6 Skills for Successful Startup Founders: Maximize your chances
Summary
TLDR视频讨论创业者在创业之前应该提前掌握的技能,包括工程、产品、设计、销售营销、财务、领导力等。每项技能都很重要,但每个人一生只能精通一两项。所以,创业团队成员应该各擅其职,互相配合。具备一些关键技能可以降低创业风险,但并不能保证成功。
Takeaways
- 😀 要成为未来的创始人,需要提前掌握工程、产品、设计、销售营销、财务、领导管理等多项技能
- 😊 技能越全面,吸引高质量合伙人和员工的可能性就越大
- 😎 如果不懂编码,至少要对技术有基本理解,这是参与创业的基本要求
- 😯 产品需要不断迭代和改进,以实现和扩大产品市场契合度
- 😮 通过自己动手做项目,可以培养产品能力
- 🤔 交互设计关注产品的使用方式和体验,这与产品密切相关
- 😀 销售和营销可以帮助创业公司打入市场和获取用户
- 😉 财务知识有助于公司从0到1后做出正确决策
- 😳 领导力来自于同理心和责任感的结合
- 🤓 技能熟练程度不同的人组成创业团队,可以互相 complement
Q & A
这篇视频主要谈论了什么?
-这篇视频主要谈论了未来创始人在创业之前应该提前培养什么技能。
创业之前需要掌握哪些技能?
-需要掌握工程、产品、设计、销售和营销、财务、领导力和管理等方面的技能。掌握的技能越多,创业成功的可能性就越大。
对于没有技术背景的人,应该如何获得工程技能?
-可以在线学习编程,或者与有技术背景的合伙人团队合作。至少要对技术有基本的了解,这样才能更好地与技术合伙人合作。
如何提高产品设计技能?
-通过在业余时间构建和发布产品,与用户交流沟通,了解他们是否喜欢你的产品以及原因,从中获取经验。
设计包含哪两方面技能?
-视觉设计和交互设计。视觉设计决定产品的外观,交互设计决定产品的使用体验。
销售和营销技能为何很重要?
-品牌塑造和获取用户关注至关重要。优秀的销售和营销技能可以帮助创业公司更准确地访问目标用户。
创业后哪些财务知识很关键?
-公司估值原理、投资回报率分析、现金流分析等,这些可以帮助做出更好的业务决策。
怎样提高领导力和人际交往技能?
-通过参与需要协调多人的项目和活动来锻炼,同时要培养同理心和责任心。读《人性的弱点》一书也很有帮助。
单个人要成为所有这些技能的专家有多难?
-基本不可能,一生之中最多只能在一两项技能上达到专家级水平。所以创业需要组建不同技能互补的团队。
技能和团队之外,创业还需要什么?
-需要有 Shared Vision,需要有创造巨大价值的点子。这需要时间和运气,技能只是更好地把握机会。
Outlines
😊 创业前需要具备的技能
视频提到创业者在创业前需要提高的技能有:工程、产品、设计、销售营销、财务、领导力等。具备这些技能可以吸引优秀人才加入,增加创业成功概率。即便不需要全部掌握,至少要在1-2项上有深厚积累,其他方面也要有基本认知。
😃 产品设计的重要性
产品设计包含交互设计和视觉设计。交互设计决定产品的使用流程和体验,是产品中心。视觉设计决定产品的外观和美感。产品人需要不断迭代和优化,才能获得并保持市场地位。
😎 销售和品牌营销的魅力
销售是一项被低估的职业。每个人都是一个品牌,在当今时代更需要展现自己。初创公司通过社交媒体直接面向目标用户,品牌营销意义重大。
Mindmap
Keywords
💡创始人
💡技能
💡团队
💡工程
💡产品
💡设计
💡销售与市场
💡财务
💡领导力
💡风险
Highlights
拥有更多的这些技能,你将吸引更多高质量的人来与你合作,无论是联合创始人还是员工。
如果您还在学校,那么学习领导力的最佳方式之一就是找到可以让您管理项目和协调人员的领导职位。
深入掌握其中一两项技能,同时对其他技能有较广泛的了解,就是您在有生之年所能做到的全部。
技术仍然是这个世界中的关键杠杆。它是最终的护城河。
产品是关于知道要建立什么。这基本上是在一个机器上运行不断找到和精炼产品市场契合度的过程。
无论业务规模如何,品牌的捕捉注意力的能力从未如此重要过。
财务知识在从零到一之后是绝对必要的。
每个企业要么正在增长,要么正在衰退,如果您没有指标来衡量,您就无法判断自己属于哪一种。
领导是一个非常重要的技能。如何带领并使人们做事,有时甚至没有权威?
