Startup Advice

Sam Altman on why you shouldn’t track absolute user growth in the early days of a startup “Nothing but a great product will save you; you can get everything else right and it still won’t work.” He points out that almost all startup founders get the following... See more

Projects rarely unfold in a linear fashion; they require frequent course correction. Most trainees should spend more time on a project’s decision tree than they currently do. Once you get into a project, you will have learned from your initial experiments, new papers will have been published, and technology will have advanced. As a result, at any... See more

I even pretend that my client’s business isn’t a business at all. Instead, I pretend it’s a book.

Whether you realize it or not, your business is indeed a lot like a book.

Like a book, it has a main idea. It’s “about” something. That main idea may be sharp and distinct, or it may be broad and commoditized. It may be easy for people to talk about, or... See more

Designing products for a single person

In business, there are countless examples of products invented for a single person that then became mass-marketable. Here are a few of my favorites:

• Baking soda —invented in the 1800s by British chemist Alfred Bird so that he could make bread for his wife, who was allergic to yeast.


• The typewriter —one of the

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