I listened to "Developing a Founder's Mindset"Links to an external site. with Alfred Lin of Sequoia Capital. Lin is a partner with the high profile VC firm and led the investments in a number of noteworthy companies, including AirBNB, DoorDash, Instacart, and others. (He also invested in FTX, but we won't necessarily hold that against him.)

The conversation is rather falsely billed - I'd argue that it revolves more around developing a VC's mindset rather than a founder's mindset. Still, it's a fantastic listen. The conversation focuses a great deal on Lin's strategies for finding great companies and continuing to develop his skills as a VC. He pinpoints nourishing curiosity and being a lifelong learner as critical values. Because Sequoia invests in a number of industries, these are critical to finding good opportunities and staying up with trends and market forces. Similarly, he looks for founders who think long and creatively about solving problems and/or challenge commonly held assumptions about industries. If an industry is based on 100 assumptions, he says, challenging even five of them can lead to a profitable and exciting start-up.

For example, he discusses travelling with his father when he was young. His father worked for a bank and had to travel around the world to open branches. He always stayed at the same hotel chain and wanted rooms that were virtually identical, down to the placement of the hair dryer. Because his job was filled with variables, he didn't want any in his hotel room. In contrast, Lin invested in AirBNB because it offered the exact opposite. Staying in a local's home rather than a hotel offered a truly unique and authentic experience. No more "tourism" or similarity. Lin refers to this as "one person's feature is another person's bug." Good founders look for the bugs (constant similarity, inauthenticity) and then think long and hard about how to overcome them (staying with a local wherever you go).

Lin also discusses the journey of building a start-up. One interesting insight was that it takes single-mindedness and conviction to start a company being doggedly focused on solving one problem or creating one product but, as investors are needed, founders must pivot to being more open-minded, accepting more advice, and opening their ideas to new markets or customers. The real keys to success for an early company, Lin says, are focusing on customers and the problem you are trying to solve. It will be a small, focused idea that then gets larger.

The interviewer also asked Lin about the kinds of books he reads. He lumps them into three categories: biographies about great thinkers (Lin likes reading about Einstein and Ben Franklin, among others), psychology or behavioral economics books (he mentions Thinking, Fast and SlowLinks to an external site.), and books about great companies like Amazon and Nike. I found this interesting because he is not reading books about building businesses or running businesses, but rather drawing inspiration from the greats.

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