If you don't know who your customer is, you don't know what quality is.

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.

Entrepreneurship is not really building a product, it's not having an idea, it's not being in the right place at the right time. It's fundamentally company building.

If the plan is to see what happens, a team is guaranteed to succeed - at seeing what happens - but won't necessarily gain validated learning - If you cannot fail, you cannot learn.

The lesson of the MVP is that any additional work beyond what was required to start learning is waste, no matter how important it might have seemed at the time.

If we do not know who the customer is, we do not know what quality is.

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