Skip to content

References: Founder Mindset & the Cohort Learning Experience

  1. Psychological safety - Wikipedia - Thorough overview of psychological safety as a group-level belief enabling interpersonal risk-taking, including Amy Edmondson's foundational research, directly supporting this chapter's claim that safety is the precondition for every other cohort activity.

  2. Mindset - Wikipedia - Covers Carol Dweck's fixed-versus-growth mindset theory in depth, the exact psychological framework this chapter uses to explain why founders can build entrepreneurial ability through effort rather than fixed talent.

  3. Psychological resilience - Wikipedia - Explains resilience as the capacity to cope with and recover from adversity, grounding this chapter's concept of founder resilience as a buildable skill rather than an innate trait.

  4. The Fearless Organization - Amy C. Edmondson - Wiley - Edmondson coined and pioneered the research on team psychological safety, naming the exact group-level belief this chapter identifies as the precondition for honest disclosure, messy idea sharing, and productive cohort feedback.

  5. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success - Carol S. Dweck - Ballantine Books - Dweck originated the fixed-versus-growth mindset framework, giving this chapter's contrast table between fixed and growth reactions to a failed field test its underlying psychological theory and vocabulary.

  6. High-Performing Teams Need Psychological Safety: Here's How to Create It - Harvard Business Review - Explains, using Google's team-effectiveness research, how psychological safety lets people take risks without fear of punishment, reinforcing this chapter's account of how a cohort facilitator builds that same safety.

  7. Getting Out of the Building: Customer Development - Kauffman Foundation (entrepreneurship.org) - Describes why founders, not hired staff, must personally run early customer experiments outside the building, illustrating exactly the kind of real-world customer friction this chapter contrasts with the safety of the cohort.

  8. Get Out of My Building - Steve Blank's blog - Blank's personal account of learning that "there are no facts inside the building," a formative story behind the customer-development mindset this chapter asks participants to practice during each Field Discovery Window.

  9. 5 Ways to Turn Rejection Into Resilience - Entrepreneur.com - Offers concrete strategies for filtering feedback, reframing rejection, and leaning on community support, directly supporting this chapter's discussion of founder resilience after real-world customer friction.

  10. The Benefits of Combining Data With Empathy - MIT Sloan Management Review - Shows how a real company uncovered a hidden customer barrier by pairing data with genuine empathy, illustrating this chapter's point that customer empathy replaces a founder's assumption with a customer's actual words.