Scalability Quotes

Metaphor is awkward, but emotion, by its nature, leaves you no more scalable approach.

In distributed systems, suspicion, pessimism, and paranoia pay off.

The moral of the story is that a NoSQL system may find itself accidentally reinventing SQL, albeit in disguise.

data outlives code.

Without stories of progress, the world has become a terrifying place. The ruin glares at us with the horror of its abandonment. It’s not easy to know how to make a life, much less avert planetary destruction. Luckily there is still company, human and not human. We can still explore the overgrown verges of our blasted landscapes - the edges of capitalist discipline, scalability, and abandoned resource plantations. We can still catch the scent of the latent commons - and the elusive autumn aroma.

If you do something to benefit one person, that is an absolute gain, and its relative insignificance in the wider scheme is irrelevant. Benefit two people without concomitant harm to others - or a village, tribe, city, class, nation, society or civilisation - and the benefits are scalable, arithmetic. There is no excuse beyond fatalistic self-indulgence and sheer laziness for doing nothing.

You get what you design for. Chester, your peer in Development, is spending all his cycles on features, instead of stability, security, scalability, manageability, operability, continuity, and all those other beautiful ’itties.

Scalability becomes supercharged with “network effects.” A network effect exists when assets become more valuable the more of them exist.

Learn the language you need. Learn the language of business (accounting) Learn the language of scalability (programming) Learn the language of entrepreneurship (influence)

how do you get, maintain, and multiply attention in a scalable and efficient way?

The faster you run high quality experiments, the more likely you’ll find scalable, effective growth tactics. Determining the success of a customer acquisition idea is dependent on an effective tracking and reporting system, so don’t start testing until your tracking/reporting system has been implemented.

It is one thing when prices drift downward over time due to innovation, scalability or other efficiencies. This might be considered “good” deflation and is familiar to any contemporary consumer who has seen prices of computers or wide-screen TVs fall year after year. It is another matter when prices are forced down by unnecessary monetary contraction, credit constraints, deleveraging, business failures, bankruptcies and mass unemployment. This may be considered “bad” deflation. This bad deflation was exactly what was required in order to return the most important currencies to their prewar parity with gold.

Concepts and patterns that your brain is sorting through and making sense of are much more scalable and universal than any specific vendor’s technology

A database is just a tool: how you use it is up to you.

When a team must allocate a disproportionate amount of time to resolving tickets at the cost of spending time improving the service, scalability and reliability suffer.

A growth hacker is someone who has thrown out the playbook of traditional marketing and replaced it with only what is testable, trackable, and scalable. Their tools are e-mails, pay-per-click ads, blogs, and platform APIs instead of commercials, publicity, and money.

The Google File System

Martin Kleppmann: “Rethinking Caching in Web Apps,

To Schema on Read or to Schema on Write, That Is the Hadoop Data Lake Question

Lawrence Page, Sergey Brin, Rajeev Motwani, and Terry Winograd: “The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web,” Stanford InfoLab Technical Report 422, 1999.

Reactive applications are characteristically interactive, fault tolerant, scalable, and event driven.

We spend this life looking for a center, a place where we can suspend without a wobble. The specific coordinates are elusive, scalable only by the heart. _Population: 485_, p 202

First make it possible. Then make it beautiful. Then make it fast.

Self-service is a scalable, cost-effective way to make customers happy.

it is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state

Next, name your scalable product or service. Naming your offering gives you ownership of it and helps you differentiate it from those of potential competitors.

The need for data integration often only becomes apparent if you zoom out and consider the dataflows across an entire organization.

The fastest and most reliable network request is no network request at all!

If we want the future to be better than the past, moral imagination is required, and that’s something only humans can provide [87]. Data and models should be our tools, not our masters.

A second key to deep decarbonization brings up an inconvenient truth for the traditional Green movement: nuclear power is the world’s most abundant and scalable carbon-free energy source.

The cost-effectiveness of energy has four dimensions: Affordability: How much money does it cost relative to how much money people have? Reliability: To what extent can it be produced “on demand”—when needed, in as large a quantity as needed? Versatility: How wide a variety of machines can it power? Scalability: How many people can it produce energy for and in how many places?

