Why did you choose to write pseudonymously online? It’s useful to have a firewall between anything you say online and your real personality. But the main reason is who I am is not relevant to what I am saying. A lot of social branding is noise. I think the best way to be successful publishing online is to have the best signal to noise ratio.
It is somewhat overrated to accumulate social capital only under your own name. I still have control over the various [pseudonymous] accounts I have. It’s like a Swiss bank account. I can transfer out of it whenever I want.
5 years ago I dropped out of college. I was working as a dishwasher. Today I am a particularly productive person. I have a fast growing company. I have a lot of distribution for my ideas online. It’s been rapid improvement mainly due to getting my habits right.
It is easier to improve by removing things. Remove unhealthy foods, remove binge watching tv shows, remove unhealthy people. It is very important to remove people from your life that don’t really want to see you happy.
Things I’ve added: exercising regularly. Your physical and mental health is upstream of your productivity. Trying to be productive first is virtually impossible.
Technology is the most fascinating thing going on right now. Humans are tool builders. Everything around us was a technology once before. So building new technology is really just building the future.
I had something I wanted to exist. I thought why not try to build it? I was shocked at how easy it was to build.
I don’t think people understand how coding works today. There are tons of powerful libraries and technologies that are free to use. They are fully documented with examples for virtually anything you want to do. They think you have to be a wizard, or somebody needs to teach you how to code. That’s not the case. It is a massive amount of leverage for a curious person.
Originality is important. You need to have an original information diet. If you consume the same information as everyone else, how can you come up with unique ideas?
Recommended blogs: Blake Masters’ notes on CS 183 [the source material for Zero to One], Melting Asphalt and Reaction Wheel.
You can build a Twitter feed that is high quality by removing people that tweet about anything topical. Anything that won’t be relevant in a day is unlikely to be a source of solid insight. If it won’t matter tomorrow why would you want to consume that information today?
Bottomless is a smart subscription. We use a weight sensor that figures out the perfect time to ship your next order. The sensor captures how much you have, and how fast you are going through it. Right now we are a coffee company. In the future who knows what else this can be applied to.
[An opportunity for entrepreneurs]: Humans are not predictable creatures. Our consumption of various things are not predictable.
I didn’t pick something I knew how to do. I just picked something that I thought could be great and figured it out. The scale had to be easy to build because I am not a hardware engineer. I didn’t even know what voltage or current were when I started Bottomless.
Doing a Kickstarter to perfect the hardware is overrated. A lot of companies die doing Kickstarter. The iterative process got us to where we needed to be.
Something under explored from a business strategy perspective: A lot of very valuable companies own the customer relationship.
An example of the entrepreneurial emotional rollercoaster: When you are putting your whole life into something that is so high variance, it is natural to have high variance feelings about it. Small sample sizes can create anxiety. Our pilot program had 15 people in it. Not much data. One person cancelled and I felt this definitely won’t work.
My cofounder is my wife. I think it is a huge advantage.
People of action are very rare in the world. Maybe more rare than people who have unique insights.
I think the number one cause of startup death is your acquisition costs increasing. [They reference the Social Capital letter that states 40 cents out of each venture dollar is going to Google or Facebook. You can read the letter here.]
Wanting someone else to do well, regardless of how that reflects on you, is fundamentally kind.
