Roadmap To Success Quotes

Vision is the "what" – the aspirational picture of the organization's future. Strategy is the "how" – the roadmap outlining the steps to reach that vision.

...Chanel didn't start out with a mission statement, nor a corporate vision, nor a roadmap for success, nor timeline for achieving her goals, nor an action item list, nor any of those other high-falutin' concepts we associate with mega modern multinational success stories.

There are different paths to your destination. Choose your own path.

Mitchell Maxwell’s Maxims • You have to create your own professional path. There’s no longer a roadmap for an artistic career. • Follow your heart and the money will follow. • Create a benchmark of your own progress. If you never look down while you’re climbing the ladder you won’t know how far you’ve come. • Don’t define success by net worth, define it by character. Success, as it’s measured by society, is a fleeting condition. • Affirm your value. Tell the world “I am an artist,” not “I want to be an artist.” • You must actively live your dream. Wishing and hoping for someday doesn’t make it happen. Get out there and get involved. • When you look into the abyss you find your character. • Young people too often let the fear of failure keep them from trying. You have to get bloody, sweaty and rejected in order to succeed. • Get your face out of Facebook and into somebody’s face. Close your e-mail and pick up the phone. Personal contact still speaks loudest. • No one is entitled to act entitled. Be willing to work hard. • If you’re going to buck the norm you’re going to have to embrace the challenges. • You have to love the journey if you’re going to work in the arts. • Only listen to people who agree with your vision. • A little anxiety is good but don’t let it become fear, fear makes you inert. • Find your own unique voice. Leave your individual imprint on the world, not a copy of someone else. • Draw strength from your mistakes; they can be your best teacher.

When you get to the end of your life, you will treasure the moments when you decided to push past fear and try something new.

The “No bullshit” version of who you are can work with a compass. Your ego needs a map because it does not quite understand the wise words of Paul Jarvis, "Nobody is successful because they took somebody else's roadmap and copied it.

Everyone has doubts and negative thoughts. It is , however, what you choose to do with those thoughts that matters.

…never settle for trying to be less than the best.

Business coaches tell you to be yourself and let yourself shine through your business. But to be yourself, you have to know yourself.

Set your goals from a place of gratitude and watch how quickly you reach them.

Success will locate and visit you even if you are static wherever you are... But remember you are responsible for constructing the roads... Go, make the roads!

We often try to get to clarity while standing still. It just doesn’t work that way. Clarity comes from movement. You must try, test, attempt, launch, prove and examine before you get to clarity.

Product requirements conversations must then be grounded in business outcomes: what are we trying to achieve by building this product? This rule holds true for design decisions as well. Success criteria must be redefined and roadmaps must be done away with. In their place, teams build backlogs of hypotheses they’d like to test and prioritize them based on risk, feasibility, and potential success.

The accession of not one but three illegal drug users in a row to the US presidency constitutes an existential challenge to the prohibitionist regime. The fact that some of the most successful people of our time, be it in business, finances, politics, entertainment or the arts, are current or former substance users is a fundamental refutation of its premises and a stinging rebuttal of its rationale. A criminal law that is broken at least once by 50% of the adult population and that is broken on a regular basis by 20% of the same adult population is a broken law, a fatally flawed law. How can a democratic government justify a law that is consistently broken by a substantial minority of the population? What we are witnessing here is a massive case of civil disobedience not seen since alcohol prohibition in the 1930 in the US. On what basis can a democratic system justify the stigmatization and discrimination of a strong minority of as much as 20% of its population?

There are people who know where they want to be, and also have a roadmap in their mind, about how to get there. But something stops them! They either keep waiting for better circumstances, or simply lack the courage to give up the comfort of a secure life. For them, the pursuit of their purpose is a risky proposition. Often, those are the same people that die with the weight of regrets. Those are the people who feel unfulfilled or unworthy at the end of their journey. They bury their dreams for the sake of a safe life, without ever venturing into the world of possibilities. But the truth is that if you risk nothing for the pursuit of your passion, you risk more. An even deeper reality is that there’s never a perfect time; the most ideal and opportune time is the time when YOU choose to begin your journey. Find courage to take the first step today. Your age, your pace, or your handicap doesn’t matter. Nothing is insurmountable if you have passion and persistence – your heart knows this. You simply have to convince your mind to play along. Find your moments of courage – the times when you feel strong, able, and energized. Tap those moments to launch yourself; the world beckons!

