What Successful Founders Focus On - Dalton Caldwell

One 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 the VCs talking on Twitter.

There are all these things you can spend all your time consuming and focusing on. The risk is, and that I see it happen sometimes, is that all of your energy goes into that stuff and not on building the actual product. You can end up thinking that you're being productive and that you're an influencer or a good thinker on startups and the ecosystem, and you're actually making no progress at all.

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. This is something that I like about Hacker News and other sources of information; a lot of it is focused on people that make stuff, 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.

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