Anil DashI’m eavesdropping (well, they’re so loud I can’t ignore them) on two young startup guys at this coffee shop, a version of a conversation I’ve heard a million times. But what’s striking vs 10 or 15 years ago is… almost nothing they’re talking about is the tech. Everything is financial engineering and how to hustle the ecosystem. Nothing about products or even markets and competition, all fussing about banks and crypto and VCs. Explains a lot about my fatigue over the industry in general.
Brian Dear@anildash This. So this.
Whenever I mentored startups and they started talking like that I cut them off and told them “tell me about your customers.”
And they’d look at me like a party pooper, and say “wut?”
And I’d suggest to them that the single most exciting story is the customer story and that they need to prepare three different customer stories. What each customer’s pain/need is, and why this hot startup has the solution. I urged them to have a customer focus. (Few listened, lol!)