Build

These are the notes for the future for myself to help me remember the key things.

• a nice example for my future kids:

  1978–1979 Startup #1: Eggs. I sold them door-to-door in third grade. I stand by that company—it was a solid business. I bought eggs cheap from a farmer, then my little brother and I piled them in our blue wagon and pulled it down the neighborhood streets each morning. It gave me pocket money that my parents couldn’t tell me how to spend—my first taste of true freedom.

• Had I stuck with it, who knows what heights I could have attained.

1.1 Adulthood

• Early adulthood is about watching your dreams go up in flames and learning as much as you can from the ashes. Do, fail, learn. The rest will follow.

• “The only failure in your twenties is inaction. The rest is trial and error.” —ANONYMOUS

• And you can’t skip a step—you can’t just have the answers handed to you and detour around the hard stuff. Humans learn through productive struggle, by trying it themselves and screwing up and doing it differently next time. In early adulthood you have to learn to embrace that—to know that the risks might not pan out but to take them anyway. You can get guidance and advice, you can choose a path by following someone else’s example, but you won’t really learn until you start walking down that path yourself and seeing where it takes you.

• I give a speech at high schools sometimes—at graduations where a bunch of eighteen-year-old kids are heading out into the world, alone, for the first time. I tell them that they probably make 25 percent of their decisions. If that. From the moment you’re born until you move out of your parents’ house, almost all your choices are made, shaped, or influenced by your parents. And I’m not just talking about the obvious decisions—which classes to take, which sports to play. I mean the millions of hidden decisions you’ll discover when you leave home and start doing things for yourself:

  • What type of toothpaste do you use?

  • What kind of toilet paper?

  • Where do you put the silverware?

  • How do you arrange your clothes?

  • What religion do you follow?

  All these subtle things that you never made a decision about growing up are already implanted in your brain.

  Most kids don’t consciously examine any of these choices. They mimic their parents. And when you’re a kid, that’s usually fine. It’s necessary.

  But you’re not a kid anymore.

  And after you move out of your parents’ house, there’s a window—a brief, shining, incredible window—where your decisions are yours alone. You’re not beholden to anyone—not a spouse, not kids, not parents. You’re free. Free to choose whatever you’d like.

  That is the time to be bold.

  • Where are you going to live?

  • Where are you going to work?

  • Who are you going to be?

  • Your parents will always have suggestions for you—feel free to take them or ignore them. Their judgment is colored by what they want for you (the best, of course, only the best). You’ll need to find other people—other mentors—to give you useful advice. A teacher or cousin or an aunt or the older kid of a close family friend. Just because you’re on your own doesn’t mean you have to be alone with your decisions.

    Because this is it. This is your window. This is your time to take risks.

  When you’re in your thirties and forties, the window begins to close for most people. Your decisions can no longer be entirely your own. That’s okay, too—great even—but it’s different. The people who depend on you will shape and influence your choices. Even if you don’t have a family to support, you’ll still accumulate just a little more each year—friends, assets, social standing—that you won’t want to risk.

  But when you’re early in your career—and early in your life—the worst that can happen if you take big risks is probably moving back with your parents. And that is not shameful.

  You might screw up. Your company might fail. You might have so many butterflies in your stomach you’ll be worried you got food poisoning. And that’s okay. It’s exactly what should be happening. If you don’t feel those butterflies then you’re not doing it right. You have to push yourself up the mountain, even if it means you might fall off a cliff.
  

• It was crazy. But it was fun. Especially in the beginning when everybody was focused on fun. There was no dress code. No rules for the office. It was so different from what I was used to in the Midwest. General Magic was probably one of the first Silicon Valley companies that truly embodied the idea that playing at work was worthwhile—that a joyful workplace could make a joyful product.

• (I don’t recommend working that much, by the way. You should never kill yourself for your job, and no job should ever expect that of you. But if you want to prove yourself, to learn as much as you can and do as much as you can, you need to put in the time. Stay late. Come in early. Work over the weekend and holidays sometimes. Don’t expect a vacation every couple of months. Let the scales tip a little on your work/life balance—let your passion for what you’re building drive you.)

