“ There’s a big difference between adding a feature to an existing product and building a product around a philosophy. ”
“ Virality is something that has to be engineered from the beginning… and it’s harder to create virality than it is to create a good product. The reason that over $150 billion is spent on US advertising each year is because virality is so hard. If virality was easy, there would be no advertising industry. ”
“ eBay, YouTube, Sun, Oracle, Apple, Cisco, Facebook, Yahoo!, and Google. All of them share a couple common traits: they launched before taking outside investment, and they were able to do it because they had a set of founders with the skills to build the initial version of the product themselves. ”
“ Once a startup is successful, and you ask the founders what made it successful, they will usually cite all kinds of things that had nothing to do with it. People are terrible at understanding causation. But in almost every case, the cause was actually product/market fit. ”
“ Just because something is simple to build doesn’t mean it won’t be a good venture capital investment ”
“ As soon as it’s written, every business plan is wrong. ”
“ There is no such thing as a quantum leap. There is only dogged persistence - and in the end you make it look like a quantum leap. ”
James Dyson, inventor of the Dyson vacuum cleaner (via kareem, tedr, mikehudack)
“ I wasn’t thinking about markets or fortunes. I was making better shoes a foot at a time. ”
Bill Bowerman, co-founder of Nike (via jamesnord, tedr, msg)
