

Two metrics set the limits for effective distribution. A great company is a conspiracy to change the world when you share your secret, the recipient becomes a fellow conspirator.

The best entrepreneurs know this: every great business is built around a secret that's hidden from the outside. You should focus relentlessly on something you're good at doing, but before that, you must think hard about whether it will be valuable in the future. How can the future get better if no one plans for it? - Progress without planning is what we call “evolution”.Īdvertising doesn't exist to make you buy a product right away it exists to embed subtle impressions that will drive sales later. The perfect target market for a startup is a small group of particular people concentrated together and served by few or no competitors. Therefore, every startup should start with a very small market. Every monopoly dominates a large share of its market.

The clearest way to make a 10x improvement is to invent something completely new.Įvery startup is small at the start. Most of a tech company’s value will come at least 10 to 15 years in future. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.Ī great business is defined by its ability to generate cash flows in the future. Instead, you should try things out, “iterate,” and treat entrepreneurship as agnostic experimentation.Īll happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. You should not know what your Business will do planning is arrogant and inflexible. Startups operate on the principle that you need to work with other people to get stuff done, but you also need to stay small enough so that you actually can.Īll companies must be "lean," which is code for “unplanned”. If you've invented something new but you haven't invented an effective way to sell it, you have a bad business-no matter how good the product. If you can't monopolize a unique solution for a small market, you'll be stuck with vicious competition. My main takeaways from this book are staying intentionally small, not worrying too much about planning for the long future and creating a product that is at least 10x better than any competition, otherwise, you will be obsolete.
