Phil Strazzulla is a finance nerd turned entrepreneur. Phil started investing in the stock market when he was 12, but set his sights on starting a company after an internship at a two person company during college. After graduating from NYU, Phil began his career working in venture capital at Bessemer Venture Partners before getting his MBA at Harvard Business School. He’s a self taught programmer who has started two bootstrapped technology companies. He now spends most of his time working on SelectSoftware, a site dedicated to providing in depth and unbiased reviews of business software. Outside of work, Phil is working on his yoga poses, meditation practice, sous vide skills, and golf swing. When not enjoying the many benefits of working from home, you can find him traveling around the world to escape his arch nemesis, the dreaded Boston weather.
Entrepreneurial Role Models:
- Chris Savage Co-founder & CEO of Wistia
- Jason Fried Co-founder & CEO of Basecamp
When business started difficulties overcame:
“I think one of the major difficulties was social pressure. I graduated business school in 2014, I started a business right out of the gate, it took a really long time for it to get off the ground and it was never a runaway success. And so I sort of gave up a lot of earnings and saw my peers accelerate on their career trajectories for five years. And I was at this crossroads of hey do you want to go try to work at a company and have a real job… And the thing I just wanted to do was start a new company”…[Listen for More]
Favourite Books:
- Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger Book by Charles T. Munger
Also mentioned
- The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers Book by Ben Horowitz
- The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon Book by Brad Stone
- The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life Book by Alice Schroeder
Favourite Quote:
“the harder you work the luckier you get” Dan Gable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Gable
Recommended Online Resources:
- Indie Hackers – Work Together to Build Profitable Online Businesses. Connect with developers who are sharing the strategies and revenue numbers behind their companies and side projects
- Hacker News is a social news website focusing on computer science and entrepreneurship. It is run by Paul Graham’s investment fund and start-up incubator, Y Combinator. In general, content that can be submitted is defined as “anything that gratifies one’s intellectual curiosity”
- Paul Graham Essays – is an English born computer scientist, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, author, and essayist. He is best known for his work on Lisp, his former start-up, Viaweb (later renamed “Yahoo! Store”), co-founding the influential start-up accelerator and seed capital firm Y Combinator, his blog, and Hacker News.
Best Advice to Other Entrepreneurs:
“understand bias, understand your own bias and understand other people’s bias especially when you are starting off… People take their experiences and kind of regurgitate them as advice to you and it’s not always the most relevant stuff. And what can be really hard especially when you are starting off is that these people are very credentialled and somebody may be sold their company for a hundred million dollars or $1 billion or they took it public and they are telling you a thing and they just don’t have the perspective to understand that that’s actually not relevant for your business or could be bad advice. And so, understanding other folks bias is super, super hard to do however very, very impactful. And of course, you have to understand your own bias. Are you cheap? Are you liberal with your money? Are you somebody who kind of swings for the fences? Are you overly analytical question? All these things have to be reined in because all of your strengths that you should supercharge can also be things that can lead to your detriment. And so, try to be introspective, try to have advisers who will tell you to your face how you are thinking, correctly or incorrectly”…[Listen for More]
More About Phil Strazzulla:
Neil’s Quote at the Beginning:
“The expert in anything was once a beginner.” Helen Hayes
Other Quotes From the Chat with Phil Strazzulla:
- “I think that you always run a tremendous amount of experiments when you start a new business, a truly novel concept. And of course, knowing the outcomes of those experiments would have been enormously helpful”
- “there has to be a really strong analogue to what you want to do that already exists. It’s very hard to completely change consumer or business behaviour. What I mean by that is if you are starting a business you are going to have a business model that probably already exists. Don’t try to iterate on the business model and how you make money. If you have a product it should be a product that already exists just it’s just better, cheaper, faster… I would look for what is it that already exists that gives you a lot of confidence that the thing that you are building is going to be successful”
- “grit and resilience is probably the most important aspect”
- “you have got to stay there and you have got to keep fighting whenever anybody pushes you down and you have just got to get back up and keep shooting”
- “as entrepreneurs we are trying to solve problems”
- “make sure you are prepared because opportunities will walk in front of you at some point and you need to have the skill set, the network, the confidence, the perspective in order to take advantage of those things”
- “Elon is not sitting around reading books all of the time he is carving his own future”
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