Confidence, Can’t Win With Out It. A word I can honestly say I rarely if ever hear in business is, self-confidence. I do hear it a lot when discussing entrepreneurs and start-ups, specifically when the discussion is about the founders, but what about everyone else? Why doesn’t the word self-confidence enter the business lexicon? It should. Self-confidence is at the heart of performance. The decisions we make are driven by our confidence level. The decisions we DON’T make are influenced by our self-confidence. Executives without it have frozen themselves and their company in its tracks, not moving when they should, not making the investments necessary, not removing the EVP who isn’t making their numbers, or not buying that start-up needed to penetrate new markets.
Sales people without it don’t make the cold calls, they don’t ask for the close, they don’t challenge the customer, they are uncomfortable making the customer uncomfortable, they struggle introducing new products. How confident are you in your decisions? Demonstrating strength. Investor, Startup, & Entrepreneur Resources — The Roach Post. Be Good. April 2008 (This essay is derived from a talk at the 2008 Startup School.) About a month after we started Y Combinator we came up with the phrase that became our motto: Make something people want.
We've learned a lot since then, but if I were choosing now that's still the one I'd pick. Another thing we tell founders is not to worry too much about the business model, at least at first. Not because making money is unimportant, but because it's so much easier than building something great. A couple weeks ago I realized that if you put those two ideas together, you get something surprising. When you get an unexpected result like this, it could either be a bug or a new discovery. I suspect it's the latter, because as soon as this thought occurred to me, a whole bunch of other things fell into place. Examples For example, Craigslist. In Patrick O'Brian's novels, his captains always try to get upwind of their opponents. I'm not saying startups should aim to end up like Craigslist. Power Morale Help.