1.2 Get a Job

• General Magic did not. We started from the technology—focusing on what we could create, what would impress the geniuses at our company—not the reason why real, nontechnical people would need it. So the Magic Link solved problems that regular people wouldn’t recognize for more than a decade. And because nobody else was building technology for nonexistent problems, the networks, processors, and input mechanisms our products depended on weren’t good enough. We had to make everything ourselves. Magic CAP, a revolutionary object-oriented operating system. TeleScript, a new client server programming language. We created servers with online applications and stores. And ultimately, even though it fell short of the vision, we built something really incredible. For us geeks.

• About management consulting thats a great metaphore :

  Steve Jobs once said of management consulting, “You do get a broad cut at companies but it’s very thin. It’s like a picture of a banana: you might get a very accurate picture but it’s only two dimensions, and without the experience of actually doing it you never get three dimensional. So you might have a lot of pictures on your walls, you can show it off to your friends—I’ve worked in bananas, I’ve worked in peaches, I’ve worked in grapes—but you never really taste it.”
  

• If you’re passionate about something—something that could be solving a huge problem one day—then stick with it.

1.3 Heroes

• Not when people are just asking for a job. Or angling for funding. But I’ll notice people who come with something interesting to share. Something smart. Especially if they keep coming. If they sent me something cool last week and something cool this week and they keep bringing fascinating news or tech or ideas and they’re persistent, then I’ll start to recognize them. I’ll start to remember them, and respond. And that can turn into an introduction or a friendship or a referral or, potentially, a job at one of our portfolio companies.

1.4 Don’t (Only) Look Down

• So 20 percent of the time, individual contributors need to look up. And they need to look around. The sooner they start, the faster and higher they’ll advance in their career.

• New perspectives are everywhere. You don’t have to drag a bunch of people off the street to stare at your product and tell you what they think. Start with your internal customers. Everyone in a company has customers, even if they’re not building anything. You’re always making something for someone—the creative team is making stuff for marketing, marketing is making stuff for the app designers, the app designers are making stuff for the engineers—every single person in the company is doing something for someone, even if it’s just a coworker on another team.

• The most wonderful part of building something together with a team is that you’re walking side by side with other people

2.1 Just Managing

• 1. You do not have to be a manager to be successful. Many people assume that the only path to more money and stature is managing a team. However, there are alternatives that will enable you to get a similar paycheck, have similar amounts of influence, and possibly be happier overall. Of course if you want to be a manager because you think you’ll love it, then absolutely pursue it. But even then, remember that you don’t have to be a manager forever. I’ve seen plenty of people go back to being individual contributors, then turn around and be managers again in their next job.

• 5. Honesty is more important than style.

• 6. Don’t worry that your team will outshine you

• It was kind of like that at General Magic, too. Our culture was clear: we didn’t need managers. Everyone was smart and could manage themselves. So anyone who tried to be a real manager was pretty much ignored.

  It was great. Until the team grew. Until we needed to launch something and turn all these brilliant minds in one direction. Until we all had to agree on what was necessary and what got cut.

  But when I finally started looking around at General Magic, I realized coding and designing hardware wasn’t as interesting to me as seeing how the whole product—the whole business—came together. [See also: Chapter 1.4: Don’t (Only) Look Down.] It became exceedingly obvious that I could never guarantee success through great engineering alone. The best technology wouldn’t always win—look at Windows 95 versus Mac OS.

  A lot of engineers only trust other engineers. Just like finance people only trust finance people. People like people who think like them. So engineers often keep their distance from sales, marketing, creative—all the functions that are soft, squishy.

• One of the hardest parts of management is letting go. Not doing the work yourself.

• You can’t let it slide into mediocrity because you’re worried about seeming overbearing. Even if your hands aren’t on the product, they should still be on the wheel.

