We’re trained to avoid failure like it’s a contagious disease.

At school, failing wasn’t just about getting a bad grade — it was about getting labeled. If you didn’t pass, you weren’t just “behind,” you were branded. Pulled into extra classes, singled out in front of your peers and whispered about in the hallways. It can feel like public shame dressed up as education.

When you grow up in that kind of system, what you learn fast is: Don’t mess up. Don’t take risks. Don’t give anyone a reason to think less of you. And the biggest lesson? Stay in your lane.

The problem is that that mindset doesn’t prepare you for the real world — especially if you want to lead, build or create anything meaningful. Because here’s the truth: If you’re afraid to fail, you’ll never truly succeed.

Related: Want to Be a Successful Entrepreneur? Fail.

The fear that holds us back

Fear of failure isn’t just about the actual mistake — it’s about the imagined fallout.

• What will people think?
• Will they see me as incompetent? Reckless? Stupid?
• Will this cost me my reputation, my relationships, my livelihood?

And because those fears feel heavy and real, we avoid taking the shot. We stay where it’s “safe,” never realizing that “safe” is just a slow, quiet way to fail anyway.

As leaders, that fear can be deadly. It keeps us from innovating, from hiring bold talent, from experimenting with new products or ideas. It makes us reactive instead of proactive. And when the market shifts — as it always does — the leaders who’ve been too scared to risk anything are the ones left scrambling.

How I learned to get comfortable with losing

The real turning point for me wasn’t some massive success — it was being okay with losing. But that didn’t happen overnight.

When I started my business, I brought that school-based fear of failure right along with me. I worried about how my decisions would look. I avoided risks that felt “too visible.” I overworked myself trying to make sure nothing went wrong — and when something inevitably did, I beat myself up for weeks.

But here’s what changed everything: I realized failure without feedback is just a loss. But failure with insight? That’s an investment.

When you stop seeing failure as a verdict and start treating it as raw material, it becomes the most valuable thing you have.

Over the last eight years, I’ve:

• Mismanaged people and learned how to lead better.
• Made bad hires and learned how to recruit with sharper instincts.
• Invested in projects that flopped and learned where my market actually is.
• Lost more money (and time) than I’d like to admit — and learned exactly how to make it back (and more).

None of those lessons came from the times things went perfectly. Every single one was purchased with the currency of failure.

Related: 4 Key Strategies to Help Entrepreneurs Cope With Failure

How school got it wrong

Part of why this mindset is so hard to adopt is that it’s almost the opposite of what we were trained to believe.

Our education system rewards perfection and punishes missteps. You’re graded on what you got right, not on how many creative attempts you made. You’re celebrated for the A, not for the questions you dared to ask or the risks you took to get there.

And that’s fine if your career goal is “ace tests forever.” But in real life, success is about trying, adapting and trying again — fast. It’s about iteration, not immaculate execution on the first go.

If you’ve ever wondered why so many talented people never reach their potential, this is it. They’ve been conditioned to fear the first step because they’ve been conditioned to fear the stumble.

The leader’s advantage: Failing faster

Here’s the mindset shift that’s changed everything for me: Don’t run from failure — run toward it.

When you take a calculated risk and it doesn’t work out, you gain information your competitors don’t have. You see where the potholes are. You understand the dynamics of your market or your team in a way you simply can’t from the sidelines.

Failure speeds up your feedback loop. And in business, speed of learning is a competitive advantage.

When I stopped worrying about how failure looked and started focusing on what it taught, I moved faster. My team moved faster. We became more willing to experiment, to test ideas, to pivot quickly.

And here’s the irony: The more comfortable I got with failing, the less I actually failed in ways that mattered. Why? Because the lessons compound. The insight you gain from one mistake prevents five more down the line.

Turning failure into fuel

If you’re looking for practical ways to reframe failure, here’s what’s worked for me:

1. Separate the event from your identity. Failing at something doesn’t make you a failure. It makes you a human who’s gathering data.
2. Ask better post-mortem questions. Instead of “Why did I mess up?” ask “What specifically did I learn, and how will I apply it next time?”
3. Take the hit, then take the action. Feel the sting, but don’t camp there. Apply the lesson as quickly as possible so it becomes forward motion.
4. Make it visible for your team. When leaders are open about their own missteps, it gives everyone else permission to try without fear.

Related: How to Turn Failures Into Wins As an Entrepreneur

The real goal

At the end of the day, the point isn’t to fail for failure’s sake. The point is to strip failure of its power over you so you can move without hesitation.

If there’s one mindset that’s been critical to my success, it’s this: Be okay with failing — because the lesson you learn is worth more than the hit you take.

The faster you embrace that truth, the faster you’ll grow — not just as a leader, but as a human being who’s willing to show up, take the shot and trust that even if you miss, you’re still moving forward.

A major U.S. bank, with over $2.6 billion in assets, just raised its minimum wage.

Bank of America announced on Wednesday that it would raise its minimum pay for its full- and part-time U.S. hourly workers to $25 an hour. The change will take effect next month, pushing the minimum salary for full-time U.S. employees to over $50,000 annually.

This pay increase is the final phase of a plan announced in 2017 to boost the bank’s base pay from $15 an hour to $25 an hour by 2025. (Employees have been making $24 an hour since October 2024.) With the raise to $25 an hour, the starting salary for full-time U.S. workers will have increased by more than $20,000 since 2017.

