Introducing Growth Mindset

A new space to explore the world of growth-stage business building and investing.

Hello world! (okay I’ll admit, that felt cool to type)

I’m excited to introduce to you Growth Mindset, a new space I’m creating to publicly explore the world of growth-stage business building and investing. My goal in creating this blog is primarily to learn and to connect with people who are also interested in this space. Hopefully over time some of what I write can help others learn as well.

To kick things off I’ll start by answering the three key questions I asked myself before committing to this.

Why start a blog?

Over the past year or so I’ve increasingly found myself with lots of questions about the world of business and investing like:

• Are multiples now too punitive?

• How has Uber managed to become profitable?

• What impact will AI/ML have on the types of businesses that are created and scaled over the next 10 years?

As I tried to dive into these questions while commuting home from work or between business school classes, I found myself wanting a dedicated space where I could synthesize my learnings. This blog will be that space for me.

I’ve been taught that clear writing = clear thinking and so my hope with this blog is that by forcing myself to write down my thoughts it will help sharpen my thinking. The dream is that over time I can start to connect ideas across posts as I continue to refine my own mental model of how the world works.

Why Growth Mindset?

The blog title serves two purposes:

1. Inspired by the core thesis of Carol Dweck’s excellent book “Growth Mindset”, my goal with this blog is to contribute to my own learning by doing the hard work to synthesize ideas and share them in a digestible format. My primary aim is simply to keep growing, hence the title Growth Mindset.

2. I’m particularly interested in growth-stage businesses (read: post-product-market-fit, pre-maturation), and so the title serves to identify exactly which stage of a businesses lifecycle I plan to focus on. I’ll likely write about a wider range of topics than just growth-stage businesses, but the learnings should generally relate back to growth in some way.

Why now?

Again, there’s two main reasons:

1. Over the past year in business school I have had the opportunity to learn about 200+ different businesses facing unique and interesting problems. However, what I’ve gained in breadth I have given up in depth. I get 80 minutes to discuss and think deeply about these businesses and then it’s on to the next one. From my time in consulting and private equity I’m used to having weeks if not months to think about individual businesses, and I miss the process of digging in to really understand a business or concept at a deeper level. Fortunately, with my second year of business school on the horizon I know I’ll have plenty of free time. I intend to use some of that time to double down on my learning and more rigorously explore these topics I can’t seem to stop thinking about.

2. On my first day of undergrad my program director gave an address on “scholarship” where she explained how the true purpose of higher education is to help students transition from simply consumers of existing knowledge to producers of new knowledge. That framing always struck me as profound, and while I’m not sure I lived up to the challenge in college I now have a second chance. With one year of formal higher education left in my life, I’d like to finally start producing new knowledge that others can benefit from.

I hope you’ll join me on the journey ahead!