10 Habits PhDs Must Unlearn To Build a Startup | Startup School
Francois Chaubard, a former researcher in Fei-Fei Li's lab turned startup founder, explains on Y Combinator's Startup School the 10 academic habits PhDs must unlearn to build a successful company.
The gist
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Chaubard says founders should chase what customers will actually pay for, not vanity metrics like grades, citations or a novel algorithm.
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He argues novelty is not required, since copying a proven idea and executing better, as Instacart did with grocery delivery, often wins.
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At Focal, his team spent 3 months building retail people tracking that no store would pay for, so he advises starting AI companies with a human in the loop.
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Chaubard cites Jeff Bezos's rule of deciding with about 70% of the information, saying speed beats perfect data, as Oracle showed in the database wars.
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He says CEOs must handle sales and marketing themselves to build customer empathy, and recommends four books for building a founder mindset.
"I could have manually labeled a few videos a day and given them the same data and gotten the same conclusion, and that would have saved me 3 months. So that's why I advise if you are an AI company, start with a human in the loop. Validate that your customers actually want what..."
▶ Play at 5:412 creators recommend it, including Vladimir Keil.
See all on the Human-in-the-loop page"If you want to quiet your academic brain and start growing your founder brain, I highly recommend reading SPIN Selling, High Output Management, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and How to Win Friends and Influence People."
▶ Play at 9:24"If you want to quiet your academic brain and start growing your founder brain, I highly recommend reading SPIN Selling, High Output Management, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and How to Win Friends and Influence People."
▶ Play at 9:242 creators recommend it, including Anish Acharya.
See all on the High Output Management page"If you want to quiet your academic brain and start growing your founder brain, I highly recommend reading SPIN Selling, High Output Management, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, and How to Win Friends and Influence People."
▶ Play at 9:24"As Dale Carnegie once wrote, you can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get others interested in you. This is exactly how sales and product development work... I highly recommend reading SPIN Selling, H..."
▶ Play at 9:246 creators recommend it, including Bryce Rattner Keithley, Matthew Hussey, and Sam Parr.
See all on the How to Win Friends and Influence People pageWhat they recommend · 5 picks
"I could have manually labeled a few videos a day and given them the same data and gotten the same conclusion, and that would have saved me 3 months. So that's why I advise if yo..."
"As Dale Carnegie once wrote, you can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get others interested in you. ..."
"If you want to quiet your academic brain and start growing your founder brain, I highly recommend reading SPIN Selling, High Output Management, The Seven Habits of Highly Effect..."
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