At IMVU, we opened up our board meetings to the whole company.

We must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want or what we think they should want.

We need to reengineer companies to focus on figuring out who the customer is, what's the market and what kind of product you should build.

The way forward is to learn to see every startup in any industry as a grand experiment.

Because startups often accidentally build something nobody wants, it doesn’t matter much if they do it on time and on budget. The goal of a startup is to figure out the right thing to build - the thing customers want and will pay for - as quickly as possible.

Our educational system is not preparing people for the 21st Century. Failure is an essential part of entrepreneurship. If you work hard, you can get an 'A' pretty much guaranteed, but in entrepreneurship, that's not how it works.

I asked all of our recruiters to give me all resumes of prospective employees with their name, gender, place of origin, and age blacked out. This simple change shocked me, because I found myself interviewing different-looking candidates - even though I was 100% convinced that I was not being biased in my resume selection process.