Related: Bank of America Is Cracking Down on Overwork for Junior Bankers and Capping Hours to ‘Only’ 80 a Week. Here’s Why.

“[The raise] gives a teammate a chance to join our company, spend their whole career here, and support their families,” Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan told Bloomberg.

Moynihan emphasized that the higher minimum wage minimized turnover, causing the rate of departing employees to drop from 20% in 2017 to around 10% this year. Customer attrition, or a loss of customers, has also dropped, he stated.

^{Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan. Photographer: Betty Laura Zapata/Bloomberg via Getty Images}

As Bank of America adopts new technologies like AI, it has reduced its number of employees across some departments, Moynihan told Bloomberg. The goal is to put more dollars in the pockets of the employees who remain and “re-skilling them,” he said.

Bank of America had about 213,000 employees as of July, according to its newsroom.

Related: Here’s What’s Considered ‘Middle Income’ in the U.S. Today, According to Bank of America Data

Amazon Is Raising Pay

Amazon also announced this week that it would increase its average hourly pay to more than $23 per hour. The retail giant is investing more than $1 billion to increase wages and decrease the cost of healthcare plans for its employees.

Full-time employees will have their pay increase by an average of $1,600 per year.

Meanwhile, Amazon’s entry-level healthcare plan will cost $5 per week and $5 for co-pays beginning next year. Amazon stated that the change is a 34% reduction in weekly contribution costs.

Amazon employed 1.55 million people globally as of the end of last year.

Related: Amazon Tells Thousands of Employees to Relocate or Resign

“It’s always been my dream to be a CEO of a fashion brand,” Ginny Seymour, CEO of contemporary women’s fashion brand Aligne, tells Entrepreneur.

^{Image Credit: Courtesy of Aligne. CEO Ginny Seymour.}

A fashion industry veteran who started her career as a contemporary buyer at Saks Fifth Avenue, Seymour had an opportunity to realize that goal with Aligne, originally founded by Dalbir Bains as a wholesale women’s fashion brand in London in 2020.

Seymour envisioned a new era for Aligne — the brand could fill a white space she saw in modern women’s clothing: the need for design-led, wearable pieces at an accessible price point, delivered with an omnichannel approach.

Related: 5 Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me Before I Became a CEO

Seymour set out to make it happen, essentially “refounding” the company. She joined the business as managing director in 2022, relaunched Aligne under her vision in 2023 and was officially named CEO in 2024.

^{Image Credit: Courtesy of Aligne}

“I felt partners [had to be] a huge part of the story.”

During her first several years as CEO, Seymour focused on Aligne’s community building online and “design handwriting,” then branched out from a direct-to-consumer strategy to an omnichannel approach with U.S. retail partners.

In fact, despite being a London-founded brand, Aligne sees a larger part of its business unfolding in the U.S., Seymour says.

The CEO even recently relocated from London to New York to support the U.S. office and team as the brand continues its expansion.

“ We’re still based in the UK, so I travel back and forth,” Seymour says. “London to me is our creative hub; it’s part of our DNA being a British brand. That’s super important to me and something we don’t want to lose. So we’re very much creatively driven out of London, but commercially driven out of the U.S.”

^{Image Credit: Courtesy of Aligne}

Related: ‘We Got So Many DMs’: This 27-Year-Old Revamped Her Parents’ Decades-Old Business and Grew Direct-to-Consumer Sales From $60,000 to Over $500,000

As a still relatively young British brand, Aligne gains validation with a U.S. audience through retailers that have loyal customer bases.

“In  the UK, it’s easier to be direct-to-consumer only because the UK is much smaller and more attainable,” Seymour says. “But in the U.S., to resonate as the next contemporary brand that people should be looking at, I felt partners [had to be] a huge part of the story.”

Aligne recently launched with Nordstrom, a retailer Seymour says she’d always hoped to partner with one day, after the company direct-messaged her to express its interest in the brand. Aligne is also available at Anthropologie.

^{Image Credit: Courtesy of Aligne}

Related: Her Self-Funded Brand Hit $25 Million Revenue Last Year — And 3 Secrets Keep It Growing Alongside Her ‘Mischievous’ Second Venture: ‘Entrepreneurship Is a Mind Game’

“There’s less visibility [into] the analytics and who your customer is. You have to really listen.”

Despite the long-term goal to expand in retail, Seymour first prioritized understanding Aligne as a brand and its relationship to customers before tackling those partnerships, appreciating how important that strategy is for sustainable success.

Whether you’re refounding a business that already exists or starting one from scratch, knowing who your customer is — and quickly — will make or break its growth.  ”And that’s easier said than done,” the CEO notes. “There are so many factors. With every iOS update, there’s less visibility [into] the analytics and who your customer is. You have to really listen.”

Aligne’s target customers are “confident, working” women, and acknowledging what those consumers wanted in a clothing line helped guide the brand’s design shift and the direction of its collection, Seymour says.

Related: This Is the Real Secret to Exceeding Your Customer’s Expectations

Dialing into that customer base is paying off. Aligne ended its fiscal year in July 2025 with 56% year-over-year revenue growth and revenue approaching eight figures.

