made the point famous in Originals; a separate paper put it bluntly in its title: “Don’t Quit Your Day Job. (Garcia-Perez et al.)”

The research helps unpack why you see a difference, which is that “going all in” isn’t a strategy but a resource decision. You pour your scarcest input, time, into the venture. And pouring more time into something that isn’t working yet doesn’t guarantee it’s going to work (sooner or at all), but you still have rent/mortgage due.

The day job, meanwhile, is protecting your judgment. A founder whose survival depends on the thing working this month can’t say no to a bad customer or wait for a real answer instead of a convenient one. Staying employed a little longer allows you to keep your head clear enough to read the evidence more objectively.

So the question I sent him home with wasn’t “are you ready?” It was: how will you know when there’s enough there-there? You should go full-time not when you are overwhelmed by the excitement and passion, but when hedging your time has become the bottleneck — when the demand is real and the only thing choking it is that you’re doing this at 6am before work.

Until then, continuing your full-time role while building your startup isn’t playing it safe because making real progress in the margins — under constraints, without permission — is the best test of whether there’s something there.

I didn’t tell him he was brave. I told him to go have twenty more customer conversations and try to secure 3-4 pre-sales before we talk about anyone quitting anything. Deep down, I think that’s the answer he was hoping for.

-Jamie

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Worth Your Time

-Aaron Dinin

I feel like a bit of a shill for putting this here, but I promise nobody is paying me. I just wanted to use the space this week to plug Jia Jiang’s new book, Easy Discipline. Jia, as a reminder, is a Duke Fuqua alum and the author of Rejection Proof, which I mentioned here a few weeks ago.

Rejection Proof found its way back on my radar after getting an advance copy of Easy Discipline. Now that the new book is officially out, I thought I could give that one a quick recommendation, too.

Specifically, I love the premise because it’s a strategy I’ve tried to live by for years. Jia argues that the most successful people aren’t necessarily the ones with the most willpower. They’re the ones who’ve designed their work so they actually enjoy doing it. Instead of relying on grit alone, they build systems and habits that make it easier to keep showing up.

As you’d expect, the book goes into much more detail — including plenty of practical advice on how to do that yourself. So if you’re someone who’s ever wondered why some people seem effortlessly disciplined while everyone else is white-knuckling their way through life, I think you’ll find it worth the read.

-Aaron Dinin

Every month, the Duke Innovation & Entrepreneurship team does some sort of team building activity. And this month, we did improv.

Sure, you might read “improv” and picture aspiring comedians standing on a stage pretending to be pirates while arguing with squirrels. And that’s definitely a manifestation of improv, but, at its core, improv is about entertaining and communicating. And it’s about learning to listen, react, collaborate, and build on the ideas of other people.

In other words, it’s a surprisingly useful skill for entrepreneurs.

For example, as we practiced improv together, one exercise, in particular, struck me as particularly valuable for entrepreneurs. So valuable, in fact, that you might consider trying it with a friend.

The person leading our improv session instructed everyone to pair up and have a simple conversation. The catch was that all our responses to each other had to begin with the classic improv phrase: “Yes, and...”

If you’ve ever done any improve before, you surely know what happened. Every conversation naturally expanded. Even when someone suggested something a little odd, nobody judged it. “Yes, and…” encouraged us to explore it and find unexpected ways to build on it.

Then the facilitator changed the rules. This time, every response had to begin with, “Yes, but...”, and the entire energy of the room changed almost instantly as the conversations started feeling like they were trying to move through tar. We made progress, but it was slow and argumentative.

After a few minutes of, “Yes, but…”, the facilitator changed the instructions again. We had to respond to each other by starting every phrase with, “No, because...”

That phrase absolutely killed the conversations. All ideas got rejected before they had a chance to become anything.

Finally, after a few minutes of “No, because…” we returned to “Yes, and...”, and the energy immediately came back into the room.

To be clear, I’m not telling everyone they should run around saying “Yes, and…” to everything. Sure, that works for improv. But entrepreneurs need to be more practical.

Instead, what caught my attention was how little it took to completely change the trajectory of an interaction. We weren’t changing the people or the ideas. We were just changing a couple words at the beginning of every sentence. But those two words completely changed what became possible.

