The next four editions of Silicon Valley Outsider are going to be awesome.

I’ll cover:

• How to get shit done at startup speed (you are here)

• How to build the operational machine behind a rocketship startup

• How to raise money as a first-time founder

• How to navigate the politics of the startup world

These will be the final four lessons in my Silicon Valley Startups series. We started with the basics (VC 101, Startups 101), and just finished the mid-level courses (How to Found a Silicon Valley Startup, How to Break Into Venture Capital, How to Join a Rocketship Startup, How to Choose).

The secrets I’m about to share were significantly harder for me to earn than those of previous lessons.

You can do a few of hours of research to figure out how VC Math works, but it took thousands of hours of my time pitching venture capitalists — and making that godforsaken drive from Berkeley to Palo Alto — to learn what worked and what didn’t as I raised funding as a first-time founder with zero professional network in Silicon Valley.

Similarly, learning how to be effective as a startup operator has been my principal focus for the better part four years. When I joined Astranis, we were 50 people with a scale model of a satellite that used a beach ball as a propellant tank; today, we’re over 300 people and have five real satellites launching on SpaceX rockets next year.

These lessons are going to be significantly spicier than usual, so I’ve decided to put them behind my subscriber paywall.

Without further ado, let’s get into it. Our topic for today: how to get shit done at startup speed...