Here in Silicon Valley, I have taken part in hundreds of conversations trying to convince people to dive in and become entrepreneurs. All too often, innovators with good, safe, jobs are unwilling to put their family's access to health care at risk by walking away from company-backed medical insurance.

A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.

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.

Innovation is a bottoms-up, decentralized, and unpredictable thing, but that doesn’t mean it cannot be managed.

Customers don't care how much time something takes to build. They care only if it serves their needs.

It doesn't matter if you call it a boom or a bubble. The startup business moves in cycles, and what goes up will eventually come down.

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