It’s an interesting lesson for entrepreneurs because building companies is, fundamentally, a collaborative activity. You’re constantly responding to teammates, customers, investors, partners, and employees. The words you choose either invite people to keep building with you or (unintentionally) encourage them to stop.

Again, please don’t run around saying “yes” to every idea. Some ideas really are bad ideas. But there’s a meaningful difference between evaluating an idea and prematurely ending the conversation.

The best entrepreneurs I’ve met seem to understand that distinction. They’re remarkably good at creating conversations where ideas have room to breathe before they’re judged. And sometimes, enabling those conversations starts with something as simple as choosing “Yes, and...” instead of “Yes, but.”

-Aaron

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Worth Your Time

-Amy Wyron Robinson

This week I’ve been thinking about a piece from Wes Kao on what it actually means to be inspiring.

One idea in particular has stayed with me: we tend to describe arguments we agree with as “logical” and arguments we disagree with as “emotional.” In reality, emotion isn’t the opposite of logic. A strong argument with flat delivery is still strong, and a weak argument delivered passionately isn’t automatically going to win over the listener.

For entrepreneurs, this distinction matters. Founders often obsess over presentation skills, storytelling techniques, and stage presence. And they should! Those things matter. You should absolutely work on your delivery. But great delivery can’t rescue a flawed argument.

The best pitches succeed because the underlying logic is sound. The problem is real. The customer insight is compelling. The proposed solution makes sense. The business has a credible path forward. When those pieces fit together, passion amplifies the message. When they don’t, charisma can only carry you so far.

As you prepare your next pitch, please spend at least as much time strengthening the argument as you do polishing the presentation. Investors, customers, and partners may appreciate your enthusiasm, but they’ll ultimately decide based on whether your story holds together.

-Amy Wyron Robinson

I recently worked with a cohort of young entrepreneurs preparing to pitch their ideas. As always, I loved the coaching part.

I am in my happy place when I’m helping founders sharpen their story, clarify their thinking, and find the thread that makes an audience lean in. What I don’t love is judging.

In fact, being a judge is one of my least favorite jobs to be done.

I was reminded how little I enjoy judging when I was recently asked to judge a pitch competition sponsored by Inc. Magazine for high school entrepreneurs. The founders were eager. Their ideas were creative. But what jumped out at me most wasn’t the pitches themselves.

It was the other judges.

As we discussed the finalists, it became clear that we weren’t all evaluating the same thing.

Some judges rewarded great storytelling. Others cared more about opportunity size. Some cared most about execution and traction. Others were drawn to founders who demonstrated deep expertise and clearly knew their subject matter inside and out. And others cared more if the imaginary revenue projections were math-ing…

The same pitch could land completely differently depending on who happened to be listening and what their ear was listening for.

Which leads me to something every founder (and professor) eventually learns:

There is no universal definition of “best.”

We like to believe that competitions, investors, customers, and markets are objective. That if we just work hard enough, polish enough, and put in the reps, there will be a clear winner.

But entrepreneurship doesn’t work that way.

The “best” pitch isn’t a formula (although there are some very important boxes to check). It’s not a spell you’re casting on others. It’s a conversation between a founder and an audience, and every audience brings its own biases, experiences, agendas, and hard-earned scars.

An investor who spent years losing money on marketplace businesses hears a marketplace pitch differently than one who made a fortune investing in them.

A customer who has lived with a super specific problem for years sees huge potential where others see a narrow niche.

A judge who values potential will listen for different signals than a judge who values traction.

The goal, then, is not to create a pitch that every person will love.

That’s impossible.

The goal is to create a pitch so compelling that the right people can’t ignore you.

The founders who ultimately stood out in the competition didn’t necessarily have the most beautiful slides. They weren’t always the most charismatic, either.

They had ideas grounded in insight and evidence. They were clear and simple. They understood the problem deeply. They had practiced. They could articulate why the world should change and why they were the people to make that change happen.

Most importantly, their ideas felt inevitable.

They answered the questions the audience is asking, whether they say them out loud or not:

Why this?

Why now?

Why you?

As founders (and humans) we spend far too much time worrying about whether we’re the best at something.

