tylertringas

Sounds like you're describing calm companies: https://calmfund.com/thesis

Actually the question was about broadly how to learn things quickly.

>If you have someone who needs to learn how to quickly, you don't teach them theory

Elon would disagree: "One bit of advice: it is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree — make sure you understand the fundamental principles, ie the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to."

https://lifehacker.com/elon-musk-on-learning-new-things-view...

Always appreciate these thoughtful critiques on HN :)

> I would have included a sauté pan

Yep. It's the first recommendation on the list! Though I typo'd (fixed now) as sauce pan.

> Follow the recipe, then don't follow it. Yes! At first I found it super helpful be ultra-precise: read the recipe twice, use a digital thermometer exactly, measure everything, etc. Then you learn what "good" is by tasting, then you can start improvising and substituting. True of how to learn a lot of things I think

Agree that's the true minimum viable set, and you can cook a lot of things with just that. But I think if a novice cook was trying to work through the cookbooks I recommended, they would find it frustrating not to have some of the other stuff I recommend. My "minimum viable" is sort of "your lack of X won't be a substantially annoying obstacle from completing most of the recipes in these essential books"

Agreed! But, I think very novice cooks should rigorously follow recipes, learn what a good result is across a wide variety of dishes, then learn how to substitute things or change up recipes. Or rather that's what worked for me.

Good catch! I just typo'd and used convection twice.

Hi folks, Tyler here from Earnest Capital. I'll be leading one of these Mastermind Sprints and happy to answer any questions or hear suggestions here.

Basically like a lot of folks we've been looking for ways to increase our motivation and stay productive during gestures at everything

Mastermind are great for collective accountability and learning from peers, but my experience has been that they are often too unstructured and open-ended. So we've created a more structured, focused, time-boxed, and mentor-facilitated version. We beta tested it over the Summer and founders loved it so we're opening it up to broader applications.

Focused on bootstrapper type founders/businesses though we're open-minded about that.

investors like me are at a basic level middlemen. We have to raise capital from other sources and then invest it in founders. So it's not so much a questions of what kind of returns we're 'happy' with as it is, what kind of returns will enable us to keep collecting more money that we can turn around and use to back founders. If I was already a billionaire deploying my own capital, it would be a different story (and I'm actually a big proponent of folks investing with lower return expectation because I think entrepreneurship is an inherent social good) but that's not our situation.

> is all just ear candy and hype without evidence the only evidence i can think of would be reviews from other founders who've worked with us. They are a super nice bunch and are generally happy to have a chat if you're curious. Here's one founder quoting another on the non-cash benefits of working with us: https://twitter.com/_rchase_/status/1233074457406771208?s=20

>Maybe earn trust with founders before asking for or expecting extra icing? 100% Agreed.

the untold secret of bootstrapping to date is that is has often been done from positions of privilege: family money, savings from a very high paying career, spouse's salary, inheritance. Very hard to make broad generalizations since the companies are often privately held and under the radar (so no statistically significant data) but my experience is that the case far more often than you would think.

On the other side, I see many many founders essentially twist their business plan into something VCs want to see because accelerators/VCs are the only source of capital for early stage tech companies.

Funds like Earnest trying to change that.

I'd say the number of non-venture-backed software businesses exceeds venture-backed by at least 20:1. See also "patio11's law" https://twitter.com/mmcgrana/status/1260250538299408387?s=20

thx! probably this one: https://earnestcapital.com/investment-memo-fund-2/

i hear you. not enough. we're scaling up as fast as we can!

all good. we can pivot to Goat Trail by Earnest Capital(TM)

Ah yes, fair. I'm not sure there can be a true solution to "we have to see your data before know if we can invest or not"

Our approach here is 1) we always give value before we ask for anything. Some strategy, resources, writing prompts, and anything else we can think of on a topic.. THEN we say "hey if you want to share your thinking on this here's how" 2) it's 100% optional. Founders can go through the entire process, get feedback from the community, hopefully improve their strategy, without ever sharing anything with us.