Most of Aligne’s pieces are priced between $100 and $300. Although Seymour recognizes why some brands evolve into the “premium contemporary” space amid rising costs and tariff challenges, she says the company is committed to its accessible price point.

^{Image Credit: Courtesy of Aligne}

“I quickly had to learn where I didn’t want to lean and how to make sure to get the support.”

Being a CEO is a lot harder than Seymour thought it would be when she was 20 years old, she admits. But she appreciates how the job has allowed her to draw on her experience as a buyer, which demanded a “balance of art and science” much like the executive role does.

“[There might be a] week that I’m so artistic and designing the concept and the line, and there’s other days where I’m definitely leaning into the science,” Seymour says. “But I quickly had to learn where I didn’t want to lean and how to make sure to get the support in those areas because a CEO wears so many hats.”

Related: I Founded a $1.7 Billion Startup for Small Businesses — Here’s the Secret Every Entrepreneur Should Know

One of the biggest lessons Seymour’s learned during her tenure as CEO so far is the value in listening to her instincts — even when it’s difficult. Over the first couple of months of the company’s refounding, Seymour sometimes hesitated to say what she wanted, then didn’t get the results that she desired.

“Three months in, I had this moment where I brought the team together and was much clearer about what I wanted,” Seymour says. “That brought them more on the journey with me, and it solidified us as a team and our values. If you have an idea and you’re building your own business, trusting your gut and not being scared to say it is powerful.”

German Sierra, founder of Pana Food Truck in Santa Cruz, California, never imagined his craving for a childhood comfort food would lead him to build a thriving business with a loyal following and the distinction of Yelp’s Top 100 Food Trucks.

“My brother and I came to the United States in 2016 [from Venezuela],” he says. “There weren’t any arepas. We actually eat arepas every day in Venezuela, so we needed them. My brother was like, ‘Hey, why don’t we make some arepas and take them to the streets, and maybe people will buy them?'”

Armed with foil-wrapped arepas and homemade Venezuelan juices, the brothers set up outside a supermarket. They didn’t sell a single one. A police officer stopped them, asking for a permit they didn’t know they needed. Instead of giving up, Sierra gave the food away and kept searching for a way forward.

Related: They Built Their First Restaurant With Their ‘Bare Hands.’ Now They Have 380 Locations.

“Sometimes there’s a little miscommunication between entities. Sometimes the health department will [have] different rules than the city,” Sierra says, describing the challenges he faced trying to get his business off the ground. “There are specific places to park. You cannot park everywhere because there’s gonna be competition with restaurants.”

As a business with one core offering, Sierra had to sell the value of arepas to customers who had never heard of them.

“It was hard in the beginning — and [is] still hard — to convince people why we don’t have other dishes,” Sierra says. “We wanted to focus on arepas [so] there is no confusion of what we sell, and it’s memorable.”

Small adjustments, like listing arepas as “chicken” or “beef” on the menu, helped introduce the dish to American diners and reduce confusion without losing cultural authenticity. “When customers come, they want 30-second decisions — no half an hour figuring out the menu and what to get,” Sierra says.

Related: He Grew His Small Business to a $25 Million Operation By Following These 5 Principles

As word spread, Sierra focused on making connections with customers, pairing education about the food with free samples to encourage repeat visits. Early on, he recognized that an excellent customer experience made people more likely to choose Pana over another restaurant.

“I didn’t wanna be just in the food truck business,” he says. “I want to be in the heart-warming business, because the food makes your heart warm. That’s the emotion I want to create every time.”

Now celebrating six years in business, Pana continues to grow while staying true to its roots. In 2025, Sierra and his wife, Gabriella Ramirez, opened their first brick-and-mortar restaurant in downtown Santa Cruz. “It wasn’t an overnight success, and we’re still growing and improving,” Sierra says. “We are just a baby, and there’s so much that we can change and improve.”

For Sierra, every arepa is a chance to share a piece of home, and to build what he calls “an arepa empire, one arepa at a time.”

Related: These Brothers Turned a 2-Man Operation Into One of the Most Trusted Companies in Their Area. Here’s How.

After turning a craving for arepas into one of Yelp’s Top 100 Food Trucks of 2025 and opening a brick-and-mortar, Sierra’s advice for current and future business owners is clear:

• Start small but stay consistent. Break overwhelming challenges into smaller steps and commit to showing up for your customers every day.
• Adapt to your audience while staying authentic. Customer education can help your audience understand new offerings and grow goodwill in your community.
• Lead with generosity. Warm service and meaningful interactions matter just as much as what’s on the menu. Customers return not only for flavor, but also for connection.
• Think about the big picture. For Sierra, selling arepas was never just about food — it was about creating heart-warming experiences. Any platform, whether it’s a food truck or restaurant, can be a vehicle to share your mission.
• Play the long game. Building something meaningful takes time, patience and passion. If your business isn’t an immediate success, research the steps you’ll need to take to achieve smaller goals that get you closer to your vision.

Watch the episode above to hear directly from German Sierra, and subscribe to Behind the Review for more from new business owners and reviewers every Wednesday.

Editorial contributions by Jiah Choe and Kristi Lindahl

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Andy Jassy is trying to reset Amazon’s culture by getting rid of excess layers of middle management.