There is no objective “best” pitch, founder, or startup.

There are only people trying to convince other people that a different future is possible, the time for that change is now, and you are the one person on earth to bring this vision to life.

-Amy

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Worth Your Time

-Shep Moyle

Sam Altman may have just given us a preview of the next era of entrepreneurship. In this article from Inc. Magazine, OpenAI is offering $2 million in OpenAI API tokens to startups in Y Combinator’s Spring 2026 batch in exchange for an undetermined amount of future equity. Not cash for equity. Not office space for equity. Not accelerator programming for equity. Compute for equity. That may sound like a clever startup financing idea. I think it is much bigger than that.

For decades, the answer to the startup resource question was obvious. Founders needed capital. They needed money to hire engineers, build software, buy infrastructure, acquire customers, and survive long enough to find product-market fit. But AI changes the math.

If a founder can use AI to write code, generate content, build prototypes, analyze markets, test ads, automate customer support, build internal workflows, and personalize products, then the scarce resource may no longer be only money. The scarce resource may be intelligence at scale. And intelligence at scale requires compute. So is compute becoming the new cash? I think the answer is yes, at least partially.

Cash still matters. Payroll matters. Sales matter. Customer acquisition matters. Legal fees, travel, distribution, data, and real-world execution still matter. But for AI-native startups, compute may become what manufacturing capacity was to industrial companies, what shelf space was to consumer brands, what server capacity was to internet companies, and what oil was to the twentieth-century economy. It is not just an expense. It is an input into possibility.

Would I take the deal? Maybe. But not blindly. If I were a YC founder, I would want to know what I was really giving up. Two percent of a company sounds small when the company is just an idea, a pitch deck, and a few people sitting around a table. It sounds very different if that company becomes worth a billion dollars. I would also ask whether the compute accelerates learning or simply subsidizes waste. Free tokens can make founders sloppy. The goal is not to use more AI. The goal is to learn faster, build faster, sell faster, and get closer to the truth faster.

I would ask whether I was becoming too dependent on one platform. If my product, workflow, cost structure, and roadmap are all tied to OpenAI, am I building a company or am I building a feature in someone else’s ecosystem?And I would ask what OpenAI sees that I may not. If OpenAI wants equity in hundreds of startups in exchange for compute, they are not just being generous. They are buying insight, option value, ecosystem influence, and a front-row seat to the next generation of AI-native companies.

This should also get the attention of venture capital firms. Not because OpenAI is replacing venture capital tomorrow. But because the value stack around startups is changing. Traditional venture capital offers cash, credibility, pattern recognition, networks, hiring help, and follow-on financing. That still matters. But what happens when a platform company can offer something more immediately useful? What happens when OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Nvidia, or Meta can say to a founder: we will give you the fuel to build? That is a different kind of capital.

In the AI era, money is necessary but less differentiated. What is scarce is unfair advantage. The real question for investors may become: what do you bring that helps this company learn, build, sell, or scale faster than anyone else? If the answer is only money, that may not be enough. Will YC companies take the deal? Many will. Of course they will.

Early-stage founders are resource constrained. Equity feels abstract. Compute feels real. Two million dollars of AI capacity could let a young company build more, test more, serve more customers, and try things that otherwise might be impossible.But the best founders will not treat this as free money. They will treat it as high-octane fuel. And high-octane fuel is only valuable if you know where you are driving. The dangerous founder response is, “Great, now we can use AI everywhere.” The disciplined founder response is, “Where can this compute create proprietary learning that compounds?”

The pricing question is also fascinating. Cash is easy to price. A dollar is a dollar. Compute is different. Its value depends on who is using it, for what purpose, at what stage, with what model, and with what outcome. For one startup, $2 million of tokens may be an expensive science experiment. For another, it may be the difference between a demo and a real product. For another, it may unlock an entirely new business model that could not have existed five years ago. So the real value of compute is not just its sticker price. It is its option value.

Compute allows founders to run more experiments, serve more users, train or fine-tune more systems, personalize more deeply, automate more workflows, and compress time. And in entrepreneurship, compressed time is often the most valuable thing there is. If you can learn in two weeks what used to take six months, you have not just saved money. You have changed the slope of the company.The bigger implication is that compute may only be the beginning. If compute can be traded for equity, what else can?