The appropriate milestones measuring a startup’s progress answer these questions: How well do we understand what problems customers have? How much will they pay to solve those problems? Do our product features solve these problems? Do we understand our customers’ business? Do we understand the hierarchy of customer needs? Have we found visionary customers, ones who will buy our product early? Is our product a must-have for these customers? Do we understand the sales roadmap well enough to consistently sell the product? Do we understand what we need to be profitable? Are the sales and business plans realistic, scalable, and achievable? What do we do if our model turns out to be wrong?

Rob’s entire life was successfully laid out, his attributes taking center stage, his accolades only a few seconds shy of the next brilliant offer, and the next rave review. Our family life seemed happy, at least from the outside looking in, and why wouldn’t it? I was the dutiful little housewife, he was the brilliant plastic surgeon, and his daughters closed the circle of the perfect family. When he was gone, working late, patching people up, consulting on emergencies, with the children long asleep, I would often stare at myself in the mirror, and wonder how my life had gotten so far left of where I was once headed. My face, without makeup, was burdened with secrets, lines that threatened to one day reveal themselves like a roadmap of my unhappiness. But for all Rob’s planning, he couldn’t have anticipated that on the second day of August, at 5:45 a.m., his life was about to become completely and forever irreparably changed.

BELIEVE IN ONE LOVE: Bonding of love between polygamous is nothing but only delusion & seductive-shots called sexuality breeds cynicism, despising, criticism and condemnation; each always looks other through the negative lens and creates separation and hatred. Conversely bonding of love between monogamous is everything full of integrity, purity and heartfelt mingling like diluting of hard clout of soil with pristine rain breeds serenity, bliss and lure like magnetism each always looks other through positive lens and creates union and frequently electrify each other to share and care each other feelings of life for the sole purpose of a shared vision; a road-map of life between two bodies into one soul creating success in life through enacting commitment and trust each on other for a win-win situation is called soul-mate-ship. Therefore, each man and woman should choose a path of monogamous making life enjoyable and praiseworthy at the shake of adultery. I earnestly urge of the mankind to believe in one-love making life fullest.

a close network of supportive law school friends is invaluable to your success and well-being. Because all 1Ls are in the same overcrowded lifeboat, most people jump at the chance to make friends in these early days. When all is said and done, the friends you make in law school will be one of the best features of your entire experience. If you spot someone at one of these events who you know is going to be one of your first-year professors (they’ll usually be wearing name tags), go up and introduce yourself. This is hard for a lot of people to do, but as elaborated on in Chapter 9, there is value in getting to know and being known by your professors. The fact that they’re attending the event (most profs don’t) means that they’re probably approachable people. Many law professors are shy, introverted types who are not good at “making the rounds,” so don’t wait for them to approach you. Don’t worry. They’re not going to ask you deep legal questions, but they may default to asking the classic introductory question, “What made you decide to come to law school?”, which is the law professor

Requirements for a Roadmap Relaunch ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​As we outlined in the preface, the product people we’ve talked to are looking for certain things from a roadmap. A product roadmap should: Put the organization’s plans in a strategic context Focus on delivering value to customers and the organization Embrace learning as part of a successful product development process Rally the organization around a single set of priorities Get customers excited about the product’s direction ​​​​​​​​​​​​​At the same time, a product roadmap should not: Make promises product teams aren’t confident they will deliver on Require a wasteful process of up-front design and estimation Be conflated with a project plan or a release plan (we cannot stress this enough)

What is my motivation for writing this? I’m tired of seeing so many people struggle. I’m frustrated at seeing so many kids coming out of college without even the basic skills for living a free life for themselves. I’m fed up watching so many parents in a stage of utter exhaustion, wondering what happened to their life after believing that following the rules we were all taught would lead them to success rather than the road to nowhere. I’m sad watching so many of us in our thirties and forties miss out on precious time with our families by drowning in meaningless work, and then finding relief inside a bottle of wine. And I want to prevent those about to embark on this journey to learn from our mistakes and successes.

