Soi Silicon

Within academic Finance, there is a concept known as “Portfolio Theory”.

It states that you need to buy a certain amount of assets in order to diversify away the ‘unique’ risk.

In other words, the weird stuff will cancel each other out.

I would argue that this concept should also be applied to being an entrepreneur.

Instead of putting all your eggs in 1 basket, you should try to have at least 2 products in different categories. That way, if some ‘unique’ risk comes along, the other one will be okay. That unique risk could be something like Google entering your space.

This also applies to the model of ‘rapid prototyping’. The more prototypes you can build, the more likely you will reach the expected outcome.

In the case of entrepreneurism, I would argue that if you create enough ‘helpful’ and ‘unique’ products, you will eventually be rewarded proportionately, even if the majority end up being duds.

Lessons:

• Take on more than 1 project at a time. Ignore the people who tell you to focus – that is a ‘cog-in-the-wheel’ employee type of mentality.
• Iterate quickly. The faster you can, the faster you will get to your deserved reward.

Mark Pincus says when he realizes a project won’t succeed, he stops it immediately. Even when he had VC funding lined up, he still stopped one of his projects.

Mark says that you need to stop COMPLETELY; otherwise, your brain won’t have mental cycles free to process new information and get new ideas.

Action: I blocked a phone number of someone who has been annoying me. Avoid people touting ‘mindset’ over real skills.