Successful founders and lucky founders focus on their product, customers, revenue, and team rather than getting caught up in the noise of the startup ecosystem. It is important to reduce consumption of media, especially regarding fundraising, and instead focus on building and making things. Hacker News and similar sources are valuable because they prioritize discussions about creating and monetizing products rather than non-work-based conversations about fundraising.

Dalton Caldwell, Y Combinator partner and founder of imeem and Mixed Media Labs, on what successful founders focus on.

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1 of the things that I've seen very successful founders and lucky founders focus on is their product, customers, revenue, their team, and not really focus on all of the noise in the startup ecosystem.

Specifically, there's a great deal of press every day about who raised money, on what terms, and how much.

There's all of the VCs talking on Twitter.

There's all these things that you can spend all your time consuming and focusing.

And the risk is, and that I see happen sometimes, is that all of your energy goes into that stuff and not on building the actual product.

And you can end up thinking that you're being productive and that you're an influencer, you're a good thinker on startups in the ecosystem, and you're actually making no progress at all.

And so I actually encourage people to reduce their consumption of media, especially stuff around fundraising or the fundraising environment, and to focus much more on building and making things.

And this is something that I like about Hacker News and other sources of information, is a lot of it is focused on people that make stuff and give it to people and talk about how they made money from it, as opposed to very meta, non-work-based conversations that are inside baseball around fundraising.

That does not yield, that does not look like productive work.


Speaker 0: 1 of the things that I've seen very successful founders and lucky founders focus on is their product, customers, revenue, their team, and not really focus on all of the noise in the startup ecosystem. Specifically, there's a great deal of press every day about who raised money, on what terms, and how much. There's all of the VCs talking on Twitter. There's all these things that you can spend all your time consuming and focusing. And the risk is, and that I see happen sometimes, is that all of your energy goes into that stuff and not on building the actual product.

And you can end up thinking that you're being productive and that you're an influencer, you're a good thinker on startups in the ecosystem, and you're actually making no progress at all. And so I actually encourage people to reduce their consumption of media, especially stuff around fundraising or the fundraising environment, and to focus much more on building and making things. And this is something that I like about Hacker News and other sources of information, is a lot of it is focused on people that make stuff and give it to people and talk about how they made money from it, as opposed to very meta, non-work-based conversations that are inside baseball around fundraising. That does not yield, that does not look like productive work. You

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What Successful Founders Focus On - Dalton Caldwell