When we become an autonomous organization, we will be one of the largest unadulterated digital security organizations on the planet,” he told the annual Intel Security Focus meeting in Las Vegas. “Not only will we be one of the greatest, however, we will not rest until we achieve our goal of being the best,” said Young. This is the main focus since Intel reported on agreements to deactivate its security business as a free organization in association with the venture company TPG, five years after the acquisition of McAfee. Young focused on his vision of the new company, his roadmap to achieve that, the need for rapid innovation and the importance of collaboration between industries. “One of the things I love about this conference is that we all come together to find ways to win, to work together,” he said. First, Young highlighted the publication of the book The Second Economy: the race for trust, treasure and time in the war of cybersecurity. The main objective of the book is to help the information security officers (CISO) to communicate the battles that everyone faces in front of others in the c-suite. “So we can recruit them into our fight, we need to recruit others on our journey if we want to be successful,” he said. Challenging assumptions The book is also aimed at encouraging information security professionals to challenge their own assumptions. “I plan to send two copies of this book to the winner of the US presidential election, because cybersecurity is going to be one of the most important issues they could face,” said Young. “The book is about giving more people a vision of the dynamism of what we face in cybersecurity, which is why we have to continually challenge our assumptions,” he said. “That’s why we challenge our assumptions in the book, as well as our assumptions about what we do every day.” Young said Intel Security had asked thousands of customers to challenge the company’s assumptions in the last 18 months so that it could improve. “This week, we are going to bring many of those comments to life in delivering a lot of innovation throughout our portfolio,” he said. Then, Young used a video to underscore the message that the McAfee brand is based on the belief that there is power to work together, and that no person, product or organization can provide total security. By allowing protection, detection and correction to work together, the company believes it can react to cyber threats more quickly. By linking products from different suppliers to work together, the company believes that network security improves. By bringing together companies to share intelligence on threats, you can find better ways to protect each other. The company said that cyber crime is the biggest challenge of the digital era, and this can only be overcome by working together. Revealed a new slogan: “Together is power”. The video also revealed the logo of the new independent company, which Young called a symbol of its new beginning and a visual representation of what is essential to the company’s strategy. “The shield means defense, and the two intertwined components are a symbol of the union that we are in the industry,” he said. “The color red is a callback to our legacy in the industry.” Three main reasons for independence According to Young, there are three main reasons behind the decision to become an independent company. First of all, it should focus entirely on enterprise-level cybersecurity, solve customers ‘cybersecurity problems and address clients’ cybersecurity challenges. The second is innovation. “Because we are committed and dedicated to cybersecurity only at the company level, our innovation is focused on that,” said Young. Third is growth. “Our industry is moving faster than any other IT sub-segment, we have t

With all their faults, [lawyers] stack up well against those in every other occupation or profession. They are better to work with or play with or fight with or drink with than most other varieties of mankind.” Trust that the haters and joke-tellers will be the first ones calling when they get in trouble.

Most people who are successful . . . didn’t do what everybody else did. They didn’t go the same routes everybody else went. It is the people who think outside the box in whatever discipline they are in who shake the world.

Early in the solution development process, an entrepreneur is likely to create both “works like” and “looks like” prototypes. “Works like” prototypes explore technical feasibility and show how a solution will deliver required functionality.

It is critical to unearth and understand our stories – both as individuals and as entrepreneurs. Once we do that, make peace with it, and embrace it, not only can we live empowered, transformed, and fulfilling lives, we can help others do that too as models and as guides." p. 29

Try not to become a person of success, but rather a person of value. —ALBERT EINSTEIN

I love running! I began running as an adult and became addicted, running over 70,000 miles, much of it alongside the athletes I was lucky enough to coach.

There is nothing quite like the feeling of accomplishment at the end of a hard workout or race.

Working with young people and helping them succeed in this great sport were some of the best hours of my life.

Base Camp With “tough tech” ventures—in which product development demands a vast amount of leading-edge science and engineering work—entrepreneurs often consider creating ancillary businesses before launching their primary business. These pared-down versions serve as the first application for the technologies they’re developing. Samir Kaul and his partners at Khosla Ventures have likened these ancillary businesses to a base camp, where mountaineers pause to organize their provisions and get acclimated to low oxygen levels before their final push to the summit.

