Startup Secrets Sandbox

Welcome to the Startup Secrets Sandbox

About Startup Secrets

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, I’m humbled by how little I really know about any of this and I’m still trying to expose more and more Startup Secrets, from the great founders I invest in, work with, mentor or can reach out to, asking them to share their real world case examples to enrich us all. These are the real stars of Startup Secrets and I’m very grateful to them for sharing their 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 all to gain insight from.

Since Startup Secrets was founded, 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 prove the best learning

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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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.

Want to know more? Read:

About this Sandbox⁠

and

FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions⁠

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