New Year and a New(ish) Entrepreneur Office Hours

Entrepreneur Office Hours - Issue #313

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

Inside the Office

Welcome to 2026! And welcome to an upgraded Entrepreneur Office Hours, now powered by the entire team at Duke Innovation & Entrepreneurship.

I’ve been hinting for a while that changes were coming, and this is the moment where those ideas turn into something concrete. The goal of this next version of Entrepreneur Office Hours is to make this resource more useful, more practical, and more grounded in the real work of entrepreneurship.

To do that, issues are going to consist of three core sections, with each one designed to give you something tangible you can think about, learn from, or try.

Inside the Office

Each issue will kickoff with short, real stories from the classroom or the entrepreneurial work we’re do alongside students and founders. This space is meant to highlight the kinds of moments we often see in our work with entrepreneurs — the moments where things don’t necessarily go as planned — and use those moment to surface a lesson worth carrying forward. After all, that’s a big part of what entrepreneurship education is (both the formal and informal kind)… it’s learning from experience.

Worth Your Time

Each week, we’ll share a piece of content we’ve found genuinely interesting or useful, including articles, podcast episodes, videos, or maybe even the occasional academic study (but, we promise, the kinds that have real world value). The goal here is to make sure EOH is connecting you with real knowledge about startups, markets, and the fundamentals of entrepreneurial decision-making under uncertainty, plus some helpful context for why it’s worth your time. (For the record, this is something I’ve been wanting to include for a long time, and I’m excited to finally share more than just my own articles.)

Tools We’re Tinkering With

Since entrepreneurship is as much about tools as ideas, we plan to start highlighting products, platforms, and services we’ve been experimenting with along with a short explanations of what they do, why they’re interesting, and where they might (or might not) fit into your entrepreneurial workflow.

Again, none of this is meant to be hype-y or prescriptive. This evolution is meant to better represent the kind of ongoing conversations at the core of entrepreneurial progress. It’s a set of ideas, resources, and experiments you can borrow from, push against, and, in hopefully valuable ways, adapt to your own work.

This week, I’m covering all the sections. However, starting next week, my colleagues will be chiming in and sharing, too. We’re all looking forward to this next chapter of Entrepreneur Office Hours. As always, thanks for stopping by, and send along any thoughts/questions/ideas to help us keep making this better.

— Aaron & the Duke I&E Team

P.S. As I make this transition, I’m sure I’m going to break some things. For example, I have no idea who’s going to be listed as the “sender” of this issue or how it might impact deliverability. But, as we all know, breaking things is an important part of entrepreneurship. Thanks, in advance, for tolerating the inevitable screwups of trying something new. It’s entrepreneurial progress in-action!

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Worth Your Time

-Aaron Dinin

As you all know, lots of my entrepreneurial attention over the last few years has shifted toward social media. But it’s not because I have a wandering eye and no longer care about entrepreneurship. It’s because social media creators are an incredible subsection of entrepreneurs.

Chief among those creators is Jimmy Donaldson, a.k.a. MrBeast. If you’ve not listened to any interviews with Jimmy, you really should. For my money, he’s one of the most thoughtful entrepreneurs in the world at the moment.

As an example — while I feel a little guilty for recommending this — his Diary of a CEO interview is filled with amazingly savvy insights. For example, this clip about “purple cows” is brilliant… especially if you take it beyond the context of creating videos and think about it more broadly in terms of products, marketing, customer acquisition, fundraising, and just about anything else you need to do to push your entrepreneurial vision forward.

FYI… it’s a little NSFW because of language!

(If you’ve got time for the full, 1.5 hour interview, you can find it here.)

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Tools We’re Tinkering With

-Aaron Dinin

If I’m being honest, I’m not the right person to tell you about the coolest, latest, and most innovative tools in the entrepreneurial world. Heck, that’s a big reason I want other people helping me write this newsletter. Simply put, there’s a lot more in the world to tell you about than what I know, and adding additional perspectives is going to enable this resources to be more valuable.

However, since I’m in the driver seat for this issue, I’m going to share a tool I’m sure lots of you have heard of, but I’m not sure enough of you are using it: Airtable.

Or rather, not enough of you are using it to its full capability. Most people I talk with think of Airtable as a nicer spreadsheet or a lightweight database. While that’s technically true, it misses the point. Airtable isn’t about rows and columns — it’s about modeling how work actually happens. It lets you design systems around messy, real-world processes like content pipelines, research tracking, customer discovery notes, course development, partnership outreach, and all the half-structured information that entrepreneurs live inside every day.

At this point, Airtable has quietly become the backbone of my workflow. Nearly everything I do — classes, content, research, newsletters, collaborations, and long-term projects — runs through Airtable in some form. It’s where all my ideas live long before they turn into something polished, and it’s what helps me keep track of all those things as I push them forward.

If you’re not using Airtable… that’s fine. This isn’t an ad for it. Instead, find something equally powerful that can serve as the hub of your entrepreneurial workflow. I wish I’d been better about finding that tool earlier in my journey as an entrepreneur, and, I promise, it’ll help you, too.