Startup Office Quotes

When the officer asked what he’d taken, Sunny blurted out in his accented English, “He stole property in his mind.

My advice was to start a policy of making reversible decisions before anyone left the meeting or the office. In a startup, it doesn’t matter if you’re 100 percent right 100 percent of the time. What matters is having forward momentum and a tight fact-based data/metrics feedback loop to help you quickly recognize and reverse any incorrect decisions. That’s why startups are agile. By the time a big company gets the committee to organize the subcommittee to pick a meeting date, your startup could have made 20 decisions, reversed five of them and implemented the fifteen that worked.

In one of their last email exchanges, he recommended two management self help books to her, 'The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't' and 'Beyond Bullshit: Straight-Talk at Work', and included their links on Amazon.com. He quit two days later. His resignation email read in part: 'good luck and please do read those books, watch The Office, and believe in the people who disagree with you

One evening, as they wrapped up a meeting in her office shortly after he joined the company, she lapsed into a more natural-sounding young woman’s voice. “I’m really glad you’re here,” she told him as she got up from her chair, her pitch several octaves higher than usual. In

When you were making excuses someone else was making enterprise.

Justin's resignation letter to Elizabeth Holmes regarding her management style: 'good luck and please do read those books, watch The Office, and believe the people who disagree with you

Sunny called the cops. Twenty minutes later, a police cruiser quietly pulled up to the building with its lights off. A highly agitated Sunny told the officer that an employee had quit and departed with company property. When the officer asked what he’d taken, Sunny blurted out in his accented English, “He stole property in his mind.

in the Israeli military, the tactical innovation came from the bottom up—from individual tank commanders and their officers. It probably never occurred to these soldiers that they should ask their higher-ups to solve the problem, or that they might not have the authority to act on their own. Nor did they see anything strange in their taking responsibility for inventing, adopting, and disseminating new tactics in real time, on the fly.

The virus is causing something akin to panic throughout corporate America, which has become used to the typos, misspellings, missing words and mangled syntax so acceptable in cyberspace. The CEO of LoseItAll.com, an Internet startup, said the virus had rendered him helpless. “Each time I tried to send one particular e-mail this morning, I got back this error message: ‘Your dependent clause preceding your independent clause must be set off by commas, but one must not precede the conjunction.’ I threw my laptop across the room.”  . . . If Strunkenwhite makes e-mailing impossible, it could mean the end to a communication revolution once hailed as a significant timesaver. A study of 1,254 office workers in Leonia, N.J., found that e-mail increased employees’ productivity by 1.8 hours a day because they took less time to formulate their thoughts. (The same study also found that they lost 2.2 hours of productivity because they were e-mailing so many jokes to their spouses, parents and stockbrokers.)  . . . “This is one of the most complex and invasive examples of computer code we have ever encountered. We just can’t imagine what kind of devious mind would want to tamper with e-mails to create this burden on communications,” said an FBI agent who insisted on speaking via the telephone out of concern that trying to e-mail his comments could leave him tied up for hours.

But those start-up founders don’t hide their failures; to the contrary, they flaunt them—blogging about them, gathering to talk about them at conferences like FailCon.

Making a product is just an activity, making a profit on a product is the achievement.

You tell them that you’re doing this not because you want to save money on office space but because this is how their generation likes to work.

good luck and please do read those books, watch The Office, and believe in the people who disagree with you…Lying is a disgusting habit, and it flows through the conversations here like it’s our own currency. The cultural disease here is what we should be curing before we try to tackle obesity…I mean no ill will towards you, since you believe in what I was doing and hoped I would succeed at Theranos. I feel like I owe you this bad attempt at an exit interview since we have no HR to officially record it.

The lawyers I worked with ran a valuable business, and they were impressive individuals one by one. But the relationships between them were oddly thin. They spent all day together, but few of them seemed to have much to say to each other outside the office. Why work with a group of people who don’t even like each other?

What the Soviet émigrés brought with them is symptomatic of what Israeli venture capitalist Erel Margalit believes can be found in a number of dynamic economies. “Ask yourself, why is it happening here?” he said of the Israeli tech boom. We were sitting in a trendy Jerusalem restaurant he owns, next to a complex he built that houses his venture fund and a stable of start-ups. “Why is it happening on the East Coast or the West Coast of the United States? A lot of it has to do with immigrant societies. In France, if you are from a very established family, and you work in an established pharmaceutical company, for example, and you have a big office and perks and a secretary and all that, would you get up and leave and risk everything to create something new? You wouldn’t. You’re too comfortable. But if you’re an immigrant in a new place, and you’re poor,” Margalit continued, “or you were once rich and your family was stripped of its wealth—then you have drive. You don’t see what you’ve got to lose; you see what you could win. That’s the attitude we have here—across the entire population.

Gene Berdichevsky, one of the members of the solar-powered-car team, lit up the second he heard from Straubel. An undergraduate, Berdichevsky volunteered to quit school, work for free, and sweep the floors at Tesla if that’s what it took to get a job. The founders were impressed with his spirit and hired Berdichevsky after one meeting. This left Berdichevsky in the uncomfortable position of calling his Russian immigrant parents, a pair of nuclear submarine engineers, to tell them that he was giving up on Stanford to join an electric car start-up. As employee No. 7, he spent part of the workday in the Menlo Park office and the rest in Straubel’s living room designing three-dimensional models of the car’s powertrain on a computer and building battery pack prototypes in the garage. “Only now do I realize how insane it was,” Berdichevsky said.

Matt Levine, a Bloomberg columnist who writes a detailed and witty daily email dissected by Wall Street bankers, had been on vacation when the prospectus went live. The following Monday morning, he wrote in his email that the “We” trademark news was “the news item that caused me to absolutely lose my mind—the item that, if I were a slightly more dedicated financial columnist, would have had me on the next helicopter back to the office.

After that, Sunny seemed to have it in for Seth and frequently harassed him, which led Seth to look for another job. He found one a few months later at a company based in Redwood City called Genomic Health and walked into Elizabeth’s office, resignation letter in hand, to give his notice. Sunny, who was there, opened up the letter, read it, then threw it back in Seth’s face. “I won’t accept this!” he shouted. Seth shouted back, deadpan, “I have news for you, sir: in 1863, President Lincoln freed the slaves.

There is an enormous difference between starting a company and running one. Thinking up great ideas, which requires mainly intelligence and knowledge, is much easier than building an organization, which also requires measures of tenacity, discipline, and understanding. Part of the reason that nineteen out of twenty high-tech start-ups end in failure must be the difficulty of making this critical transition from a bunch of guys in a rented office to a larger bunch of guys in a rented office with customers to serve. Customers? What are those?

Less than three months later, the walls began closing in again: on March 14, 2018, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Theranos, Holmes, and Balwani with conducting “an elaborate, years-long fraud.” To resolve the agency’s civil charges, Holmes was forced to relinquish her voting control over the company, give back a big chunk of her stock, and pay a $500,000 penalty. She also agreed to be barred from being an officer or director in a public company for ten years. Unable to reach a settlement with Balwani, the SEC sued him in federal court in California. In the meantime, the criminal investigation continued to gather steam. As of this writing, criminal indictments of both Holmes and Balwani on charges of lying to investors and federal officials seem a distinct possibility.

But Holbrooke brought to every job he ever held a visionary quality that transcended practical considerations. He talked openly about changing the world. “If Richard calls you and asks you for something, just say yes,” Henry Kissinger said. “If you say no, you’ll eventually get to yes, but the journey will be very painful.” We all said yes. By the summer, Holbrooke had assembled his Ocean’s Eleven heist team—about thirty of us, from different disciplines and agencies, with and without government experience. In the Pakistani press, the colorful additions to the team were watched closely, and generally celebrated. Others took a dimmer view. “He got this strange band of characters around him. Don’t attribute that to me,” a senior military leader told me. “His efforts to bring into the State Department representatives from all of the agencies that had a kind of stake or contribution to our efforts, I thought was absolutely brilliant,” Hillary Clinton said, “and everybody else was fighting tooth and nail.” It was only later, when I worked in the wider State Department bureaucracy as Clinton’s director of global youth issues during the Arab Spring, that I realized how singular life was in the Office of the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan—quickly acronymed, like all things in government, to SRAP. The drab, low-ceilinged office space next to the cafeteria was about as far from the colorful open workspaces of Silicon Valley as you could imagine, but it had the feeling of a start-up.