It’s tempting to assume she achieved this despite the “Nos.” But in truth, each of those 148 “Nos” was a clue that ultimately made her business even stronger. Some sharpened her view on who her user was—and who her user wasn’t. Some helped her grasp how her competition might think. And some gave her an early warning about the ways her company might fail. At the end of the fundraising process alone, Kathryn had a roadmap marked with every potential pitfall she’d need to navigate around—and the unexplored territory she could explore ahead of any competitors.

Unlike ventures that are caught in a Speed Trap, with the Help Wanted pattern, a startup sustains product-market fit as it grows but cannot mobilize the resources needed to continue expanding.

Failure is not the worst thing; the worst thing is working on something for years with no end in sight. —Andrew Lee, Esper co-founder

It turns out that these two responses are related: The time spent wrestling with the intense emotions engendered by a struggling startup—or avoiding these emotions—leads some entrepreneurs to delay shutting down longer than they should. They are Running on Empty—to the detriment of all concerned. The longer this goes on, the longer employees are wasting time on a lost cause, when they could be moving on to their next act. And the longer a founder hopes in vain that new investors or an attractive acquisition will save the day, the longer he is burning through capital that could be returned to investors.

Successful pivots like these often have one thing in common, however: They happen early in the venture’s development.

a startup may not have enough runway left to complete the pivot successfully. Recall Eric Ries’s definition of “runway”: the number of pivots that a startup can complete before cash balances are exhausted. That number may be zero if the startup has just enough cash to commence a pivot but—absent an infusion of fresh capital—cannot survive long enough to see whether the pivot is working.

Humans are wired to oversimplify explanations for both good and bad outcomes through what philosophers call the single cause fallacy. We shine a spotlight on one big reason for a calamity—say, a failed presidential bid (“neglect of a key swing state”) or a sports team’s late-season collapse (“the star pitcher’s torn hamstring”)—when the outcome is actually a result of multiple factors.

Furthermore, we’re prone to make what psychologists call the fundamental attribution error. Research shows that when we observe others, our explanations for their behaviors tend to overemphasize dispositional factors—their personality type and the values we assume they have—while downplaying situational factors, such as social pressures or environmental circumstances. By contrast, when explaining our own behaviors, we tend to attribute good outcomes to dispositional factors—in particular, our skill and diligence—and bad outcomes to situational ones.

the definition of entrepreneurial failure that I’ll use in this book: A venture has failed if its early investors did not—or never will—get back more money than they put in. Why early investors? Because, when a startup fares poorly, later investors may get all of their money back while early investors generally receive less than the full amount they invested—or nothing at all.

after raising a Series D round, fewer than 40 percent of startups still have a founder as their CEO. I will keep founders’ personal goals in sharp focus throughout this book, but we shouldn’t use founders’ goal fulfillment as our main measure of success.

The diamond-and-square framework provides the answers. The framework’s diamond breaks down the startup’s opportunity—that is, the “horse”—into four constituent parts: its customer value proposition, technology and operations, marketing, and profit formula. The diamond is framed by a square whose corners denote the venture’s key resource providers: its founders (that is, the “jockeys”), other team members, outside investors, and strategic partners.

An early-stage startup has promising prospects when the eight elements of the diamond-and-square framework are in alignment—that is, when they work together harmoniously. Furthermore, alignment must be dynamic: As the startup matures, its opportunity will evolve, as will the nature of the support needed from resource providers.

Such barriers—called “moats” by some entrepreneurs—come in two types: proprietary assets and business model attributes. Proprietary assets are either difficult to duplicate or are in scarce supply.

Business model attributes are those that can confer an advantage in attracting and retaining customers, like high customer switching costs and strong network effects.

Switching costs aren’t just financial expenditures; they can also include inconveniences and risks incurred when a customer changes from one vendor to another. Consider, for example, the costs and risks when switching dog walkers. A family must trust the new walker with keys to their residence, must brief the new walker on their pet’s patterns and preferences, and run the risk that their dog may not take to this new human in its life. Switching costs can be a double-edged sword. For example, to attract customers, Baroo had to overcome these barriers. However, once it did, Baroo retained customers because they faced the high cost of switching to a competitor.