跟随者对领导者更重要,而不是领导者对跟随者更重要。
如果您不知道如何编码或没有技术背景,您应该保持开放的态度并学习。
深入掌握一两项关键技能,在其他技能上具备“危险”的广泛知识。
最难的是,要成为一个出色的产品负责人的最明显的方法就是通过实践。
交互设计是设计的重点。它与产品联系最为直接。
《如何交朋友与影响人》这本书可以使您在全部技能上有所提高,而不仅仅是领导力。
Transcripts
- In this video,
we talk about what skills a future founder
can and should work on
before they take the plunge into starting something.
Let's get into it.
(upbeat music)
Do you have the skills
and do you have what it takes?
First off, here's the list
and it's pretty long.
Engineering, product, design, sales and marketing,
finance, leadership and management.
The more things out of this list
you are actually familiar with,
the more likely you will succeed.
We all want to be a part of a rocket ship
as it's taking off
but we don't want to join anything
that will fail without us.
And as a result,
we repel people when we need them the most.
And in the same way,
we attract them when we have other options.
This is a key fact of life.
The more of these skills you have,
the more you will attract high quality people
to come work with you,
whether it's cofounders or employees.
If you're early in your career,
know that you should try and figure out
which of those skills you can be particularly good at.
What do you enjoy?
At the same time,
learn the other parts too.
You might not enjoy working on some of these skills,
but every single one of them
will help you along on your journey.
And because you're strong at those parts,
you will be much more complimentary.
Be deep in one or two of these areas
but broad enough to be dangerous in the rest.
You actually need this to be able to tell
who's actually good in those positions
and to be able to work with those best people
in those expertise areas.
(rockets firing)
I want to be super explicit here-
you don't have to have all of these things figured out.
Deciding to start is a very personal decision.
There are people who have very few of these things
and still succeed,
and there are also people
who have all of those skills listed
and they fail.
Starting a start-up isn't deterministic like that.
You're taking risk
and these skills make it a more calculated risk.
All right, let's start.
When it comes to engineering,
we're talking about technical prowess.
You have to have the basics down.
You don't need a computer science degree
but it sure does help.
Technology remains the key leverage in this world.
It's the ultimate moat.
When you have a piece of code
or an algorithm figured out
that nobody else has,
when you have something like PageRank,
that's the ultimate moat for Google
and it protects something
that is worth billions and billions of dollars.
Someone can't just walk in off the street
and take that from them.
They'd have to build PageRank first.
I realize a lot of different kinds of people
are watching this video.
So I don't want to discourage you.
If you have technical skills, great, that's table stakes.
If you don't,
then you do have to team up with someone who does.
And if you don't know how to do that,
then you should try to learn enough
to get dangerous with it.
Most people who try to find technical cofounders
don't even make the simple effort
of understanding the craft.
But if you understand the craft
and you can build a good but not perfect version
of what you ultimately want to build,
you can get the ball rolling.
It'll immediately distinguish you
against this sea of nontechnical people
who are also trying to find a technical cofounder.
Again, you don't have to be the best at this
but it helps.
All I'm saying
is that if you don't know how to code
or you don't have a technical background,
you should keep an open mind
and you should learn.
How do you acquire this skill?
Well, while top CS schools remain the gold standard.
Increasingly, there are great ways
to learn how to code online.
Codecademy, for instance, is amazing at this,
or for scientists who want to train up
into the data science and data engineering roles,
there are amazing fellowships out there
like Insight Fellows.
Link in the description
if you want to watch my video on that.
There's a YC startup named Career Karma
that is also an amazing way
for people to break into tech.
They'll even help you find the right bootcamp
or figure out if the bootcamp path is right for you.
Next is product.
Being able to do product,
being able to run the product function
is about knowing what to build and for whom.
I really like Suhail Doshi's lesson about product
and here's what he says,
"I wish I understood the degree to which
"focusing on a few things in a product mattered.
"I used to feel liberated
"that I could finally work on new ideas
"once things started growing
"but I later realized
"that you're only at the beginning of a curve
"to finally take the market.
"It's often so hard to discover and deliver on a use-case
"that's so important to people.
"And to let up on the gas and let others catch up to you
"is an opportunity wasted.
"Often, it requires continuous improvement
"over many years
"to keep and take the mantle."
Product is about knowing what to build.
It's basically being able to run the process on a machine
to continually find and refine product market fit.
This isn't a one time thing.
This is a constant process.
And how do you acquire this skill?
Unfortunately, there's not an obvious way
to become a good product person,
short of practicing it.
So that's why working on projects in your spare time
is probably my best recommendation
to learn product.
Build something and release it,
release it to users and see if they stick with it.
Talk to users
and see why they did or didn't take to it.
Did it solve their problem?
What are their hangups?
The next big thing to really focus on is design.
And when we're talking about design,
there are actually two parts to this,
interaction design,
also known as user experience,
and visual design.
UX and interaction design
is about how it works
and visual design is how it looks.
Most people think about visual design
when they hear the word design.
It's a skill like drawing or painting.
You can work on it,
this skill can be cultivated
and I think there are two practical aspects of visual design
to really note.
One is really being able to do it yourself.
