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Hello friend,
Toronto is too hot in the summer. Here’s what I heard at Toronto Tech Week while I tried to stay cool:
If you ask if you’re being ambitious enough you have your answer
The latest crop of AI-native companies is proving you can grow bigger, faster.
A billion dollar company isn’t cool, a trillion dollar company is cool.
Invert objections to requirements
The default response to an ambitious plan is to list the reasons why it won’t work.
Here’s a more valuable question:
What would need to be true for my company to be worth a trillion dollars?
Problems are pets, solutions are cattle
Multiple unicorn founders stressed the importance of focusing on a problem and being flexible about solutions.
“If you want to build a great company, you can't fall in love with one solution to a problem. You actually have to fall in love with a problem.”
My neighbor June has a hunger problem and is flexible about solutions
Your mind is the shortest path from problem to solution
Typing is 1 KB per minute. Your brain operates at 1 TB per second. You can never make up that difference. Work on your own problems, you know them best.
“Building a snowboard store was utterly load bearing for the company of Shopify, still 20 years later today.”
Have an AI story
Talent and investors are excited about AI, not much about anything else.
The fastest way to get out of a conversation was to tell someone you’re working on a SaaS.
Blessed be the technical
“The single biggest mistake that I made was I gave up being technical.” -
Even if you become a billionaire you’ll wish you could code better.
AI makes being technical easier. Don’t fumble it or you might get stuck in the 9 comma club.
Step out of the shadows
That’s newsletter #1, hope you liked it.
Cheers,
Will Pate