The Amazon CEO stated on Tuesday at the company’s annual conference for third-party sellers that he wanted to eliminate bureaucracy to help Amazon grow and innovate more quickly. Bureaucracy is not compatible with “startups” and “entrepreneurial organizations,” but it is “really easy to accumulate,” according to Jassy.

“I would say bureaucracy is really anathema to startups and to entrepreneurial organizations,” Jassy said at the event. “As you get larger, it’s really easy to accumulate bureaucracy, a lot of bureaucracy that you may not see.”

Related: Amazon Tells Thousands of Employees to Relocate or Resign

Jassy wrote in his latest annual shareholder letter in April that Amazon must “strive to operate like the world’s largest startup” by solving real customer problems, working quickly, reducing bureaucracy and being willing to take risks.

Jassy’s latest remarks on Tuesday follow Amazon’s attempts across the past year to flatten its organization and eliminate excess layers.

In September 2024, Jassy asked each team within the company to reduce the number of managers by at least 15%. A leaked guidelines document in January showed that Amazon accomplished this without layoffs by asking managers to increase their number of direct reports, pause hiring new managers, and demote some employees down a level to non-managerial positions.

Managers are now required to have at least eight team members as direct reports, an increase from the six that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos mandated in 2017, according to the document.

Jassy also introduced a “Bureaucracy Mailbox” last year to allow employees to email him examples of unwanted processes or rules that could be changed to help the company run more efficiently. Within a year, the mailbox received 1,500 emails, resulting in changes to 455 processes, Jassy said at Tuesday’s event.

^{Amazon CEO Andy Jassy on July 8, 2025. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images}

At a November all-hands meeting, Jassy reiterated that he wanted to make changes to middle management to keep the company competitive.

“The reality is that the [senior leadership team] and I hate bureaucracy,” Jassy said at the meeting. “One of the reasons I’m still at this company is because it’s not a political or bureaucratic place.”

Related: Here’s Why Companies Shouldn’t Replace Entry-Level Workers With AI, According to the CEO of Amazon Web Services

Jassy took over as Amazon CEO in 2021, following Bezos. Under his leadership, Amazon laid off 27,000 corporate employees and mandated that employees return to the office five days a week.

Despite complaints from employees and an initial shortage of desks, the return-to-office mandate took effect on Jan. 2.

Amazon states on its sustainability page that it employs 1.5 million people worldwide at the time of writing, making it the second-largest employer in the world.

Airbnb’s growth has slowed in recent years, says the company’s CEO, Brian Chesky, but he has a plan to remedy the situation.

In an interview on Tuesday at the Skift Global Forum conference, an event for the travel industry, Chesky noted that Airbnb experienced 40% growth in 2022, but that number declined to 18% in 2023 and then 12% in 2024. For the second quarter ending June 30, revenue growth was at 13%.

“I’m not happy about where the growth rate is at the company,” Chesky said at the event. “I think Airbnb should be growing significantly faster. It should at least be growing in the teens, and I aspire to run the kind of company that’d be growing at more than 20% one day.”

Related: Airbnb’s CEO Says He Personally Manages 40 to 50 Employees as Direct Reports: ‘A Lot of Work’

The problem, Chesky explained, was that the company lacked the foundation for sustainable growth and needed to “rebuild” itself entirely earlier this year to open the doors to new businesses.

“That’s what we’ve been doing,” Chesky said. “The final stage is now we reinvent ourselves.”

In May, Airbnb redesigned its app to include a new feature that allows guests to book services (such as massages, photography services, spa treatments, personal training, private chefs, and beauty treatments) and experiences (such as watching a comedy show or going on a boat sightseeing tour with local hosts). Chesky said the company hopes to grow its core business, vacation rentals, while “layering on” these services and experiences.

Chesky said on Tuesday that he believes Airbnb‘s new offerings will be “multi-billion-dollar businesses” at some point, per Business Insider.

^{Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky. Photo by Myunggu Han/Getty Images for Airbnb}

He also stated in the interview that he believes Airbnb’s growth will accelerate next year, despite Airbnb’s history of “decelerating” growth, and reminisced about the company’s “hypergrowth,” when it was first founded in 2008.

“We grew the company like a rocket ship,” Chesky stated at the event.

Related: Airbnb Will Be the Place to Find Work After AI Takes Your Job, Says Its CEO: ‘Nobody Wants a Robot Answering the Door’

Airbnb is also leaning into AI. In August, Chesky stated on an earnings call that Airbnb would become an “AI-first application” over the next few years. The company began using AI for customer service in April, which reduced human customer service interactions by 15%. AI now handles tasks at the company like canceling reservations and helping with travel plans. Airbnb plans to expand the agent this year and give it more advanced capabilities, like the ability to search through a reservation to find specific details.

Airbnb had a market cap of over $76 billion at the time of writing. The company has over 5 million hosts.

Zoom CEO Eric Yuan founded the video communications company in 2011 when he was 41 years old and took it public in 2019. As of September 2025, Zoom had a market cap of $25.66 billion.

But despite 15 years of daily practice, he still thinks video calls can be better, because the best meetings are when people “can be themselves,” he told The New York Times.

Here’s Yuan’s advice for making your Zoom calls more productive.

Be accessible

Yuan says that he has a Zoom meeting link in his email signature so that people can set up calls with him.

Related: 13 Leadership Lessons from Zoom Founder and CEO Eric Yuan

Preparation is key

Who you invite is as important as why you’re calling the meeting, Yuan said.

