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" Watching an entrepreneur fail is sad, but watching him fail from lack of nerve is tragic. "

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

" What's been missing from regions outside of Silicon Valley is a 'playbook.' In American football, a playbook contains a sports team's strategies and plays. It struck me that every region needs its own industry playbook on how to compete globally. "

" Visionary CEOs are not 'just' great at assuring world-class execution of a tested and successful business model: they are also world-class innovators. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" Visionary CEOs are product- and business-model-centric and extremely customer focused. "

" 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. "

" Long hours don't necessarily mean success. "

" Customer discovery is the process of translating a founder's vision for the company into hypotheses about each component of the business model and creating a set of experiments to test each hypothesis. "

" Market type determines the startup's customer feedback and acquisition activities and spending. It changes customer needs, adoption rates, product features, and positioning as well as its launch strategies, channels and activities. "

" Founders, presuming they know their customers, assume they know all the features customers need. "

" Decades before we were able to articulate the value of 'getting out of the building' and the Lean Startup, the value in having skunk works controlling their own distribution was starkly evident. "

" If you've never founded a company, rest assured it never happens as elegantly and smoothly as articles in 'Inc.' and other business magazines or case studies suggest. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" As I've gotten older, I've come to grips that the unexamined life is what works for most people. Most take what they learned in school, get a job, marry, buy a house, have a family, become a great parent, serve their god, community and country, hang with friends, and live a good life. And for them that's great. "

" The business model is both the starting point and the scorecard for Customer Development progress. "

" The stock market clearly values companies that can deliver disruptive innovation. "

" 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. "

" The Value Proposition Canvas functions like a plug-in to the Business Model Canvas and zooms into the value proposition and customer segment to describe the interactions between customers and product more explicitly and in more detail. "

" The goal of listening to customers is not to please every one of them. It's to figure out which customer segments serve your needs - both short and long term. "

" If you think the job of a CEO is to increase sales, then Ballmer did a spectacular job. "

" Great founders live for chaotic moments. "

" At the commencements I attended, graduates were classified by their academic rankings. Outstanding academic performance was noted in the programs and awarded with special honors. "

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

" Great entrepreneurial DNA is comprised of leadership, technological vision, frugality, and the desire to succeed. "

" 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. "

" Skunk works differed from advanced research groups in that they were more than just product development groups. They had direct interaction with customers and controlled a sales channel which allowed them to negotiate their own deals with customers. "