School for Startups Minutes

Sleep. There's nothing more important for your brain than sleep. Have a good day.

The absolute best way you can challenge and push your brain is also one of the hardest things to do: challenge your opinions. That's right, take everything that you believe, including what you believe about the president, and then look at the other side. Challenge yourself to understand those ideas, too.      

Generations need to hang out together. It is incredibly beneficial for both. For the elderly, it's a great way to learn new things, new societal Trends, and to get that boost of energy for the youngsters, they need a steady stream of guidance, and they learn from the Elder generation things that are cool, like history.

Travel, especially international travel, is one of the very best ways to expand your brain and make you think about things you've never thought about before. It's a great way to push yourself. Please, go take a trip.

My favorite word in the whole language is neuroplasticity . Let's talk about it. Neuro means brain; plasticity means it can change, it's still malleable. We can still make little, subtle differences. That's such a cool idea. We're not stuck being as stupid as I am right now; I'm not stuck like this forever. I can actually get smarter and you can, too. You can make subtle changes to your brain that...

Once the document is done, don't put it away in a binder and on a shelf. Use it. Continue to update it. When you make a big sale, put that in there and then update how that changes the model, so that if someone asks for it, you can say, "I'll get that for you in 24 hours.

At this point, you're going to do two things. One: share the document with as many people as you can. Let everyone read it. Invite input, beg people for whatever advice they can offer. And number two: start executing it. You've worked hard - now go and do the plan.

Today, obviously, the next step is to fill in the template, but you will find questions that you cannot answer. It will be hard. You will have to leave some things blank. It's okay.

Don't try to write it from scratch. Get the help of a template. There are many great templates that you can use. They help drive the conversation, and the text helps you think of things that you would have forgotten. They're all great. Pick one.

This week is one of the most dreaded in entrepreneurship: the hated business plan. I've heard every excuse in the world not to write one - "No one will read it," "It's not that important," "It's just a big waste of time," "Those are out of style." Every excuse you can think of. But no matter how you slice it, it is still very beneficial for you and will definitely help you be more successful, the...

In 2000, a Garmin engineer was driving to a client meeting and got lost. This was before smartphones, and even the Garmin devices were so complicated that he ended up lost. He sat down on the side of the road and realized that maybe the device was designed wrong. He went back and redesigned it to be as simple as possible for the driver, and it turned into a billion-dollar industry.

Those rubbery chemicals that he had left overnight turned into the goop that we call today Silly Putty. A factory error turned into one of the best-selling toy products of all time. The lesson is: failure in one market can lead to success in a different market that you hadn't anticipated.

Well, the mistake feature, of course, was the screenshots, which were a huge hit. They enjoyed it more than the game, which led to the generation of meme-sharing platforms, a multi-billion-dollar industry. The moral: sometimes what you build is not what they want. The glitch may be the gold mine.

Well, that jug of forgotten tea that sat in the back of the refrigerator for an entire weekend turned into one of the latest health crazes out there. The fizzy fermented drink is now a three-billion-dollar-a-year product. It's called kombucha, and it's one of the biggest health products out there. Sometimes products just need a new label.

This week, we're going to have some fun and talk about business accidents that turned into billions of dollars. We're going to start with a 1995 Starbucks story. One of the baristas was making a cold drink, and someone poured a steamer with hot milk over it by mistake, creating a big mess. One of the customers said, "Oh, I want to try that." Guess what happened next? When the barista made a mistak...

An Italian artist named Salvatore Garau made headlines when he sold an invisible sculpture. There was nothing there—just an empty space marked by a square of tape on the floor. And a buyer paid—how much do you think?—eighteen thousand dollars for "the energy of the vacuum."      

So, imagine a website that's simply a grid—a thousand by a thousand—and each tiny point on the grid is barely visible. Alex Tew sold each little point for one dollar. Companies bought them in blocks of a thousand so they could create a visible logo. He sold all one million pixels and made one million dollars just by selling tiny pixels on a webpage.      

A California couple noticed that their dog was squinting in the bright sun, so they made eyeglass-style sunglasses for dogs. They called them Doggles. They sold tens of thousands of them—even to the military, which used them in desert missions. They've now sold in 60 countries and made over 25 million dollars. Doggles—that's right, goggles for your dogs.

Alex Craig launched a company that would send potatoes, yes. Real potatoes in the mail with handwritten notes on it. He even got on Shark Tank and made a deal with Kevin O'Leary, who said advertising need to be weird to work. Mailing potatoes sure qualifies for that.

This week, we're going to have a slightly lighter topic so we can have some fun and relax a little. Maybe life is stressful for you, so this might be a nice break. We're going to talk about the five silliest products ever. In 1975, adman Gary Dahl was sitting around drinking with some friends, and they were all complaining about their pets. He joked that the perfect pet would be a rock. Within a f...

Eighty-six percent of millionaires and billionaires got there one way - by starting a business. Not luck, not waiting, not building over time. Starting a business is the best way to become a millionaire. Eighty-six percent of millionaires started a business.

This statistic is very sad to me. Only two percent of the wealthy got there by saving their entire lives. It works, but it just takes so long. Most millionaires want to become rich in their 20s and 30s so they can enjoy it. Only two percent get wealthy over time.

CEO, vice president, CFO, doctors, lawyers, accountants - all great ways to get rich. It just takes a really long time, and the chances are pretty small. Less than five percent get rich this way.

What are the odds of you inheriting a bunch of money? Well, you probably already know if you're going to, but the odds are very low. Only seven percent of millionaires become rich through inheritance. It's not as much as people think.

  How do you get rich? How do rich people end up that way? This week, we're going to talk about it. I've come up with about ten ways you can get rich in this world, and I've divided those into five categories—one a day. Each day, I will introduce a new category and give you the odds of that way making you rich.   So today, how many people get rich purely from luck? What would that be—things like w...