Whenever you hear a snotty (and frustrated) European middlebrow presenting his stereotypes about Americans, he will often describe them as “uncultured,” “unintellectual,” and “poor in math” because, unlike his peers, Americans are not into equation drills and the constructions middlebrows call “high culture”—like knowledge of Goethe’s inspirational (and central) trip to Italy, or familiarity with the Delft school of painting. Yet the person making these statements is likely to be addicted to his iPod, wear blue jeans, and use Microsoft Word to jot down his “cultural” statements on his PC, with some Google searches here and there interrupting his composition. Well, it so happens that America is currently far, far more creative than these nations of museumgoers and equation solvers. It is also far more tolerant of bottom-up tinkering and undirected trial and error. And globalization has allowed the United States to specialize in the creative aspect of things, the production of concepts and ideas, that is, the scalable part of the products, and, increasingly, by exporting jobs, separate the less scalable components and assign them to those happy to be paid by the hour. There

Defining the sales methodology enables the sales training formula to be scalable and predictable. The three elements of the sales methodology are the buyer journey, the sales process, and the qualifying matrix.

Pop culture is all about identity and feeling like you’re participating. It has nothing to do with cooperation, the past or the future — it’s living in the present. I think the same is true of most people who write code for money.

As the Big Shift takes hold, companies are no longer places that exist to drive down costs by getting increasingly bigger. They’re places that support and organize talented individuals to get better faster by working with others. The rationale of the firm shifts from scalable efficiency to scalable learning—the ability to improve performance more rapidly and learn faster by effectively integrating more and more participants distributed across traditional institutional boundaries.

Without stories of progress, the world has become a terrifying place. The ruin glares at us with the horror of its abandonment. It’s not easy to know how to make a life, much less avert planetary destruction. Luckily there is still company, human and not human. We can still explore the overgrown verges of our blasted landscapes— the edges of capitalist discipline, scalability, and abandoned resource plantations. We can still catch the scent of the latent commons— and the elusive autumn aroma.

the success of creation spaces can be traced back to careful design at the outset by a small group of people who were very thoughtful about the conditions required to foster or “scaffold” scalable collaboration, learning, and performance improvement.

The Global Learning XPRIZE competition, which started in 2014, offered $15 million for “open-source, scalable software that will enable children in developing countries to teach themselves basic reading, writing and arithmetic within 15 months.” Results from the winners, Kitkit School and onebillion, suggest that the goal has largely been achieved.

Direct democracy, prefigurative politics and direct action are not, we hasten to add, intrinsically flawed.19 Rather than being denounced in themselves, their utility needs to be judged relative to particular historical situations and particular strategic objectives – in terms of their ability to exert real power to create genuine lasting transformation. The reality of complex, globalised capitalism is that small interventions consisting of relatively non-scalable actions are highly unlikely to ever be able to reorganise our socioeconomic system. As we suggest in the second half of this book, the tactical repertoire of horizontalism can have some use, but only when coupled with other more mediated forms of political organisation and action.

Starting a successful business is not tricky. Starting a successful business does not require above average intelligence. Starting a successful business does require having a pig-headed, purpose-driven tenacity about achieving your life goals and fulfilling your life's vision through providing products and services that offer uncompromising quality in a scalable and duplicatable way.

Technology is a powerful force in our society. Data, software, and communication can be used for bad: to entrench unfair power structures, to undermine human rights, and to protect vested interests. But they can also be used for good: to make underrepresented people’s voices heard, to create opportunities for everyone, and to avert disasters. This book is dedicated to everyone working toward the good.

PEACETIME CEO/WARTIME CEO Peacetime CEO knows that proper protocol leads to winning. Wartime CEO violates protocol in order to win. Peacetime CEO focuses on the big picture and empowers her people to make detailed decisions. Wartime CEO cares about a speck of dust on a gnat’s ass if it interferes with the prime directive. Peacetime CEO builds scalable, high-volume recruiting machines. Wartime CEO does that, but also builds HR organizations that can execute layoffs. Peacetime CEO spends time defining the culture. Wartime CEO lets the war define the culture. Peacetime CEO always has a contingency plan. Wartime CEO knows that sometimes you gotta roll a hard six. Peacetime CEO knows what to do with a big advantage. Wartime CEO is paranoid. Peacetime CEO strives not to use profanity. Wartime CEO sometimes uses profanity purposefully. Peacetime CEO thinks of the competition as other ships in a big ocean that may never engage. Wartime CEO thinks the competition is sneaking into her house and trying to kidnap her children. Peacetime CEO aims to expand the market. Wartime CEO aims to win the market. Peacetime CEO strives to tolerate deviations from the plan when coupled with effort and creativity. Wartime CEO is completely intolerant. Peacetime CEO does not raise her voice. Wartime CEO rarely speaks in a normal tone. Peacetime CEO works to minimize conflict. Wartime CEO heightens the contradictions. Peacetime CEO strives for broad-based buy-in. Wartime CEO neither indulges consensus building nor tolerates disagreements. Peacetime CEO sets big, hairy, audacious goals. Wartime CEO is too busy fighting the enemy to read management books written by consultants who have never managed a fruit stand. Peacetime CEO trains her employees to ensure satisfaction and career development. Wartime CEO trains her employees so they don’t get their asses shot off in the battle. Peacetime CEO has rules like “We’re going to exit all businesses where we’re not number one or two.” Wartime CEO often has no businesses that are number one or two and therefore does not have the luxury of following that rule.