A good campaign usually deploys multiple tactics: paid media (TV ads, digital ads, radio ads, print ads), earned media (which is just jargon for public relations), opposition research (a euphemism for digging up dirt on someone), field (canvassing, door knocking, flyers, lit drops, posters, phone calls), lobbying (personal connections in one way or another), and today, perhaps more than anything else, social media. We went at it on every front. I convened a meeting of our senior team every morning at 8 a.m. to discuss what we could to do to drive Anthony from the race. Here’s the best of what we did: Earned media: I kicked things off by saying, on the front page of the New York Times, that if Anthony ran, I’d add an extra $20 million to our campaign budget to ensure that we destroyed his reputation so thoroughly, he’d never be able to run for anything ever again. In retrospect, the threat probably landed harder than I realized because Anthony was already starting to self-destruct. (It wasn’t like what he got caught doing on Twitter didn’t exist in other, pre-Twitter formats before then.) We started exactly where anyone would when it comes to Anthony Weiner: sex. In his time as a member of the House, Anthony had passed all of one bill. And that one illustrious piece of legislation was to give more visas to models. Yep, protecting the rights of hot women was Anthony’s sole achievement in office. That was a good point to make but not an exposé in and of itself. But then our research team noticed something: Anthony had also received campaign contributions from many of the models who received highly coveted H1B visas. Not only was this pay-to-play (give contributions, get government favors), it was illegal.

Having studied workplace leadership styles since the 1970s, Kets de Vries confirmed that language is a critical clue when determining if a company has become too cultish for comfort. Red flags should rise when there are too many pep talks, slogans, singsongs, code words, and too much meaningless corporate jargon, he said. Most of us have encountered some dialect of hollow workplace gibberish. Corporate BS generators are easy to find on the web (and fun to play with), churning out phrases like “rapidiously orchestrating market-driven deliverables” and “progressively cloudifying world-class human capital.” At my old fashion magazine job, employees were always throwing around woo-woo metaphors like “synergy” (the state of being on the same page), “move the needle” (make noticeable progress), and “mindshare” (something having to do with a brand’s popularity? I’m still not sure). My old boss especially loved when everyone needlessly transformed nouns into transitive verbs and vice versa—“whiteboard” to “whiteboarding,” “sunset” to “sunsetting,” the verb “ask” to the noun “ask.” People did it even when it was obvious they didn’t know quite what they were saying or why. Naturally, I was always creeped out by this conformism and enjoyed parodying it in my free time. In her memoir Uncanny Valley, tech reporter Anna Wiener christened all forms of corporate vernacular “garbage language.” Garbage language has been around since long before Silicon Valley, though its themes have changed with the times. In the 1980s, it reeked of the stock exchange: “buy-in,” “leverage,” “volatility.” The ’90s brought computer imagery: “bandwidth,” “ping me,” “let’s take this offline.” In the twenty-first century, with start-up culture and the dissolution of work-life separation (the Google ball pits and in-office massage therapists) in combination with movements toward “transparency” and “inclusion,” we got mystical, politically correct, self-empowerment language: “holistic,” “actualize,” “alignment.

Tim Tigner began his career in Soviet Counterintelligence with the US Army Special Forces, the Green Berets. That was back in the Cold War days when, “We learned Russian so you didn't have to,” something he did at the Presidio of Monterey alongside Recon Marines and Navy SEALs. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, Tim switched from espionage to arbitrage. Armed with a Wharton MBA rather than a Colt M16, he moved to Moscow in the midst of Perestroika. There, he led prominent multinational medical companies, worked with cosmonauts on the MIR Space Station (from Earth, alas), chaired the Association of International Pharmaceutical Manufacturers, and helped write Russia’s first law on healthcare. Moving to Brussels during the formation of the EU, Tim ran Europe, Middle East, and Africa for a Johnson & Johnson company and traveled like a character in a Robert Ludlum novel. He eventually landed in Silicon Valley, where he launched new medical technologies as a startup CEO. In his free time, Tim has climbed the peaks of Mount Olympus, hang glided from the cliffs of Rio de Janeiro, and ballooned over Belgium. He earned scuba certification in Turkey, learned to ski in Slovenia, and ran the Serengeti with a Maasai warrior. He acted on stage in Portugal, taught negotiations in Germany, and chaired a healthcare conference in Holland. Tim studied psychology in France, radiology in England, and philosophy in Greece. He has enjoyed ballet at the Bolshoi, the opera on Lake Como, and the symphony in Vienna. He’s been a marathoner, paratrooper, triathlete, and yogi.  Intent on combining his creativity with his experience, Tim began writing thrillers in 1996 from an apartment overlooking Moscow’s Gorky Park. Decades later, his passion for creative writing continues to grow every day. His home office now overlooks a vineyard in Northern California, where he lives with his wife Elena and their two daughters. Tim grew up in the Midwest, and graduated from Hanover College with a BA in Philosophy and Mathematics. After military service and work as a financial analyst and foreign-exchange trader, he earned an MBA in Finance and an MA in International Studies from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton and Lauder Schools.  Thank you for taking the time to read about the author. Tim is most grateful for his loyal fans, and loves to correspond with readers like you. You are welcome to reach him directly at tim@timtigner.com.

The Disruption Machine What the gospel of innovation gets wrong. by Jill Lepore In the last years of the nineteen-eighties, I worked not at startups but at what might be called finish-downs. Tech companies that were dying would hire temps—college students and new graduates—to do what little was left of the work of the employees they’d laid off. This was in Cambridge, near M.I.T. I’d type users’ manuals, save them onto 5.25-inch floppy disks, and send them to a line printer that yammered like a set of prank-shop chatter teeth, but, by the time the last perforated page coiled out of it, the equipment whose functions those manuals explained had been discontinued. We’d work a month here, a week there. There wasn’t much to do. Mainly, we sat at our desks and wrote wishy-washy poems on keyboards manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation, left one another sly messages on pink While You Were Out sticky notes, swapped paperback novels—Kurt Vonnegut, Margaret Atwood, Gabriel García Márquez, that kind of thing—and, during lunch hour, had assignations in empty, unlocked offices. At Polaroid, I once found a Bantam Books edition of “Steppenwolf” in a clogged sink in an employees’ bathroom, floating like a raft. “In his heart he was not a man, but a wolf of the steppes,” it said on the bloated cover. The rest was unreadable.

Radhakishan Raswe was Vandana’s driver in Mumbai, chauffeuring her and cameraman Hemant Chaturvedi around for shoots in a white Maruti Gypsy. In the early days, Vandana and Hemant were the entire ‘crew’; the camera assistants, light men and sound attendants would come much later. One day, Vandana recalls, Hemant snapped and let Raswe have it. ‘Firing him in terrible abusive language, he used all the MCs, BCs and said, “You will always remain a driver because you’ve shown no initiative to say ‘Can I help you?’” You are seeing us carrying stuff, but not even once have you said, ‘Can I become a part of this?’”’ That shook up the driver; today, Raswe is the head cameraman at TV18’s Mumbai office.

Competing in a 100-pushup challenge in the office This is another example of an activity that can be a way to facilitate group bonding but isn’t necessarily inclusive of people with different levels of physical ability. Especially in startups with a younger median age, team activities can tend to skew toward those enjoyed by a very specific subset of the population. Things like fantasy sports teams; foosball, ping-pong, or pool tables; and fitness challenges can give off a “tech bro” kind of vibe. This isn’t to say that they shouldn’t be allowed, and it might not be possible to find an activity that every single person will love, but it’s important to pay attention to the type and variety of activities and rituals and who they might be unintentionally favoring or excluding.

