Watson, Deep Blue, and ever-better machine learning algorithms are cool. But the most valuable companies in the future won’t ask what problems can be solved with computers alone. Instead, they’ll ask: how can computers help humans solve hard problems?
Elite students climb confidently until they reach a level of competition sufficiently intense to beat their dreams out of them.
In the most dysfunctional organizations, signaling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work.
Every living thing is just a random iteration on some other organism, and the best iterations win.
A startup is a team of people on a mission, and a good culture is just what that looks like on the inside.
Sometimes you do have to fight. Where that’s true, you should fight and win.
Finance epitomizes indefinite thinking because it’s the only way to make money when you have no idea how to create wealth.
Your company needs to sell more than its product. You must also sell your company to employees and investors.
There’s nothing wrong with a CEO who can sell, but if he actually looks like a salesman, he’s probably bad at sales and worse at tech.
People are scared of secrets because they are scared of being wrong. By definition, a secret hasn’t been vetted by the mainstream. If your goal is to never make a mistake in your life, you shouldn’t look for secrets. The prospect of being lonely but right – dedicating your life to something that no one else believes in – is already hard. The prospect of being lonely and wrong can be unbearable.
Paradoxically, then, network effects businesses must start with especially small markets. Facebook started with just Harvard students – Mark Zuckerberg’s first product was designed to get all his classmates signed up, not to attract all people of Earth. This is why successful network businesses rarely get started by MBA types: the initial markets are so small that they often don’t even appear to be business opportunities at.
Recruiting should never be outsourced. Everyone at your company should be different in the same way.
Jobs planned the iPod to be the first of a new generation of portable post-PC devices, but that secret was invisible to most people.
Vertical progress is harder to imagine because it requires doing something nobody else has ever done.
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 that happen, and it’s harder than it looks.
Sometimes you do have to fight. Where that’s true, you should fight and win. There is no middle ground: either don’t throw any punches, or strike hard and end it quickly.
Unless you have perfectly conventional beliefs, it’s rarely a good idea to tell everybody everything that you know. So who do you tell? Whoever you need to, and no more. In practice, there’s always a golden mean between telling nobody and telling everybody – and that’s a company. The best entrepreneurs know this: every great business is built around a secret that’s hidden from the outside.
Competition can make people hallucinate opportunities where none exist.
A product is viral if its core functionality encourages users to invite their friends to become users too.
The single greatest danger for a founder is to become so certain of his own myth that he loses his mind. But an equally insidious danger for every business is to lose all sense of myth and mistake disenchantment for wisdom.