Paul Graham on mistakes that kill startups, Steve Jobs on being a doer and thinker, and the garage where Jeff Bezos built Amazon

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: Paul Graham on mistakes that kill startups

1. Single Founder

2. Bad Location

3. Marginal Niche

4. Derivative Idea

5. Obstinacy (stick-to-your-vision approach)

6. Hiring Bad Programmers

7. Choosing the Wrong Platform

8. Slowness in Launching

9. Launching Too Early

10. Having No Specific User in Mind

11. Raising Too Little Money

12. Spending Too Much

13. Raising Too Much Money

14. Poor Investor Management

15. Sacrificing Users to (Supposed) Profit

16. Not Wanting to Get Your Hands Dirty

17. Fights Between Founders

18. A Half-Hearted Effort

Source: The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups by Paul Graham

2: Steve Jobs on being a doer and thinker

“The doers are the thinkers.

Did Leonardo have a guy off to the side who was thinking five years into the future about what he would paint or the technology he would use to paint it?

Of course not. Leonardo was an artist, but he also mixed his own paints. He also was a fairly good chemist and knew about pigments and human anatomy.

Combining all of those skills together - the art and the science, the thinking and the doing - is what resulted in the exceptional result.

There is no difference in our industry. The people that have really made the contributions have been the thinkers and the doers.

It’s very easy for somebody to take credit for the thinking and say, ‘Oh, I thought of this three years ago’. But usually, when you dig a little deeper, you find that the people that really did it were also the people that really worked through the hard intellectual problems as well.”

Source: Steve jobs on Thinkers And Doers

3: The garage where Jeff Bezos built Amazon

Best of The Week

See you next Monday,

- The Z Fellows Team

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