Between 2017 and 2020, the Nanjing Economic and Technological Development Zone plans to put at least 3 billion RMB (around $450 million) into AI development. That money will go toward a dizzying array of AI subsidies and perks, including investments of up to 15 million RMB in local companies, grants of 1 million RMB per company to attract talent, rebates on research expenses of up to 5 million RMB, creation of an AI training institute, government contracts for facial recognition and autonomous robot technology, simplified procedures for registering a company, seed funding and office space for military veterans, free company shuttles, coveted spots at local schools for the children of company executives, and special apartments for employees of AI startups.

the autonomous-driving side of things, Alphabet (formerly Google), which has logged several million self-driving-car test miles, continues to lead the pack. At the end of 2016, it created a new business division, called Waymo, for its autonomous driving technology. In May 2017, Waymo and Lyft announced that they would work together on developing the technology, and later in the year, Alphabet invested $1 billion in the start-up. Others, like Cruise Automation (which GM acquired for $1 billion) and Comma.ai, which offers open-source autonomous driving technology in the same vein as Google’s Android mobile operating system, are chasing hard. Baidu, China’s leading Internet search company, has an autonomous-driving research center in Sunnyvale. Byton—backed by China’s Tencent, Foxconn, and the China Harmony New Energy auto retailer group—has an office in Mountain View, as does Didi Chuxing, the Chinese ride-sharing company in which Apple invested $1 billion. Many of these companies have taken not just inspiration but also talent from Tesla. Part of the value of an innovation cluster like Silicon Valley lies in the dispersal of intellectual labor from one node to the next. For instance, PayPal is well known in the Valley for producing a number of high performers who left the company to start, join, or invest in others. The so-called PayPal Mafia includes Reid Hoffman, who founded LinkedIn; Max Levchin, whose most recent of several start-ups is the financial services company Affirm; Peter Thiel, a Facebook board member and President Trump–supporting venture capitalist who cofounded “big data” company Palantir; Jeremy Stoppelman, who started reviews site Yelp; Keith Rabois, who was chief operating officer at Square and then joined Khosla Ventures; David Sacks, who sold Yammer to Microsoft for $1.2 billion and later became CEO at Zenefits; Jawed Karim, who cofounded YouTube; and one Elon Musk.

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here was a particular kind of energy in those early days, something I've only really found in startups. The regulars - the boring 9-to-5 people - haven’t invaded the world yet. All around you are people who practically buzz with mental adrenaline - the kind of people who sneer at words like policy and dress code and fill the office at nights with pizza and bad jokes and the relentless tip-tack-clack of keyboards. They push boundaries, turn small ideas into game-changers and small arguments into fistfights. No company can last forever this way: it’s a bit like being in a cage. Eventually the strange ones move out and give way to order and conformity and all the things that make for a smoothly operating machine. But that brief chaos is what really gives a company its soul.

Some of the same forces have come to bear in the business world, where many companies in thriving talent-dependent industries embraced a new workplace ethos in which hierarchies were softened and office floor plans were reengineered to break down the walls that once kept management and talent separated. One emerging school of thought, popular among technology companies in Silicon Valley, is that organizations should adopt “flat” structures, in which management layers are thin or even nonexistent. Star employees are more productive, the theory goes, and more likely to stay, when they are given autonomy and offered a voice in decision-making. Some start-ups have done away with job titles entirely, organizing workers into leaderless “self-managing teams” that report directly to top executives. Proponents of flatness say it increases the speed of the feedback loop between the people at the top of the pyramid and the people who do the frontline work, allowing for a faster, more agile culture of continuous improvement. Whether that’s true or not, it has certainly cleared the way for top executives to communicate directly with star employees without having to muddle through an extra layer of management. As I watched all this happen, I started to wonder if I was really writing a eulogy. Just as I was building a case for the crucial value of quiet, unglamorous, team-oriented, workmanlike captains who inhabit the middle strata of a team, most of the world’s richest sports organizations, and even some of its most forward-thinking companies, seemed to be sprinting headlong in the opposite direction.

Enterprise deals or “how to lose your freedom in 5 minutes” Being able to use our product for sales prospecting, I decided to go after some big names at the enterprise level. After one week I had booked meetings with companies like Uber, Facebook, etc. This is where the fun begins…or not… I spent 3 months doing between 4 to 9 meetings for each enterprise company I had booked meetings with. Every meeting leads to the next one as you go up the chain of command. And then comes the pilot phase. Awesome you might think! Well, not really… Working with enterprise-level clients requires a lot of custom work and paperwork. And when I say “a lot” I mean a sh*t ton of work. You need an entire department to handle the legal aspect, and hire another 10 people to entirely change your tech department to meet their requirements. During 4 months I went from being super excited to work with the most famous companies in the world to “this deal will transform our company entirely and we’ll have to start doing custom everything”. Losing my freedom and flexibility quickly became a no-go. The issue here is, with all these meetings I thought that they would adapt to our standards. That they understood from the start that we were a startup and that we couldn’t comply with all their needs. But it doesn’t work like this. It’s actually the other way around even though the people you meet working at these companies tell you otherwise. The bottleneck often comes from the legal department. It doesn’t matter if everyone is excited to use your product, if you don’t comply with their legal requirements or try to negotiate it will never work out. To give you an example, we had enterprise companies asking us to specifically have all our employee’s computers locked down in the office after they end their day. Knowing that we’re a remote company, it’s impossible to comply with that... If you want to target enterprise accounts, do it. But make sure to know that you need a lot of time and effort to make things work. It won’t be quick. I was attracted to the BIG names thinking that it would be an amazing way to grow faster, but instead, I should have been 100% focused on our target market (startups, SMBs).

Sebenarnya start-up kayak kita kan ‘hidup segan, mati tak mau’. Kalau nggak ada pemasok dana, mana bisa ritme kerja kayak gini bikin bahagia padahal gajian telat mulu? Gue sih bisa aja punya sense of ownership tinggi karena berhasil mewu- judkan cita-cita perusahaan. Tapi, kalau nggak gajian, ya gue bisa kelaparan juga,” lanjut Yongki lagi.

capital expenditures required in Clean Technology are so incredibly high,” says Pritzker, “that I didn’t feel that I could do anything to make an impact, so I became interested in digital media, and established General Assembly in January 2010, along with Jake Schwartz, Brad Hargreaves and Matthew Brimer.” In less than two years GA had to double its space. In June 2012, they opened a second office in a nearby building. Since then, GA’s courses been attended by 15,000 students, the school has 70 full-time employees in New York, and it has begun to export its formula abroad—first to London and Berlin—with the ambitious goal of creating a global network of campuses “for technology, business and design.” In each location, Pritzker and his associates seek cooperation from the municipal administration, “because the projects need to be understood and supported also by the local authorities in a public-private partnership.” In fact, the New York launch was awarded a $200,000 grant from Mayor Bloomberg. “The humanistic education that we get in our universities teaches people to think critically and creatively, but it does not provide the skills to thrive in the work force in the 21st century,” continues Pritzker. “It’s also true that the college experience is valuable. The majority of your learning does not happen in the classroom. It happens in your dorm room or at dinner with friends. Even geniuses such as Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates, who both left Harvard to start their companies, came up with their ideas and met their co-founders in college.” Just as a college campus, GA has classrooms, whiteboard walls, a library, open spaces for casual meetings and discussions, bicycle parking, and lockers for personal belongings. But the emphasis is on “learning by doing” and gaining knowledge from those who are already working. Lectures can run the gamut from a single evening to a 16-week course, on subjects covering every conceivable matter relevant to technology startups— from how to create a web site to how to draw a logo, from seeking funding to hiring employees. But adjacent to the lecture halls, there is an area that hosts about 30 active startups in their infancy. “This is the core of our community,” says Pritzker, showing the open space that houses the startups. “Statistically, not all of these companies are going to do well. I do believe, though, that all these people will. The cost of building technology is dropping so low that people can actually afford to take the risk to learn by doing something that, in our minds, is a much more effective way to learn than anything else. It’s entrepreneurs who are in the field, learning by doing, putting journey before destination.” “Studying and working side by side is important, because from the interaction among people and the exchange of ideas, even informal, you learn, and other ideas are born,” Pritzker emphasizes: “The Internet has not rendered in-person meetings obsolete and useless. We chose these offices just to be easily accessible by all—close to Union Square where almost every subway line stops—in particular those coming from Brooklyn, where many of our students live.

