Because startups often accidentally build something nobody wants, it doesn’t matter much if they do it on time and on budget. The goal of a startup is to figure out the right thing to build - the thing customers want and will pay for - as quickly as possible.
Get your product in front of actual, living, breathing strangers. Your college roommate's approval does not mean there's market demand.
To bring out a new technology for consumers first, you just had a very long road to go down to try to find people who actually would pay money for something.
You think you have this great idea that everyone's going to come join, but that's not how it works.
If you think your initial market might be too big, it almost certainly is.
You can basically change everything in a startup but the market.
I focus on consumer Internet. Sometimes it's a working prototype; sometimes it's an idea on a napkin. I don't do a ton of deals a year, and I really like working with startups - it's the only way I can invest. It fits my ADD brain.
Startups don’t fail because they lack a product; they fail because they lack customers and a profitable business model.
You only get points when you make something the market wants. So if you work really hard on the wrong things, no one will care.
I don't understand how you can have product-market fit and not a lot of people wanting your product. The two go hand-in-hand.
Everybody wants to make something they think is a surefire winner, though nobody knows what a surefire winner is, in my opinion.
The way to build billion dollar companies is to first build something people love. There isn't really a shortcut there.
The biggest thing is to create a product that consumers find useful. As more and more people like something, it becomes harder and harder to have a conspiracy theory about it.
We don't believe in market research for a new product unknown to the public. So we never do any.
If you think you have a good idea, get into the marketplace as quickly as you can, using as little money as possible, and see what happens.
A vote of confidence from Cisco Systems can be very important to fledging technology companies, especially if they have initial public offerings on the horizon.
Most startups are not just built for the person who is using them. When you do that, every now and then you get really lucky and... are representative of some huge class of people who all want the same thing you do... but very often that just turns into a side project that doesn't go anywhere.
If someone doesn't believe enough in your product to put money in to it, then you should rethink how good the product is.
Products a start-up builds are really experiments…Learning about how to build a sustainable business is the outcome of those experiments [which follow] a three-step process: Build, measure, learn.” “[A startup is] … an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty.
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.
I love working with really early stage startups where the outcome is still in doubt. Maybe they'll go on to greatness, or maybe they'll never get off the runway at all.
The goal of a private company is, first, zero to one: Get past the product-market fit; figure out whether people actually care about what you're trying to build and someone will pay you money for that. That's the zero to one problem.
Face-to-face customer feedback refines or validates every component of the startup's business model, not just the product itself.
Nothing exists if a store doesn't buy it and you're not able to get it.
First be sure a thing is wanted or needed, then go ahead.
