Business and Marketing

Being small is a feature — not a bug

Pick business partners with high intelligence, energy, and above all, integrity. Don’t partner with cynics and pessimists. Their beliefs are self-fulfilling.

The blessing of modest expectations is that they leave room for many experiences to be a pleasant surprise.

If people don’t love or hate your work, you just haven’t done all that much.

If you try to please everyone, you’ll stop pleasing the people you care about.

The riskiest thing you can do is make average stuff for average people and pitch it to the masses. Instead, focus on the smallest viable audience and bring magic to them, they will come back and they will bring their friends.

Embrace accountability and take business risks under your own name. Society will reward you with responsibility, equity, and leverage.

Convenient services beat free. iTunes failed over pirating, but Apple Music is too convenient to not pay the low fee.

Fail faster, succeed sooner.

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.

Quality is remembered long after the price is forgotten.

Apple owes much of its success to Steve Jobs’s understanding that the way a product makes users feel trumps most other considerations, including price.

The market rewards execution, not ideas.

Never start a company with the intention of becoming rich, because then you will focus on the wrong things.

People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.

Start simple. Don’t complicate things.

The most reliable source of long-term profitability and sustainable growth is understanding the customers.

There is no skill called ’business’. Study microeconomics, game theory, psychology, persuasion, ethics, mathematics, and computers.