The Start-Up
of You
- Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself,
and Transform Your Career
My notes:
Prince Ramanan

All Humans are Entrepreneurs!
….not because they start companies but
because the will to create is encoded in human
DNA, and creation is the essence of
entrepreneurship.

Permanent beta is essentially a lifelong
commitment to continuous personal growth.
For life in permanent beta, the trick is to never
stop starting. The start-up is you.

Winning careers, like winning start-ups, are in
permanent beta: always a work in progress.

Your competitive advantage is formed by the
interplay of three different, ever-changing
forces:
• your assets,
• your aspirations/values
• the market realities

Often it's when you come in contact with
challenges other people find hard, but you find
easy that you know you're in possession of a
valuable soft asset.

Many people think you get career stability by
minimizing all risk.
But ironically, in a changing world, that's one of
the riskiest things you can do.

Remember: If you don't find risk, risk will find you

You remake yourself as you grow and as the
world changes.
Your identity doesn't get found.
It emerges!

One lunch is worth dozens of emails.

Before dreaming about the future or marking
plans, you need to articulate what you already
have going for you - as entrepreneurs do.

The fastest way to change yourself is to hang out
with people who are already the way you want
to be.

Great opportunities almost never fit your
schedule.

Observe, orient, decide, act.
It’s fighter pilot terminology. If you have the
faster OODA loop in a dogfight, you live. The
other person dies.
In Silicon Valley, the OODA loop of your
decision-making is effectively what
differentiates your ability to succeed.

How you manage your own personal career is
the exact way you manage a small business.
Your brand matters.

Involve yourself in organizations that try to
systemically improve society at a massive scale.

A team in the business world will tend to
perform at the level of the worst individual
team member. Remember this in your recruiting

Make sure a certain percentage of the people
that you're hiring are generalists so that you
can be, kind of reconfigured in the workforce
pretty easily.

Seeing what someone's reading is like seeing the
first derivative of their thinking.

Whether you want to learn a new skill or simply
be better at the job you were hired to do, it's
now your job to train and invest in yourself.

Establish an identity independent of your
employer, city, and industry.
This way, you’ll have a professional identity
that you can carry with you as you shift jobs.

If something worthwhile will be riskier in five
years than it is now, be more aggressive about
taking it on now.
As you age and build more assets, your risk
tolerance shifts.

This formal philosophy of learning treats
knowledge like a fixed asset: learn, then you
have it forever!
But as a modern professional, you can't acquire
knowledge this way, because the knowledge you
need isn't static. it's always changing

The HR department is like the soldiers in the
movie 300, holding the line. They have no power
to say yes but enormous power to say no.
Their job is to prevent you from moving
forward. Find a way to vault past them by
getting introductions to people who can say
yes.

If you want to find out how resourceful you can
be, shrink your budget. Move your deadlines up.
See how you cope. This may make you more
resilient to actual hardships that inevitably
arise.

Throwing your heart into something is great,
but when any one thing becomes all that, you
stand for, you're vulnerable to an identity crisis
when you pivot to a Plan B.

Making a decision reduces opportunities in the
short run but increases opportunities in the
long run.
To move forward in your career, you have to
commit to specific opportunities as part of an
iterative plan, despite doubt and despite
inconvenience.

Opportunities do not float like clouds in the
sky. They're attached to people.
If you're looking for an opportunity, you're really
looking for a person.

How you gather, manage, and use information
will determine whether you win or lose.

The most entrepreneurial employees want to
establish personal brands that stand apart from
their employers.
It's a rational, necessary response to the end of
lifetime employment.

If I ever hear a founder talk about oh this is
how I have a balanced life so on and so forth?
They're not committed to winning.

Network!
When information moves back and forth
between knowledgeable people who care, the
signal strengthens.
Two (or more) well-coordinated brains beat one
every time.

Hope you Enjoyed reading!
Prince Ramanan