Ambition is most underrated force of history. Ambitious people look for leverage. Each age has a dominant technology of ambition. 1000 years ago it was literacy. 1000 years ago, you'd have been training to be a monk. Institutions show up to teach the dominant tech. Universities were a response to literacy. Business school to finance. EF has 30 people around the world making friends with professors and student leaders, quietly telling people about EF as option (but not giving a hard sell). ## Ethan Mollick interview Average age of US founder is 42. Average age of a hypergrowth founder (top 0.1% of growth rate??) is 45-59. Young people start consumer apps and want to be rock stars. Some get lucky and are salient to us. But so much of the action is B2B. Lean startup good because it's good to try things. But you must still have a plan. As a entrepreneur in new category you must have a core belief behind what you're doing. Otherwise you'll get pulled around by customer feedback, maybe also advisor feedback. Solo founders underrated. Founding team breakup kills 50%. Family businesses have best survival rates. Former coworkers second best. Friends who aren't coworkers are bad. Strangers are disastrous. You can be co-founders or make a founding team that get salary and equity. Go for early and cheap failure in founding relationships. Small projects. #tweet Matt: Socially, bar to starting something with someone is really high. But so too is the bar to admitting it isn't working. EF tries to lower bar to getting into a team, and lower the bar to getting out. Task conflict (diff ideas about how to do things) is usually good, usually very generative. So long as it doesn't spread into relationship conflict. Relationship conflict (people hate each other) is very bad. Teams that don't fight about tasks are in danger of group think and are not as innovative. Matt: EF tells people you're not looking for a friend, not for the person in this cohort you most want to have a beer with. You're looking for best combination of skills. Productive teams rarely break up. Stagnating teams often go into relationship conflict. Where do good ideas come from? Consultant approach (e.g. Bezos): analyse entire internet, find a product class that looks good, ok books. Effectual: who am I? What do I know that other people don't? Who do I know / what connections that other people don't? Looking for user innovation: someone who has a problem and has to solve it by hacking something together. E.g. Excel being used for something other than adding or subtracting numbers. In UK something like 5% of population has intended something that was used by someone outside their family. Habit of abduction: Why is something happening? Why not happening? Keep a note on your phone, longlist of ideas, review monthly. "One thing you realise as you become an expert is that nobody knows that much." We have enough knowledge that we know when to ask questions. We're not exactly faking it, but there's an idea that its like we're just comfortable with assembling pieces together." EF trains people to think: what is your edge. 500K people have taken his MOOC on entrepreneurship on Coursera. Has written on pedagogy. Made pedagogical games. Made a 3 week simulation game to learn to run a business. Fake Slack, fake Gmail, etc etc. Free 80 minute version: https://interactive.wharton.upenn.edu/ !!! #tweet #todo VCs want to fund people who do really well in the game. Hiring Do NOT hire b people early. 10x managers and 10x engineers. Do NOT give people puzzles. Work samples, ideally cognitive tests. Do not randomly shoot from the hip. Work test work test work test. Reading and summarising a tonne of random stuff: this is my version of entertainment.