Interruption Marketing was easy. Build a few ads, run them everywhere. Interruption Marketing was scalable. If you need more sales, buy more ads. Interruption Marketing was predictable. With experience, a mass marketer could tell how many dollars in revenue one more dollar in ad spending would generate. Interruption Marketing fit the command and control bias of big companies. It was totally controlled by the advertiser, with no weird side effects.

Similarly, product managers must be problem solvers as well. They are not trying to design the user experience, or architect a scalable, fault‐tolerant solution. Rather, they solve for constraints aligned around their customer's business, their industry, and especially their own business. Is this something their customers need? Is it substantially better than the alternatives? Is it something the company can effectively market and sell, that they can afford to build, that they can service and support, and that complies with legal and regulatory constraints?

Don’t know if there even is such a thing as “worse” when it comes to grief. I’ve kind of come to think of grief the same way you might think about drowning. Drowning is drowning, some people might be drowning for longer than others, some drowning might put you on a whole new path once you’re through it, sometimes it might change how your brain works if you’re cut off from oxygen for long enough, could even cost you your life—the severity of the drowning incident might be scalable but the drowning itself, the grief itself, it’s all water you can’t breathe in.

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?

Scalable Social Network Analysis. The SSNA would monitor telephone calls, conference calls, and ATM withdrawals, but it also sought to develop a far more invasive surveillance technology, one that could “capture human activities in surveillance environments.” The Activity Recognition and Monitoring program, or ARM, was modeled after England’s CCTV camera. Surveillance cameras would be set up across the nation, and through the ARM program, they would capture images of people as they went about their daily lives, then save these images to massive data storage banks for computers to examine. Using state-of-the-art facial recognition software, ARM would seek to identify who was behaving outside the computer’s pre-programmed threshold for “ordinary.” The parameters for “ordinary” remain classified.

Through the years, many people have asked me why I set up Khan Academy as a nonprofit. After all, my previous career was very for-profit, and I live in the middle of Silicon Valley, where scalable tech-enabled solutions can be worth a lot of money. Many have been skeptical whether a nonprofit could even compete with for-profit companies. There were two notions I couldn’t get out of my head, however. First, I tend to believe in market forces, but there are a few sectors—namely, education and health care—where the outcomes of market forces don’t always align with our values. Education and health care are two areas where our shared values tell us that, ideally, family resources shouldn’t be a limiting factor in accessing the best possible opportunities. Most of us believe that every mind and life deserves to reach its full potential.

The Industrial Revolution has bequeathed us the production-line theory of education. In the middle of town there is a large concrete building divided into many identical rooms, each room equipped with rows of desks and chairs. At the sound of a bell, you go to one of these rooms together with thirty other kids who were all born the same year as you. Every hour a different grown-up walks in and starts talking. The grown-ups are all paid to do so by the government. One of them tells you about the shape of the earth, another tells you about the human past, and a third tells you about the human body. It is easy to laugh at this model, and almost everybody agrees that no matter its past achievements, it is now bankrupt. But so far we haven’t created a viable alternative. Certainly not a scalable alternative that can be implemented in rural Mexico rather than just in wealthy California suburbs.