An early-stage startup has three important choices to make regarding its customer value proposition—choices that will have a big impact on its odds for success:

Target a Single Customer Segment?

An alternative to targeting multiple segments with a single product is creating separate versions of the product, each with different features and branding. This solution takes care of positioning problems but boosts costs and complexity.

How Much Innovation? When designing their first product, founders must decide how much to innovate. Some entrepreneurs believe that more innovation is always better, but as we’ll see, that mindset can get them in trouble.

Entrepreneurial innovation comes in three flavors: 1) new business models, as with Rent the Runway offering apparel for rent rather than sale; 2) new technologies, as with Solyndra, a failed maker of cylindrical solar panels built with a proprietary thin-film material; and 3) combining existing technologies in new ways, as with Quincy Apparel using a measurement system akin to that used for men’s suiting to offer better-fitting clothing for women.

Looking back, Wallace concluded that instead of raising funds from VC firms, Quincy could have sought financial backing from a clothing factory. That would have solved two problems: A factory with an equity stake in Quincy would have expedited orders and worked harder to correct production problems, and factory owners with deep industry experience would have known how to set an optimal pace for the growth of a new apparel line—in contrast to Quincy’s VCs, who pressured the founders to grow at full tilt.

The fundraising dilemmas confronting Quincy’s founders are echoed in the results of my survey of early-stage startups. Consistent with Quincy’s experience, the startups I surveyed that were struggling or shut down were more likely than their successful counterparts to have missed their targets in their initial round of fundraising. Likewise, the founder/CEOs of these struggling startups were more likely to have been disappointed with the quality of advice they received from their investors and more likely to report frequent, serious, and divisive conflict with investors over strategic priorities.

Finding the right strategic partners can have a major impact on an early-stage startup’s performance. Partners can lend their resources—key technologies, manufacturing capacity, warehouses, call centers, and so forth—to a new venture that lacks the wherewithal and/or time to develop such resources in-house. However, the asymmetry in bargaining power between a big, mature, resource-rich company and a fledgling startup can make it difficult to secure the right resources on reasonable terms.

Quincy’s struggle to get good service from its factory partners highlights a risk endemic to early-stage startups when they partner with established players. It’s easy for a mouse to get trampled by an elephant. Even an elephant with good intentions may be clumsy and too slow moving to avoid squashing the mouse.

the complexity posed another problem: There is no way to run a lean experiment to prove, in advance, that a planned production process will work. You must fully develop the process and then run it in order to demonstrate its effectiveness. Producing apparel in sample quantities, which Quincy’s founders did successfully after their trunk show tests, is a completely different ball game compared to manufacturing it in volume.

startups are more likely to be vulnerable to the Good Idea, Bad Bedfellows failure pattern when they pursue opportunities that involve 1) complex operations requiring the tight coordination of different specialists’ work; 2) inventory of physical goods; and 3) large, lumpy capital requirements. By contrast, consider the more modest management demands on a purely software-based startup like Twitter when it launched. A small team of engineers created the site, and it spread virally without a paid marketing push. Capital requirements were modest and there was no physical inventory to manage. As Twitter grew, it eventually added an array of specialists to manage various functions—for example, community relations, server infrastructure, copyright compliance, etc. But it didn’t need these specialists at the outset.

Founders who fear that they may not be able to amass the resources required to pursue an attractive opportunity should also consider ways to constrain that opportunity. They can do this by reducing the scope of their effort—at least initially, until proof of concept is established and it becomes easier to mobilize resources. This approach is somewhat counterintuitive because startup dogma holds that growth is the prime goal for a new venture. Instead, with this contrarian approach, a startup should start small in order to get big.