As the 1970s drew to a close, and Commodore, Tandy, Altair, and Apple began to emerge from the sidelines, PARC director Bert Sutherland asked Larry Tesler to assess what some analysts were already predicting to be the coming era of “hobby and personal computers.” “I think that the era of the personal computer is here,” Tesler countered; “PARC has kept involved in the world of academic computing, but we have largely neglected the world of personal computing which we helped to found.”41 His warning went largely unheeded. Xerox Corporation’s parochial belief that computers need only talk to printers and filing cabinets and not to each other meant that the “office of the future” remained an unfulfilled promise, and in the years between 1978 and 1982 PARC experienced a dispersal of core talent that rivals the flight of Greek scholars during the declining years of Byzantium: Charles Simonyi brought the Alto’s Bravo text editing program to Redmond, Washington, where it was rebooted as Microsoft Word; Robert Metcalf used the Ethernet protocol he had invented at PARC to found the networking giant, 3Com; John Warnock and Charles Geschke, tiring of an unresponsive bureaucracy, took their InterPress page description language and founded Adobe Systems; Tesler himself brought the icon-based, object-oriented Smalltalk programming language with him when he joined the Lisa engineering team at Apple, and Tim Mott, his codeveloper of the Gypsy desktop interface, became one of the founders of Electronic Arts—five startups that would ultimately pay off the mortgages and student loans of many hundreds of industrial, graphic, and interaction designers, and provide the tools of the trade for untold thousands of others.

Employees should love their work. They should enjoy going to the office so much that formal business hours become obsolete and nobody watches the clock.

If you're too inexperienced to start a startup, what you should do is start one. That's a way more efficient cure for inexperience than a normal job. In fact, getting a normal job may actually make you less able to start a startup, by turning you into a "tame animal" who thinks that he needs an office to work in and a product manager to tell him what software to write.

The sort of candidate who might have benefited from such legislation is Boštjan Špetič, a Slovenian citizen, discussed previously. As founder of Zemanta, Špetič had opened his business in New York in 2009 with an L-1A visa, used to transfer a foreign company's top managers. Zemanta had an office in London and Špetič had moved to the USA from there. After a year, however, he was denied a visa renewal. “The US officers said that we didn’t have enough staff in the United States to justify a senior executive position,” recalls Špetič. “They stated that it was obvious from the organizational chart that we didn’t have an office manager, implying that no one was answering phone calls, and that’s why we could not claim a senior executive transfer. Somewhere in my office I still have four pages of explanations. At that point, I called everybody, the American ambassador in Slovenia, the Slovenian ambassador here, the Slovenian foreign ministry. My investor, Fred Wilson, got in touch with a New York senator, but no one could do anything.” Špetič therefore had to work from Ljubljana for the following three months, when a new attorney finally found the right bureaucratic avenue to obtain an L-1B visa, a specialized technology visa. “Personally, I want to move back home eventually,” says Špetič. “I’m not looking to permanently immigrate to the US. I prefer the European lifestyle. Nevertheless, this is absolutely the best place to build a startup, especially in the media space. It made so much sense to build and grow the company here. I never could have done it in Europe, and that is an amazing achievement for New York City.” For this reason, when other European entrepreneurs ask him for advice, Špetič always tells them to settle in New York, at least for a period of time, to gain American experience. And for them he dreams of creating a co-working space modeled after WeWork Labs: “Imagine a place exactly like this, but with decent coffee, wine tasting events in the evening and only non-US business people working in its offices,” explains Špetič. “There is a set of problems that foreigners have that Americans just can’t understand. Visa issues are the most obvious ones. Working-with-remote-teams issues, travel issues, personal issues such as which schools to send your children to… It’s a set of things that is different from what American startups talk about. You don’t need networking events for foreigners because you want people to network into the New York community, but a working environment would make sense because it would be like a safe haven, an extra comfort zone for foreigners with a different work culture.

Startups often make a fatal assumption when they attend presentations, business plan competitions, or demo days. They assume they are basically invisible until they take their place on the stage. Big mistake. The truth is, investors are observing you. We learn as much from watching your off-stage behavior as your canned presentation. Here’s a good way to go. Resolve that your formal presentation starts the moment team members leave their homes or offices and ends only when the last team member returns. At all other times, you are “on.” Assume the microphones are always on and someone has a camera phone on you at all times. Act like a disciplined team at all times. Watch what you say in the elevator or in the bathroom. You can’t believe the damaging stuff I’ve heard in bathrooms. Wait to debrief until you get back to the privacy of your office.

From 1995 to 2005, the immigrants helped found a quarter of all American high-tech companies, creating 450,000 jobs, according to the latest available statistics mentioned by Jeremy Robbins, Special Advisor on these issues for the Office of the Mayor of New York City, and Director of the Partnership for a New American Economy.

A New Yorker by birth is David Karp, the child prodigy who at age 21, in 2007, founded Tumblr, whose headquarters are located just one block east of Hunch. The son of a composer and a science teacher, at 14 Karp began working as an intern in an online animation company; at 15, tired of traditional school, he continued to study at home alone, learning, among other things, Japanese; then he became the chief technology officer of the Internet site UrbanBaby and at 17 he went to Tokyo for five months by himself. In 2006, UrbanBaby was bought by CNET, and Karp used his share of proceeds to establish Tumblr, a blogging platform with elements of social networking that allows its users to follow other bloggers. Tumblr allows users to build a collection of content according to their own tastes and interests. Easy to use, with a format of short entries to be enriched with photos and videos, Tumblr has quickly gained many followers among the creative community as well as the public at large. Today it is home to nearly 70 million blogs, including those of Lady Gaga and Barack Obama, with a total audience of 140 million users. At 26, Karp is leading a company with over 100 employees, valued at more than $800 million, with shareholders of the caliber of Virgin Group’s Richard Branson. He defines Tumblr as new media, as opposed to technology, and seeks to attract non-traditional ads, inviting brands to create awareness and desire in their ads, rather than just trying to capture intent. Karp has already received several acquisition offers from other media groups, but he has always refused because he thinks big: he wants to reach billions, not millions of users and one day be in a position to acquire rather than be acquired. Meanwhile, in order to grow he is convinced that New York City, the capital of media and advertising, is the right city.[47]

The lawyers I worked with ran a valuable business, and they were impressive individuals one by one. But the relationships between them were oddly thin. They spent all day together, but few of them seemed to have much to say to each other outside the office. Why work with a group of people who don’t even like each other? Many seem to think it’s a sacrifice necessary for making money. But taking a merely professional view of the workplace, in which free agents check in and out on a transactional basis, is worse than cold: it’s not even rational. Since time is your most valuable asset, it’s odd to spend it working with people who don’t envision any long-term future together. If you can’t count durable relationships among the fruits of your time at work, you haven’t invested your time well—even

