Interesting quotes

"The best is often the enemy of the good." — Voltaire

"A business should be run like an aquarium, where everybody can see what's going on." — Jack Stack, The Great Game of Business (Currency/Doubleday)

"As a good rule of thumb, proprietary technology must be at least 10 times better than its closest substitute in some important dimension to lead to a real monopolistic advantage." — Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

"In a startup no facts exist inside the building; only opinions." — Steve Blank

"Not every opportunity arises from something that can be quantified and measured. As Henry Ford supposedly said, 'If I had asked people what they wanted, they would've said a faster horse.'" — The Product Book

"Launch isn't the end of development but rather the beginning of selling." — The Product Book

"Features always have hidden costs. More features mean more tests, more screenshots, more videos, more coordination, more complexity, and more distractions. Start With No." — Running Lean

"The three A's of metrics are: Actionable, Accessible, and Auditable." — Eric Ries

"A startup can focus on only one metric. So you have to decide what that is and ignore everything else." — Noah Kagan

"While you might be aiming to build a mainstream product, you need to start with a specific customer in mind. Even Facebook, with its now 500 million+ users, started with a very specific user in mind: Harvard University students." — Running Lean

"While revenue is the first form of validation, retention is the ultimate form of validation." — Running Lean

"Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it's decoration." — Jeffrey Zeldman, A List Apart

"Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked." — Steve Jobs

"In order for connection to happen, we have to allow ourselves to be seen—really seen." — Brené Brown

"Whatever we say, we're always talking about ourselves." — Alison Bechdel

"When people realize they're being listened to, they tell you things." — Richard Ford

"Put yourself, and your work, out there every day, and you'll start meeting some amazing people." — Bobby Solomon

"Teamwork makes the dream work, but a vision becomes a nightmare when the leader has a big dream and a bad team." — John Maxwell

"Lead through influence and not authority." — Unknown

"If you do not know where you are going, every road will get you nowhere." — Henry A. Kissinger

"All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make, the better." — Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The premature outlay of huge amounts of money in pursuit of the wrong strategy is the thing to avoid. You need to have an experimental mindset." — Clayton Christensen

"I loved that business ideas could be tested with minimal coding required." — Jaime Levy

"Instead of becoming a champion for one possible explanation or hypothesis or model, collect as many as possible. Consider all of them to be plausible until you find some evidence that causes you to rule one out. That way you will be emotionally able to see the evidence that rules out an assumption that may become entangled with your own identity." — Donella H. Meadows

"Most of my advances were by mistake. You uncover what is when you get rid of what isn't." — R. Buckminster Fuller

"At its core, all business is about making bets on human behavior." — "The Power of 'Thick' Data," The Wall Street Journal

"Fail often, fail fast." — Don Norman