Entrepreneurs are often advised to focus on networking to increase visibility and access to capital. However, listening to billionaire innovators like Chamath Palihapitiya, founder of Social Capital, or Naval Ravikant, co-founder of AngelList, reveals a different perspective, different priorities.
Founders who succeed clearly optimize all available resources, but ultimately, they focus on creating something of undeniable value. In essence, they act decisively on new ideas, concentrate on doing great work, and deliver technologies, products, and services that matter, that solve a problem, meet a need, or fulfill a desire.
Naval Ravikant dismantles a common myth: success comes from who you know. Networking, he argues, is merely a distraction when it’s “small talk” and “shaking hands” at conferences and meet-ups. Targeted, purposeful connections with people you respect, people you can learn from, or recruit are much more valuable. “Do something great and your network will instantly emerge!” “Focus on your product, your team, and your users,” and the right people will come to you.1
Ravikant emphasizes that building a startup entails confronting “an infinite set of problems” not only as a fledgling enterprise but also over time. Scattered focus doesn’t lead to a sustainable business. Rather, a founder must take full responsibility for allocating attention and energy each day, for controlling inputs and outputs. “Attention,’ says Ravikant, “is the currency of life.”2
Ravikant has also noted the importance of recruiting “high agency people” who can be relied upon to get stuff done. Likewise, Nick Saban, college football’s most decorated coach, led with the mantra “Do Your Job,” and bluntly stated, “High achievers don’t like mediocre people…”3 In sports, tech, or any field, every member of the team must be capable of excellence. To quote high-achiever, billionaire Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems: “The team you build is the company you build.”4
In 2017, Social Capital founder Chamath Palihapitiya spoke at the Stanford School of Business, stating that a small, elite group holds disproportionate power over key assets, the flow of capital, and global decision-making. Palihapitiya followed up by saying, “First order of business is that I want to…be at that table.” How? Palihapitiya intends to prove that he can do what they do as well as they do it, and then do it better than they can. “They will let me stay [at the table] because I add value.”5 Like Ravikant, his view is that success relies upon doing the hard work, creating a product, service, or experience that people find useful, desirable, and potentially, world-changing.
- x.com/StartupArchive_/status/1769395062729752957?lang=en
- youtube.com/watch?v=TmAO9jBqJf4
- youtube.com/watch?v=2ulRxlork5M
- x.com/vkhosla/status/1445973802282745857
- youtube.com/watch?v=8qjHwHsAUBM