Data can be traded for equity. A hospital system, retailer, university, logistics company, or financial institution with proprietary data may become a strategic investor in startups that can turn that data into products, insights, and outcomes. Distribution can be traded for equity. The hardest thing in many startups is not building the product. It is reaching the customer. A company with trusted customer access may have something more valuable than a check. Workflow access can be traded for equity. Imagine a startup embedded inside a law firm, hospital, manufacturer, university, or sales organization, building AI tools around real pain points in real time. The company providing the workflow becomes an investor through access. Expertise can be traded for equity. Not advisory shares in the old ceremonial sense. Real expertise. A world-class doctor, engineer, operator, teacher, CFO, or sales leader can help train, validate, and shape a product in ways money cannot.

Brand trust can be traded for equity. In a world full of AI-generated noise, trust becomes more valuable. A respected institution or community can reduce customer hesitation and create legitimacy. Talent networks can be traded for equity. Access to elite builders, researchers, domain experts, and operators may become a capital source. Regulatory navigation can be traded for equity. In health care, finance, education, energy, and defense, knowing how to move through complexity is not a side service. It is a strategic asset. Customer commitments can be traded for equity. Early customers may increasingly say, “We will help you build this, test it, and buy it, but we want ownership.” Community can be traded for equity. A deeply engaged audience may be more valuable than an ad budget. Attention is everywhere. Trust is scarce.

That is what makes this story so important. The old founder question was, “How much money do I need to raise?” The new founder question may be, “What resource changes the trajectory of my company?” For some founders, that resource is cash. For others, it is compute. For others, it is data, distribution, trust, talent, credibility, customer access, regulatory insight, or speed. Entrepreneurship has always been about the pursuit of opportunity without regard to the resources currently controlled. But AI changes the resource map.

The founder of the future may not ask only, “Who will fund me?” The founder of the future may ask, “Who can give me the unfair advantage I cannot buy later?” I would not dismiss this OpenAI offer as a publicity move. I would also not treat it as charity. This is a platform company making a strategic bet that the next generation of startups will be built on AI infrastructure, and that owning a small piece of many of them may be very valuable. For founders, this is exciting and dangerous. For VCs, it is a warning shot. For universities, it is a wake-up call. For students, it is an invitation.

The tools are no longer theoretical. The cost of building has collapsed. The speed of experimentation has exploded. The definition of capital is changing. The distance between idea and product is shrinking every day. So the question is not just whether you would trade equity for compute.

The better question is this: If someone gave you $2 million of intelligence tomorrow, would you know what to do with it?

-Aaron Dinin

This week, a couple of us from Duke Innovation & Entrepreneurship sat down with Duke’s Vice Provost for the Arts to talk about ways our programs might collaborate.

To be clear, that part wasn’t new. We’ve been working with Duke’s arts community for years, and some of my favorite projects have come from those partnerships.

What was new was the context hanging over the conversation. Specifically… AI.

Like with most of you, I’m sure, the past few years have included lots of conversations with entrepreneurs, engineers, venture capitalists, and technologists about what AI might mean for the future of work. And one of the observations that seems to come up over and over again is that the careers we’ve traditionally considered “safe” — computer science, software engineering, technical knowledge work — suddenly don’t seem quite as safe as they once did.

At the same time, I’ve had plenty of conversations and read lots of thought pieces arguing the things we associate with artists (e.g. creativity, taste, originality, emotional resonance, etc.) are becoming more valuable because they’re harder to replicate.

I’m sure you’ve heard some version of that argument before. I realize none of this is groundbreaking.

Instead, what struck me was a realization that I’ve almost exclusively been discussing this stuff with other “tech people” and “business people.” I honestly couldn’t remember the last time I’d sat down with artists and asked them what they thought.

Do they agree with this narrative? Are they excited by it? Skeptical? Does it even match what they’re experiencing? Or is this just another story the technology world is telling itself about the future?

I don’t have answers. And my one meeting with the Duke Arts Provost isn’t exactly statistically significant. But it did remind me of something I think entrepreneurs forget surprisingly often. We spend lots of time talking about people instead of talking to them.