An accurate budget must be built on a base of thorough research. You must do research on your community to find out what it will cost to get a church off the ground. You need to solidly answer questions such as:, What will the cost of living in this community be?, What will my salary be? How about salaries for additional staff?, How much will it cost to rent space for the church to meet in?, How much will it cost to operate a business in this city (office rent, phones, computer equipment, copy equipment, and so on)? Talk with other pastors in the community. Find out what their start-up costs were and what they are currently spending to maintain and operate the church. Other pastors can be a valuable resource for you on many levels. The worst mistake you can make is to start the budget process by viewing economic realities through a rose-colored lens. If you speculate too much or cut corners in this area, you’ll end up paying dearly down the road. Remember, God never intended for you to go it alone. There are people and resources out there to help you prepare. Ask others for help. God receives no glory when you are scraping the bottom to do His work. So don’t think too small. Church planting is an all or nothing venture. You can’t just partially commit. You have to fully commit, and often that means with your wallet. Don’t underestimate the importance of having a base of prayer partners. You need prayers as desperately as you need money. You need prayers as desperately as you need money. An unhealthy launch may occur when a new church begins as the result of a church split, when a planter is disobedient in following God, or when there is a lack of funding or solid strategy. Finding the right teammates to help you on this journey is serious business. The people you bring on to your staff will either propel you down the road toward fulfilling the vision for your church or serve as speed bumps along the way. You should never be afraid to ask potential staff members to join you—even if it means a salary cut, a drastic position change or a significant new challenge for them. When you ask someone to join your staff, you are not asking that person to make a sacrifice. (If you have that mentality, you need to work to change it.) Instead, you are offering that person the opportunity of a lifetime. There are three things that every new church must have before it can be a real church: (1) a lead pastor, (2) a start date, and (3) a worship leader. Hire a person at the part-time level before bringing him or her on full time. When hiring a new staff person, make sure he or she possesses the three C's: Character, Chemistry & Competency Hiring staff precedes growth, not vice versa. Hire slow, fire fast. Never hire staff when you can find a volunteer. Launch as publicly as possible, with as many people as possible. There are two things you are looking for in a start date: (1) a date on which you have the potential to reach as many people as possible, and (2) a date that precedes a period of time in which people, in general, are unlikely to be traveling out of town. You need steppingstones to get you from where you are to your launch date. Monthly services are real services that you begin holding three to six months prior to your launch date. They are the absolute best strategic precursor to your launch. Monthly services give you the invaluable opportunity to test-drive your systems, your staff and, to an extent, even your service style. At the same time, you are doing real ministry with the people in attendance. These services should mirror as closely as possible what your service will look like on the launch date. Let your target demographic group be the strongest deciding factor in settling on a location: Hotel ballrooms, Movie theaters, Comedy clubs, Public-school auditoriums, Performing-arts theaters, Available church meeting spaces, College auditoriums, Corporate conference space.

If you can’t find 15 people to talk to, well, imagine how hard it’s going to be to sell to them. So suck it up and get out of the office. Otherwise, you’re wasting time and money building something nobody wants.

LEADERSHIP | Intuit’s CEO on Building a Design-Driven Company Brad Smith | 222 words Although 46 similar products were on the market when Intuit launched Quicken, in 1983, it immediately became the market leader in personal finance software and has held that position for three decades. That’s because Quicken was so well designed that using it is intuitive. But by the time Smith became CEO, in 2008, the company had become overly focused on adding incremental features that delivered ease of use but not delight. What was missing was an emotional connection with customers. He and his team set out to integrate design thinking into every part of Intuit. They changed the layout of the office, reduced the number of cubes, and added more collaboration spaces and places for impromptu work. They increased the number of designers by nearly 600% and now hold quarterly design conferences. They bring in people who have created exceptionally designed products, such as the Nest thermostat and the Kayak travel website, to share insights with Intuit employees. The company acquired one start-up, called Mint, and collaborates with another, called ZenPayroll, to improve customer experience. Although most people don’t think of financial software as a category driven by emotion or design, Smith writes, Intuit’s D4D (“design for delight”) program has paid off. For example, its SnapTax app, inspired by consumers’ migration to smartphones, led one user to write, “I want this app to have my babies.

From the CEO, receptionist to the office manager, everybody at your startup should know the one-minute pitch of your business

From the CEO to the receptionist to the office manager, everybody at your startup business should know that one-minute elevator pitch.

In 2010, Chile began paying foreign entrepreneurs to visit the country for six months and interact with locals. The program, dubbed Start-Up Chile, offered foreigners $40,000, plus free office space, Internet access, and mentorship, and asked only that they consider moving to Chile permanently. As of June 2014, the program had attracted more than 12,000 applicants from 112 countries and admitted 810 from 65 countries. Thus far, 132 of the resulting companies have opted to stay in Chile and have already brought in around $26 million in capital;

KruegerInvest offer the best deals regarding family office. A family office is the organization that is created for life and wealth management of a family group. Family Office Exchange supports wealthy families and their advisors in mastering the unique challenges of managing family wealth, operating family offices, and planning for future generations.

squared his napkin on the tile next to him and started collecting the debris into it. The couple five tables away were watching him. ‘When are they coming back?’ Reacher asked. ‘An hour,’ the guy said. ‘How much do they want?’ The guy shrugged again and smiled a bitter smile. ‘I get a start-up discount,’ he said. ‘Two hundred a week, goes to four when the place picks up.’ ‘You want to pay?’ The guy made another sad face. ‘I want to stay in business, I guess. But paying out two bills a week ain’t exactly going to help me do that.’ The sandy guy and the dark woman were looking at the opposite wall, but they were listening. The opera fell away to a minor-key aria and the diva started in on it with a low mournful note. ‘Who were they?’ Reacher asked quietly. ‘Not Italians,’ the guy said. ‘Just some punks.’ ‘Can I use your phone?’ The guy nodded. ‘You know an office-supply store open late?’ Reacher asked. ‘Broadway, two blocks over,’ the guy said. ‘Why? You got business to attend to?’ Reacher nodded. ‘Yeah, business,

Don’t Invent Job Titles I used to make up job titles because, as a bootstrapper, I didn’t particularly care what someone’s title was. I didn’t want it to matter—but it really does. When we realized we needed an architect to scale our infrastructure at Drip, we asked our internal recruiter to hire for the job of “Senior Scaling Architect.” She eventually talked us into the title of “Senior Architect.” Why? Because when she ran the data, she couldn’t find enough salary information on the title we’d given her. Not only that, but if we’d used a made-up job title, qualified candidates wouldn’t have known what we were hiring for. There are standard SaaS job titles. Use them. Your ideal candidates have saved job searches for things like “Engineer,” “Customer Service Lead,” and, yes, “Senior Architect.” Ignoring that makes it harder to connect with people searching for the job you’re hiring for. It also does a disservice to whomever you end up hiring. They’ll have a much tougher time explaining their qualifications to their next employer when their job title was “Code Wizard” rather than “Senior Engineer.” Although a treatise on organizational structure is beyond the scope of this book, here’s a typical hierarchy of engineering titles (in descending order of authority) that can be easily translated into other departments: Chief Technical Officer VP of Engineering Director of Engineering Manager of Engineering Senior Software Engineer Software Engineer Junior Software Engineer Entry-Level Software Engineer Note: These titles assume the typical path is to move into management, which doesn’t have to be the case. Individual contributor titles above Senior exist, such as Principal Engineer and Distinguished Engineer. But for the sake of simplicity, I’m laying out the above hierarchy, which will work for companies well into the millions of ARR. Another note on titles: be careful with handing out elevated job titles to early employees. One company I know named their first customer service person “Head of Customer Success.” When they inevitably grew and added more customer service people, they didn’t want him managing them and ended up in a tough situation. Should they demote him and have him leave? Or come up with an even more elevated title for the real manager?

The sweet spot for your work should be where all three intersect. If you’re focusing solely on things you’re good at that bring you joy, you can get stuck galloping down paths that are detrimental to the needs of your company. If you’re doing things the company needs that bring you joy (but you’re not good at), then you’re dragging your company down. But if you’re stuck doing things the company needs that you’re good at (but don’t like), that leads to burnout. That’s exactly what I was doing. I hired an executive assistant who lightened that load for a bit. She helped streamline a few things and made appointments, but what I really needed was someone to whom I could delegate at another level. At the time, I felt like we couldn’t afford someone who wasn’t contributing to the bottom line of the company. In retrospect, this was one of the biggest mistakes I made while building the company. I should have hired someone who could come into the office and handle operations. Things like legal, payroll, HR, and facilities. Most of these were outsourced to external providers, and it was just a matter of interfacing with them. As I look back at my descent into burnout, one thing that could have saved me was having enough funding to hire someone to do the work that didn’t bring me joy. Or prioritizing spending money on hiring and delegating tasks that didn’t move the business forward but were contributing to my lack of satisfaction at work. I hope you’re not at a place where the next section is helpful to you. I hope that you’re smarter than I was and are putting measures into place to keep yourself from burning out like I did. As Jason said in his talk: “The right question is what should you be doing differently now […] in order to build a company that’s more healthy and prosperous, and also avoid this balloon payment of emotional toil at the end.