Nagaraj and his new team were heading for a False Start—a failure pattern common to many early-stage ventures. A false start occurs when a startup rushes to launch its first product before conducting enough customer research—only to find that the opportunities they’ve identified are rife with problems. By giving short shrift to early and accurate customer feedback and by neglecting to test their assumptions with MVPs, they simply run out of time to fix all the flaws, thus turning Lean Startup’s “Fail Fast” mantra into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But Triangulate’s team, like many entrepreneurs, neglected yet another Lean Startup precept: complete “customer discovery”—a thorough round of interviews with prospective customers—before designing and developing a minimum viable product. In Nagaraj’s postmortem analysis of Triangulate’s failure, he acknowledged skipping this crucial early step: “In retrospect, I should have spent a few months talking to as many customers as possible before we started to code.

Latecomers who fail to offer a superior solution will almost always face an uphill battle, especially if they target a market—like online dating—with strong network effects.

These arrows represent an initial focus on divergent thinking—generating lots of ideas—followed by an emphasis on convergent thinking—deciding which ideas are best. For the problem definition phase, divergent thinking means exploring the full range of customer segments you might plausibly serve and, for each segment, identifying the full set of unmet needs you could conceivably address. Next, convergent thinking allows you to home in on which customer segments you will target and which needs you will focus on. The same “diverge then converge” rhythm applies to solution development. You generate lots of possible solutions to customers’ problems and then select the most promising one.

Iteration should stop only when you’re confident you have formulated a compelling customer value proposition—also known as a positioning statement—that includes answers to all of the blanks listed below: For [INSERT: target customer segments] dissatisfied with [INSERT: existing solution] due to [INSERT: unmet needs], [INSERT: venture name] offers a [INSERT: product category] that provides [INSERT: key benefits of your defensible, differentiated solution].

Most entrepreneurs have a solution in mind at the outset. That’s good, but Double-Diamond Design asks you not to become too emotionally attached to that solution. Rather, you should stay open to possibility: More pressing unmet needs or better solutions might be out there. Entrepreneurs who fall victim to a false start are closed to these possibilities; they jump directly to the end of the design process.

The best way to synthesize all of this convergent thinking is to develop personas—fictional examples of archetypal customers used to focus product designs and craft marketing messages. Personas often have memorable names—say, “Picky Paula,” for a hard-to-satisfy dater—along with imagined photos, specific demographic and behavioral attributes

It’s generally best to create three to five personas, with one or two being “primary,” that is, representative of your target customer segments. Having too many primary personas can result in a product that tries to be all things to all people.

corralling “HiPPOs”—the highest paid person’s opinions. The brainstorming process should be as inclusive as possible, recognizing that great ideas truly can come from anywhere.

MVP Testing. Prototyping and prototype testing should proceed in iterative loops until a dominant design emerges. Based on test feedback, designers should reject some prototypes and refine others, producing higher-fidelity versions. Once they converge on a single, favored solution, it’s time for minimum viable product testing. An MVP is a prototype—a facsimile of the future product. What distinguishes an MVP from other prototypes is how it is tested. Rather than sitting across a table, getting verbal feedback from a reviewer, you put a prototype that seems like a real product in the hands of real customers in a real-world context. The goal is to quickly but rigorously test assumptions about the demand for your solution—and gain what Eric Ries calls “validated learning”—with as little wasted effort as possible.

To acquire customers, Baroo did not invest in traditional paid marketing, such as Facebook ads. Instead, the startup relied on the marketing efforts of apartment building partners and on word-of-mouth referrals from existing customers. Buildings would distribute a welcome gift from Baroo—a chew toy or leash—to new residents who owned pets. The team also hosted quarterly events for residents, such as “yappy hours” and pet Halloween. Finally, building concierge staff would recommend Baroo to residents. In exchange, the startup paid buildings a share of the revenue that it earned from their residents, averaging about 6 percent. Such revenue sharing is standard practice for service providers, like cable TV companies, that want access to residents.

Hyde revealed, “We felt we had great proof points and a path to geographic expansion with building partners who managed properties across the country. In retrospect, I didn’t have the discipline to pass up these growth opportunities.

But Washington held some unpleasant surprises: Customer attrition spiked when the Trump administration took control in January 2017 and many federal employees who’d been appointed by President Obama left town. Also, apartment buildings were more dispersed in D.C. than in Boston or Chicago, which added travel time between jobs for Baroo care providers.

