If you focus on near-term growth above all else, you miss the most important question you should be asking: will this business still be around a decade from now?

EVERY MOMENT IN business happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.

Distribution may not matter in fictional worlds, but it matters in most. The Field of Dreams conceit is especially popular in Silicon Valley, where engineers are biased toward building cool stuff rather than selling it. But customers will not come just because you build it. You have to make this happen, and it's harder than it looks.

There's a wide range of sales ability: there are many gradations between novices, experts, and masters. There are even sales grandmasters. If you don't know any grandmasters, it's not because you haven't encountered them, but rather because their art is hidden in plain sight.

All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.

Had the people who started Facebook decided to stay at Harvard, they would not have been able to build the company, and by the time they graduated in 2006, that window probably would have come and gone.

If you think your initial market might be too big, it almost certainly is.