And the fact is, most founders
would get a lot out of this skill
but it's not required for them.
It sure does help
if you're particularly consumer though.
Being able to do it yourself
just means faster iteration time.
The second aspect is probably more important
and that is having taste.
So being able to know when a design
does or doesn't work.
Does it fit the aesthetic?
Does it fit the mood?
Does it speak to your customer?
Does it convey the right level of quality?
Taste is something that is very important,
particularly for consumer,
but these days, for all businesses.
Now, interaction design is probably the meat of design
when I think about it.
Interaction design is most directly related to product.
And it's about taking the ideas of who's it for
and what problem are we solving
and it brings it to the level of how.
Where do you put the buttons
and what do you say on those buttons?
What do you say around those pages
to get people through something really complicated?
How do you break up a complex multi-step process
into something manageable?
And how do you make sure the user knows where they are
and where they want to go?
And one of my favorite books
on how to learn the basics
is Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug.
I actually did a two hour talk
on Y Combinator Startup School
on YouTube that you can watch right now.
It's also a link in the description.
(phone ringing)
Next is sales and marketing.
As Ryan Peterson of Flexport says,
"Sales is the most underrated profession."
My cofounder Alexis Ohanian talks about
how everybody is a brand
and a brand's ability to capture attention
has never mattered more.
Brand is super important
because every business today is a meme.
It's never been easier for a startup
to access exactly the people who have that problem.
Sales, marketing, being able to sell,
being able to get in front of people,
it's super key.
(Intro to Pink Floyd's song Money)
Finance is another key skill to work on.
This isn't super important at the outset.
Engineering, product, sales, marketing,
they're really the key to getting product market fit
but financial literacy is absolutely essential
once you go from zero to one.
Matt MacInnis from Rippling
talks about, "I wish I'd better understood
"the principals of corporate fiance.
"Once I understood that my company was worth
"the net present value of all future cash flows,
"I started making better decisions.
"Also, all the investor tropes
"started to make a lot more sense."
Finance is a fundamental too
in helping you figure out how to repeatedly grow
and how well you're actually doing on that front.
Every business in the world
is either growing or dying
and you can't really tell which one you're doing
if you don't have the metrics to measure it.
Finance and budgeting
allows you to make sense
of the decisions you have to make in a business.
Should you hire that executive
and let them build a team?
Should you invest in that new office?
When do you get paid back for those things
and do they make economic sense?
One of the most important skills
is actually leadership and people management.
How do you lead
and how to do you get people to do things,
sometimes without authority?
Well, by example, for one.
Most people think being a leader is about being stern
or having some sort of authority.
Harvard professor Barbara Kellerman says,
"Followers are more important to leaders
"than leaders are to followers."
And this is why leading from empathy is more powerful.
It creates a more connected team
that can weather more storms
and make better decisions together.
There's more to being a leader
than being empathetic though, of course.
The next stage is to hold people accountable.
And in practice this is very hard
because you have to have very crucial conversations,
hard discussions about when things didn't go right,
ideally as constructively as possible,
while also having the impact you need to have.
This bad thing, it can't continue.
And how do you acquire this skill?
Well, if you're still in school,
one of the best ways to do it
is find leadership positions
that let you run programs and coordinate people.
That might be an after school sport,
that might be a club,
things right there in your school.
At work, there are even more
very direct ways to exercise this.
Take on projects that require coordination,
ideally with many people,
and try to actually drive to some sort of numerical outcome.
Can you actually increase sales by X percent?
Did you and your team
create X amount of value for that company?
The best book I can think of
that a lot of people haven't read
because it has a very cheesy title is actually
How to Win Friends and Influence People.
It's one of the most obvious ways
to put to work a bunch of skills
that you need to be successful
across the whole gamut of skills really.
Read that book and you'll be a better leader
but you'll also get better
at all the other skills too.
(dramatic music)
So that was a lot of things
and the reality is it takes a lifetime, or maybe two,
to even get good at one or maybe two of these things,
let alone getting to passable in the others.
How do you put lifetimes of experience together in a room,
well it could be a Zoom room,
in order to make something great?
Well, you just described the process
of putting together a startup, a startup team.
People talk about founders a whole lot
but founders are often the speck of dust
that forms the crystalline structure
that actually solves a real problem.
And this is why teams are so crucial.
Any given single human being
could probably only get truly great
at one or two of these skills
but you need a team of people who are great at all of these
in order to build a startup or business that really matters.
Finally, remember you don't have to have
all of these things figured out.
Deep expertise in one or two of these things
and then a broader view on the other skills
is all you really have time to do in a lifetime.
And having all of the right skills
is still no guarantee you'll find the right idea
or build the right team.
But that's why you're watching this.
If you want to hear more about ideas and teams,
stay tuned for future episodes
and please smash that like and subscribe button.
Hit the bell to get some notifications
and it all helps me a ton
so that I can try and help you all.
Thank you again for watching all the way to the end
and I'll catch you real soon.
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