Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

Fig. 3.6.1 Geoffrey Moore first mapped out when different people are open to new products in his book Crossing the Chasm. But that’s not the whole story. It’s also critical to understand where V1, V2, and V3 of your product will fall on this chart and how that changes what you focus on—disruption, refinement, or the business.

One of the main pulls to create the App Store was actually from corporations. As businesses began adopting the iPhone, they reached out to Apple, asking to make applications for their employees and sales. If Apple wanted people to continue using their phones for work, they’d have to give the enterprise the ability to create its own apps. And so the

So when you’re choosing your board members, here’s what types of people you should be considering:

All acquisitions come down to what you’re trying to do when you’re buying a company—do you want to buy a team? Technology? Patents? Product? Customer base? Business (that is, revenue)? A brand? Some other strategic assets?

After you’ve launched your V1, then two to four times in that year, you should be announcing something to the world. New products, new features, new redesigns or updates. Something meaty that’s worth people’s attention.

In an interview I’m always most interested in three basic things: who they are, what they’ve done, and why they did it. I usually start with the most important questions: “What are you curious about? What do you want to learn?”

Adulthood is your opportunity to screw up continually until you learn how to screw up a little bit less.

Bill would always say that if there was any potentially surprising or controversial topic, the CEO should go to every board member, one-on-one, to walk them through it before the meeting. That allowed them to ask questions, offer different perspectives, and then the CEO had time to take those thoughts back to the team and revise their thinking, pre

Tesla was in danger of becoming just one more electric car in a market flooded by them. So they started electrifying different kinds of vehicles and innovating charging networks and retail and service, batteries and supply chains. They’re ensuring that the competition has to fully disrupt every part of their operations to even enter the race. Once

To get Amazon onto people’s phones and change how people shopped online, you didn’t need to build a whole new device. You just needed a really great app that would live on everybody else’s devices. I told him: I wouldn’t make the phone. He made the phone. I didn’t get the board seat. When it launched, the Fire Phone did everything he had promised—b