TechCrunch, Fast Company, Mashable, Inc., Entrepreneur, and countless other publications. LinkedIn and Hacker News abound with job postings: Growth Hacker Needed. Their job isn’t to “do” marketing as I had always known it; it’s to grow companies really fast—to take something from nothing and make it something enormous within an incredibly tight window. And it says something about what marketing has become that these are no longer considered synonymous tasks. The term “growth hacker” has many different meanings for different people, but I’ll define it as I have come to understand it: A growth hacker is someone who has thrown out the playbook of traditional marketing and replaced it with only what is testable, trackable, and scalable. Their tools are e-mails, pay-per-click ads, blogs, and platform APIs instead of commercials, publicity, and money. While their marketing brethren chase vague notions like “branding” and “mind share,” growth hackers relentlessly pursue users and growth—and when they do it right, those users beget more users, who beget more users. They are the inventors, operators, and mechanics of their own self-sustaining and self-propagating growth machine that can take a start-up from nothing to something.

a young Goldman Sachs banker named Joseph Park was sitting in his apartment, frustrated at the effort required to get access to entertainment. Why should he trek all the way to Blockbuster to rent a movie? He should just be able to open a website, pick out a movie, and have it delivered to his door. Despite raising around $250 million, Kozmo, the company Park founded, went bankrupt in 2001. His biggest mistake was making a brash promise for one-hour delivery of virtually anything, and investing in building national operations to support growth that never happened. One study of over three thousand startups indicates that roughly three out of every four fail because of premature scaling—making investments that the market isn’t yet ready to support. Had Park proceeded more slowly, he might have noticed that with the current technology available, one-hour delivery was an impractical and low-margin business. There was, however, a tremendous demand for online movie rentals. Netflix was just then getting off the ground, and Kozmo might have been able to compete in the area of mail-order rentals and then online movie streaming. Later, he might have been able to capitalize on technological changes that made it possible for Instacart to build a logistics operation that made one-hour grocery delivery scalable and profitable. Since the market is more defined when settlers enter, they can focus on providing superior quality instead of deliberating about what to offer in the first place. “Wouldn’t you rather be second or third and see how the guy in first did, and then . . . improve it?” Malcolm Gladwell asked in an interview. “When ideas get really complicated, and when the world gets complicated, it’s foolish to think the person who’s first can work it all out,” Gladwell remarked. “Most good things, it takes a long time to figure them out.”* Second, there’s reason to believe that the kinds of people who choose to be late movers may be better suited to succeed. Risk seekers are drawn to being first, and they’re prone to making impulsive decisions. Meanwhile, more risk-averse entrepreneurs watch from the sidelines, waiting for the right opportunity and balancing their risk portfolios before entering. In a study of software startups, strategy researchers Elizabeth Pontikes and William Barnett find that when entrepreneurs rush to follow the crowd into hyped markets, their startups are less likely to survive and grow. When entrepreneurs wait for the market to cool down, they have higher odds of success: “Nonconformists . . . that buck the trend are most likely to stay in the market, receive funding, and ultimately go public.” Third, along with being less recklessly ambitious, settlers can improve upon competitors’ technology to make products better. When you’re the first to market, you have to make all the mistakes yourself. Meanwhile, settlers can watch and learn from your errors. “Moving first is a tactic, not a goal,” Peter Thiel writes in Zero to One; “being the first mover doesn’t do you any good if someone else comes along and unseats you.” Fourth, whereas pioneers tend to get stuck in their early offerings, settlers can observe market changes and shifting consumer tastes and adjust accordingly. In a study of the U.S. automobile industry over nearly a century, pioneers had lower survival rates because they struggled to establish legitimacy, developed routines that didn’t fit the market, and became obsolete as consumer needs clarified. Settlers also have the luxury of waiting for the market to be ready. When Warby Parker launched, e-commerce companies had been thriving for more than a decade, though other companies had tried selling glasses online with little success. “There’s no way it would have worked before,” Neil Blumenthal tells me. “We had to wait for Amazon, Zappos, and Blue Nile to get people comfortable buying products they typically wouldn’t order online.

One of the insidious traps of a startup is promising different customers a set of unique extensions or modifications. While it is sometimes essential to make such promises to get an order or two, the trap is you are building custom products. Building custom products is not a scalable business unless you explicitly revise your business plan.

And this is why MapReduce is designed to tolerate frequent unexpected task termination: it’s not because the hardware is particularly unreliable, it’s because the freedom to arbitrarily terminate processes enables better resource utilization in a computing cluster.

However, a real implementation may still have to include code to handle the case where something happens that was assumed to be impossible, even if that handling boils down to printf("Sucks to be you") and exit(666) — i.e., letting a human operator clean up the mess [93]. (This is arguably the difference between computer science and software engineering.)

Scalable, predictable revenue growth.

system deviating from its spec, whereas a failure is

First, we need to succinctly describe the current load on the system; only then can we discuss growth questions

John Day-Richter: “What’s Different About the New Google Docs: Making Collaboration Fast,” googledrive.blogspot.com, 23 September 2010.

