Megan Smith Quotes

The same products, services or technologies can fail or succeed depending on the business model you choose. Exploring the possibilities is critical to finding a successful business model. Settling on first ideas risks the possibility of missing potential that can only be discovered by prototyping and testing different alternatives.

Don't worry, be crappy. Revolutionary means you ship and then test... Lots of things made the first Mac in 1984 a piece of crap - but it was a revolutionary piece of crap.

You can sometimes avoid costly mistakes. Paint a corner of the room a certain color to see how the light affects it. Or buy just one yard of an expensive fabric to see how you like it in your room.

I would say, as an entrepreneur everything you do - every action you take in product development, in marketing, every conversation you have, everything you do - is an experiment. If you can conceptualize your work not as building features, not as launching campaigns, but as running experiments, you can get radically more done with less effort.

I tried a dozen different modifications that were rejected. But they all served as a path to the final design.

The reality is the Lean Startup method is not about cost, it is about speed. Lean startups waste less money, because they use a disciplined approach to testing new products and ideas.

We struggle with the right words to describe the design process at Apple. But it is very much about designing and prototyping and making.

We have to provide more visibility, more certainty to the investors and reduce the cost of failure.

We are looking for ways where you can have a sandbox, where you have a restricted environment within which people can try new things, and I can try new rules. And depending on what works, then I open up the sandbox, and it becomes the new rule for the whole system.

A company can set off in one direction, figures out that it's not the right way to go, and then go in an entirely new direction. Over time, the product or service improves, and the company gets better at executing and delivering.

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.

In a startup, both the problem and solution are unknown.

Start with something simple and small, then expand over time. If people call it a 'toy' you're definitely onto something.

My focus is incredibly narrow. I can't talk with any authority other than design and development of product.

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 reason why the Wright brothers were successful wasn't because they had the most resources, but because they understood how invention works. You have to iterate quickly, and you should be prepared to fail. Because things often don't go as planned.

I know exactly what it feels like to be an entrepreneur with everything riding on a sale.

We are reluctant to do these bigger acquisitions that are then integrated, especially if they are committed to a certain product that they want to build that we can't guarantee we will keep evolving.

I think we operate in a very dynamic marketplace, and as such, we need to constantly innovate.

I'll drop something for a while, a year or maybe several years, and then pick it up again. I think that's the way successful innovators work. They keep juggling ideas, keeping them in the air, in the back of their mind, to inspire them or enable new recombinations.

You need to fail quickly and learn from those failures to continue to build along the way.

Iteration, not ideation, is the most important part of early stage entrepreneurship. You have to have a lot of ideas - a lot of bad ideas - if you want to end up with a good one.

There are some keys to success in the fad business. One is never give up. You need total motivation and the right kind of creativity. You also have to back the right activity. It is a disaster if you back the wrong idea with your energy. You not only lose money, but you take a big social risk.

We need to stop defining Boeing's future based on a single program or two programs, and we have been doing that with the fighter story. It doesn't mean it was wrong or right; I just don't think it represents the great diversity of the Boeing Defense portfolio.

Build something, make something, test something, sell something. Learn for yourself if your idea is a good one.