The myth that the CEO is going to discover you and nurture you and ask you to join her for lunch is just that, a Hollywood myth.

Personalizatio n wasn't supposed to be a cleverly veiled way to chase prospects around the web, showing them the same spammy ad for the same lame stuff as everyone else sees. No, it is a chance to differentiate at a human scale, to use behavior as the most important clue about what people want and more important, what they need.

Don't find customers for your products, find products for your customers.

It's easy to pretend expertise when there's no data to contradict you.

The wettest, weirdest environment is human interaction. Whatever we build gets misunderstood, corroded and chronic, and it happens quickly and in unpredictable ways. That's one reason why the web is so fascinating-it's a collision between the analytic world of code and wet world of people.

If you think your organization needs a bigger marketing budget, maybe you just need to be less average instead.

Believe in what you do, because you may have to do it for a long time before it catches on.