“Number one, you need to prepare: who to invite, who not to invite, and a very clear agenda,” Yuan said, per The Times.

Think about the vibes

Yuan said the second most important thing for a productive meeting is to make sure everyone can be themselves.

“Don’t be too nice, too polite,” Yuan said. “In a Zoom call, people tend to be so nice. It’s becoming too formal. It’s OK to interrupt a little bit. And after the meeting, you need to have some follow-up.”

How to exit a call

Don’t be afraid to use the chat.

“Sometimes I just send a channel message: ‘Sorry, I got to do something.’ I use the chat a lot before I leave,” Yuan said.

Related: Zoom CEO Eric Yuan Cuts His Own Pay By 98% Amid Layoffs

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I’ve seen many startups succeed, and many fail. I’ve consulted for and invested in lots of them. My previous startup, Anchor, navigated its own challenges and missteps; we were fortunate to survive them, and ultimately Spotify acquired the company in 2019.

Over the years, I’ve come to think of startups as a game of Minesweeper. Remember that game from early PCs? You’d start with a grid of clickable squares, with cartoon mines hidden throughout. Your job was to take a few guesses, gain some information about where the mines were, and logic your way through finding them all. Similarly, startup founders start with an empty board. And although nobody can know their locations, the mines are guaranteed to be there — and certain types of mines are common to every kind of business. A founder can save a lot of time, money, and energy if they know how to avoid these pitfalls from the very start.

After many years of navigating mines, I’ve identified the 50 most common ones. (I share lessons like this regularly in my newsletter — which you can find at my website, zaxis.page.) To be clear, this list is far from exhaustive. And while there are certainly exceptions, it can be a great shortcut for anyone leading a new initiative, at any sized company.

Related: The Path to Success Is Filled With Mistakes. Do These Four Things to Tap Into Their Growth Potential.

Ready to find your mines? Here they are.

1. Thinking you have all the answers

My favorite piece of advice for startup founders: You’ll be 90% wrong about your assumptions. The problem is that you don’t know which 90%. Therefore, do everything you can to challenge your convictions, and be willing to shed them or tweak them as needed. Rapid iteration and an open mind are two necessary ingredients for a successful startup journey.

2. Ignoring the impact of compounding

Meaningful long-term change takes time, be it learning new skills, obtaining new customers, or establishing a brand. The most underrated way to drive improvement is through incremental steps that compound over time. Einstein apocryphally called compound interest the “eighth wonder of the world.” Tiny changes each day multiply to astronomical gains, so long as you’re consistent and committed.

3. Disregarding the law of funnels

Any action a user or customer needs to take is considered the top of a “conversion funnel.” The goal is to get them to the bottom. One of the easiest ways to lose someone along that journey (a phenomenon known as churn) is to require them to go through too many steps. I call this the “Law of Funnels.” It states: “The more steps a user has to go through to do something, the less likely they are to complete it.”

4. Hiring based on experience

Startups have very little time and resources to focus on the wrong thing, but it’s impossible to predict what they will need to focus on. So don’t waste energy and precious hires on what a person has done in the past. It’s 97% irrelevant to what they will be doing in the future. Instead of hiring for relevant experience, hire people who are adaptable and good problem-solvers.

5. Focusing on scaling too early (see fig. 1)

Many startups overengineer and future-proof in the early days, which is almost certain to result in a tremendous waste of energy. At the start of the journey, there are very few knowns (see mistake No. 1). But one thing that is known is that there is a fundamental difference between the friction that prevents a product from taking off and the friction that prevents it from scaling.

Related: Failed Startups Made These 7 Marketing Mistakes — Are You Making Them, Too?

6. Wearing too many hats

In my favorite brainteaser of all time, 100 prisoners wear different colored hats and strategize ways to identify their own hat colors. A startup often has far fewer than 100 employees, but often has far more than 100 hats. Context-switching carries a real cost, and early-stage employees who fail to delegate responsibility often end up performing all tasks poorly. Find people you can trust to take some of those hats off your head, and bring them in early.

7. Comparing your work-in-progress to others’ finished works

One of the easiest ways to get discouraged while running the startup marathon is to compare your rough drafts and works-in-progress to polished success stories. All difficult tasks (be they entrepreneurial, creative, educational, etc.) require iteration and more iteration, revision and more revision. The mistakes along the way are countless, sure, but they are also priceless. Comparing a work-in-progress to the finished products we see every day is not only demotivating — it’s also disingenuous. It’s comparing a sapling to a fully grown tree.

8. Trying to solve unbounded problems

To be solved effectively and efficiently, problems must be segmented and bounded. First, split your intractable problems into small, digestible challenges with a single goal in mind for each. Second, ensure that their solution is bounded to a finite solution space. Not realizing this is almost always a recipe for wasted resources and disappointing outcomes.

9. Being frightened of incumbents

Founders are often scared to take on powerful incumbents, believing those paths to be dead ends. This is a mistake. Taking on a monopoly is often a missed opportunity with enormous upside, and with lower costs than you think. There are four main reasons: Monopolies have already proven the industry is viable and lucrative. They refuse to cannibalize their own dominance. They’ve institutionalized their inefficiencies. And perhaps most importantly, they have the most to lose from making mistakes. Startups, by contrast, have the most to gain.

