So, I was reading this article in the New York Times about Donald Trump and Nancy Pelosi, and how Donald Trump has never had to really go up against someone like Nancy Pelosi in business negotiations before. And why he's being a bit, you know, he's been frustrated by that. And someone in the article, someone quoted in the article, "The art of war." So, there's this ancient [00:00:30] Chinese book by a man name Sun Tzu. So, I'm not a fan of war, but I am a fan of strategy and so this is a book about war strategy and a lot of people have used it to draw analogies to business strategy. In any kind of like zero sum adversarial strategy in general. There's a lot of takeaways that you can take from this book. 

                    So anyway, someone in this article was quoting Sun Tzu and the quote [00:01:00] that they read was this, here's the quote. "Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win." And this quote reminded me a lot about the things I'd like to do differently and the things that I think I am doing differently as a second time entrepreneur. So, I think a lot of [00:01:30] entrepreneurs are like, they start a business, and they raise funds, and they are basically executing with the hopes of winning, right? So, they'll raise money and the belief is that this money that they've raised is a lottery ticket and it basically allows them to enter the game to play the game. [00:02:00] And maybe they'll win, maybe they'll lose. And at best the money that they've raised they believe increases their likelihood of winning. And, I think that's a bad way to think about venture capital or any kind of investment, or business in general. 

                    I think the best entrepreneurs when they do raise money, or deploy capital, or invest in anything as a business, they are [00:02:30] deploying capital against a strategy that they've proven that they can execute against. And, they're deploying capital so that they can scale what is already winning, right? They're deploying capital to scale what is already working and how does this relate to business strategy, or entrepreneurship, or building a product company? I think for me [00:03:00] the biggest way that this comes into play is around product market fit and around engineering. So, a lot of companies spend a lot of money compensating for lack of product market fit, or compensating for not having a sticky product, not having a product that sells itself. Not having a product that goes viral, [00:03:30] et cetera. And so, they'll do a lot of things like, buy ads on AdWords, or hire a bunch of salespeople, or go to a bunch of conferences and buy booths, and they're doing all these things because they believe that they can deploy capital to increase the [00:04:00]

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