10 powerful lessons on how to be a great Entrepreneur

The CEO of OpenAI who helped create chatGPT: Sam Altman.

He has a net worth of $250,000,000 from his businesses.

Here're 10 powerful lessons on how to be a great Entrepreneur:

Before we start,

Here are some of Sam's accomplishments:

• CEO & Cofounder of OpenAI.

• Partner at legendary start-up Y Combinator.

• Built and sold a startup for +40M in his mid-20s.

• Invested in Airbnb, Stripe, Reddit, Asana, Pinterest, Teespring, and Zenefits.

Let's go:

Sam’s secrets to being successful:

• Focus

• Network

• Work Hard

• Be bold & willful

• Be a competitor

• Think by yourself

• Be a sales master

• Compound yourself

• Get rich by owning things

Sam’s other lessons will surprise you…

Leverage Being Misunderstood:

Being misunderstood is bad right? Wrong!

Bad question: Can you stop caring what people think?

Good question: Whose opinions matter most?

Surround yourself with people whose opinions you care about.

If you’re playing the short game you risk losing the long game.

Trade:

Short-Term Low-Status for being Long-Term High-Status.

The most successful people care about the long term.

Make a long-term bet on something unpopular.

When you're right, then you will be understood.

The truth about investing (HINT: the internet lied to you):

You only need 3 things:

• Access

• Decisions

• Have companies choose you

Long-form written content helps access.

Don't ask to invest, ask them how you can help.

For access, you have to make networking a full-time job.

The single most important part of success:

Decisions.

Rewards are in finding great, but inexperienced people.

• Decide to invest in people who you would work for

• Decide to invest where costs are low but cycles are fast

• Decide on which companies will be market leaders

Network like your life depends on it.

You need a team. You are limited on your own.

Build a world-class network by:

• Helping as many people as you can.

• Develop a reputation for treating people well.

• This gives you an unlimited compounding of future opportunities.

99% of people copy others.

Be hard to compete With:

The more valuable you are, the harder you are to compete with.

Do this:

• Create a powerful brand

• Build personal relationships

• Combine multiple & valuable skill sets

The combination allows you to become unique.

Do you validate ideas?

The best ideas are fragile.

Surround yourself with people who don't judge you for making bad ideas.

Think of something that is possible this year and wasn’t possible last year.

That is the seed of a great startup.

Test ideas by asking yourself:

• If this worked, would it be HUGE?

• Is this something that most people think is bad, but you understand why it's good?

Look at yourself in 20 years, then reverse engineer.

Crazy things happen in 20 years.

Trust yourself.

TLDR:

Leverage being misunderstood

Trade: Short-Term Low-Status for being Long-Term High-Status.

3 things to be a good investor

Decisions

How to network

Be bold and willful

Be hard to compete with

Validate ideas

Test ideas yourself

On success

Investments

Venture Capital Updates

• Vendict emerges with $9.5M in funding to automate security compliance with generative AI (Read more)

• Prompt engineering startup Vellum AI raises $5M as demand for generative AI services scales (Read more)

Meme of the Day

Thanks for reading.

Until next time!

Owais

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