10. Fearing the pivot

For most startups, there are only two viable outcomes. In the unlikely case, they will be a big success. In the more likely scenario, they will fail. Don’t stick to early product or strategy decisions that raise the likelihood of the latter. If your startup fails, the value of all your decisions will be zero — so do everything you can to maximize the likelihood of success. If that requires pivoting from what you know and are comfortable with, so be it.

Related: I Have Helped Founders Raise Millions. Here Are 7 Fundraising Mistakes I See Many Startups Making — And What You Need To Do Instead.

11. Thinking you need to be first

Passionate and creative thinkers often believe that in order to succeed, they need to be the first mover. This is wrong. Being the first mover is often a tremendous disadvantage. What matters is not being first but having consumers think you were first, all while benefitting from the courses charted by your forerunners.

12. Catering too much to existing users (see fig. 2)

Your existing users or customers are critically important; you wouldn’t have a business without them. But focusing too much on their needs necessarily comes at the expense of the audience you haven’t yet reached, and for whom you’re still struggling to showcase value. Catering to those who have reached the bottom of your funnel prevents you from serving the needs of those higher in the funnel, whose needs have not yet been served. This is the push and pull of product development, and there is a flip side to it. That’s the next mistake…

13. Catering too much to potential users (see fig. 2)

The danger outlined in mistake No. 12 swings the other way too. Neglecting to serve the needs of your existing users runs the risk of causing unnecessary churn. The cost of retaining customers you have already converted is substantially lower than the cost of obtaining new ones. Don’t be overly protective of the users you have, but don’t be overly dismissive either.

14. Not understanding employee motivation

Your employees are motivated by different things, and failing to recognize their different styles often leads to poor management as well as to employee dissatisfaction. I categorized people into a “Climber, Hiker, Runner” framework: Climbers are driven by the prospect of unlocking future opportunities. Hikers prefer to take on new challenges and learn new things. And Runners are happy when they can dive deep into what they’re good at. Approaching motivation this way has made me a better manager, and has helped me identify effective ways to keep employees happy.

15. Focusing too much on short-term gains

Successfully growing a startup is a marathon (see mistake No. 2). Short-term wins offer little beyond dopamine hits and the stroking of egos. In long-term success stories, accomplishing tough goals takes time but yields meaningful and lasting benefits. While it takes many short-term wins to get to the finish line, don’t miss the forest for the trees. Those incremental achievements are not the true goal. They are the means to an end.

Related: 7 Common Mistakes to Avoid When Scaling Your Business

16. Putting off hard conversations

Your life is divided into two parts: that which occurs before you have the awkward, unpleasant, or emotionally taxing conversation you’re putting off, and that which occurs after. Which would you rather extend? If it’s the latter, why not do everything in your power to cross the boundary right now?

17. Failing to recognize power laws

Power laws govern everything you do. Most of the work you put into your startup will yield little clear benefit. Most of the success you see will come from a handful of bets. Internalizing this phenomenon leads to better decision making, less emotional turbulence, and healthier, more sustainable businesses.

18. Overprotecting your idea

Have a brilliant idea and an NDA preventing anyone from peeking at it? You’re likely not doing yourself any favors. Truly successful companies win with superior execution, not superior ideas (see mistake No. 11). And by overprotecting your idea from being prodded and challenged, you’re weakening its probability of ever coming to fruition. Often, those individuals who frighten you as potential competitors are those whose feedback is most valuable. And if you fear them stealing the idea, be comforted in knowing that there is no shortage of great ideas in the world. There is, however, a dire shortage of people who know what to do with them.

19. Keeping interactions inside the office

Whether in person or remote, the value of having your team “break the ice” cannot be overstated. I mean that in two ways. First, it’s of course good for your colleagues to get to know one another (and hopefully like one another), which leads to happier employees and higher productivity. Second, when people let loose, it “breaks the ice” of the day-to-day mayhem of startup life — or what I like to call “a necessary thawing period.”

20. Getting too comfortable (see fig. 3)

There is a big difference between being at a local minimum and being at a global one. Yet from a day-to-day vantage point, they look the same. Any change in any direction means more work, more stress, and more risk. We must zoom out and look at the entirety of our options. Sometimes the best paths or strategies lie just beyond a hill we’re scared to climb.

Related: I Made These 3 Big Mistakes When Starting a Business — Here’s What I Learned From Them

21. Not putting things in perspective

When lost in the hustle and bustle of the early stages of a company, it’s important to remember that most stressful things don’t actually matter in the long term. They will do little to affect the eventual outcome, but they will heavily drain you in the near term. Please take regular moments to stop yourself, look at your small stressors, and ask if this really matters in life. It probably doesn’t.

22. Not quantifying goals

Goals without metrics are unbounded (see mistake No. 8). This makes them harder to achieve — and how will you know when you do achieve them? How will you hold yourself accountable when you’ve veered too far off course? Particularly when working as part of a team, quantifiable and measurable goals are of paramount importance to achieve any level of alignment.

23. Waiting to find a technical cofounder

Nearly everything I’ve needed to learn to become a technical cofounder, I taught myself (with the guidance of great mentors). You live in an age of wonders, where anyone can learn anything with incredible efficiency. Do not allow the search for a technical cofounder to prevent you from pursuing your dream. Become the technical cofounder yourself.

