Early focus, environment, and perspective

Welcome back to the Z Fellows newsletter! Every Monday we share 3 ideas - to help you build companies, ship products, and create your life's work.

1: On Early Focus

“In the first few weeks of a startup’s life, the founders really need to figure out what they’re doing and why.  Then they need to build a product some users really love.  Only after that, they should focus on growth above all else.

A startup that prematurely targets a growth goal often ends up making a nebulous product that some users sort of like and papering over this with ‘growth hacking’.  That sort of works—at least, it will fool investors for awhile until they start digging into retention numbers—but eventually the music stops.

I think the right initial metric is “Do any users love our product so much they spontaneously tell other people to use it?”  Until that’s a “yes”, founders are generally better off focusing on this instead of a growth target.” — Sam Altman

Source: Before Growth

2: On Environment

The cost of not surrounding yourself with ambitious people is too high.

“Ambitious people are rare, so if everyone is mixed together randomly, as they tend to be early in people’s lives, then the ambitious ones won’t have many ambitious peers.

When you take people like this and put them together with other ambitious people, they bloom like dying plants given water.

Probably most ambitious people are starved for the sort of encouragement they’d get from ambitious peers, whatever their age.” — Paul Graham

Source: The Anatomy of Determination

3: On Perspective

Steve Jobs sent this email to himself in 2010:

Source: Internal Tech Emails

Best of The Week

See you next Monday,

- Jay + The Z Fellows Team

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