Innovation Is A Bottoms-up, Decentralized, And Unpredictable

The Biggest Start-up Successes - From Henry Ford To Bill Gates To Mark Zuckerberg - Were Pioneered By People From Solidly Middle-class Backgrounds. These Founders Were Not Wealthy When They Began. They Were Hungry For Success, But Knew They Had A Solid Support System To Fall Back On If They Failed.

At Imvu, The Cost Of Customer Acquisition Through Our Five-dollar-a-day Adwords Campaign Was Less Than Twenty-five Cents. Our Revenue From Those Same Customers Was More Than A Dollar.

Products A Start-up Builds Are Really Experiments…learning About How To Build A Sustainable Business Is The Outcome Of Those Experiments [which Follow] A Three-step Process: Build, Measure, Learn.” “[a Startup Is] … An Organization Dedicated To Creating Something New Under Conditions Of Extreme Uncertainty.

We Must Learn What Customers Really Want, Not What They Say They Want Or What We Think They Should Want.

If Your Goal Is To Make Money, Becoming An Entrepreneur Is A Sucker's Bet. Sure, Some Entrepreneurs Make A Lot Of Money, But If You Calculate The Amount Of Stress-inducing Work And Time It Takes And Multiply That By The Low Likelihood Of Success And Eventual Payoff, It Is Not A Great Way To Get Rich.