Product Market Fit

✅ In life, there’s generally no opportunity without risk. Avoid risk and you can live quietly and reasonably happy, but you probably won’t create something new or make your mark. Career planning The first rule: don’t plan your career. You can’t plan it because you can’t predict the future: industries, companies, roles, even who you’ll become. Career planning = career limiting. The second rule: build skills and pursue opportunities. Two kinds of opportunities: The ones that present themselves when you’re in the right place at the right time. They show up when you’re not expecting them, and they vanish fast if you don’t jump. The ones you go create. A lot of people coast even when they know what they want. Don’t be one of those people. Life is way too short. The world is malleable. Know what you want, go for it with maximum energy, and the world can reconfigure faster than you’d think. Think of your career like a portfolio: jobs, roles, opportunities each have a potential return (income, skills, experience, location, etc.) and a risk profile (fired, can’t handle demands, forced move, company bankrupt, opportunity cost). Your risk-return profile changes with life stage: Right out of school: low burn rate, flexible geography, higher risk tolerance. Family obligations: dial back income risk (but it's not black and white). More experience later: a different risk-return profile again. Marc on what risks to take: Early: optimize for skill growth and experience. Take income risk to do it. Take the job that best develops skills, regardless of salary. This is not the time to play it safe. With family obligations: reduce income risk, but in places like Silicon Valley, a hot startup can still be rational because it may be easy to get another job, especially with better skills. Geography risk: moving to the industry center (e.g., Silicon Valley) is often worth the network and lifestyle risk because the upside compounds for decades. Big-company risk is sneakier than it looks: impersonal layoffs plus slow skill growth can trap you in "only other big companies." Ten years disappears and you have a problem. Watch opportunity cost constantly. Doing one thing means not doing another. Easy to ignore. Expensive to ignore. College College is not your only chance to pursue passion. If you want impact, start developing concrete real-world skills fast, and undergrad is a great place to start. Passion can come later once you're primed. Useful degrees tend to have a technical element: engineering, etc. The “jobs are going to India and China so it’s not useful” idea is silliness. Technical degrees teach you to do something difficult that matters and teach you rigorous thinking: reason, logic, data. “Graduating with a technical degree is like heading out into the real world armed with an assault rifle instead of a dull knife.” If you have a useful undergrad, graduate degrees are often overrated. Many people do fine with liberal arts plus MBA, but he calls it a missed opportunity: MBA on top of engineering math is better and rare. Where to go: try hard to get into one of the best schools in the world for your field. Don't fear being a small fish. Always be in the best pond. If undergrad isn't top in-field, consider a great grad program. What to do in school: practical experience. Work during the year. Do internships and co-ops. Target the best companies early and often. On-campus jobs can be powerful: working for a professor's research program or being a star in a computer or research lab. If you do it right, you graduate with a year-plus of high-quality work experience plus years of practical on-campus experience, and most other uses of time (besides decent grades) are mistakes. Skills after school Graduation is the beginning of building a portfolio of useful skills. For “extraordinary,” two paths: Become the best at one thing. Nearly impossible. He doesn’t recommend trying. Become top 25% at two or more things. Much easier. The magic is combination. Few people can do two rare-ish things together, and that makes you unusual. Stack degrees and skills: business on top of engineering, law, medicine, science changes what you can run and what you can build. He claims most successful people have about three skills in the top 25%. CEOs too: rarely best at any one function, but top 25% across a set. Five skills to develop after school: Communication. Become a top 25% public speaker. Practice makes it available to anyone. Communication multiplies every other skill, and most people are bad because they never treat it seriously. This is especially true for technical people who assume quality speaks for itself. If you can't communicate well, it's hard to change the world. Management. Work for a great manager, ask to learn, then manage a team. Even if you won’t be a manager forever, it’s a tool you’ll need. Sales. Learn to sell: reliably influencing people while offering something they should want. It helps with recruiting, fundraising, partnerships, press, analysts. Spending a year in sales can be great even if you don’t want a sales career. Finance. Literacy: statements, budgeting, structure, equity and debt markets. Learn via classes, books, or swapping skills with a finance person. Read the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal daily; five years builds a lot of the mental model. International. Time in other countries and cultures compounds over a career. If offered a year abroad, consider taking it. He leans toward younger, faster-growing market economies, but almost any exposure helps. High achieving people If your life has been orchestrated, elite schools, activities, constant support, you risk getting smacked by reality and not recovering. You haven’t had to make tough decisions alone with bad information and then live with consequences. High achievers will make fast decisions with incomplete or incorrect info under time pressure and political pressure. You will screw up. The screw-ups have consequences and you'll feel stupid. You can't let it faze you. Get back up and keep going, and learn that early. Picking an industry Pick an industry where the founders are still alive and actively involved. Founder-led industries are usually more dynamic. If founders are dead or out of touch, beware caretaker companies run by 2nd, 3rd, 4th generation managers. Second rule: once you pick an industry, get to the center of it fast. Head where the action is. Don’t delay for extraneous opportunities no matter how lucrative. Optimize for the most dynamic pond, company, city, everything. Living outside the center of your industry is a mistake. Third: in fast-changing fields like tech, early experience is best in younger high-growth companies: You do more stuff and learn faster. You get promoted faster. You get used to sharp people, high expectations, rapid change. Big companies teach you how to work for big companies. Raw startups are variable. Many are poorly managed. Often better to go somewhere already succeeding, build skills, then go startup. Once you’ve got killer skills, go startup. Or start your own. If it fails, try another. If that fails, go back to high growth to reset and learn, then try again. Repeat until something changes the world. Marc’s productivity tips Don’t keep a schedule: refuse commitments at set times in future days so you can work on what matters most anytime. Hard for structured jobs and CEOs, but liberating if you can do it. Schedule only truly important things. Todo list: each night write a 3x5 card with 3 to 5 things for tomorrow, then do them. Use the back as an anti-to-do list: write down useful things you did and marvel at what got done. Only agree to new commitments when both your head and your heart say yes. Head says yes, heart says no, mouth says yes, and suddenly your schedule is full of things you don’t want. Use the “adrenaline spike” test: if thinking about it gives you that spike, your heart is saying yes. CEOs Entrepreneurs must make hard decisions about what the company will do, even when employees won’t like it. Employees don’t like leaders who won’t make tough decisions. Also: you must fire people who aren’t great or aren’t right. Nobody great wants to work with mediocrity. Age and entrepreneurship Enthusiasm peaks early and declines. Experience rises with age. He claims the equilibrium hits around 38 to 40 for creative endeavors. Hit rate doesn’t increase over time. The career periods with the most hits also have the most misses, so taking more swings has higher payoff than trying to improve batting average. He says IQ is largely irrelevant. "Keep on going and chances are you will stumble on something, perhaps when you are least expecting it. I have never heard of anyone stumbling on something sitting down." , Charles Kettering Four kinds of luck: energy, curiosity, flexibility and aggressiveness in synthesizing, and uniquely developing a personal point of view. Personal point of view comes from "eccentric hobbies, personal lifestyles, and motor behaviors" that uniquely prepare you to create. That's why more life experience and journeys into unrelated areas can be better for creative people than more formal domain-specific education, at least if they want to create. A motivator: being in a unique time and place where it's possible to start, build, and succeed with multiple companies, and not walking away from that.