Hi friends, 👋

This is my first draft of this newsletter — and the fact that I’m comfortable publishing it is a minor miracle.

In consulting, I learned to title my first drafts “_v01,” rather than “_v1,” because the first zero was necessary to keep your drafts able to alphabetically sort if you made it through more than nine drafts. The cycles of revision and commenting were endless, and they taught us junior people two important lessons:

1. Your early drafts don’t matter

2. You are not the owner — it is your job to enact the edits of your managers and your clients

When I moved to Silicon Valley, I was amazed when both of those rules proved to be unique to the consulting world. I would turn in first or second drafts at Astranis… and we’d ship them! 🚢 It was exhilarating (and slightly terrifying) to have that much ownership over a final work product.

Over time, however, I found that more ownership led to more learning, and the skill of making the most of your first drafts (and being comfortable releasing them as a result) has been a huge benefit to my work at Astranis and my writing here.

As another case-in-point, here’s a first-draft attempt at a keynote speech.

Over the past year or so, I’ve given speeches to college students on a variety of Silicon Valley Outsider-like topics: what it’s like to be an entrepreneur, how venture capital works (and why that matters), how startups think about risk, and more. I’ve been wanting to give a “how to start a career in startups” talk for a while — and when I was invited to attend a conference, I asked the organizer if I could take a speaking role instead, and she graciously said yes!

I didn’t know that I had just volunteered for an EdTech conference… in Europe… on the night of daylight savings time… on the weekend of a friend’s wedding… but once I figured all of that out, it was too late to back out. 😂

The result was a first draft — armed with little more than a few bullet points of prep, I woke up at 5:00 AM Pacific, walked outside of the hotel, and gave a talk about why you don’t have to start a startup.

Some of the resources I mentioned in my call:

• Nick Huber’s “sweaty startups”

• Tim Ferriss’s “Muse”

• My piece on the stages of startup life

Thanks for reading Silicon Valley Outsider! I’m Christian, the Chief of Staff of Astranis, and I write this newsletter for folks who are interested in startups and live outside of the SF Bay Area. Here are a few past editions that you might like if you enjoyed this one:

• 😱 Don’t be afraid of working at a startup

• 💥 Startups aren’t as risky as you think 

• 👩‍💼 Most new businesses are not startups