Martin Kleppmann and Alastair R. Beresford: “A Conflict-Free Replicated JSON Datatype,” arXiv:1608.03960, August 13, 2016.

Sam Elliott: “CRDTs: An UPDATE (or Maybe Just a PUT),” at RICON West, October 2013.

Jonathan Ellis: “Facebook’s Cassandra Paper, Annotated and Compared to Apache Cassandra 2.0,” datastax.com, September 12, 2013.

Eric Evans: “Rethinking Topology in Cassandra,” at ApacheCon Europe, November 2012.

Bottled Water implements CDC for PostgreSQL using an API that decodes the write-ahead log [28], Maxwell and Debezium do something similar for MySQL by parsing the binlog [29, 30, 31], Mongoriver reads the MongoDB oplog [32, 33],

If an SSD is disconnected from power, it can start losing data within a few weeks, depending on the temperature

Resurrection is not a very popular technique. It is rarely used even in Microsoft’s own code. This is because it plays with an object’s lifetime in a hidden way. It is a finalization on steroids - taking all its disadvantages and doubling them.

More recently, there has been growing interest in change data capture (CDC), which is the process of observing all data changes written to a database and extracting them in a form in which they can be replicated to other systems. CDC is especially interesting if changes are made available as a stream, immediately as they are written.

What is Tableau Tableau Software is a highly scalable client-server architecture. It is an application that resides on your computer and used for individuals and publishing data sources as well as workbooks to tableau server. Which is allows for instantaneous insight by transforming data into interactive visualizations? Read from OnlineITGuru at Tableau Online Course

The digital poorhouse is massively scalable. High-tech tools like automated decision-making systems, matching algorithms, and predictive risk models have the potential to spread very quickly.

If you want to guarantee that there will be no editing conflicts, the application must obtain a lock on the document before a user can edit it. If another user wants to edit the same document, they first have to wait until the first user has committed their changes and released the lock. This collaboration model is equivalent to single-leader replication with transactions on the leader.

pick the write with the highest ID as the winner, and throw away the other writes. If a timestamp is used, this technique is known as last write wins (LWW).

Operational transformation [42] is the conflict resolution algorithm behind collaborative editing applications such as Etherpad [30] and Google Docs [31]. It was designed particularly for concurrent editing of an ordered list of items, such as the list of characters that constitute a text document.

it would be good to include staleness measurements in the standard set of metrics for databases. Eventual consistency is a deliberately vague guarantee, but for operability it’s important to be able to quantify “eventual.

Kyle Kingsbury: “Call Me Maybe: Cassandra,” aphyr.com, September 24, 2013.

Understanding the scope of the problem and being able to step outside the current solution is essential to building efficient systems. The initial solution to a problem may be the entirely wrong approach to the problem as it evolves.

Moving away from traditional hotel loyalty programs' model and offering a good mix of instant gratifications and long-term rewards based on the guest type is crucial to creating sustainable and scalable programs. And if it is unlikely that the industry will ever entirely move away from the points-for-stay model, most hotel brands are already integrating guest experience, recognition and service personalization as part of their loyalty programs, realizing that the in-house financial value of their guests is as important as their stay frequency.

The extreme competitiveness in travel is slowly bringing search engines, OTAs and metasearch engines to converge towards an increasingly homogeneous model. The reason is simple, almost Darwinian: the model that will prove to be the most efficient in terms of scalability and efficiency for the end user is going to prevail.

I know two companies that collapsed due to the inability to reduce operating costs when the utilization of their sites diminished. The dot-com user base (of intangible monetary value based on registered users) did not grow and generate revenue as expected. There was a substantial number of loyal users, and both companies were able to redefine their business plans to turn a profit by catering solely to their loyal user base. However, the business plans required reducing operational costs, and due to countless bad application design decisions, the applications would not operate on architectures substantially smaller than the large-scale originals. Although the traffic and utilization of their architectures dropped to about 10% of the original goal, they were only able to realize a 20% reduction in operational costs.

] Ulrich Drepper: “What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory,” akkadia.org, November 21, 2007.

Leslie Lamport: “Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System,

Alex Scotti: “Adventures in Building Your Own Database,” at All Your Base, November 2015.

Oren Eini (Ahende Rahien): “The Fallacy of Distributed Transactions

​ Consensus is one of the most important and fundamental problems in distributed computing. On the surface, it seems simple: informally, the goal is simply to get several nodes to agree on something.

Dave Scherer: “Those Are Not Transactions (Cassandra 2.0),” blog.foundationdb.com, September 6, 2013.