False positives unfold in two ways. With both patterns, entrepreneurs mistakenly assume that the behavior of early adopters will be matched by that of mainstream customers. With the first pattern, an entrepreneur tailors a solution for early adopters, commits resources to this solution, and then learns that the solution doesn’t meet the needs of the larger mainstream market. Without mainstream customers, the venture won’t earn enough revenue to survive. By the time the entrepreneur recognizes the need to pivot, he’s amassed resources of the wrong type, and a cash-constrained startup lacks the wherewithal to replace them.

With the second pattern, an entrepreneur assembles resources to capitalize upon an opportunity. While pursuing this opportunity, he is surprised by the level of demand from early adopters and assumes that the demand from mainstream customers will also be strong. In response, he ramps up expansion plans. But as with the first pattern, the venture’s original resources aren’t suited for this new direction.

I learned that the happiest you’ll ever be with an investor is when you sign the term sheet. I now know that if it’s not all rosy then, you should just walk away.

when entrepreneurs are pleasantly surprised by the positive responses from early adopters after the venture has launched, they should consider the possibility that the broader market may not respond in the same way.

Convenience sampling—testing the waters with friends and family—often leads to false positive results because loved ones tend to adore your idea no matter what. Crowdfunding campaigns—like the one Jibo ran on Indiegogo—pose a similar hazard. Individuals who back such campaigns are often product category enthusiasts looking for bright, shiny new things and are eager to be first to sample them. Crowdfunding campaigns can demonstrate a product’s appeal to such zealots, but they don’t provide data on mass-market demand.

Hiring specialists too soon can cause trouble, as can delaying their recruitment. The same holds true for formal structure and systems. Such problems are rarely the main reason for a late-stage startup’s failure: The root cause is almost always that goals for speed or scope are out of whack. Nevertheless, organizational problems can act as amplifiers, boosting the odds of failure by distracting management when marketplace challenges require their full attention.

Venture capitalist Ben Horowitz defines company culture as how employees make decisions when their boss isn’t there. In a company with a strong culture, employees “just know” what to do when confronted with a nonroutine issue.

VC Fred Wilson estimates that a typical startup will turn over its management team three times between its inception and when it achieves significant scale. Wilson emphasizes that turning over a team is not the same as firing someone for poor performance. Still, it can be tough to create new roles for senior managers who can’t handle the evolving demands of their current positions, and terminating them can be demoralizing for colleagues who’ve worked with them since the beginning—especially if those individuals are torchbearers for the startup’s mission and values. Wilson notes that serial entrepreneurs, having seen these patterns before, are better equipped to manage executive churn. He also advises founders to be open with new hires, letting them know that “they may not make it to the finish line, but they will be handsomely compensated with equity.

The discussion above of the Six S framework suggests that its elements frequently interact and influence each other. My analysis of scaling startups shows that these interactions frequently follow two predictable paths—each with its own catalyst. The first path starts with a drive for Speed—that is, accelerated growth for the startup’s core business. With the second path, the catalyst is a vision with ambitious Scope. As we’ll see in the chapters that follow, these two paths expose startups to unique risks—and unique modes of failure.

Entrepreneurs who lead late-stage startups must maintain balance while pursuing opportunity, which requires them to set goals for speed and scope that are sufficiently ambitious yet achievable. By “speed,” I mean the pace of expansion of the venture’s core business—that is, its original product offered solely in its home market. “Scope” is a broader concept that encompasses four dimensions. The first three—geographic reach, product line breadth, and innovation—collectively define the range of the startup’s product market: How many additional customer segments will be targeted, and which of their needs will be addressed? The fourth dimension, vertical integration, refers to the range of activities that the startup will perform in-house rather than outsourcing to third parties.

Cultures in scaling startups can fracture in two ways. First, “old guard versus new guard” conflicts may arise if early team members resent the growing power of specialists or some new employees’ lack of initiative and commitment. Recent hires, in turn, may be jealous of early employees who’ve amassed enormous stock option gains (“That engineer in the next cubicle does the same thing I do, and she just made $5 million”). Second, as specialists are added to the staff and their units expand, functions can develop their own subcultures. Employees may feel a stronger sense of attachment to their functional unit—say, marketing or warehouse operations—than to the venture overall.

