From the course: Brad Feld on Validating Your Startup Idea

Next steps

- So we just spent a bunch of time talking about startup opportunities and how to think about, evaluate, start executing around a new idea that you may have. One of the most powerful things to do is explore lots of other avenues of information. There's a lot of stuff on LinkedIn Learning that take you to the next step in terms of the evaluation of your idea into developing the first company and the product. But there's lots of other people who have written about and are doing things today that are really helpful. Examples of writers around startups that are worth paying close attention to include Eric Ries, who has written a magnificent book called Lean Startup that really helps you think about the dynamics around how to get a startup from the very beginning to that minimum viable product. And you think about people and think about your own career, books like the Start-up of You from Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha are really helpful, just in terms of your own introspection around becoming an entrepreneur and how you're going to do things. Getting out in the world and actually practicing entrepreneurship is key. I talk a lot about this in my book, Startup Communities, but I'd encourage you not just to read books but to actually go participate in things like Startup Weekends, which is really a 54-hour simulation of entrepreneurship. So it's a chance for you to spend a long weekend with 99 of your closest friends or so, actually creating startups from scratch and going through the exercise in a very compressed time period of dealing with lots of the stuff we've talked about, even if at the end of the Startup Weekend, you throw away the idea and don't do anything with it, that practical experience is incredibly powerful, and don't lose sight of mechanisms like Techstars and other accelerators that help you with a group of your peers, go through a period of time where you're actually creating the startup, but with mentors and with mentorship around you that can really help you accelerate the activity that you're doing so that the three months that a Techstars Accelerator is is actually two years of real-life work. Don't be bashful about not just sharing your idea with other people, but actively engaging with them around the construct of exploring and developing your business. And with that, good luck.

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