What Is The Ultimate Startup?

Seattle entrepreneur Andy Sack once told me that the most successful startups are the ones that connect the dots, turning available content into a premium product. This next segment is from my interview with another entrepreneur, Michael FitzGerald, the founder of Submittable.com, on how he's learned this same lesson early in his startup career. Clutch masters, and how the mob turned one man into a millionaire. What makes a great photograph? We live in the age when anyone can take pretty much any picture, so how do you stand out from the crowd? Christopher Michel is a San Francisco based photographer, previously a Navy pilot and the founder of Military.com Christopher Michel knows the secret to great photography. How do you give advice in such a way that people actually listen? This might be counter-intuitive to the ambitious Type-A type, but very often when asking for advice, people don't actually want to hear a step-by-step guide to solving their problems. But what do they want then? Hiten and Steli advice on giving advice has the answer. Could Silicon Valley's success be the cause for its downfall? What if I could enable millions of people to share their views and their thoughts through podcasts? What if you got startup founders to teach business, healthcare pros to teach medicine, scientist to show you chem and physics, and have it all done via podcasts, wouldn't that be interesting? That was the idea with this first guest episode by Stewart Alsop. Listen how he thoughtfully uses Peter Thiel conversation with Eric Weinstein to deliver the message. What is the biggest problem with Science today? Eric Weinstein, host of The Portal podcast, has a few things today. In short, we are stifling innovation by following the scientific method. How did Smash Notes get started? Blame it all on Caspar Babypants. Here's me, talking about the idea and the future of Smash Notes on the Crazy Wisdom podcast. If you're curious and want to hear me talk for 45 minutes, I encourage you to listen to that entire podcast. Smash Notes got to rank #5 on Google. It was a little weird because as much as it sounds good, the ranking was for a rather odd search query. The jury is still out on whether it was any good. Read the full story. Lastly, huge thanks to the legendary Donald DeSantis for providing music for this episode. Thank you for reading this week's update.