Now, of course, Netflix’s culture is famous. There’s a much-downloaded PowerPoint presentation given to all new employees. But the truth is, it wasn’t the product of meetings or careful planning or roundtable discussions. It arose organically, through a shared set of values among a team of people who had been through their fair share of offices—startups, major corporations, and everywhere in between. Netflix, for all of us, was an opportunity to work at the kind of place we’d always dreamed about. It was a chance to do things truly our way. Culture isn’t what you say. It’s what you do.

Ivar joined Durant on road shows, and interest grew as Ivar repeated his speech throughout 1923. By the fall Durant believed he finally had found enough investors, and Ivar and Lee Higginson began preparing to close a deal. They followed the same procedure as anyone seeking money. First, they created a new firm, called International Match Corporation, and incorporated it in Delaware. During the late nineteenth century, states had begun competing for corporate charters, the formative documents that corporations are required to file when they are created. Delaware had recently surpassed New Jersey as the incorporation state of choice, and increasingly companies chose to file in Delaware, even if their operations were in another state. Delaware judges took a hands-off approach to business, and would be unlikely to second-guess Ivar’s decisions. By incorporating International Match in Delaware, Lee Higginson would give Ivar and themselves maximum flexibility. Next, Durant and Ivar chose the initial shareholders and directors of International Match. The two original shareholders would be Swedish Match and a syndicate of Swedish banks; they would contribute start-up capital of 30 million dollars and receive the company’s shares, in equal amounts. As shareholders, Swedish Match and the bank syndicate would vote for the company’s board of directors, as well as other major business decisions. The shareholders would elect five directors to oversee International Match’s business: Ivar; Krister Littorin, Ivar’s engineering classmate from Stockholm; Donald Durant; Frederic Allen, Lee Higginson’s senior statesman and head of the firm’s New York office; and Percy A. Rockefeller, a nephew of John D. Rockefeller. Percy Rockefeller owned the World Match Company of Walker-ville, Ontario, and recently had met Ivar while negotiating the sale of a Canadian match manufacturing plant to Swedish Match.29 The two men had impressed each other, and Ivar saw that Rockefeller, who then served on more than sixty other boards, would be the ideal director of International Match: he was well connected, wealthy, generally familiar with the match industry, and far too busy to care about any details. Ivar had idolized the Rockefellers since he was a boy in Kalmar; now, a member of that family would serve on his board.

Uber had to get creative to unlock the hard side of their network, the drivers. Initially, Uber’s focus was on black car and limo services, which were licensed and relatively uncontroversial. However, a seismic shift occurred when rival app Sidecar innovated in recruiting unlicensed, normal people as drivers on their platform. This was the “peer-to-peer” model that created millions of new rideshare drivers, and was quickly copied and popularized by Lyft and then Uber. Jahan Khanna, cofounder/chief technology officer of Sidecar, spoke of its origin: It was obvious that letting anyone sign up to be a driver would be a big deal. With more drivers, rides would get cheaper and the wait times would get shorter. This came up in many brainstorms at Sidecar, but the question was always, what was the regulatory framework that allows this to operate? What were the prior examples that weren’t immediately shut down? After doing a ton of research, we came onto a model that had been active for years in San Francisco run by someone named Lynn Breedlove called Homobiles that answered our question.22 It’s a surprising fact, but the earliest version of the rideshare idea came not from an investor-backed startup, but rather from a nonprofit called Homobiles, run by a prominent member of the LGBTQ community in the Bay Area named Lynn Breedlove. The service was aimed at protecting and serving the LGBTQ community while providing them transportation—to conferences, bars and entertainment, and also to get health care—while emphasizing safety and community. Homobiles had built its own niche, and had figured out the basics: Breedlove had recruited, over time, 100 volunteer drivers, who would respond to text messages. Money would be exchanged, but in the form of donations, so that drivers could be compensated for their time. The company had operated for several years, starting in 2010—several years before Uber X—and provided the template for what would become a $100 billion+ gross revenue industry. Sidecar learned from Homobiles, implementing their offering nearly verbatim, albeit in digital form: donations based, where the rider and driver would sit together in the front, like a friend giving you a ride. With that, the rideshare market was kicked off.

Bundling eventually stopped working for Microsoft. After the antitrust investigation, the company maintained its dominance on the PC operating systems market, but it lost control of many other markets. Eventually the industry jumped from PC to mobile. Microsoft tried to exactly replicate the network effects it had before—an ecosystem of hardware manufacturers who paid a licensing fee to run Windows Mobile, and app developers and consumers to match—but this time it didn’t work. Instead, Google gave away its Android mobile OS for free, driving adoption for phone makers. The massive reach of Android attracted app developers, and a new network effect was built, derived from a business model where the OS was free but the ecosystem was monetized using search and advertising revenue. Microsoft has also lost the browser market to Google Chrome, and is being challenged in its Office Suite by a litany of startup competitors large and small. It continued to use bundling as a strategy, adding workplace chat via Teams to its suite—but it hasn’t achieved a clear victory against Slack. If bundling hasn’t been a sure thing for Microsoft, it’s an even weaker strategy for others. The outcome seems even less assured when examining how Google bundled Google+ into many corners of its product, including Maps and Gmail, achieving hundreds of millions of active users without real retention. Uber bundled Uber Eats across many touchpoints within its rideshare app, but still fell behind in food delivery versus DoorDash. Bundling hasn’t been a silver bullet, as much as the giants in the industry hope it is.

The hot tub girl was the one before the one with the legs, and after the one with the boobs," Dan snorted, weaving slightly on his feet. "And I think he had a couple of models in between from the modeling agency start-up that he was considering adding to his portfolio." "I told you we should have invested in that one," Marco said, making no effort to keep his voice down. "He was swimming in tits and ass." He looked over at Daisy. "Pardon my French." Daisy gave him a cold smile. "Quel salaud!" Liam didn't speak French, but from the look on Daisy's face he suspected what she'd said wasn't polite. "So who is she really?" Dan gave him a nudge, keeping his voice low. "I mean, come on, man. You and her?" "I'm his parole officer." Daisy grabbed Liam's arm and tugged him in the opposite direction. "He's on an escorted day pass. Move aside because I have to have him back in his cell by eleven P.M." Dan's eyes widened. "No shit? What did he do?" "He swam in the wrong hot tub." Daisy fixed Dan with a glare. "Next time, check their ID.

(Rebekah Neumann was largely focused on her acting career; she was known to tell friends as they toured the first office that she chose the coffee, and that it was the “secret” to the business’s success.)

It was an odd promise considering the source. Rod’s career, until that point, had been anything but a paradigm of reform. His father-in-law, Dick Mell, was a Chicago alderman and ward boss, and used his influence to get Rod elected to the state legislature in Springfield. After four years of doing little in state government, opportunity struck. Dan Rostenkowski, the longtime congressman from Chicago’s north side, was forced to resign in scandal after being caught writing personal checks on his government account. In the next election, a Republican—Mike Flanagan—managed to win the seat. But this was a Democratic district through and through and whoever won the nomination to oppose Flanagan next time around was guaranteed victory. Rod, although having accomplished literally nothing in his four years in the state legislature, had two things going for him: his innate political skills and his father-in-law. In many ways, Rod exemplified the distinction between the skill set needed to run for office and the skill set needed to serve in office. Rod was an incredible public speaker. Charismatic. Charming. Funny. Self-deprecating. He could go into a black church, sing gospel—unironically—and bring the place down. He knew what you wanted to hear and had no qualms saying it, regardless of what it was or whether he actually meant it. He could shine in a speech to the state legislature, at a union hall, and in a TV ad. His retail political skills were better than anyone I’d ever seen (except maybe Bill Clinton) and when you combined that with his ward boss father-in-law’s clout, beating more-qualified opponents to win the Democratic nomination to the House was within reach.