• Examining the product in great detail and caring deeply about the quality of what your team is producing is not micromanagement. That’s exactly what you should be doing. I remember Steve Jobs bringing out a jeweler’s loupe and looking at individual pixels on a screen to make sure the user interface graphics were properly drawn.

• As a manager, you should be focused on making sure the team is producing the best possible product. The outcome is your business. How the team reaches that outcome is the team’s business. When you get deep into the team’s process of doing work rather than the actual work that results from it, that’s when you dive headfirst into micromanagement. (Of course sometimes it turns out that the process is flawed and leads to bad outcomes. In that case, the manager should feel free to dive in and revise the process. That’s the manager’s job, too.)

1:1s

• The other place where you’ll get useful data is in 1:1s with team members. It’s all too easy to turn 1:1s into friendly chats that go nowhere, so just as you need to have a process for your team meetings, your weekly meetings with individuals should have an agenda, a clear purpose, and should be beneficial to both sides. You should get the info you need about product development and your team members should get insight into how they’re doing. Try to see the situation from their point of view—talk about their fears and your own concerns out loud, reframe your thoughts so they can hear the feedback, understand the goals, clear up ambiguities or concerns.

  You are there to help. Every word should come from a place of caring.

• I started with some management classes. No class will give you all the answers, but any class is better than nothing. And then I went way beyond the basic classes you’ll take at a big company—I went down the rabbit hole. I started reading management books and realized that a great deal of management comes down to how you manage your own fears and anxieties. That led me to psychology books. And that led me to therapy. And yoga.

• But I didn’t try to change who I was. You are who you are. If you have to completely rearrange your personality to become a manager, then it will always be an act and you won’t get comfortable in the role.
  

• WOW: Kwon Oh-hyun, the former CEO of Samsung Semiconductor and an incredible partner, big brother, and sometimes mentor to me as we worked together closely on the iPod, once put it this way: “Most managers are afraid that the people who work for them are going to be better than them. But you need to think of being a manager more like being a mentor or a parent. What loving parent wants their child NOT to succeed? You want your kids to be more successful than you, right?”

2.2 Data Versus Opinion

But data can’t solve an opinion-based problem.

If you don’t have enough data to make a decision, you’ll need insights to inform your opinion.

Instead of moving forward with a design, you’d hear, “Well, let’s just test it.” Nobody wanted to take responsibility for what they were making.

The data wasn’t a guide. At best, it was a crutch. At worst, cement shoes. It was analysis paralysis.

Despite the fact that many companies now rabidly test every single element of their product and unquestioningly follow the clicks, A/B and user testing is not product design. It’s a tool. A test. At best, a diagnosis. It can tell you something’s not working, but it won’t tell you how to fix it. Or it can show you an option that solves one hyperlocal issue but breaks something else downstream.

In our case—and in the case of every first-generation product—we could have been shoveling forever. There was never going to be enough data to make an assured choice.

this is an opinion-driven decision

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!

So what do you do when you’re stuck with a manager who’s hell-bent on driving off a cliff, ideally while throwing all their money out the window at some consultants? Or what if you have data but it’s inconclusive—nobody can say for sure where it leads? Or what if you need to convince your team to follow you even though you can’t prove you’re heading in the right direction?

You tell a story.

Nothing in the world is ever 100 percent sure. Even scientific research with entirely data-based outcomes is actually filled with caveats—we didn’t do this kind of sampling, there was this variant, we need to follow up with this test. The answer may not be the answer. There’s always a chance we’re wrong.

So you can’t wait for perfect data. It doesn’t exist. You just have to take that first step into the unknown. Combine everything you’ve learned and take your best guess at what’s going to happen next. That’s what life is. Most decisions we make are data-informed, but they’re not data-made.

2.3 Assholes

1. Kill ’em with kindness.

2. Ignore them.

3. Try to get around them.

4. Quit.

That’s when your team needs to have a counternarrative. The bullshit-asymmetry theory, Brandolini’s law, will be at play here: “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude higher than to produce it.”

2.4 I QUIT

You cannot work with people you cannot trust.