For instance: Are you interested in AI but think you’ll never understand how it works? Think again.

24. Looking for complicated answers when there may be simple ones

Often, problems that seem intractable have elegant and simple solutions. We are trained to look for complexity, and to value those perspectives that overcomplicate the world. Ignore that instinct! The greatest insights I had as a founder came from light-bulb moments when I realized things were simpler than I’d assumed, not more complicated.

25. Assuming there is only one path to success (see fig. 4)

While other people’s success stories can motivate and inspire you, they can also be dangerous. Everyone’s path is unique, and often meandering. Anyone who says that your journey to success must follow a single trajectory has never built a company of their own; they’ve merely studied other people’s.

Related: Business Owners: Are You Making These 10 Mistakes?

26. Not filtering out high-frequency noise

Most day-to-day problems are just noise. Sometimes it’s angry employees or customers. Sometimes it’s a deal gone bad or failing servers. Successful leaders adopt what I call a low-pass mentality. Just as low-pass filters in engineering absorb short-term shocks by filtering out the high-frequency ups and downs, a startup founder must filter out the noise and focus on solving long-term, systemic issues that will have a high impact.

27. Putting your eggs in one basket

As shown in mistake No. 1, you’ll be wrong about pretty much all your assumptions. So why risk your business on a single bet? Of course, it’s important to have convictions — but that doesn’t preclude you from simultaneously having other convictions, particularly at the very early stages. If the primary goal of a startup is to reach product-market fit quickly (see mistake No. 5), the risk of being wrong about your one big bet would be extremely costly.

28. Putting your eggs in too many baskets

Just as it is dangerous to wear too many hats (see mistake No. 6), it is similarly dangerous to tackle too many strategies at once. Successful leaders prioritize ruthlessly; that means tackling “critical” tasks before ones that are only “very important.” It means committing to seeing through strategies before expending energy on other ones. And it means rallying the whole team around a single milestone or goal, rather than splitting their attention and making everyone worse off because of it.

29. Underinvesting in long-term relationships

Most of the key turning points in my business career came through the strength of relationships fostered over many years. Small decisions to help others, to build trust, and to keep in touch can have a tremendous impact on your future in unpredictable ways. The worst-case scenario? Some wasted social energy. The best-case scenario? You open doors you never knew were there.

30. Failing to recognize recurring patterns

Despite all the unpredictable noise in business, there is an often-overlooked consistency between market cycles and the players within them. While it’s dangerous to place too much emphasis on individual success stories (see mistake No. 25), it is even more dangerous to overlook the cyclical nature of market dynamics. Human psychology is notoriously predictable — and notoriously forgetful.

Related: How to Turn Your Mistakes Into Opportunities

31. Not talking to other founders

As a founder myself, I overlooked the learned experience of other founders. There is so much guidance buried in their success stories. There is even more to take away from their failures. As I said at the top of this article, startups are like a game of Minesweeper. You can tackle a blank board and start clicking away, or you can put aside your ego and get help from those who have played that board before. If you choose the latter, the likelihood of success can skyrocket.

32. Focusing on vanity metrics

There is a reason they are called vanity metrics. Hitting them is the kind of short-term gain I advised you to disregard in mistake No. 15. Why achieve goals that look good but aren’t strategically important? Why care about the number of users if those users are a poor fit and don’t stick around? Why focus on time spent using your product if that number is only high because your product is hard to use (see mistake No. 3)? Identify your desired outcomes, and then find the metrics that actually map to those outcomes.

33. Misunderstanding the CAP principle

In computer science, there is a fundamental limitation on how database systems can be built. One can never achieve more than two of the following three goals: consistency, availability, and partition tolerance (or “CAP”). The same is true of companies, which will inevitably see a decline in one of these as they invest in the other two. For instance, when ensuring all teams can talk to each other (availability) and that there is always an individual who can be the “source of truth” for others (consistency), your ability to manage when an employee leaves or communication channels go offline (partition tolerance) drops considerably.

34. Never setting arbitrary deadlines

Arbitrary deadlines are a tool. Like most tools, they can be good or bad, depending on who’s using them and for what. Yet while there are many times a team needs the space to think, build, and iterate without undue pressure, there are just as many instances that benefit from the structure and direction provided by arbitrary deadlines. Importantly, arbitrary deadlines should be recognized as arbitrary, and they should be adjusted if needed. But that doesn’t diminish their power in aligning a team and incentivizing productivity. In the right circumstances, I’ve seen them work wonders.

35. Ignoring uncertainty principles

Early-stage entrepreneurship, as in quantum physics, presents an inescapable tradeoff. Resources (time, money, etc.) can be spent on investing in a specific strategy or on keeping open optionality; they cannot do both. I call this phenomenon the Startup Uncertainty Principle. It shows that the more you focus on the present, the less you’re able to prep for the future. And the more you prep for the future, the less effective you’ll be now. Companies that attempt to do both at once are fighting a losing battle.

Related: Common Mistakes First-Time Entrepreneurs Make and How to Stop Them

36. Not prioritizing low-hanging fruit

As shown in mistake No. 28, successful companies prioritize ruthlessly. When companies spread themselves and their employees too thin, they hurt productivity and morale. Of course, there is value in investing in longer-term projects with higher costs and higher rewards. Yet it is also critical to regularly prioritize easy wins and short-term opportunities that move the needle incrementally. In addition to laying the foundation for compounding improvements (see mistake No. 2), it will also reengage your teammates and keep morale high.

