The most important lesson I’ve learned for developing new products: You don’t have to be the first person to come up with a product idea. In fact, that will rarely be the case. But you can almost always make an existing idea better. And that’s when you get the big wins.

An underrated way to succeed at anything is simply to be ten times better. Everyone wants to have a unique idea or be a monopoly but you can just be ten times better instead. In a lot of areas, no one is really trying. The world is coated with a film of inertia.

Most times, the best way to create value is continue to double down on the domain-specific insights you've collected over your entire career.

Take, for example, the ambition to “make your venture-backed startup profitable”: to develop, market, and distribute a product or service that’s never existed before, in a form that’s valuable and accessible enough for large numbers of people to want to pay you for it, in sufficient quantity that your revenue consistently exceeds your costs.

If you... See more