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.

What if we found ourselves building something that nobody wanted? In that case what did it matter if we did it on time and on budget?

Vanity metrics are the numbers you want to publish on TechCrunch to make your competitors feel bad.

By the time that product is ready to be distributed widely, it will already have established customers.

The attributes for entrepreneurs cut both ways. You need the ability to ignore inconvenient facts and see the world as it should be and not as it is. This inspires people to take huge leaps of faith. But this blindness to facts can be a liability, too. The characteristics that help entrepreneurs succeed can also lead to their failure.

Science and vision are not opposites or even at odds. They need each other. I sometimes hear other startup folks say something along the lines of: 'If entrepreneurship was a science, then anyone could do it.' I'd like to point out that even science is a science, and still very few people can do it, let alone do it well.

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.