25 things I learned from my conversation with Keshav Sharma of Augrade
Ask yourself, “Whatever you're building, is this going to be relevant in an AGI world?”
1. The best startups start as side projects. (Read Paul Graham’s “Before the Startup”)
2. Many successful and ambitious founders have troubled childhoods.
3. Parental support is the difference between success and giving up.
4. Ask yourself, “Whatever you're building, is this going to be relevant in an AGI world?”
5. Generational companies are the ones who've built their own hardware and have tightly integrated software.
6. Forcing strong deadlines is an effective way to get shit done, fast.
7. Science fiction enables people to broaden the possibilities and the imagination of what can happen.
8. There are two types of people in the world 1) realists and 2) dreamers -- and we need both.
9. The biggest challenges for AR/VR have always been compute, display and utility. And no one has been able to deliver that because they were missing the most important factor: contextual understanding.
10. We're entering an era where you can go from an intent to an output much quicker and faster without compromising on cost, time, or quality.
11. You're not competing with the competition today, you're competing with the competition when they see what you have built, and they try to replicate that.
12. Founder need to understand their customers’ entire workflows, not just the immediate problem the customer wants solved, but the problem the customer will pay the most to be solved.
13. Any big company that is being built, speed of execution and brand are the two things that matter. Because with time, everything else will be democratized and taken over by the competition.
14. 100 failures doesn't mean that this cannot be done, it just means very simply, this didn't work.
15. Hire for passion. "Can this person do the work without anyone else telling you to stay longer and do it?"
16. Get Zoom Premium.
17. Grant programs allow "crazy", ambitious young people do the necessary research and experimentation for their ideas.
18. Investors should be able to quickly change their views/perspectives based on surrounding evidence, data points and the things they learn.
19. When you're building a startup, a lot of the things will go to shit.
20. Sending a human to Mars has its own milestone and sense of achievement, but isn't practical for colonization, yet.
21. Apple excels at making people drool over their products.
22. Don't read business books, read biographies. (Listen to “Founders” by David Senra)
23. Your childhood has a very strong effect on how you grow up and who you grow up to be as an adult and how you behave in certain situations.
24. People's belief, even despite a lack of understanding, is critical to help founders keep going.
25. Marc Benioff is still alive and Keshav really wants to meet him.
Full transcript here: Google Doc