Meet some new human beings! Networking is something you should be doing constantly, even when you are happily employed.

People won't remember how you started. They'll remember how you left.

So if something is not working, don't just complain to people who have no power to fix it; then throw up your hands and quit!

If you flit from project to project, company to company, you will never have the vital experience of starting and finishing something meaningful.

Jobs are not interchangeable. Work is not just a sweater you can take off when things get hot. Too many people jump ship the second they need to dig in and really push through the hard grinding work of making something real, and when you look at the resumes, you can answer instantly, see the pattern.

3.1 Make the Intangible Tangible

So don’t just make a prototype of your product and think you’re done. Prototype as much of the full customer experience as possible. Make the intangible tangible so you can’t overlook the less showy but incredibly important parts of the journey. You should be able to map out and visualize exactly how a customer discovers, considers, installs, uses, fixes, and even returns your product. It all matters.

Of course, sometimes you do need hardware—it can’t be avoided. But when that happens, I still tell people to put it away. I say, “Don’t tell me what’s so special about this object. Tell me what’s different about the customer journey.”

Why should I buy the next version?

Your product, marketing, and support have to grease the skids—continually communicate and connect with customers, give them the answers they need, so they feel like they’re on a smooth ride, a single continuous, inevitable journey.

To do that right, you have to prototype the whole experience—give every part the weight and reality of a physical object. Regardless of whether your product is made of atoms or bits or both, the process is the same.

3.2 Why Storytelling

Once you have a strong answer for why your product is needed, then you can focus on how it works.

He used a technique I later came to call the virus of doubt. It’s a way to get into people’s heads, remind them about a daily frustration, get them annoyed about it all over again. If you can infect them with the virus of doubt—“Maybe my experience isn’t as good as I thought, maybe it could be better”—then you prime them for your solution. You get them angry about how it works now so they can get excited about a new way of doing things.

It never felt like a speech. It felt like a conversation. Like a story.

And the reason is simple: Steve didn’t just read a script for the presentation. He’d been telling a version of that same story every single day for months and months during development—to us, to his friends, his family. He was constantly working on it, refining it. Every time he’d get a puzzled look or a request for clarification from his unwitting early audience, he’d sand it down, tweak it slightly, until it was perfectly polished.

It was the story of the product. And it drove what we built.

Chapter 3.3 Evolution Versus Disruption Versus Execution

Your version one (V1) product should be disruptive, not evolutionary.

The iPod was Apple’s only successful new non-Mac product in fifteen years. At times it accounted for more than 50 percent of Apple’s revenue. It was hugely popular and still growing fast. It defined the company for millions of non-Mac customers.

But we decided to eat our own. We had to make the iPhone, even though we knew it could, probably would, kill the iPod.

Chapter 3.4 Your First Adventure—and Your Second

The tools you need to make those decisions are below, organized by order of importance:

Vision: Know what you want to make, why you’re making it, who it’s for, and why people will buy it. You’ll need a strong leader or a small group to ensure the vision is delivered intact.

Customer insights: This is what you’ve learned through customer or market research or simply by thinking like your customer: what they like, what they dislike, what problems they experience on a regular basis, and what solutions they’ll respond to.

Data: For any really new product, reliable data will be limited or nonexistent. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make a reasonable attempt to gather objective information—the scope of the opportunity, the way people use current solutions, etc. But this information will never be definitive. It won’t make your decisions for you.

Once you start iterating on an existing product, V2, your second adventure, you’ll have experience and customers and the luxury of plenty of data-driven decisions. However, a myopic focus on numbers can slow you down or lead you off-track. So you’ll still need all the same tools as above, just in a different order.

Data: You’ll be able to track how customers use your current product and test new versions. You can confirm or disprove hunches with hard data from actual paying customers. This data will allow you to fix the stuff you screwed up when you were just following your gut.

Customer insights: Once people have committed to paying money for your product, they’re much more reliable for useful insights. They can tell you what’s broken and what they want to see next.

