Build

1. loc. 259

   I needed to learn. And the best way to do that was to surround myself with people who knew exactly how hard it was to make something great—who had the scars to prove it. And if it turned out to be the wrong move, well, making a mistake is the best way to not make that mistake again. Do, fail, learn.

2. loc. 376

   we built something really incredible. For us geeks. For everyone else, it was kind of neat. Maybe. If they even understood what it was. A luxury toy for rich people or nerds or very rich nerds. A plaything. If you’re not solving a real problem, you can’t start a revolution.

3. loc. 506

   When you get a chance to work with legends and heroes and gods, you realize they’re none of the things that you’ve fabricated in your brain. They can be geniuses in one area and clueless in another. They can raise you up by praising your work, but you can also help them, catch things they miss, and build a relationship based not on starry-eyed hero worship but mutual respect.

4. loc. 969

   Most people don’t even want to acknowledge that there are opinion-driven decisions or that they have to make them. Because if you follow your gut and your gut is wrong, then there’s nowhere else to cast blame. But if all you did was follow the data and you still failed, then clearly something else was wrong. Someone else screwed up. This is often a tactic of people who are trying to cover their asses. It’s not my fault! I just went where the data sent me! The data doesn’t lie!

5. loc. 1216

   The key to finding them is networking. By that I don’t mean going to a conference and working the room, handing out your business cards or QR codes and cornering potential employers as they try to eat their stack of tiny sandwiches. I just mean make new relationships, beyond business—talk to people outside your bubble. Get to know what else is out there. Meet some new human beings. Networking is something you should be doing constantly—even when you’re happily employed.

6. loc. 1572

   Every product should have a story, a narrative that explains why it needs to exist and how it will solve your customer’s problems.

7. loc. 1960

   But the lesson here isn’t that Steve Jobs was fallible. Of course he was. He was human. The lesson is about when and how vision and data should guide your decisions. In the very beginning, before there are customers, vision is more important than pretty much anything else. But you don’t have to figure out your vision all by yourself. In fact, you probably shouldn’t. Locking yourself alone in a room to create a manifesto of your single, luminous vision looks and feels indistinguishable from completely losing your mind. Get at least one person—but preferably a small group—to bounce ideas off of. Sketch out your mission together. Then fulfill it together.

8. loc. 2415

   There are three elements to every great idea: 1. It solves for “why.” Long before you figure out what a product will do, you need to understand why people will want it. The “why” drives the “what.” [See also: Chapter 3.2: Why Storytelling.] 2. It solves a problem that a lot of people have in their daily lives. 3. It follows you around. Even after you research and learn about it and try it out and realize how hard it’ll be to get it right, you can’t stop thinking about it.

9. loc. 2709

   The world of investment is cyclical. The funding environment is always shifting back and forth from a founder-friendly environment to an investor-friendly environment. It’s like the housing market—sometimes it’s good for sellers, sometimes for buyers. In a founder-friendly environment, there’s so much money flowing into the marketplace that investors will fund just about anything because they don’t want to miss out on any deals. In an investor-friendly market, there’s a lot less capital to go around, investors are pickier, and founders get worse terms.

10. loc. 3184

    It’s your responsibility as a leader not to try to deal with a disaster on your own. Don’t lock yourself in a room, alone, frantically trying to fix it. Don’t hide. Don’t disappear. Don’t imagine that by working for a week straight and not sleeping you can solve the problem yourself and nobody ever has to know. Get advice. Take deep breaths. Make a plan.

11. loc. 3690

    Avoid habituation: Everyone gets used to things. Life is full of tiny and enormous inconveniences that you no longer notice because your brain has simply accepted them as unchangeable reality and filtered them out.

12. loc. 3879

    That’s why for a long time Nest couldn’t make any energy-savings claims in our marketing—the best we could do was write white papers to explain our simulation models and link to them from our website. Eventually we got more and more real customer data that proved our simulations were right—the thermostat saved energy.

13. loc. 4234

    When you’re hiring an outside law firm, you want a lawyer who talks fast and does not care about your children—at least not when they’re on the clock.

14. loc. 4598

    They’re hands-on, but to a point. They know when to back off and delegate.

15. loc. 4669

    When your team knows too much about you as a person, not just you as a CEO, they start dissecting your personal life to try to understand your decisions. Your motivations. Your ways of thinking. That’s not only a distracting waste of time, it’s counterproductive. When you explain why you’re doing something, it should be all about the customers, not about you.

16. loc. 5125

    It’s the same problem that the very wealthy face—a gradual drifting upward, away from the regular problems of regular humans. Unless you stay grounded—take public transit, buy your own food, walk the streets, set up your own IT systems, understand the value of a dollar and how far it can take you in New York or Wisconsin or Indonesia*—you start to forget the daily pains of the people you’re supposed to be creating painkillers for. [See also: Chapter 4.1: How to Spot a Great Idea:

A portion of what I highlighted, up to 1,000 words per book.