What Founders Should Be Doing During Their Next Uber Or Lyft Ride

For a startup founder, it is essential to keep continuously reading and learning from books, blogposts, podcasts... However, in a chaotic startup world where the primary concern is to move fast and make daily progress in your venture, sacrificing work time in order to do intensive reading can be a big hurdle.

As an ironic twist of fate, the common mantra that dictates to founders to only learn by doing mistakes is bypassed. It’s true that nothing trumps personal experience, yet learning from people who’ve been there and spent half your age (or probably more) to come up with golden advice and share it freely with you would only prevent putting your startup dream in the direction that most of them tend to go -failure. 

Self-Education

Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Elon Musk or even Mark Zuckerberg all changed the world by making mistakes, tons of them. But they also owe much of their success to the voracious reading habits that acted as a pathway for them to get where they are. Of course, it will be an absurd overstatement to say that if you want to be like Elon Musk, you should put into the hours of reading. I know you won’t buy into this…neither am I trying to lead you to this conclusion. But you got my point! 

As we are living in the age of short attention spans and an ever faster-moving startup world, most entrepreneurs and early-stage founders substantially refuse to spend their daily hours on education at the expense of starting and executing on their businesses. 

It's never been easier to start a business but it has never been more complex to be successful at building one. While selecting and working with non-technical startup founders at a global scale, we gradually realized that the ones who succeed the most are the ones with the ability to learn faster than anyone else. 

The Best Learning

It’s definitely a no-brainer, everyone wants to learn Entrepreneurs are avid for new knowledge and enlightening ideas, but considering how busy most of them are, finding time to read or listen to podcasts is rare, most people can’t afford the precious time it takes, or let’s face it, they just don’t know how to make time for it.

This gives me enough reason to foresee a bright future for micro-learning.

Among all the trends rising in the startup scene, this one is interesting and real. Founders enjoy surrounding themselves by these cool apps and sites that drops them small pills of knowledge. The sense of accomplishment becomes easier when you have to swipe three cards or read a small paragraph in your inbox on a consistent basis.

Reading 2 pages out of 400 once a day when you’re commuting or waiting for your next appointment. In other words, you get hooked ! And that is the foundation of habit-forming products elegantly explained by Nir Eyal in his book, Hooked.  

My friend, as much as Evernote and Trello disrupted your old note-taking and project management tools, apps providing bite-sized content are on the way to disrupt your reading habit, or probably your lack of reading habit. (Isn’t it exciting to be hooked on this habit?)

Of all the challenges that we want to address to help our founders get started on their ideas and build great products, the importance of learning rapidly and executing accordingly remains the most critical.

Here we run down some of the cool apps that we recommend new entrepreneurs and early-stage founders to surround themselves with, to keep an edge on the startup knowledge and their priorities straight. 


Startup PatternsBite-sized startup lessons for busy founders.  


With short and easy to read lessons, this app is helpful to anyone planning, running or growing a startup. Time is an essential resource for any startup. This app takes that to heart, and gives the advice startups need to stay focused and inspired, by sending you short lessons three times a week from the best startup books, blogs and talks. 


P.S. Startup Patterns is currently available only on iOS, the release of the Android App will take place soon.





Google PrimerPrimer is a fast and easy way to learn new digital marketing skillsgiving you bite-sized lessons to do whenever you have 5 minutes free 


Clearly, Primer’s main goal is to help entrepreneurs and digital marketers. It does this by expanding their repertoire of knowledge and potential skills. Primer also serves as a fun distraction, helping them kill time when they’re waiting for something and they can learn something new (or at least feel like it).







Startup Lawyer: Educate yourself about startup legal matters 


Startup Lawyer is a website for entrepreneurs and people involved in the startup scene. Topics include incorporation, funding, seed financing and venture capital.  Articles are generally legal in nature but topics may include issues and current events as they relate to the startup ecosystem. 

The blog is written by Ryan Roberts, a partner at Roberts Foster LLP. 


Founder CatalogWhat the world’s most influential founders are writing about 


Once a month, get a curated reading list from the world’s most thoughtful founders and entrepreneurs like Fred Wilson, Seth Godin, Eric Ries, and many more. 



Blinkist: Big ideas in small packages - A smarter you in 5 minutes 


Where do the world’s smartest people get their ideas? From great books! Blinkist distills the key insights of 1,500+ bestselling nonfiction books into powerful 15-minute reads or listens. Boost your knowledge and gain new perspectives to become a better, smarter you. 


The Blinkist app is proving popular with two key groups: busy entrepreneurs who want an overview of popular books, and avid readers who may read as many as 60 books per year




HighbrowKnowledge bombs dropping into your email 


Highbrow is an email-based learning service that brings bite-sized courses straight to your inbox every morning. The platform covers dozens of topics ranging from business, tech to productivity. All you have to do is to pick the topics of your interest and start receiving your pills of knowledge every morning. Isn’t that cool? 


If you think I forgot highlighting a great learning app or resource that you like, let me know in the comments!