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.

Start-ups make so many mistakes that the challenge to identify the root cause of a failure is tough. But believing in your own plan is probably the worst.

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

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

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.

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

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?