Founder Lesson
Every so often I run across a startup podcast that has a bunch of lessons in it, so it’s difficult to choose just one. That happened with this podcast. Every few minutes I was taking down a new lesson, so I figured the best thing to do was to mention them all.

In this podcast, the co-founder of ModCloth made three main points that really resonated with me...

1) It's important to celebrate your wins (at minute 18:33) - The characteristics that make you a successful founder might also make you susceptible to overlooking important milestones that are important to celebrate for your team.

2) Passion, persistency & intelligence matter more than domain experience (at minute 27:38) - Disruption often comes from outside of an industry, so don’t be afraid of starting something in a space where you are inexperienced.

3) The purpose of what you do is what makes an enduring startup (at minute 34:44) - Great startups are not opportunistic businesses developed to make money. In great startups a strong mission that team members, partners and investors can believe in deeply comes way before any notion of financial gain.

As with all of my blog posts, I’d recommend listening to all of this podcast.

Update: This article was used for my monthly Hypepotamus column (that includes some addition content from Chau Nguyen. All of my Hypepotamus articles are here and here.

Thanks to these folks for helping us all learn faster
Susan Gregg Koger (@SusanGKoger), founder & Chief Creative Officer of ModCloth (@ModCloth)
Stanford University (@Stanford)
Stanford ECorner (@ECorner)

Please let me and others know what you think about this topic
Email me privately at dave@switchyards.com or let's discuss publicly at @davempayne.