But good points to consider and thanks.

hmm, will look into it. assume it's some default accessibility feature of our site theme

Yea, for founders going down a traditional VC path, there is some what weird but actually sensible logic to the idea that "being good at pitching VCs" is actually a useful skill to filter for. If I'm a Seed VC, assessing how well the founder will do at raising from Series A-F investors is actually part of the game.

We do "funding for bootstrappers" so most founders that work with us don't really plan on needing to raise more capital (it's not prohibited or anything, just not Plan A). So we and they don't really care about how "good" they are at playing the game of pitching.

Can you say more? We explicitly do ask, at the end of each section, if founders want to (optionally) send us the results to build up their profile/"application"... so there's some above board data collection happening.

What's your main concern re: data collection with SS and/or trailhead?

Agreed.

But also, the way raise money for Earnest is very similar to Trailhead: https://twitter.com/tylertringas/status/1260972763285774337?...

Build a relationship and have a discussion over time is so much better for all parties vs "pitch me right now and I'll decide instantly"

+1. Let's hope

Thanks! The gate-keeping / "kiss the ring" approach to raising money has got to go.

Hmm, i had no idea. It's a derivative of our Founder Summit branding. Trailhead is the start of the path toward the summit. Also I like to hike.

I think it's a generic enough term but we'll find out!

Thanks! Definitely pulling on the same thread as Startup School (though I've never done it myself). Some structural differences might be

1/ this explicitly designed to be a replacement for the application process at Earnest. Over time you build up a profile that contains most of what we need to make an investment decision. We'll still need to chat and do diligence, but we're trying to remove a lot of the uncertainty around what should be in a pitch and when to time the pitch. Basically pitching is not a skillset we optimize for at Earnest (since most of the founders we back not intend to raise continuously more rounds of capital).

2/ This is explicitly opinionated in structure. Everything will intentionally skew towards our "funding for bootstrappers" strategy vs being generic advice. This should help founders decide if they are a fit for working with us long-term.

3/ This is not a "how to build a business" process. It's much closer to "here is a bunch of questions and prompts that we have found valuable to strengthen founders' thinking and strategy + some resources"... we're not here to teach you how to build a business with this.

> You mentioned that people get a free trial, but it sounds like someone can sign up for trailhead and stay in it for the long term without ever deciding to raise the earnest. What do you guys do in that case? When does someone get kicked out of their free trial? :)

good question. this is subject to experiments/change but the way we're thinking about it now is 1) Founder Summit remains a paid community (we are still a small fund and this allows us to hire an awesome team + pay people for workshops, etc) 2) We want to avoid a "pay to pitch" scenario so Trailhead folks get a 3-month free trial. 3) At the end they can choose: don't apply to Earnest but stay in the community and pay, apply to Earnest (portfolio co's get free access), or decide they've gotten what they need and move on from both.

hey folks, I'm the founder of Earnest Capital and love to hear questions or feedback. The gist here is I think the way we make founders pitch investors is pretty lame and we can do better. Definitely a v0.1 of our thinking here and would love suggestions for how to take it further.

Pretty cool right?

(post author here): The team did not have equity but I paid out substantial bonuses voluntarily to all employees. There's a lot of work to be done on how to incentivize employees in bootstrapped startups tbh. Nathan Barry has some good posts on the topic but I don't think it's a problem with any best practices yet: https://nathanbarry.com/profit-sharing/ https://nathanbarry.com/equity/

Bootstrap or just don't raise 'too much' capital and not from VCs. Lots of optionality still available for founders who raise eg less than $500k and don't give up control. (I'm not exactly neutral on this tho)

Lots of reasons, although as i said in my post, unless it's a "strategic acquisition" at a huge multiple, it's usually not because "the math" of selling makes more sense than holding it. In my case, having the liquid capital from the sale allowed me to start a fund to invest in more companies like this (https://earnestcapital.com/). Something I probably couldn't have done while operating my SaaS and just out of the business's profits. Other reasons are that the acquirer is a better fit to take the business to the next level, so if you hold it the business will likely degrade whereas a buyer has the capacity to invest in and grow it... also to create opportunities for growth for talented employees who may otherwise get bored and leave.