Because they are pursuing a novel opportunity without access to all required resources, entrepreneurs are, by definition, engaged in risky business.

failures can usually be attributed to some combination of misfortunes that were outside the control of responsible parties and mistakes made by those parties.

early-stage entrepreneurs can employ one or more of four tactics to reduce resource requirements while respectively resolving, shifting, deferring, or downplaying opportunity-related risks. However, as I’ll explain here and in the chapters that follow, every one of these tactics contains some potentially destructive downsides.

Of the four opportunity elements, an early-stage startup’s customer value proposition is without question the most important. To survive, a new venture absolutely must offer a sustainably differentiated solution for strong, unmet customer needs. This point bears repeating: Needs must be strong. If an unknown startup’s product doesn’t address an acute pain point, customers aren’t likely to buy it. Likewise, differentiation is crucial: If the venture’s offering is not superior in meaningful ways to existing solutions, again, no one will buy it. Finally, sustaining this differentiation is important. Without barriers to imitation, the venture is vulnerable to copycats.

But what if you build it and no one comes? VC Marc Andreessen commented on this possibility: “The number one reason that we pass on entrepreneurs we’d otherwise like to back is focusing on product to the exclusion of everything else. We tend to cultivate and glorify this mentality in the Valley. But the dark side is that it gives entrepreneurs excuses not to do the hard stuff of sales and marketing. Many entrepreneurs who build great products simply don’t have a good distribution strategy. Even worse is when they insist that they don’t need one or call no distribution strategy a ‘viral marketing strategy.

Heavy marketing investments made prior to a pivot are worse than wasted: They actually hurt the startup by confusing and alienating its existing and prospective customer base.

An entrepreneur doesn’t really make decisions about her profit formula. Rather, the choices she makes about the other three elements of the venture’s opportunity—its Customer Value Proposition, Technology & Operations, and Marketing—dictate revenue and costs. These decisions collectively determine who the venture will serve and in what numbers, how it will price its product, how it will attract new customers, whether it will employ a “high-touch” service approach and incur commensurate costs, and so forth.

When investors ask about a startup’s “unit economics,” they want to know how much profit the company will earn per unit sold.

Note that “profit” in this context is defined as gross profit—that is, revenue per unit minus all variable costs directly incurred in producing and delivering the unit

Not factored into the equation are marketing costs, allocations for overhead expenses, interest payments on debt, or income taxes. Deduction of these items would yield net profit.

A customer’s lifetime value (LTV) equals the discounted present value of the gross profit earned over the life of a typical customer’s relationship with the venture.

Customer acquisition cost (CAC) reflects the average marketing cost incurred in acquiring a typical customer. An LTV/CAC ratio below 1.0 implies that a customer is worth less than it cost to bring her on board.

The LTV/CAC ratio is a key performance measure, but it’s important to remember that cash flow from customers is earned over time, whereas the cost of acquiring customers is incurred up front. This implies that a startup with a healthy LTV/CAC ratio that is aggressively expanding its customer base could be burning through its capital reserves rapidly, meaning it may be at risk of violating the cardinal rule of entrepreneurship: Don’t run out of cash!

a startup has to reach its cash flow break-even point. That occurs when the venture’s sales volume generates enough gross profit to cover all of its tax payments, marketing expenses, fixed costs, and new investments (e.g., additional equipment and inventory required to support the next wave of expansion).

The four elements described above—the “diamond” in the diamond-and-square framework—collectively specify the opportunity: what the venture will offer and to whom; its plan for technology and operations; its marketing approach; and how the venture will make money. To capture this opportunity, the venture will need the right resources in the right amounts. The “square” in the diamond-and-square framework specifies the four types of resource providers whose contributions are important for success in most startups. They include the venture’s founders, other team members, outside investors, and strategic partners who may provide key technologies, operational capabilities, or access to distribution channels.

These four “square” elements should complement one another, so that an abundance of one resource can compensate for shortfalls of another.

Beware founding teams whose members all have similar training and functional experience. Startups launched at business schools often fit this profile.

So, how does one figure out whether a founder is overconfident? Often, it’s as simple as looking for signs like a lack of humility, a reluctance to listen, and defensiveness or inflexibility when challenged.