Maintain the Mindset of a Beginner

Why Read: Reading this article will help founders cultivate a beginner's mindset, fostering continuous learning, humility, and curiosity, which are essential for achieving mastery and driving innovation in their startups.

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

Link to Article: “True Mastery Requires a Beginner’s Mind”

Key Concepts and Tactics:

• Embracing a Beginner's Mindset for True Mastery:

  • Point: Recognize that true mastery requires adopting a beginner's mindset, even after achieving significant expertise.

  • "Jigoro Kano, the founder of judo, was nearing death, he asked his students to promise they would bury him wearing his white belt, the emblem of a beginner. Kano knew that death, like true mastery, makes everyone a novice all over again. He wanted to teach his students one more lesson: To understand that even after a lifetime of improvement and achievement, mastery most relies on a beginner's mind, not upon the confidence of acquired expertise and accomplishment."

• Understanding the Psychological Aspect of Mastery:

  • Point: Acknowledge that reaching peak performance involves returning to a state of child-like curiosity.

  • "In his work on understanding self-actualization, famed psychologist Abraham Maslow discovered something similar. His research showed that those who had reached peak performance and mastery had returned to a state of child-like curiosity. Maslow called this quality a 'second naivete,' in reference to the fact that everyone is born naïve and returns to that state as they reach the highest level of psychological development."

• Cultivating Humility and Curiosity:

  • Point: Approach learning with extreme humility and curiosity, even in areas where you have expertise.

  • "Masters explore the fundamentals of high performance with extreme humility, believing that new insights arrive through naïve questions and inquiry."

• Making a Pivotal Choice for Continuous Growth:

  • Point: Choose to approach learning as if you're at the starting line, rather than resting on past accomplishments.

  • "Those with any semblance of mastery have already enjoyed some success. But as life-long learners with exceptional records of achievement, they confront a pivotal choice: Stay comfortable with the knowledge and accomplishments of the success they have already achieved, or presume they are once again at the starting line, knowing very little about how the race is really won."

• Overcoming Fear of Judgment:

  • Point: Free yourself from worry about external judgments to fully embrace a beginner's mindset.

  • "The beginner's mind comes with a price. It requires the 'student' to free themselves of worry about external judgments and to operate openly without fear of being seen as a fool. This allows them to see fundamental actions and understandings anew, without the burden of presumption or the blinders of an existing paradigm."

• Committing to Continuous Learning:

  • Point: Focus on understanding rather than external approval to achieve true mastery.

  • "Masterful performers commit to an innocence of learning focused only on understanding and unaffected by external judgments or evaluations. Only by rejecting the need for acceptance and approval can the mindset of a beginner take hold and provide new insights."

The Benefits of Being Acquihired

Why Read: Understand the potential benefits of acqui-hires, including financial rewards, career advancement opportunities, and long-term growth, reframing them as positive outcomes rather than failures.

Featuring: Marina Temkin (@MTemkin), Senior Writer, Venture and Startups at TechCrunch

Link:“Selling a startup in an ‘acqui-hire’ is more lucrative than it seems, founders and VCs say”

Key Concepts and Tactics:

• Understanding the Value of Acqui-hires:

  • Point: Acqui-hires can be more financially rewarding than they initially appear, especially for founders and key employees.

  • "Selling under such circumstances is often not as poor an outcome for founders and key staff as it initially seems."

  • "Buyers often reward the top team members for their hard work at the startup by giving them much better jobs and higher pay packages than they could land elsewhere with the same experience."

• Recognizing Career Advancement Opportunities:

  • Point: Acqui-hires often result in significant career leaps for founders and key employees.

  • "Generally, when companies are acquired, it's considered a down move," said Nivas Ravichandran, one of the first employees at Frilp, a startup acqui-hired by Freshworks in 2015. "But acquisitions are a great opportunity from a financial standpoint. If you come in via an acquisition, the pay and equity are better than if you join as a lateral hire."

• Understanding Deal Structures in Acqui-hires:

  • Point: Acquirers often structure deals to incentivize founders and key employees to stay with the company long-term.

  • "While traditional M&A deals often include retention bonuses for a management team, paid out 18 to 24 months post-acquisition, acqui-hires increasingly focus on incentives for the startup's workforce. This means not just offering founders such deals, but key employees could receive higher salaries and overall compensation tied to extended equity vesting schedules."

  • "Acquirers 'are often willing to give more seniority for these people not to have to put as much cash into the deal,' Chandrasekar said. 'Those are the kinds of things that acquirers are getting increasingly clever about.'"

• Recognizing the Prevalence of Acqui-hires:

  • Point: Acqui-hires are more common than publicly known, especially in specific sectors like AI.

  • "In Q2, 90% of the M&A transactions were undisclosed, according to the latest PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor."

  • "AI startups are now becoming an acquihire target, Point72's Chandrasekar said. Large tech companies are now hunting for pre-ChatGPT-era AI startups."

• Reframing the Perception of Acqui-hires:

  • Point: Founders should view acqui-hires as potentially positive outcomes, not as failures.

  • "In this market, being acqui-hired should not be viewed negatively, those who have been through it want other founders to know. Founders can be well-enough rewarded financially. They may discover rewarding long-term career opportunities at their new big employer."

  • "And if they still have the entrepreneurial bug when their lock-up ends, they can always launch another new startup."