What Paul Graham looks for in founders, how to be successful at any job, and Reddit's origin story

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: What Paul Graham looks for in founders

1. Determination - “This has turned out to be the most important quality in startup founders… you're going to hit a lot of obstacles. You can't be the sort of person who gets demoralized easily.“

2. Flexibility - “The world of startups is so unpredictable that you need to be able to modify your dreams on the fly.“

3. Imagination - “It's not so important to be able to solve predefined problems quickly as to be able to come up with surprising new ideas. In the startup world, most good ideas seem bad initially.“

4. Naughtiness - “They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter.“

5. Friendship - “Empirically it seems to be hard to start a startup with just one founder. Most of the big successes have two or three. And the relationship between the founders has to be strong.“

Source: What We Look for in Founders by Paul Graham

2: How to be successful at any job

80,000 hours is a non-profit which produces evidence-backed research on finding a fulfilling career and success within it.

• Don’t forget to take care of yourself - “Ambitious, idealistic people often don’t take care of themselves. This can make them burn out and ultimately be less successful.“

• Surround yourself with great people - “Aim to have a wider set of weak ties in the industries and scenes you’d most like to engage with… your network will grow naturally as your skills and accomplishments improve and you have more to offer.“

• Use research into decision-making to think better - “The people with the best judgement tended to have a ‘fox’ thinking style: they considered many different points of view, were cautious and humble about what they knew, and saw their beliefs as hypotheses to test.“

• Learn how to learn - “Expertise depends not so much on how many hours a person has spent doing a task, but how many hours they’ve spent doing deliberate practice.“

• Be strategic about how you use your time at work - “In order to figure out which activities are crucial to focus on, talk to people who have succeeded in your chosen path. Don’t just trust what they tell you — work out what they actually did to get ahead.“

• Become an expert - “One thing that sets true experts apart is their ability to make creative contributions.“

Source: All the evidence-based advice we’ve found on how to be more successful in any job

3: Reddit’s origin story

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See you next Monday,

- The Z Fellows Team

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