37. Overlooking unexplored markets

As founders and dollars race to build in competitive, high-growth markets, opportunities often exist in “hidden layers” of industry. Companies that focus there can ride waves of market growth while avoiding fierce competition, by turning potential competitors into actual customers. Some of the most valuable companies in the world have taken this approach (including the two most valuable) and it has paid dividends (literally).

38. Not relying on proven technology

New technological solutions to longstanding problems can be attractive. But the hidden downsides can surface much too late — often when you’re already dependent. New technologies can break, can go out of business, can have unexpected side effects. By contrast, longstanding problems tend to have proven longstanding solutions. While not as exciting to use, they work, and that’s what matters most.

39. Sugarcoating bad news

Managers sometimes believe that when things get hard — and they inevitably will, many times over — bad news is better delivered indirectly or with a positive spin. This is an innate human desire. But employees are smart. Being disingenuous about the state of the business or the rationale for business decisions will hurt your company over the long term. This applies to everything from layoffs to pivots to cutting perks. Your employees will see through the euphemisms, rendering your sugarcoating fruitless, and they will respect you less for your lack of directness.

40. Ignoring entropy

It’s a law of the universe that everything trends toward disorder. Knowledge and control are no different. No matter what, eventually you’ll be wrong. Your convictions will need to adapt as the world in which they exist evolves. The stable parts of your business will suffer from unexpected market dynamics, new competition, and shifting consumer attitudes. Those who succeed in the long term embrace entropy as a fact of life, and they know that they cannot hold anything too sacred for too long.

Related: 10 Mistakes I Made While Selling My First Startup (and How You Can Avoid Them)

41. Forgetting your only advantage

With limited time and limited resources, only so much can get done. A startup has every disadvantage relative to more well-funded incumbents, and only one advantage: speed. Leverage this. Big players are slow to move and slow to turn, like giant cruise ships. Startups are small and nimble sailboats that can race faster and turn on a dime when it matters.

42. Treating money like it isn’t fungible

A dollar is a dollar is a dollar. Every single dollar spent—no matter how it’s accounted for — is money not spent on something else. This is all the more reason to prioritize ruthlessly (see mistake No. 28). Resources have a habit of disappearing faster than you’d expect.

43. Not explicitly deciding how to balance productivity and alignment (see fig. 5)

Companies that overinvest in aligning their team members do so at the expense of productivity. Those that focus on productivity do so at the expense of alignment. The optimal balance depends on the company, its size, and its unique journey. But the important takeaway is that you are making this trade-off whether you explicitly choose the balance or not — so you might as well choose it.

44. Only talking to people you know

The “birthday paradox” shows that if you put 23 people in a room together, there is a 50% chance two will share the same birthday. By the same mathematical logic, if any conversation has even a 0.3% chance of being life-changing, then putting a few dozen people in a room together is virtually guaranteed to lead to some life-changing conversations. The takeaway? Meet more people. (Here’s a good way to do that.)

45. Working only from home

Startup stress can seep across any boundaries you’ve set. To drive both productivity and better mental health, don’t work exclusively from where you sleep and spend time with family. I say “exclusively” because I have seen startups achieve great success in a fully remote setup. Still, the early days of startups rely critically on serendipitous conversations and ideations — and that can only happen when employees are colocated. Get the team together now and then.

Related: 5 Marketing Mistakes Startups Must Avoid in Order to Survive

46. Working only from an office

Most founders I know get their best ideas when they’re not at work. There’s something about the change of scenery, the connections between unrelated neurons, and the exposure of a problem or challenge to a new environment. Whereas mistake No. 45 showcases why it’s important to sometimes bring your team together, this one recognizes that it’s equally important to take them out of their comfort zones and get them to interact in brand-new places and brand-new ways.

47. Forgetting to revisit whatever motivates you

When things get difficult (and they will), it’s important to reflect on the things that helped motivate you to start in the first place. Have it readily accessible—be it a movie or a podcast episode or a book or a soundtrack — and revisit it when you feel the morale drop. For me in my Anchor days, it was Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories. To this day, if I need a jump-start in motivational energy, I just put on that album and get to work.

48. Not taking pictures

You’re going to miss the early days. You’ll wish they were better documented. If things end up working out, you’ll look at those moments in time and say, “Wow, look how far we’ve come.” And if things don’t, you’ll say, “Wow, look how hard we worked. If I did that, I can handle anything.”

49. Assuming you have product-market fit

Product-market fit is the elusive transition point at which you realize who your customers are and what value you’re providing for them. Hardly anyone reaches this point without considerable effort, and the easiest way for a brand-new enterprise to fail is to assume they have reached this point when they have not. There are only two ways — talking to customers and looking at data — that can verify the milestone has been hit. Once there, things get considerably easier.

50. Thinking there are only 50 startup mistakes

I suppose I’m guilty of this one right now. No list of startup advice is exhaustive. Every new entrepreneurial journey is bound to uncover unique challenges. Yet that’s also part of the fun of the startup journey: You never know what’ll happen next.

A version of this article originally appeared on Nir Zicherman’s newsletter, Z-Axis.