Vision: Assuming you got 1.0 more or less right, that original vision moves behind the data and insights you can get from actual customers. But your original vision should not be set aside entirely as you iterate. You should always keep in mind your longer-term goals and mission so that your product’s fundamental purpose doesn’t get lost.

You should also keep in mind that you’re not just making V1 or V2 of your product—you’re building out the first or second version of your team and processes.

After eight weeks it was far from perfect, but it was getting there. Considering how much we’d improved in just a couple of months, I decided that, though it wouldn’t be as good as a hardware keyboard, it would be just good enough. I convinced myself.

But marketing wasn’t moved.

After weeks and weeks of argument, Steve put his foot down. There was no data that would definitively prove it would work. There was no data that would prove it wouldn’t. This was an opinion-driven decision and Steve’s opinion was the one that counted most. “So either get on board right now or you’re off the team,” Steve said. That settled it for marketing.

Of course, in the end Steve was proven right. The iPhone changed everything. And it was only possible because he stuck to his vision.

But that’s not to say that sticking to your vision will always lead to success.

Not even for Steve Jobs.

Most people don’t realize what the iPod was originally built for. Its purpose wasn’t just to play music—it was made to sell Macintosh computers. That’s what was in Steve Jobs’s head: We’re going to make something amazing that will only work with our Macs. People will love it so much that they’ll start buying Macs again.

At the time Apple was near death. It had almost no market share—even in the United States. But the iPod would solve that problem. It would save the company.

So as far as Steve Jobs was concerned, the iPod would never work with a PC. That would completely defeat the point—we needed to sell more computers

And that’s why the first generation of iPod fizzled.

The critics loved it. So did the people who already had Apple computers. Unfortunately, at that time there weren’t many of them. The iPod cost $399. The entry-level iMac cost $1,300. Even though the iPod was by far the best MP3 player on the market, nobody was going to drop $1,700 on the complete Apple package just to listen to Radiohead more easily.

But that didn’t stop us. The same day we introduced the first version, we had already started working on the second. V2 would be thinner, more powerful, more beautiful. We came to Steve and said it needed to work on PCs. It had to.

The lesson is about when and how vision and data should guide your decisions.

Chapter 3.6 Three Generations

Google wasn’t remotely profitable for a long time. They only started making real money when they figured out AdWords.

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So when we started work on the Nest Protect smoke and CO alarm, our second product, you’d think it would be easier. That everything we’d built already would let us skip a few steps. But the second you start a new product, you have to hit the restart button—even if you’re at a big company. Sometimes it’s even harder the second time around because all the infrastructure that’s been built up for the first product gets in the way. So you’ll still need to go through at least three generations before you get it right.

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Chapter 4.1 How to Spot a Great Idea

There are three elements to every great idea:

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.]

It solves a problem that a lot of people have in their daily lives.

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.

Before you commit to executing on an idea—to starting a company or launching a new product—you should commit to researching it and trying it out first. Practice delayed intuition. This is a phrase coined by the brilliant, Nobel Prize–winning economist and psychologist Daniel Kahneman to describe the simple concept that to make better decisions, you need to slow down.

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Throwing darts at a wall is not how you pick a great idea. Anything worth doing takes time. Time to understand. Time to prepare. Time to get it right. You can fast-track a lot of things and skimp on others, but you cannot cheat time.

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That’s why we didn’t just present our vision when we pitched investors. We presented the why—told our story—and then we presented the risks. Too many startups don’t know what they’re getting into or, worse, try to cover up the risks of failure. But if investors can spot holes in your plan that you completely missed or ignored or carefully avoided, they won’t have the confidence to fund you

Chapter 4.2 Are You Ready?

Finding the right coach

So if you don’t have a CEO who will go to bat for you, if you don’t have compensation packages that will attract a great team, if you don’t have the resources of a giant company but all of the overhead, then don’t try to start your project inside someone else’s business. Your best option is probably to go it alone. Either let your idea die or start a real startup.