But remember, the best entrepreneurs don’t just form opinions inside their own bubbles. They deliberately seek out the people whose perspectives are missing from the conversation. And sometimes those perspectives confirm what you already believed. Sometimes they completely reshape how you think about a problem. Either way, having the conversation is a necessary step, and I feel like I need to start having this particular conversation about the impacts of AI on the arts with more people who are deeply invested in the arts.

In fact, I’d be curious to hear from some of you. If you work in the arts — or work closely with artists — how are these AI conversations landing where you are? Are you optimistic? Concerned? Rolling your eyes at the whole thing? Hit reply and let us know, or, better yet, drop a comment.

-Aaron

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Worth Your Time

-Jamie Jones

Do customers keep telling you your product is “really interesting,” but then you can’t close the sale? Are you getting meetings that feel great but then your contact goes silent?

If any of this feels familiar, this HBR piece is worth your time. The authors interviewed more than 250 founders across six continents, then compared the results to a similar study they ran a decade ago. They concluded that the sales playbook most founders are running was built for a market that no longer exists. Not today… not when sustainable competitive advantage is crumbling as every company has the tools to build rapidly.

The article both diagnoses the challenges that software startups face and offers a framework to think about changes you may want to consider to move from positive calls to closing the deal.

-Jamie Jones

Last week, I ran a design thinking workshop for the entire staff of the Fuqua School of Business. That’s 180 people.

I want to be clear about how ill-advised that is. Design thinking works because it’s intimate. Small groups, fast cycles, lots of back-and-forth. No one in their right mind runs one for the entire staff of a business school at once. But, the Dean (my boss) asked, and so how could I say no?

The topic was improving the student experience, and the room held just about everyone who makes Fuqua run. Building and maintenance. IT. Student services. Admissions. Marketing. People whose work shapes a student’s day in ways most of us never see. We mixed the tables on purpose, so that the people who sat together weren’t the people who already worked together. The Dean came to show she was invested in what the staff had to say. And then we asked everyone to dig into the same question from the wildly different vantage points of their actual jobs.

I went in thinking the value would be the ideas. And the ideas were good. The Dean and her team walked away with a real list worth acting on.

But that’s not the moment I remember.

The moment I remember is wandering between tables and overhearing things like “oh, I didn’t know that’s how classroom scheduling worked” and “wait, students are struggling with that?” People who had worked in the same building for years were learning, for the first time, how the other half of the operation actually functioned. They weren’t just generating ideas. They were building a map of the organization in real time, and building it together.

The next day, colleagues stopped me in the hall. Not to talk about the ideas. To tell me how much fun they’d had, and how nice it was to finally meet people they’d been emailing for years without ever sharing a table.

That’s when it clicked for me. While the workshop produced several interesting ideas, what it really produced was understanding, and connection, and a little more shared culture than we’d had the day before. While the excuse to come together may have been to generate new ideas, the real result was the community itself and our deeper understanding of each other and the organization.

If you are leading a team (especially founders, who are wired to optimize for output), you are likely obsessed with efficiently delivering a solution. And so the inefficient stuff, the part where people who don’t normally talk actually talk, the part where you stop “work” to come together for a half-day to connect and engage, gets cut first because it looks and feels like overhead.

But that inefficient stuff is often where the real value lives. A team that understands how the whole machine fits together makes better decisions for years. People who trust each other move faster when it counts. You can’t put that on a slide, which is exactly why it’s so easy to skip.

Sometimes the point isn’t the thing you set out to make. It’s everyone you made it with and the community and culture you built in the process.

-Jamie

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Worth Your Time

-Aaron Dinin

This week, I found myself messaging with Jia Jiang, author of Rejection Proof. For those who don’t know the story, Rejection Proof is the story of Jia intentionally getting rejected for 100 straight days.

That conversation brought back a fun memory. Years ago, when I first started teaching Learning to Fail, I assigned Rejection Proof to my students. At some point, they discovered Jia was a Duke alum and decided they wanted him to guest speak in class. So they did something that felt appropriately on-theme: they reached out and asked.

To their delight, he said yes.