Entrepreneurship is management. And yet, imagine a modern manager who is tasked with building a new product in the context of an established company. Imagine that she goes back to her company’s chief financial officer (CFO) a year later and says, “We have failed to meet the growth targets we predicted. In fact, we have almost no new customers and no new revenue. However, we have learned an incredible amount and are on the cusp of a breakthrough new line of business. All we need is another year.” Most of the time, this would be the last report this intrapreneur would give her employer. The reason is that in general management, a failure to deliver results is due to either a failure to plan adequately or a failure to execute properly. Both are significant lapses, yet new product development in our modern economy routinely requires exactly this kind of failure on the way to greatness. In the Lean Startup movement, we have come to realize that these internal innovators are actually entrepreneurs, too, and that entrepreneurial management can help them succeed;

The typical pol: all the politicians out there who need the job to validate their insecurities. They’re not inherently against accomplishments and they’re not unwilling to do actual work—it’s just secondary to their need for attention.* The ideologue: the true believer like the Green Party on the left or the Tea Party on the right. People like Bernie Sanders and Rand Paul are in this category. The “I’m just happy to be here”: These are the backbenchers who do little or the people who only see their job as winning office, enjoying the perks and attention, and not actually governing. The corrupt pol: people constantly engaging in pay-to-play politics, trading donations for favors, and sometimes even taking outright bribes.

But either way, it was mine. It was my model, based on my experiences, my skills, and my interests. If it succeeded, it was a reflection of everything I’d done, of who I was. If it failed, it’d also be a reflection of me, but at least I’d have failed on my own accord. We didn’t start with much. Shelley Capito, my assistant from the campaign, was brave enough to join me and become our first employee. My friends from Parks—Stuart Ruderfer and David Cohn—had started a successful marketing firm and gave us desks in their office. We started off with one client—Camelot, the operator of the UK Lottery—whom I knew from my Lehman days. I was running around, trying to gin up business, trying to land clients, trying to get the word out about our work.

That was when one of the cardinal rules of politics became clear: The vast majority of people who run for office are desperately insecure, often even self-loathing. They need attention and validation at all costs. Running for and holding office is the only way most of them can get it (since they typically lack the talent to meaningfully succeed at anything in the real world).

Truth is, I had no idea how to compile a state budget. I just made it up as I went along, using whatever common sense I had, whatever information I could gather, and just working really, really hard. (Luckily my office had a couch because sleeping on the floor would have been pretty uncomfortable.) When I look at most startup founders now, I find myself wondering if they really know what they’re doing too. But then I remember my time in Illinois and figure if they have the chutzpah, work ethic, and creativity, there’s no reason they can’t succeed.

Henry Mosley, Theranos’s chief financial officer.

Diane Parks, Theranos’s chief commercial officer, had twenty-five years of experience at pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies

Creating the pop-ups—doing something that was a pure reflection of my passions—changed my life. The core idea and drive to execute what I envisioned enabled me to realize my potential for the first time. That shift in how I approached the world supercharged all other areas of my existence. I went from being a struggling entrepre- neur to heading up a food and beverage business with $150 million in annual revenue to chief marketing officer of a publicly-traded hotel company to head of brand and experience at a billion-dollar startup in less than five years. And not only did the pop-up restaurant expe- rience provide me with the opportunity to share my creativity on a large scale while supporting my family, it also gave me the gift of fulfillment and the confidence to trust my instincts and enjoy the journey as much as, if not more than, the result.

AT 3:00 P.M. SHARP on August 23, 2012, Colonel Edgar escorted the two men into Mattis’s office on MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa. The sixty-one-year-old general was an intimidating figure in person: muscular and broad shouldered, with dark circles under his eyes that suggested a man who didn’t bother much with sleep. His office was decorated with the mementos of a long military career. Amid the flags, plaques, and coins, Shoemaker’s eyes rested briefly on a set of magnificent swords displayed in a glass cabinet. As they sat down in a wood-paneled conference room off to one side of the office, Mattis cut to the chase: “Guys, I’ve been trying to get this thing deployed for a year now. What’s going on?” Shoemaker had gone over everything again with Gutierrez and felt confident he was on solid ground. He spoke first, giving a brief overview of the issues raised by an in-theater test of the Theranos technology. Gutierrez took over from there and told the general his army colleague was correct in his interpretation of the law: the Theranos device was very much subject to regulation by the FDA. And since the agency hadn’t yet reviewed and approved it for commercial use, it could only be tested on human subjects under strict conditions set by an institutional review board. One of those conditions was that the test subjects give their informed consent—something that was notoriously hard to obtain in a war zone. Mattis was reluctant to give up. He wanted to know if they could suggest a way forward. As he’d put it to Elizabeth in an email a few months earlier, he was convinced her invention would be “a game-changer” for his men. Gutierrez and Shoemaker proposed a solution: a “limited objective experiment” using leftover de-identified blood samples from soldiers. It would obviate the need to obtain informed consent and it was the only type of study that could be put together as quickly as Mattis seemed to want to proceed. They agreed to pursue that course of action. Fifteen minutes after they’d walked in, Shoemaker and Gutierrez shook Mattis’s hand and walked out. Shoemaker was immensely relieved. All in all, Mattis had been gruff but reasonable and a workable compromise had been reached. The limited experiment agreed upon fell short of the more ambitious live field trial Mattis had had in mind. Theranos’s blood tests would not be used to inform the treatment of wounded soldiers. They would only be performed on leftover samples after the fact to see if their results matched the army’s regular testing methods. But it was something. Earlier in his career, Shoemaker had spent five years overseeing the development of diagnostic tests for biological threat agents and he would have given his left arm to get access to anonymized samples from service members in theater. The data generated from such testing could be very useful in supporting applications to the FDA. Yet, over the ensuing months, Theranos inexplicably failed to take advantage of the opportunity it was given. When General Mattis retired from the military in March 2013, the study using leftover de-identified samples hadn’t begun. When Colonel Edgar took on a new assignment as commander of the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases a few months later, it still hadn’t started. Theranos just couldn’t seem to get its act together. In July 2013, Lieutenant Colonel Shoemaker retired from the army. At his farewell ceremony, his Fort Detrick colleagues presented him with a “certificate of survival” for having the courage to stand up to Mattis in person and emerging from the encounter alive. They also gave him a T-shirt with the question, “What do you do after surviving a briefing with a 4 star?” written on the front. The answer could be found on the back: “Retire and sail off into the sunset.

I think there are five top responsibilities of a CEO: being the steward of and final arbiter of the senior management; being the chief strategist; being the primary external face for the company, at least in the early days; almost certainly being the chief product officer, although that can change when you’re bigger; and then taking responsibility and accountability for culture.

imagine a modern manager who is tasked with building a new product in the context of an established company. Imagine that she goes back to her company’s chief financial officer (CFO) a year later and says, “We have failed to meet the growth targets we predicted. In fact, we have almost no new customers and no new revenue. However, we have learned an incredible amount and are on the cusp of a breakthrough new line of business. All we need is another year.” Most of the time, this would be the last report this intrapreneur would give her employer. The reason is that in general management, a failure to deliver results is due to either a failure to plan adequately or a failure to execute properly. Both are significant lapses, yet new product development in our modern economy routinely requires exactly this kind of failure on the way to greatness. In the Lean Startup movement, we have come to realize that these internal innovators are actually entrepreneurs,

monopoly business gets stronger as it gets bigger: the fixed costs of creating a product (engineering, management, office space) can be spread out over ever greater quantities of sales.