Chapter 4.3 Marrying for Money

VC - try to get a warm introduction either through another founder or your mentor or a friend of a friend.

Try to get two similarly influential investors to balance each other out. All VCs know each other, all VCs talk—and nobody wants to piss off their potential partners. So if one of your investors starts playing games, the other can tell them to cut the crap. Your business may not matter all that much to them in the long run, but typically nobody wants to ruin their reputation among other VCs and especially the LP community.

Chapter 4.4 You Can Only Have One Customer

Steve Jobs was clear about the lesson he’d learned and made sure we all learned it, too: any company that tries to do both B2B and B2C will fail.

You can never convince a regular person to use a B2B product that’s obviously not meant for them, but you can convince a company to use your product if you appeal to the human beings inside that company.

My advice was simple: Nothing has changed. The rules still apply. You gotta pick one. And the whole reason you started this company was to get rid of scalpers, to make an amazing experience for fans. You’re B2B2C, but don’t lose your mission as you navigate your acronym. The Bs matter, but without the C you have nothing.

No matter what you’re building, you can never forget who you’re building it for. You can only have one customer. Choose wisely.

Chapter 4.5 Killing Yourself for Work

None of this is revolutionary. You probably learned it in elementary school: write down a list of what you need to do, take a deep breath and some quiet time if you’re upset, eat your vegetables, exercise, sleep. But you’ll forget. We all forget. So grab your calendar and make a plan. You’ll be working all the time for a while. That’s okay. It’s not forever. But you’ve probably been beating at your problems with the same hammer for too long—it’s time for your brain to rummage around and find a crowbar. Or a bulldozer. Give your mind some time to breathe.

Then put away your phone before bed.

Chapter 4.6 Crisis

It doesn’t matter if the crisis was caused by your mistake or your team or a fluke accident: accept responsibility for how it has affected customers and apologize.

Well, if you're in a crisis, it's time to be a micro-manager again.

It is your responsibility as a leader not to try to deal with a disaster on your own.

5.1 Hiring

nterviewer. I really dig in, try to understand a candidate’s psyche, maybe even stress them out a little to see how they deal with stress. Everyone has different styles, but you can’t be so low-key that you never dip below the surface, never push to understand who this person really is. An interview isn’t about carefree small talk. You’re there for a reason.

In an interview I’m always most interested in three basic things: who they are, what they’ve done, and why they did it. I usually start with the most important questions: “What are you curious about? What do you want to learn?”

I also ask, “Why did you leave your last job?” Not the most original question, but the answer matters. I’m looking for a crisp, clear story. If they complain about a bad manager or being the victim of politics, I ask what they did about it. Why didn’t they fight harder? And did they leave a mess behind them? What did they do to make sure they left in the right way? [See also: Chapter 2.4: I Quit.]

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Unlike Netflix A+ Employee Theory

Relative to the amazing people you brought in early, they’ll seem unimpressive. Mostly fine, good team players, get the job done.

And that’s not the end of the world. As the company expands, you need all kinds of people at all kinds of levels.

You can’t wait for the perfect A+ candidate to appear for every single empty slot. You need to hire. The best of the best don’t always want to join a big team, or they’re tied up in another job, or you can’t afford them or give them the titles or responsibilities they want.

And sometimes the people you don’t expect to be amazing—the ones you thought were Bs and B+s—turn out to completely rock your world. They hold your team together by being dependable and flexible and great mentors and teammates. They’re modest and kind and just quietly do good work. They’re a different type of “rock star.”

Chapter 5.2 Breakpoints

meetings:And it’s expensive. Even if you don’t factor in the cost of a large chunk of your company spending several hours a week making memes, there’s so much prep work involved. Google had a dedicated team for TGIF—dozens of people spent hundreds of hours on these weekly productions.

So save the all-hands for when you really need them—make them special. Keep them regular but rare. And encourage smaller, inter-team groups to get together to share relevant information. They can even sit on the floor eating lemon bars. But the goals of the meetings should be crisp and clean, and the time people spend at work should have a purpose.