This was back in the pre-Zoom era, so Jia joined us via Skype and spent time discussing the central lesson of his book… that rejection isn’t nearly as dangerous as we imagine it to be.

That’s an especially important lesson for entrepreneurs because entrepreneurship is, at its core, a profession built around hearing “no.” Customers say no. Investors say no. Partners say no. Employees say no. Sometimes the market itself says no.

The founders who survive aren’t necessarily the ones who avoid rejection. They’re the ones who stop treating rejection as evidence they should quit. Instead, they learn to see it as information, feedback, and an unavoidable part of building anything meaningful.

If you’ve never read Rejection Proof, it’s worth your time. And if you’re currently sitting on an email, pitch, proposal, or request you’re afraid to send because someone might reject it, consider this a sign you should send it.

-Aaron Dinin

After spending the past month teaching Duke in Silicon Valley, and another week on vacation in California with my family, I finally made it back to Durham.

For me, that meant a return to the office. But before that, I had to take my daughters to summer camp. By chance, both girls are starting new camps this week. Neither knows anyone, and neither has ever been before. So, as you might imagine, both were a little nervous when I dropped them off.

As we sat in the car before walking in, I found myself giving what I assume is a fairly standard piece of dad advice:

“Nervous is good.”

To be clear, I don’t mean debilitating anxiety is good. “Good nervous,” I explained, “is that feeling in your stomach when you’re about to do something that matters. It’s the feeling that comes from uncertainty mixed with hope, and the feeling that exists because you care about the outcome, which is a good thing.”

I went on to tell them something I often have to remind the entrepreneurs and students I work with: “If you’re never nervous, you’re probably not challenging yourself enough.”

What’s funny is that after dropping them off, I headed to the I&E office to prepare for a new class I started teaching this week, and, as I drove in, I realized I was feeling nervous, too.

At first, I was confused about why I felt that way. After all, at this point in my career, I’ve taught hundreds of classes. Plus, the class I’m teaching isn’t technically “new.” It’s a one-week online course for about 50 graduate students, and this is the fifth time I’ve taught it. I know the material. I know the activities. I know the pacing. By any reasonable standard, I should feel completely comfortable.

And yet, every single time I start a new class, I’m nervous. But I’m not nervous because I’m worried it’s going to go badly. I’m nervous because I want it to go well. I care whether the students learn something useful, and I care whether the discussions are engaging, and I care whether I’m bringing enough energy and preparation to justify asking these students to spend a week of their lives learning with me.

In other words, I’m nervous for exactly the same reason my daughters were nervous: The thing I’m doing matters.

I bring this up because, increasingly, I feel like the entrepreneurs I work with are treating nervousness like a signal something is wrong. They interpret uncertainty as evidence they aren’t ready, aren’t qualified, or shouldn’t move forward.

But most of the time, nervousness isn’t a warning sign. It’s a sign you’re doing something meaningful.

Whether you’re starting a company, launching a product, pitching investors, hiring your first employee, taking a new job, teaching a new class, or walking into a summer camp where you don’t know anyone… those experiences all involve growth. And growth tends to feel a lot like nervousness while it’s happening.

So if you’re feeling a little nervous about something this week, maybe don’t rush to make the feeling go away.

Maybe just take it as evidence you’re doing exactly what you’re supposed to be doing.

You’re growing, and that’s a good thing.

-Aaron

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Worth Your Time

-Amy Wyron Robinson

One of the most thorough and thoughtful pieces of startup content I’ve come across recently is Rob Snyder’s three-hour lecture, The Physics of Startups. When I transitioned from 20 years in early-stage startups to teaching entrepreneurship at Duke, I spent a lot of time searching for frameworks that matched what I had actually experienced in the field. Many felt either too simplistic or disconnected from reality. When I discovered Rob’s work, I had the uncanny feeling that he’d been looking over my shoulder for the last two decades.

His central argument is deceptively simple: customer demand is the only thing that really matters. He challenges much of the conventional startup advice around identifying “pain points” and offers a more nuanced and rigorous way of thinking about why some ventures gain traction while others don’t. Whether you’re a founder, investor, or entrepreneurship educator, this is one of the most thoughtful frameworks I’ve seen for understanding startup momentum and market pull.