At IMVU, the cost of customer acquisition through our five-dollar-a-day AdWords campaign was less than twenty-five cents. Our revenue from those same customers was more than a dollar.

The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else.

Zero invites imagination, but small numbers invite questions about whether large numbers will ever materialize.

This is one of the most important lessons of the scientific method: if you cannot fail, you cannot learn.

Learning to see waste and systematically eliminate it has allowed lean companies such as Toyota to dominate entire industries. Lean thinking defines value as 'providing benefit to the customer'; anything else is waste.

If we stopped wasting people's time, what would they do with it?

There is no greater country on Earth for entrepreneurship than America. In every category, from the high-tech world of Silicon Valley, where I live, to University R&D labs, to countless Main Street small business owners, Americans are taking risks, embracing new ideas and - most importantly - creating jobs.