COACHES/MENTORS

Just remember there’s a difference between coaches and mentors:

Coaches are there to help with the business. It’s all about the work: this company, this job, this moment in time.

Mentors are more personal. They don’t just help with people’s jobs, they help with their lives, their families.

A coach helps because they know the company; a mentor helps because they know you.

Chapter 5.3 Design for Everyone

At its core, designing simply means thinking through a problem and finding an elegant solution

Design thinking: to identify your customer and their pain points

Ask why at every step—why is it like this now? How can it be better?

Think like a user who has never tried this product before; dig into their mindset, their pain and challenges, their hopes and desires.

Break it down into steps and set all the constraints up front. [See also: Chapter 3.5: Heartbeats and Handcuffs.]

Understand and tell the story of the product. [See also: Chapter 3.2: Why Storytelling.]

Create prototypes all along the way. [See also: Chapter 3.1: Make the Intangible Tangible.]

You have to notice the problem in the first place.

Keeping your brain young is key.

Chapter 5.4 A Method to the Marketing

The best marketing is just telling the truth.

Finding the best way to tell that story to customers is an art. It's a science. It's marketing.

Chapter 5.5 The Point of PMs

The superpower of every truly great product manager is empathy.

Building a product is like making a song. The band is composed of marketing, sales, engineering, support, manufacturing, PR, legal. And the product manager is the producer—making sure everyone knows the melody, that nobody is out of tune and everyone is doing their part. They’re the only person who can see and hear how all the pieces are coming together, so they can tell when there’s too much bassoon or when a drum solo’s going on too long, when features get out of whack or people get so caught up in their own project that they forget the big picture.

But they’re also not directing everything. Their job isn’t to be CEO of the product—or, God forbid, what some companies call the “product owner.” They can’t single-handedly dictate what will and will not make it in. Sometimes they’ll have the final opinion, sometimes they’ll have to say “no,” sometimes they’ll have to direct from the front. But that should be rare. Mostly they empower the team. They help everyone understand the context of what the customer needs, then work together to make the right choices. If a product manager is making all the decisions, then they are not a good product manager.

Chapter 5.6 Death of a Sales Culture

Find people who are good human beings in addition to being good at sales.

Part VI Be CEO

People have this vision of what it’s like to be an executive or CEO or leader of a huge business unit. They assume everyone at that level has enough experience and savvy to at least appear to know what they’re doing. They assume there’s thoughtfulness and strategy and long-term thinking and reasonable deals sealed with firm handshakes.

But some days, it’s high school. Some days, it’s kindergarten.

Chapter 6.1 Becoming CEO

You don't have to be an expert in everything; you just have to care about it.

So it's wise to stand alone, not to let anyone at work get too close, even if you wish you could just grab a drink with your team like you used to.

But when you are CEO, you are in charge. Sure, you are constrained by money or resources or your board, but for the first time there are no constraints on your ideas. You get to finally test out the things that other people told you couldn't be done. It's your opportunity to put your money where your mouth is!

Chapter 6.2 The Board

The Right Investors: When you are picking investors, you are also picking one or two of them to be board members.

So the bar for taking a corporate public board seat versus an early-stage private board seat is very different.

Chapter 6.4 Fuck Massages

Apple provides subsidized meals rather than free ones. There is a reason you can get discounted products but not free ones when you work there. Steve Jobs almost never gave out free Apple products as gifts. He didn't want employees to devalue the very things they were working on. He believed if they are worthwhile and important, then you should treat them as such.

Subsidizing perks rather than giving them away is obviously much better financially for your business too.

It felt wrong. We hadn't earned it yet. That building was meant for a profitable company that had already proven itself. It was meant for people who could relax and spend their time arguing about who was going to get the window seat, who'd get the best view, but that's not what Nest was about.

Humans are the same way, but so many of us get stuck at version one. Once we settle into ourselves, we lose sight of what we can become, but just as products are never finished, neither are humans. We are constantly changing, constantly evolving.