Summary of today’s issue
🔑 #1 - The Habits to Make a Successful Organization
🔑 #2 - The King of Yogurt Started with an SBA loan
🔑#3 - How to Win Without Being Lucky
In the spirit of a New Year, let’s talk about habits.
I listened to a fantastic interview with the General Partners at Benchmark VC.
For the last decade, the firm has hosted a famous weekly dinner series.
They invite their backed founders, interesting leaders (like Bezos), and even founders of companies they missed investing in.
The following quote from the interview struck a chord with me:
“Firms are full of strategies that are not coupled with reality.” - Peter Fenton
This quote led me to reflect on what are goals in my business that may be de-coupled with reality.
He follows this statement with a quote from a famous philosopher:
Firms are a collection of habits ~ William James
Benchmark’s core strategy is the pursuit of curiosity.
The dinner series represents a strategic decision to systematically weave curiosity into their organization.
Hopefully, now you’re thinking:
Here are my strategies, and corresponding habits:
Thinking Better → Write Weekly.
Writing helps me work through things I’m thinking about and engrains lessons I want to keep.
Actively Learning → Write Weekly.
Writing this newsletter checks two of my boxes. By making a commitment to share quality learnings with you each week, I’m forced to be constantly learning. I guess a thank you is appropriate to my readers for helping me with these goals.
Invest in Great Companies → Structured Deal Review.
We have a scheduled weekly deal review. This forces our team to prepare and review dozens if not hundreds of deals before our meeting.
Build Community → Join a Mastermind + Twitter
Some great things in my business happen from knowing people doing interesting things. I’m in a Mastermind Group with fellow entrepreneurs and capital allocators. Also, being active on Twitter has introduced me to interesting business partners as well.
This year I’m considering joining YPO.
Questions to consider:
What are strategies you want to pursue in your career or relationships? What habits will you implement to achieve these?
If you’ve been following me for a while, you know I’m a believer in the power of the SBA program to create wealth.
The founder of Chobani started his business by buying a cheese factory using SBA. It must have been terrifying, but he turned that initial investment into an empire.
The SBA requires a personal guarantee, so remember to tread very carefully. Most small businesses are not a good investment.
Sahil Bloom is one of my favorite writers on the internet.
My favorites from this thread:
Become Antifragile - create structure in your life to protect yourself when the worst happens. For me, that means creating multiple cash flow streams to supplement your W2.
Be Comfortable with Discomfort - you need to take action. If you want to grow, you need to push yourself into discomfort.
I’ll add one of my own:
→ Host Interesting People:
Host events that bring together interesting people. As the host, by default, your guests will become close to you.
Meeting a few great people can permanently change the trajectory of your life.
Hope you and your close ones had a nice holiday.
Have a great week,
Sieva
ps: if you enjoyed today’s newsletter consider sharing it with a friend. Thank you.
