Building a Lifestyle Design Business vs VC-funded Startup

Rob Fitzpatrick is a serial entrepreneur who teaches early-stage entrepreneurship in Europe via his company Founder Centric. Rob is a Y Combinator alum and is the author of The Mom Test, a handbook on customer development that teaches you how to learn from customers even when they’re lying to you.

One of the most crucial parts of building a successful business is developing a rounded skillset that allows you to build products that solve problems and forge relationships with customers and partners to sell those solutions effectively.

Rob teaches people to do this and is great at awesome at distilling his entrepreneurial experience into practical advice. He's also taught at Oxford and UCL as well as designing education programs for accelerators and the UN, so if you want someone to teach you entrepreneurship you can’t get much better.

In this episode we discuss a real whirlwind of topics including:

- The core skills and mental models every entrepreneur needs to learn - How to talk to customers effectively and get the results you want - Rob’s own approach to learning new skills from chess to programming to repairing sailing boats and reading up on diesel engines.

So whether you're starting out as an entrepreneur and are looking to build a new business or learn from the customers you already have in an existing one, this episode will give you that and much more.