Personal MBA

6. There are no extra points for growing headcount, budget size, or fixed expense.

7. Jeff said many times that if we wanted Amazon to be a place where builders can build, we needed to eliminate communication, not encourage it.

Midjourney built its business with 40 employees and earned $200 million in revenue for 2023.

I’ve met with dozens of these companies now, and the story is the same. They make a great product and nail their positioning—and then they’re off to the races.

In other words, today’s cloud and mobile companies — Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and Google — may very well be the GM, Ford, and Chrysler of the 21st century. The beginning era of technology, where new challengers were started every year, has come to an end; however, that does not mean the impact of technology is somehow diminished: it in fact means

You have to build a great pipeline. Your best pipeline is going to come from your personal contacts. You literally have to sit everyone at your company down and tell them to name the 10 best people they've ever worked with or gone to school with … You get those 10 best people and then you just pound the pavement. You have lunch, coffee, breakfast,

I price my products at an affordable rate, make them as valuable as possible, and simply ask people to tell their friends if they enjoyed them. I've found this pricing approach to be just as effective (if not more so) than a money-back guarantee.

This is why I recommend that people price things to be accessible and create a WOM machine. It's easy to

When we [at Y Combinator] say ‘focus on product,’ it means that you put almost all of those hours into talking to users, creating product, and making sure that you have some users that really love your product.

The single best product lens is “build until they tell” — focus on improving your product until every user refers someone else