Chinat · September 5, 2026
Don't Catch the First Opportunity
Four days into business school, he was already trying not to catch the first opportunity. Before school he ran operations for a company that manages public schools in Brazil. When he joined, it ran one school. When he left eighteen months later, it ran thirty-six, revenue had gone from about $4 million to $50 million, and at one point his team hired 1,600 teachers in thirty days.
He was not asking me how to get into startups. He was asking me how not to get pulled into the wrong one.
The trap is designed
A place like this is very good at manufacturing urgency. Within a month you will be offered more projects, teams, and side quests than you can evaluate, and each one comes with the same line: if you don't join now, someone else will, and you're out. The frustrating part is that it is often true. The opportunity really does go to someone else.
I know this because I am the worst case of it. I am a yes-man. You say jump, I say how high. That trait built most of what I have, and it has also cost me years, because saying yes in the moment feels like momentum and is usually just motion.
So the discipline I told him about is the one I am still learning: before you dive into anything, step back and ask what you are actually committing to, and whether it is the right thing right now. Not whether it is exciting. It is always exciting.
He had already arrived at the same place from the other direction. His words: "I'm trying to intentionally put myself in a place where I don't know what to do, and I do not catch the first opportunity." That sentence is the whole post. The rest is how.
Work from what you know is true
You cannot think your way to a startup idea. You find it through trial and error. But the trials go faster if you start from first principles about yourself rather than from the market.
Given what I know is true about me: what do I care about, what do I want my days to look like, what am I unusually good at? Then derive: given the resources, access, and skills I actually have, what is the best path to that? Most people run it backwards. They pick a hot space and then try to convince themselves they care.
I have made that mistake with money attached. One of my earlier companies raised over a million dollars, and when the push came to leave education for something more venture-scale, the honest answer was that on paper I would be a multimillionaire and I would not be able to stick it out. I left. I do not regret it, and I only got to choose cleanly because I knew what I valued going in.
Compress the exploration
Most MBAs spend year one exploring and year two focusing. He is trying to compress the exploration into six months: one conversation with a founder or operator every business day, a hundred-plus people before the year is out. Not to network. To learn how those people found their industry, what they want to build next, and how they used the school's resources.
That is a better plan than most people's whole degree, and the reason is the number. One conversation every business day is not a vibe. It is a quota, and a quota forces the discipline of picking who is worth the hour.
The unglamorous levers
What I loved most from his side of the table was how small the important levers were. A school he ran had 80% attendance on Mondays because students preferred to stay home. Lasagna for Monday lunch and a football event on Fridays moved attendance up fifteen points. The principals, he said, spent their days on administration instead of education, so the company's actual product was taking the administration away so the school could focus on learning.
Nothing about that is a pitch deck. It is operations, and one of those schools went from the bottom 40% of the country to the top 30 schools nationally. That is what real impact looked like at scale: operations, not a pitch deck.
What I told him
Build hackathon-style: put yourself in rooms where you have to ship something with people you do not know yet, because that is the fastest way to find out who you work well with. Say no to most things, and mean it. Treat the first exciting opportunity as data, not destiny.
And if you are new to a place like this, remember that the fear of missing out is part of the curriculum. The people who do the best here are not the ones who caught the most opportunities. They are the ones who could still tell you, a year in, what they were actually looking for.
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