Entrepreneurship / Lesson 01
Lesson 01 · School of Entrepreneurship
Don’t die
Survival is the first product requirement
First principle
An entrepreneur allocates scarce time, money, attention, trust, and energy under uncertainty. The first job is to remain capable of making the next decision.
Runway is time to evidence
Cash matters because it buys time. Time matters only when it becomes contact with reality: a buyer conversation, a paid test, a delivery constraint, or a named decision threshold.
Endurance is not learning
Staying alive while repeating the same untested activity is not resilience. Survival must be paired with a learning rate and a stop rule.
Reversible before irreversible
Prefer experiments that can be stopped or changed. Delay commitments that consume your ability to learn: fixed overhead, premature hiring, broad builds, and promises you cannot deliver.
Do the work
Write a survival sheet: current resources, weekly burn, next evidence threshold, the condition that forces a decision, and three commitments you will not make before evidence.
This is a working course document combining first-principles reasoning with observations from BIPU work. It is not a guarantee of business success. Ask what would falsify it.