Practice

By Larry Chiang

My opinion is that entrepreneurship is a practice. Majority treat startups as a perfection. I’m going to attack this thread from the point of view of a non-entitled student, hungry to study entrepreneurship. Practice entrepreneurship.

/1/ Take it before you take it.

Have you heard the public speaking adage, “Tell ’em what you’re gonna tell em. Tell em. Tell them what you told them”? Well I believe the class you mentioned, “ENGR 145” should be pre-taken, taken & then Re-taken.

Huh?!

This technique of pre-study and pre-preparation is pervasive. It is uber popular among the set of individuals who ‘SET THE CURVE’. For example, you Asians self study the math and science classes the summer before the academic year.

Set. The. Curve.

For example, prepping to score a 4/5 on AP tests is pre-studying college in high school. Setting the curve is easier if you know the content and it leads me to my next point…

/2/ Setting the ENGR 145 Curve

Pro baseball players practice the same drills kids do. Kung fu fighters keep kicking the butt of that one dummy with many arms. Setting the curve takes practice.

Setting the entrepreneur curve takes basic, basic practice

– Fielding rejections

– Leaving the classroom and building.

– Setting appointments with people who view you as a newbie

– Doing work ON THE PHONE

– Continuous deployment of API’s other people engineered.

– knowing the difference between External Deliverable (hard) and ‘internal deliverable’

/3/ Reading ENGR 145 content before the practice of E145.

Tom Kosnik’s book

Tom Byers’ textbook

Steve Blanks seminal tome.

Business Model Generation.

Mark McCormack’s book

/4/ Practicing before the ENGR 145 class.

Dual track. One track is classroom smarts. The other track is street smarts. Track one is point #3. Track two, Street Smarts, is point #2 above. Remember, you got into Stanford because you studied through your weakness. Whatever was your academic bottleneck, you worked through it. In entrepreneurship, it’s all a bottleneck.

This leads me to my last point:

/5/ Pattern Iteration.

In answering the question, “What best entrepreneurship classes are available at Stanford?” You’re looking for a silver bullet class that reveals knowledge. This is a form of pattern recognition. My mentor told me that pattern recognition is tough.

So what’s the answer?

Pattern iteration.

You delegate the pattern recognition to the cadre of ENGR 145 stalwarts. Tom, Tom, Steve, Mark, PG, Chuck and Tracy are already posting publicly so reach out to them. In short, you delegate the pattern recognition to your mentor. You the ENGR 145 practitioner “Pattern Iterate” and ‘pattern replicate’

	Larry Chiang (@LarryChiang)
7/15/14, 8:54 AM #ENGR145 RT @tjkosnik: @LarryChiang @kasiabiesialska Thank You Kasia and Larry. Your words of encouragement inspire me! :)”