7 random tips for new founders

I was helping a couple ex-Branchsters this week as they raise their first funding, and I wrote up a few tips / learnings for them as they get started on their journey. I'm sharing them here too in case other new founders can benefit from anything in them. Below is the raw content from the email.

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I want to share a few insights I've had over the years in case they're helpful to you. Feel free to accept or discard them, but I hope you can take away a few nuggets?from things I've learned:

1. Funding is oxygen, not the goal. While it can be celebrated as a way to attract talent and such, never let it cloud your judgment of what the true mission is. Too many companies get confused and think fundraising is the success, and it's just the start of the real work. You've taken other people's money, so now you have a responsibility to them to do everything in your power to make it successful. And with every round comes higher expectations along the way.
2. Always model the behavior you want others to exhibit.?If you walk by a piece of trash on the ground in your office but expect someone else to pick it up, you have it backwards - you instead should be the one picking it up to model that that's what others should also do when you're not around. You can't expect others to do things that you won't do yourself.?
3. Start from mission and values. If you stay true to your mission, you'll ensure you don't get too far off track along the way. It'll be your guiding light when you have to make hard decisions with difficult?tradeoffs. But it'll keep you focused. Which leads to #4...
4. Ruthlessly prioritize. There will be a million things you could do, especially at the beginning, especially with people like me spouting off a ton of random ideas. Listen, and then ruthlessly prioritize. Don't try to do it all because you'll fail if you do. Instead, pick the 1 or 2 things you're going to carve out as your niche in the beginning and crush those. Everything else goes into the backlog or idea bucket. But don't try to do it all or try to be everything to everyone.?
5. Keep an open mind, but make your own decisions. You'll have a lot of people with various (often conflicting) opinions. Hear them out, but then do what you?think is right, not what someone else tells you. That goes for me too - I'm just one random person, so take everything I say with a grain of salt, including this sentence. You're the one pouring your heart and soul into your business 16-18 hours a day, so you know best. Everyone else is just sharing tips in?general but they may not apply, so feel free to discard them.?
6. Move fast and iterate quickly. You'll be faced with a lot of decisions and options on the regular, but just pick a direction and move, instead of being stuck analyzing. I see too often people when faced with various options get stuck not acting at all. There's no way to imagine learning things - you just have to do.?You'll learn 10 times more by just starting in a direction and iterating, instead of trying to play out scenarios and theorizing what the result would be.
7. It's all just training for the future. You'll make a shit ton of mistakes. Don't sweat it. Just view them as learning exercises so you're better the next time. When you have your first bad hire and have to fire them? Learn from it and move on. It's like going to the gym - you do hard things, but it's so the next time you do it it's easier. Same thing here with mistakes. Make as many as you can quickly so when you're at scale later with more serious implications, you already know the answer b/c you learned when stakes were low.?

Let's get to work ??