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

At IMVU, the cost of customer acquisition through our five-dollar-a-day AdWords campaign was less than twenty-five cents. Our revenue from those same customers was more than a dollar.

The mistake isn't releasing something bad. The mistake is to launch it and get PR people involved. You don't want people to start amping up expectations for an early version of your product. The best entrepreneurship happens in low-stakes environments where no one is paying attention, like Mark Zuckerberg's dorm room at Harvard.

Leadership requires creating conditions that enable employees to do the kinds of experimentation that entrepreneurship requires.

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

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.

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