Twelve top pieces of advice for young entrepreneurs
Come day eight, the cohort’s thirst for knowledge has still not faded. The morning focused on early start up legals, before jumping into an afternoon of mentoring.
David Easton (Bridges Ventures Investor), Paul McGuire (serial mobile entrepreneur), David Langer (GroupSpaces, co-founder), Illian Iliev (Cambridge IP), Andy Goodman (McKinsey) and Assi Gol (McKinsey) joined us to give their time and attention to the cohort’s start-up ideas in an afternoon’s worth of team-to-one mentoring sessions.
But it didn’t stop there, some of the entrepreneurs who have supported EF from the start joined us in the evening. David Langer co-founder Groupspaces, Pete Smith co-founder Songkick, Jason Trost co-founder Smarkets and Nadav Rosenberg from Taboola, were grilled by the cohort in a Q&A session. Here are my top picks….
- 1. You’ve got to do something between now and dying – a startup is a pretty good way to pass the time
- 2. Either you know exactly where you want to go, or you just have to be opportunistic. Either way, just jump into it.
- 3. It’s important to be extremely passionate about the space you work in, since you will have to be passionate about it for many, many years.
- 4. Take what you’ve learned from all your experiences, lessons and aspects of your life. Whether it’s waitressing or being a referee – take it and apply them to your own start-up.
- 5. Before starting your start up – think about your personality and choose a role accordingly. Something that comes naturally to you.
- 6. Be more honest with your co-founder than to yourself. What you won’t admit to yourself, admit it to your co-founder.
- 7. Be relentless.
- 8. Managing means coming back to the vision and to why your team is following you.
- 9. Get ready to face the hiring, as well as the firing. This is one of the hardest things you’ll have to do.
- 10. At the start it’s all yours. With time, you need to compromise more.
- 11. An expert is someone who has done all the possible mistakes.
- 12. Strategically do what’s best for your company. And sometimes that means that your company will steer down a different direction from where you’d like to go.
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