Sam Altman on endurance, Marc Andreessen on business plans, and getting better everyday

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: Sam Altman on Endurance

“Everyone knows that you need a great team, great execution, and a great idea. Less obvious is that you have to have great endurance. It's very tough to keep going when everyone tells you your idea sucks and it will never work. It's tough to keep going when everything goes wrong, which it almost certainly will. And it's tough to keep working when you're really tired, but very often that extra 5% at a critical point is how you beat out a competitor for a critical deal and then they disappear in the rearview mirror.

Most startups don't die at the hands of a competitor. It's more often something like an internal implosion, the founders giving up, or not building something people want (and failing to remedy that situation). You can win by endurance.”

Source: https://blog.samaltman.com/by-endurance-we-conquer

2: Marc Andreessen on Initial Business Plans

“A startup’s initial business plan doesn’t matter that much, because it is very hard to determine up front exactly what combination of product and market will result in success.

By definition you will be doing something new, in a world that is a very uncertain place. You are simply probably not going to know whether your initial idea will work as a product and a business, or not. And you will probably have to rapidly evolve your plan—possibly every aspect of it—as you go.

It is therefore much more important for a startup to aggressively seek out a big market, and product/market fit within that market, once the startup is up and running, than it is to try to plan out what you are going to do in great detail ahead of time.”

Source: https://pmarchive.com/guide_to_startups_part7.html

3: Getting 1% Better Every Day via The Compound Effect

Source: Atomic Habits by James Clear

Best of The Week

See you next Monday,

- The Z Fellows Team

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