Each week we scour the web for insightful articles to share with the Founder Institute network.
This week's top articles include tips for interviewing customers; how to wire the Silicon Valley mindset into your community; why only fools write code first, and much more.
Check out our must read articles for the week of November 3 - November 10:
| How to Wire Silicon Valley into Your Community | |
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Governments around the world routinely invest massive sums of money into taxpayer-supported venture funds, extravagant office parks, and even whole cities, in the hopes of “creating the next Silicon Valley.” But Silicon Valley cannot be replicated from the top down with money and facilities. Why, you ask? Because Silicon Valley is not a place. It’s a mindset. |
| Why Only Fools Write Code First | |
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Building first puts you at a disadvantage. Here’s why: Your job as an entrepreneur is to increase the odds that your business will succeed. Put another way, your job is to reduce the risks that prevent your venture from succeeding. There are several types of risk that can kill your company. |
| Why Your Innovation Contest Won't Work | |
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Innovation is the process of idea management – so, yes, you need great ideas to innovate, but that is only part of it. You also need to be able to select ideas. Once you’ve done that, you need the ability to execute them. While all this is going on, you have to keep people inside your organization enthusiastic about the ideas. And at the end of all of this, you have to get your great new idea to spread. To innovate, you need to be good at all of these things. |
| Interviewing Customers is a Special Kind of Torture | |
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When I started interviewing customers, the only thing I cared less about than talking about other people’s problems, was asking about them. So, I skipped all the questions I thought were BS, and jumped to the most important ones: |
| 5 Lessons From Scuba Diving on How to Survive a Startup | |
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In this post from the PlayFitness blog, New York Founder Institute grad, Pavel Asanov, compares his experience as a long-time scuba diver, to his most recent endeavor - starting a company. Pavel suggests scuba diving and startups have a lot more in common than you might initially suspect. |
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