Make incremental advances

1. stay lean and flexible. All companies must be “lean”, which is code for “unplanned” yeapharmacy.com. You should not know what your business will do; planning is arrogant and inflexible. Instead you should try things out, “iterate” and treat entrepreneurship as agnostic experimentation.

2. improve on competition. Don’t try to create a new market prematurely

3. Focus on product, not sales

4. if you can recognize competition as a destructive force instead of a sign of value, you are already more sane than most.

5. Characteristics of monopoly:

• proprietary technology

• network effects. Paradoxically, then, network effects business must start especially small markets. Facebook started with just Harvard students.

• economies of scale

• branding. Beginning with brand rather substance is dangerous.

1. start small and monopolize. Therefore, every startup should start with a very small market. It is easier to domincate a small market than a large one. The perfect target market for a startup is a small group of particular people concentrated together and served by few or no competitors. Any big market is a bad choice.

2. Scaling up once you create and dominate a niche market, then you should gradually expand into related and slightly broader markets.

3. The most successful companies make the core progression, to first dominate a specific niche and then scale to adjacent markets.

4. Don’t disrupt, es. Paypal and credit cards. As you craft a plan to expand to adjacent markets, don’t disrupt: avoid competition as much as possible.

5. Jobs saw that you can change the world through careful planning, not by listening to focus group feedback or copying others’ successes

6. you should focus relentlessly on something you are good at doing, but before that you must think hard about whether it will be valuable in the future

7. As a founder, your first job is to get the first things right, because you cannot build a great company on a flawed foundation

8. Part-time employees don’t work. Even working remotely should be avoided, because misalignment can creep in whenever colleagues aren’t together full-time, in the same place, every day.

9. A company does better the less it pays the CEO.

10. A cash bonus is slightly better than a cash salary, at least it’s contingent on a job well done. But even so-called incentive pay encourages short-term thinking and value grabbing.  Any kind of cash is more about the present than the future. Equity can’t create perfect incentives, but it is the best way a founder to keep everyone in the company broadly aligned.

11. Recruiting is a core competency for any company. It should never be outsourced.

12. You will attract the employees you need if you can explain why your mission is compelling: not why it is important in general, but why you are doing something important that no one else is going to get done. Just cover the basics like health insurance and then promise what no others can: the opportunity to do irreplaceable work on a unique problem alongside great people.

13. The best thing I did a manager at PayPal was to make every person in the company responsible for doing just one thing. Defining roles reduced conflict.

14. A product is viral if its core functionality encourages users to invite their friends to become users.

15. Seven questions that every business must answer:

16. the engineering question. Can you create breakthrough technology instead of incremental improvements?

17. The timing questions. Is now the right time to start your particular business?

18. The monopoly question. Are you starting with a big share of a small market?

19. The people questions. Do you have the right team?

20. The distribution question. Do you have a way to not just create but deliver your product?

21. The durability question. Will your market position be defensible 10 and 20 years into the future?

22. the secret question. Have you identified a unique opportunity that others don’t see?

23. you can’t dominate a submarket if it’s fictional, and huge markets are highly competitive, not highly attainable.

24. Never invest in a tech CEO that wears a suit.

25. Every entrepreneur should plan to be the last mover in her particular market.

26. A valuable business must start by finding a niche and dominating a small market.