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" At 19, I joined the Air Force during the Vietnam War. "

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" Visionary CEOs don't need someone else to demo the company's key products for them. They deeply understand products, and they have their own coherent and consistent vision of where the industry/business models and customers are today, and where they need to take the company. "

" The convergence of digital trends, along with the rise of China and globalization, has upended the rules for almost every business in every corner of the globe. "

" The music and movie business has been consistently wrong in its claims that new platforms and channels would be the end of its businesses. In each case, the new technology produced a new market far larger than the impact it had on the existing market. "

" Normally when I have students over, we sit in the house and look at the fields to try to catch a glimpse of a bobcat hunting. "

" There's nothing wrong with a business that supports you and perhaps an extended family. But if you want to build a scalable startup, you need to be asking how you can you get enough customers/users/payers to build a business that can grow revenues past several $100M/year. "

" Great VCs do everything they can to make you successful. But just like your bank, credit card company, mortgage holder, etc. they are not confused where their long-term loyalty lies. "

" In corporations, the penalty for repeated failure on known tasks is being reassigned to other tasks or asked to leave the company. "

" Startups have finite time and resources to find product/market fit before they run out of money. Therefore startups trade off certainty for speed, adopting 'good enough decision making' and iterating and pivoting as they fail, learn, and discover their business model. "

" Out of electronics school, my first assignment was to a fighter base in Florida. My roommate, Glen, would become my best friend in Florida and Thailand as we were sent to different air bases in Southeast Asia. "

" VCs like acquisitions as much as IPOs because the acquiring companies often can rationalize paying large multiples over the current valuation of the startup. "

" Market type influences everything a company does. Strategy and tactics for one market type seldom work for another. "

" Founding a company is a sheer act of will and tenacity in the face of immense skepticism from everyone - investors, customers, friends, family, and employees, to name a few. "

" At the intersection of food science and technology, food replacement startups are creating substitutes for the basic components of meals as well as replacements for complete meals. "

" Learning how to keep track of inventory and cash flow and creating an income statement and a balance sheet are great skills to learn for managing existing businesses. "

" Commencement Day has a sobering finality in that it's the end of the prescribed path. "

" In a web/mobile startup, coding is not an outsourced activity. It's an integral part of the company's DNA. "

" Not all startups are alike. One of the key ways they differ is in the relationship between a startup's new product and its market. "

" Once you establish what activities your company needs to do, the next question is, 'How do these activities get accomplished?' i.e. what resources do I need to make the activities happen? "

" Innovation in an existing company is not just the sum of great technology, key acquisitions, or smart people. Corporate innovation needs a culture that matches and supports it. "

" Creating a vertically oriented regional ecosystem is a pretty amazing accomplishment for any country or industry. "

" As an entrepreneur, my problem was that I had too many ideas. "

" Value Proposition Design is a 'must have' for anyone creating a new venture. It captures the core issues around understanding and finding customer problems and designing and validating potential solutions. "

" The food replacement category is what it sounds like - companies are substituting plants or food grown in a lab to replace meat, fish, eggs, milk - or, like Soylent, to package nutritionally complete meals into a drink. "

" Failure will happen. It's a normal part of the startup process. "

" In winning companies, everybody pulls in the same direction. "

" For Customer Development to succeed, everyone on the team - from investor or parent company to engineers, marketers and founders - needs to understand and agree that the Customer Development process is different to its core. "

" Long hours don't necessarily mean success. "

" Customer Development changes almost every aspect of startup behavior, performance, metrics, and, as often as not, success potential. "

" It typically takes multiple iterations and pivots to find product/market fit - the match between what you're building and who will buy it. "

" Entrepreneurial education in grades K-12, if it exists at all, still focuses on teaching potential entrepreneurs small business entrepreneurship - the equivalent of 'how to run a lemonade stand.' "