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More than Words If you’ve ever worked in a startup office, you’ll be familiar with a particular kind of quiet—one punctuated only by tap-tapping from keyboards and the occasional sneeze or chair scrape. Everyone sits with earbuds in, listening to music or podcasts or sometimes nothing at all. Most conversations happen via chat programs like Google Hangouts, Skype for Business, and Slack. Even in more traditional offices, it’s become

By 2008, storm clouds were gathering over Microsoft. PC shipments, the financial lifeblood of Microsoft, had leveled off. Meanwhile sales of Apple and Google smartphones and tablets were on the rise, producing growing revenues from search and online advertising that Microsoft hadn’t matched. Meanwhile, Amazon had quietly launched Amazon Web Services (AWS), establishing itself for years to come as a leader in the lucrative, rapidly growing cloud services business. The logic behind the advent of the cloud was simple and compelling. The PC Revolution of the 1980s, led by Microsoft, Intel, Apple, and others, had made computing accessible to homes and offices around the world. The 1990s had ushered in the client/server era to meet the needs of millions of users who wanted to share data over networks rather than on floppy disks. But the cost of maintaining servers in an ever-growing sea of data—and the advent of businesses like Amazon, Office 365, Google, and Facebook—simply outpaced the ability for servers to keep up. The emergence of cloud services fundamentally shifted the economics of computing. It standardized and pooled computing resources and automated maintenance tasks once done manually. It allowed for elastic scaling up or down on a self-service, pay-as-you-go basis. Cloud providers invested in enormous data ​centers around the world and then rented them out at a lower cost per user. This was the Cloud Revolution. Amazon was one of the first to cash in with AWS. They figured out early on that the same cloud infrastructure they used to sell books, movies, and other retail items could be rented, like a time-share, to other businesses and startups at a much lower price than it would take for each company to build its own cloud. By June 2008, Amazon already had 180,000 developers building applications and services for their cloud platform. Microsoft did not yet have a commercially viable cloud platform. All of this spelled trouble for Microsoft. Even before the Great Recession of 2008, our stock had begun a downward slide. In a long-planned move, Bill Gates left the company that year to focus on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. But others were leaving, too. Among them, Kevin Johnson, president of the Windows and online services business, announced he would leave to become CEO of Juniper Networks. In their letter to shareholders that year, Bill and Steve Ballmer noted that Ray Ozzie, creator of Lotus Notes, had been named the company’s new Chief Software Architect (Bill’s old title), reflecting the fact that a new generation of leaders was stepping up in areas like online advertising and search. There was no mention of the cloud in that year’s shareholder letter, but, to his credit, Steve had a game plan and a wider view of the playing field.

Entrepreneurship is management. And yet, imagine a modern manager who is tasked with building a new product in the context of an established company. Imagine that she goes back to her company’s chief financial officer (CFO) a year later and says, “We have failed to meet the growth targets we predicted. In fact, we have almost no new customers and no new revenue. However, we have learned an incredible amount and are on the cusp of a breakthrough new line of business. All we need is another year.” Most of the time, this would be the last report this intrapreneur would give her employer. The reason is that in general management, a failure to deliver results is due to either a failure to plan adequately or a failure to execute properly. Both are significant lapses, yet new product development in our modern economy routinely requires exactly this kind of failure on the way to greatness. In the Lean Startup movement, we have come to realize that these internal innovators are actually entrepreneurs, too, and that entrepreneurial management can help them succeed; this is the subject of the next chapter.

One metaphor I use to explain this shift is to take yet another analogy from military history: the marines take the beach, the army takes the country, and the police govern the country. Marines are start-up people who are used to dealing with chaos and improvising solutions on the spot. Army soldiers are scale-up people, who know how to rapidly seize and secure territory once your forces make it off the beach. And police officers are stability people, whose job is to sustain rather than disrupt. The marines and the army can usually work together, and the army and the police can usually work together, but the marines and the police rarely work well together. As you blitzscale, you may need to find new beaches for your marines to take rather than ask them to help patrol the existing ones.

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Jules and me extensively, talked to everyone at the office, and flown themselves out to California to interview Crazy Craig. They’ve even tracked down the first wedding Cyrus ever officiated. The couple, Gillian and Michael Rushmore-Smith, live in Boulder, Colorado, and run a no-waste grocery store where you bring your own containers. For them, Cyrus designed something called a Wetting: their guests brought water from all four corners of the country and anointed the couple, after which they all jumped into the Boulder Reservoir. They are still very happy together.

Girish Mathrubootham, the CEO and cofounder of FreshDesk (cloud-based customer support platform), had a secret way to motivate himself during the early days of the company after watching the padayappa movie. Before starting to the office he would watch the song 'Vetri kodi kattu' (Hoist the flag of victory) from the movie and then step into his office every day. It motivated him a lot his company (Freshdesk) won the Microsoft BizSpark Startup Challenge within six months and helps over 50,000 businesses and organizations around the world offer better, more personal support to their customers.

To initiate its EIR program, USCIS would also turn to an agitator. Brad Feld, an early-stage investor and prolific blogger, had become exasperated when officers of two promising startups under his watch were forced to return to their home countries because they couldn’t secure visas. He shared their story on a blog, attracting the attention of other entrepreneurs, including Ries, who couldn’t understand why there was no visa category for an entrepreneur with American investors and employees. In lieu of that category, many entrepreneurs were at the mercy of visa examiners who didn’t understand how they operated. At the point of visa application, many startups had not hired many employees or generated much revenue. This confused traditional visa examiners, who would then ask odd and irrelevant questions, often before a denial. To give just one example, it’s been years since AOL required a compact disc to use its service. And yet, visa examiners were demanding proof of a warehouse, where software startups would store their CD inventory for shipping to customers. As Feld’s idea of a “startup visa” became intertwined with, and paralyzed by, the broader debate on comprehensive immigration reform, the USCIS, with White House support, sought to accomplish something administratively within the existing law. It instituted an EIR program, to organize and educate a specialty unit of immigration officers to handle entrepreneur and startup nonimmigrant visa cases.22 The project also called for educating entrepreneurs about the available options, one of which they may have overlooked. For instance, the O-1 visa, which was reserved “for those with extraordinary ability,” had proven a successful channel for actors, athletes, musicians, directors, scientists, artists, businessmen, engineers, and others who could provide ample evidence of their unique and impressive abilities, attributes, awards, and accolades. It had even created some controversy, when visa evaluators took the term “model” to an extreme, awarding a visa to one of Hugh Hefner’s ex-girlfriends, a Playboy centerfold from Canada named Shera Berchard.23 If she was confident enough to assert and explain her “extraordinary ability,” why weren’t entrepreneurs?

They want to say “fuck you” every time some guy uses a woman’s body as a way of describing something—We’re already pregnant, let’s just push this thing out or: Should we open the full kimono?—but they know they’re going to walk into that office or that pitch meeting, and they’re going to feel like they have to bro it up with all the other guys, because who wants to be the uptight girl who makes everyone shush the minute she walks into the room? We want to be on the inside, we want to hang. We want to be cool. And we want to win.

Facilities may not seem like a very important topic; but they are. We’ve seen a number of companies, such as the one above, encounter difficulty soon after moving into beautiful new buildings and offices. It’s not that the new offices are in themselves bad. But they send a signal: “We’ve arrived. We’re successful. We’ve made it.” Greg Hadley, an experienced turnaround artist, described the impact of a new building on the psychology of a company that he took over: It was like the Taj Mahal. People looked around, and said, “Hey, look at this. We must be good. We must already be successful.” And then they started paying more attention to their golf game than the business. Gavilan Computer Company, which burned through tens of millions of dollars of capital in going from start-up to bankrupt, had exquisite corporate offices. As one employee told us, “I felt like I was already working in the FORTUNE 500. It diluted any real sense of urgency. And, you know, it wasn’t anywhere near as much fun as some other start-ups I’ve been with.” Do we mean to imply that you shouldn’t have nice places to work? No, of course not; but you should be aware that a beautiful new edifice symbolizes having crossed a threshold, having “made it,” having completed a mission.