Essentials of how to do a startup do not include writing a business plan.
No business plan survives first contact with customers.
You need to ask yourself, ‘Where do you want to work: startups, mid-size or large companies?’ If you find yourself debating the ‘startup versus large company’ choice you’ve already chosen the big company. Entrepreneurship isn’t a career choice it’s a passion and obsession.
A startup is a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.
There are no facts inside the building so get the hell outside.
Greatest risk is not development of new product, but development of customers and markets.
The company that consistently makes and implements decisions rapidly gains a tremendous, often decisive, competitive advantage.
Unless you have tested the assumptions in your business model first, outside the building, your business plan is just creative writing.
We now know that something between 85 and 90 percent of most software product features are unwanted and unneeded by customers. That is an enourmous ammount of waste of time and money that ends up on the floor.
A business model describes how your company creates, delivers and captures value.
The core tenant of what I teach is there are no facts inside the building. When we come up with a new idea, we tend to slide into our own reality distortion field to convince ourselves and others. And that’s not healthy.
In a startup no facts exist inside the building, only opinions.
When you’re gone would you rather have your gravestone say, ‘He never missed a meeting.’ Or one that said, ‘He was a great father.’
One of the mistakes we’ll make because we’re human beings is to believe that your vision is a fact. That’s the natural optimism of human beings.
For students to understand what the future of journalism is going to be, they’re going to have to invent it. It’s a big idea. We don’t know what journalism is going to look like in the next three years, let alone the next 10 years.
Using the Product Development Waterfall diagram for Customer Development activities is like using a clock to tell the temperature. They both measure something, but not the thing you wanted.
Startups don’t fail because they lack a product; they fail because they lack customers and a profitable business model.
Business plans are the tool existing companies use for execution. They are the wrong tool to search for a business model.
Along the journey we commonly forget its goal. – Friedrich Nietzsche.
In my 25 years as a technology entrepreneur I was lucky to have three extraordinary mentors, each brilliant in his own field: Ben Wegbreit who taught me how to think, Gordon Bell who taught me what to think about, and Allen Michels who showed me how to turn thinking into direct and immediate action.