A personal note from Michael Skok

In many ways Startup Secrets is a startup itself! Created for the Harvard i Lab in 2012, it was born out of a need to provide a basic understanding of what it takes to start a company and build a business. Based on my own experience of what I wished I’d known when I started my first company, I humbly began to just share everything I could. The team running the iLab at the time suggested we needed a stronger calling card and came up with the name Startup Secrets. I quipped at the time that my job would be to ensure there were no secrets by the time we’d finished!

Over a decade later, with over 10 million views on YouTube alone, we’re humbled by the reach of the program, and people’s response to it. Given how much the entrepreneurial world is changing and how much we all have to learn, I’m continuing to engage with even more ventures; working to expose more and more Startup Secrets, from the great founders I’m lucky enough to connect with, invest in, work with, and mentor. They are generously responding and if you’re one of them I hope you’ll also share your real world case examples to enrich us all. You are the real stars of Startup Secrets and I’m very grateful to you for sharing you learnings with us all and not just from success but also the inevitable failures we all learn from. I celebrate you all for the challenges you’ve overcome and for sharing them with us.

Mission driven

Since Startup Secrets was founded in 2012, I’ve been mission driven not content ownership driven. (See

Creative Commons Attribution⁠

). All the while, more and more has been written about startups. There is a lot that is truly excellent and it causes me to keep raising the bar to ensure we’re adding value and not just confusing potential entrepreneurs. And so I’ve done my best to

stay humble and keep learning

be inclusive of other’s thinking where it’s consistent - or learn from it and adapt my own, always giving credit where it is due, as I have no pride of authorship, just a mission to provide the best learning experience

be deferential and acknowledging of other great startup material that is out there that is original and incorporate it or reference it. (Your help will be appreciated by commenting to bring my attention to it!)

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How to comment in Coda⁠

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keep open minded and curious and constantly seek to improve as I focus on the mission of inspiring entrepreneurs like you to solve real world problems

expand the content to cover more and more use cases such as not for profit, for cause and impact oriented ventures in areas like tough tech.

(My personal operating experience was mainly B2B and B2B2C tech. Accordingly, I apologize in advance if any bias comes through based on the limits of what I’ve learned personally. Just know I’m constantly striving to learn from every entrepreneur I encounter in every field in which they operate to be more inclusive.)

Thanks in advance for participating and bringing whatever you can to Startup Secrets for others to learn from.

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