You want respect? Be the best in the room. Outwork, outthink, outperform.

Be confident, nice to everyone, and maybe share your lunch. Sometimes respect starts with a sandwich.

How to Earn Respect 

• Why Read:

  • The article provides valuable insights on cultivating a mindset of mastery, attention to detail, and earning the respect of top performers, which can significantly benefit startup founders in their pursuit of excellence.

• Featuring:

  • Admired Leadership (@AdmiredLeaders), a development program focused on leadership behaviors that create loyal followership & results

• Link: 

  • “Game Recognizes Game”

Key Concepts and Tactics:

• Recognizing True Mastery:

  • Point: High performers look for signs that others understand and appreciate the dedication required for top-level mastery.

  • "Leaders, athletes, and performers who are highly skilled and experienced look for signs that others understand what it takes to perform at the highest level. They look for people who have "game," which is another way of saying they recognize others who appreciate the ingredients of top performance and who have begun mastering the skills associated with those elements."

• The Hidden Details of Excellence:

  • Point: Consistent elite performance depends on mastering very specific, often unseen processes, actions and details.

  • "The secret high performers know is that distinguished and consistent results depend on very specific details and actions. These details are often invisible to those with less skill and highly elusive to those who have not yet broken through to top performance."

  • "In most sporting endeavors, for instance, what separates professionals who play for a living and high amateurs who wish to are not drastic differences in skill but a distinctive focus on less obvious processes, actions, and details that are hidden from view."

• Demonstrating "Game":

  • Point: Those striving for excellence demonstrate "game" by valuing and incorporating the nuanced practices of top performers into their own processes.

  • "When less experienced performers can point to these details, display that they value them by incorporating them into their processes, and work hard to master the actions connected to them, they are thought to also have "game.""

• Keen Observation and Questioning:

  • Point: Developing "game" involves closely observing elite performers, asking questions, and seeking wisdom about the nuances that enable peak performance.

  • "Those less experienced who have game usually spend a lot of time observing top performers looking for the ingredients that give them a performance edge. They ask loads of questions and seek the wisdom of those more skilled than they are but with an eye toward nuance and process, not skills and results."

• Building Mastery Habits:

  • Point: Having "game" means incorporating the routines, behaviors and practices of elite performers into your own daily preparation.

  • "Excellence at the highest level of any field or discipline shares common routines, behaviors, and practices that promote that elite performance. When you have game, you have come to learn of some of these actions and details and have built them into your daily practice and preparation."

• Earning Respect:

  • Point: Those demonstrating "game" gain the respect of established high performers, who are more likely to invite them in to further explore the nuances of mastery.

  • "Those who already have game recognize this and are more likely to invite you into their tent to explore and discuss what makes special so special."

Tactics from Two AI Founders

Why Read: 

• The article provides actionable advice for startup founders on adapting to industry trends, leveraging open source, standing out in crowded markets, focusing on customer needs, and prioritizing rapid iteration.

Featuring:

• Vivek Ramaswami (@vivekramaswami), Partner at Madrona

• Devvret Rishi (@devvret_rishi), Chief Executive Officer at Predibase

• Travis Addair (@TravisAddair), Co-Founder & CTO at Predibase

Link: 

• “Building Predibase: AI, Open-Source, and Commercialization with Dev Rishi and Travis Addair”

Key Concepts and Tactics:

• Recognize opportunities arising from industry trends: 

  • "What convinced me about the idea of making deep learning accessible was an extrapolation of what I perceived to be a trend happening in the industry, which was on two different fronts. One was the consolidation of data infrastructure from data swamps and data lakes and unstructured towards more canonical systems of record for data. Data was getting better and getting organized. The other was on the modeling side, that model architectures were consolidating as well towards transformer-based architectures."

• Stay flexible as customer needs and market evolve with new technologies like LLMs:

  • "Our vision hasn't necessarily changed that much, but our tactics have changed entirely. Our vision initially was as a platform for anyone to be able to start to build deep learning models. We initially started with data analysts as an audience in 2021...The biggest change that happened is that last value proposition, which was third on our list, has become the most important thing that people have started to care about."

• Stand out in a crowded market by advancing the ecosystem with novel research/frameworks: 

  • "The only way that we've seen to be effective to stand out as an organization, especially when you don't have that hour with a customer, you need to go ahead and build a brand where people are just going to look at you for maybe a few seconds or a minute and make an assessment of, "Is this worth my time?" The only way that we've seen work is you have to do work that advances the ecosystem yourself."

• Focus on a narrow slice of an important problem versus boiling the ocean: 

  • "Attacking a narrow slice of the market is the only way that I found to be able to stay above the noise. The reality is that we talked about how pre-LLMs so much of our focus was on getting people to care, even understanding what the value proposition was, and now everyone cares."

• Be wary of developing solutions not grounded in real customer needs:

  • "One tip I would say is to be wary anytime someone suggests that you should pick something that's strategically important to your business, like pick your go-to-market motion or pick what you want your differentiator to be. A real risk that happens toward first-time founders is you sit on a couch, and you're like, "Hey, what can we do that would be really interesting?" And that's a really interesting trap, I think, to be able to fall into that doesn't essentially take in the customer lens of what customers actually care about."

• Prioritize velocity by shipping quickly and getting customer feedback fast: 

  • "Everyone who's done startups has emphasized the importance of velocity. It's very easy to mix up velocity with, "I need to go ahead and pull 16-hour days and be building a lot of code." To me, velocity is building highly iteratively. How do you get feedback as soon as possible? The easiest way to do that is what Travis's point is, is cutting scope. One of my favorite bits of advice that I've gotten, which is a bit controversial, is nothing takes longer than a week."

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