The best founders are the ones that are able to quickly master new skills. Sam Altman, the previous CEO of Y Combinator, has called the rate of improvement of the founder, “the number one predictor of success.”
A simple strategy to learn new skills quickly is to find the Top expert. Instead of becoming an expert in a field by reading or consulting with many people, rather find the single top expert in that field and then work exclusively with that expert to gain the knowledge and skills needed.
Brian Chesky founder and CEO of Airbnb calls this approach, “going to the source”: instead of talking to ten people about a particular topic and synthesising all their advice… spend half your time learning who the definitive source is... if you pick the right source you fast-forward. A few of Chesky’s mentors: Jony Ive on design, Bo Iger on management, Mark Zuckerberg on product, and Simon Sinek on purpose.
A similar approach was used by Drew Huston, the founder of Dropbox, who read the top rated business book in each business category before starting his business. Tim Ferris took a related strategy when learning how to work with a top publisher as a first-time author.
“Like, say, sell a book to the world’s largest publisher as a first-time author... I picked one book out of dozens based on reader reviews and the fact that the authors had actually done what I wanted to do. If the task is how-to in nature, I only read accounts that are “how I did it” and autobiographical. No speculators or wannabes are worth the time… I only read the sections of the book that were relevant to immediate next steps, which took less than two hours....”
The key is identifying the right mentor, expert or source. If you get the right mentor or expert you are much more likely to succeed. A few rules of thumb for identifying the top experts:
