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

Meritocracy is a good thing. Whenever possibly, people should be judged based on their work and results, not superficial qualities.

If you can’t out iterate someone who is trying to copy you, you’re toast anyway.

Start-up success is not a consequence of good genes or being in the right place at the right time. Success can be engineered by following the right process, which means it can be learned, which means it can be taught.

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.

Customers don't know what they want. There's plenty of good psychology research that shows that people are not able to accurately predict how they would behave in the future. So asking them, 'Would you buy my product if it had these three features?' or 'How would you react if we changed our product this way?' is a waste of time. They don't know.

We must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want or what we think they should want.