Sustainable growth is characterized by one simple rule: New customers come from the actions of past customers.

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.

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?

Better to have bad news that's true than good news we made up

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

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.

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