The biggest start-up successes - from Henry Ford to Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg - were pioneered by people from solidly middle-class backgrounds. These founders were not wealthy when they began. They were hungry for success, but knew they had a solid support system to fall back on if they failed.

Products a start-up builds are really experiments…Learning about how to build a sustainable business is the outcome of those experiments [which follow] a three-step process: Build, measure, learn.” “[A startup is] … an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty.

The Lean Startup has evolved into a movement that is having a significant impact on how companies are built, funded and scaled.

Meritocracy is a good thing. Whenever possibly, people should be judged based on their work and results, not superficial qualities.

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

Except in very narrow cases, where there's breakthrough science that needs patent production, worrying about competitors is a waste of time. If you can't out iterate someone who is trying to copy you, you're toast anyway.

Using the Lean Startup approach, companies can create order not chaos by providing tools to test a vision continuously.