Delphi for professors

“Most startup failure has nothing to do with dumb founders or bad ideas. I surveyed 470 founders and found failure follows a small set of repeatable patterns: good idea but wrong resources, false starts, false positives, speed traps, help wanted, or cascading miracles. Naming the pattern is usually more useful than another success story.”

“I look for four things: Pied Piper magnetism, an exceptional spike, authentic founder-market fit, and clock rate, meaning both raw horsepower and the nerve to make hard calls fast. The best founders get people to follow them even when rationally no one should.”

“Unit economics is the profit or loss you make on one customer or one transaction before you scale, and it should be applied as a discipline: model lifetime value against customer acquisition cost and test whether real customers actually pay enough, stay long enough, and cost little enough to serve before you pour capital into growth.”

“Going public tends to hurt the novelty of internal innovation. In my research, firms that completed their IPO saw roughly a 50% decline in patent citation-based novelty relative to firms that withdrew and stayed private, driven partly by the departure of key inventors and a shift toward more conventional projects.”

“Walk out your front door and notice three things about it you've never seen before. The moment you assume you know something, you stop looking, and everything becomes duller than it actually is.”

“I started out studying difficult conversations and all the ways we avoid being direct when we should just ask people what they're thinking. That fascination with why we read each other badly became the thread of my career, from couples in my dissertation to jerks at work.”

“We are a social species, and saying no feels like a real threat to a relationship. We imagine the other person will judge us as unhelpful or uncaring, and we overestimate how harshly they will react. In my studies, people agree to things they do not want to do, including vandalizing library books, partly because the awkwardness of refusing is so intense in the moment.”

“Before a hard 1:1, I take thirty seconds to jot down three topics and one question I genuinely need answered, because walking in empty-handed makes me defensive.”

“I think of talent as trajectory, not level.”

“Tax data shows that private business ownership is far more top-heavy than most people assume. In work with Danny Yagan, Eric Zwick, and Matt Smith, we linked 2011 tax returns and found that the top 1% of households received about 70% of partnership and S-corporation income.”

“Robots don't replace craft; they replace what we've already simplified. The assembly line turned the artisan's nonroutine work into repetitive tasks, and only then could machines take over. Most factory automation is clever task redesign, not general-purpose dexterity.”

“In our study of software engineers, sitting together made people give and ask for more code-review feedback, especially from senior to junior engineers. The gap was fragile: even a ten-minute walk between buildings cut feedback as sharply as being states apart.”