An important aspect of total order broadcast is that the order is fixed at the time the messages are delivered: a node is not allowed to retroactively insert a message into an earlier position in the order if subsequent messages have already been delivered. This fact makes total order broadcast stronger than timestamp ordering.

it can be proved that a linearizable compare-and-set (or increment-and-get) register and total order broadcast are both equivalent to consensus [28, 67]. That is, if you can solve one of these problems, you can transform it into a solution for the others.

Airbnb’s strategy for photographing its hosts’ rooms offers an instructive example. Early on, Airbnb’s founders discovered that one of the key factors that increased the chances of renting a room on Airbnb was the quality of the photographs of that room. It turns out that most of us aren’t professional photographers, and our poorly composed, poorly shot cell phone pictures don’t do a good job of conveying the awesomeness of our living spaces. So the founders took to the road, visiting hosts and taking photographs for them. Obviously, personally visiting every host was hardly a scalable solution, so the the task was soon outsourced to freelance photographers. As Airbnb grew, the strategy shifted from the founders managing a short list of photographers, to an employee managing a large group of photographers, to an automated system managing a global network of photographers. Founder Brian Chesky describes this strategy succinctly: “Do everything by hand until it’s too painful, then automate it.

Regarding C, without a doubt, I can say that a compiler of it has been written for any hardware architecture ever created. I will not be surprised if alien spaceships had their own C compiler on board.

If the error is due to overload, retrying the transaction will make the problem worse, not better. To avoid such feedback cycles, you can limit the number of retries, use exponential backoff, and handle overload-related errors differently from other errors (if possible).

As useful as services are to the scalability and develop-ability of a system, they are not, in and of themselves, architecturally significant elements. The architecture of a system is defined by the boundaries drawn within that system, and by the dependencies that cross those boundaries.

As the rich history of broken calendar sync implementations demonstrates, multi-leader replication is a tricky thing to get right.

Organizational success comes when IT and business act from “IT vs. business” to a true partnership with high scalability, speed, and significance.

Monitoring is so important that our monitoring systems need to be more available and scalable than the systems being monitored.

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled. Richard Feynman, Rogers Commission Report (1986)

You have to revisit anyway The fact is that everyone has scalability issues, no one can deal with their service going from zero to a few million users without revisiting almost every aspect of their design and architecture. -Dare Obasanjo, Microsoft

the strategic goal was the same: to reach people in an effective, scalable, and data-driven way.

If you want to create a scalable business, you have to understand just how crucial it is to build brand equity. The emotional attachment that links customers to your product, as opposed to any other, translates into sustainable growth. Here are some basic rules to connect, shape, influence, and lead with your brand: Choose your target audience: The surest road to product failure is to try to be all things to all people. Connect with the public: Your objective is to make your audience feel an emotional attachment to your brand. Inspire and influence your audience: An inspirational brand message is far more influential than one that just highlights product feature functions.

Simplicity means or is related to too many things such as manageability, availability, scalability, flexibility, reliability, robustness, sensitivity, comprehensiveness, speed, or responsiveness.

The chakra of creating scalable business or growing in once own career is simple yet under rated: 1. Skills and education 2. Experience & subject matter expertise 3. Mentor ship & guidance 4. Use of capital 5. Use of technology 6. Use of marketing 7. Networking & relationship

Goal setting is more art than science. We weren’t just teaching people how to refine an objective or a measurable key result. We had a cultural agenda, as well. Why is transparency important? Why would you want people across other departments to know your goals? And why does what we’re doing matter? What is true accountability? What’s the difference between accountability with respect (for others’ failings) and accountability with vulnerability (for our own)? How can OKRs help managers “get work done through others”? (That’s a big factor for scalability in a growing company.) How do we engage other teams to adopt our objective as a priority and help assure that we reach it? When is it time to stretch a team’s workload—or to ease off on the throttle? When do you shift an objective to a different team member, or rewrite a goal to make it clearer, or remove it completely? In building contributors’ confidence, timing is everything.

The demands of customer discovery require people who are comfortable with change, chaos, and learning from failure and are at ease working in risky, unstable situations without a roadmap. In short, startups should welcome the rare breed generally known as entrepreneurs. They’re open to learning and discovery—highly curious, inquisitive, and creative. They must be eager to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. Agile enough to deal with daily change and operating “without a map.” Readily able to wear multiple hats, often on the same day, and comfortable celebrating failure when it leads to learning and iteration.