How to go from SDR to Founder

Today’s outline:

• A lesson from a Harvard commencement address 👨‍🎓 

• A mystery puzzle 🧩 

• Winston Churchill teaches us something about being an SDR/founder 🇬🇧 

• Learning from others 🧐 

An awesome question to kick it off

Last week an SDR in the TopSDRs network asked me a great question: when starting a business what is the right first step? Is it an action or an idea? Many of the top SDRs I have spoken to have entrepreneurial aspirations so as an SDR turned founder I thought I’d take a moment to address this question.

The short answer: Action comes first.

Lesson from Harvard Commencement:

In 2017 when I was finishing my sophomore year at Harvard I happened to be on campus for that year’s commencement address. In his speech, the speaker had this to say: “Ideas don’t come out fully formed. They only become clear as you work on them. You just have to get started. If I had to understand everything about connecting people before I began, I never would have started Facebook. Movies and pop culture get this all wrong. The idea of a single eureka moment is a dangerous lie. It makes us feel inadequate since we haven’t had ours.” Looking back on it, these words from Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg have rung true throughout my entire journey as an entrepreneur (admittedly on a sliggghtly smaller scale).