“A Great CEO Is The Chief Experience Officer”

- Dharmesh Shah, Founder and CTO at HubSpot

Shah argues that CEOs will have done their job if they create amazing (1) product, (2) purchasing, (3) brand, (4) support, (5) exit, and (6) employee experiences.

The concept of creating a superb experience rings true for all levels of employees (including both managers and sole contributors) as well, with the key difference being that customers can be internal as well as external. In other words:

Great employees are the chief experience officers of their domains.

- Randall Munroe

“Because your time is expensive too. This is a fact often overlooked in debates about how much a digital book should cost. Reading a book is a big undertaking. What you spend to buy a book — whether $5 or $50 — is small compared to the hours you’ll spend reading it. Every great book is underpriced; no bad book is cheap enough.“

- Matthew Butterick, typographer (emphasis added)

“Love those Close to You. Failure of your company is not failure in life. Failure in your relationships is.”

- Ev Williams, internet entrepreneur extraordinaire (Blogger, Twitter, Medium)

An apple a day keeps the doctor away. So does not making an appointment.

Make sure your metrics are meaningfully aligned with success. In this case, it’s your health that matters, not how often you see the doctor. Frequency of doctor visits is not necessarily a good proxy for your health. It’s easier to measure than your health, but it doesn’t matter.

A poor choice of metric can easily become your master as you attempt to optimize it. Minimizing the metric of doctor visits is not necessarily a path to a clean bill of health, and instead might lead to disastrous results.

Measure what matters, not necessarily what’s easy.

“Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.”

- Howard Aiken, computing pioneer

If you ever find yourself the recipient of stock with a vesting clause, make sure to heavily consider an 83(b) election. It’s usually the right thing to do, and can save you a ton of pain down the road (and even bankruptcy, in extreme situations). Without one there may be some unexpected and very unpleasant tax consequences. There are many articles about this; here and here are two that provide a quick intro to the topic.

Check out David Fry’s (serial entrepreneur, investor, and CTO, Fry Communications) great answer to “What’s the shrewdest, smartest maneuver you’ve ever seen in business?”

My (and many others’) favorite definition of entrepreneurship was penned in 1987 by Harvard Business School Professor Howard Stevenson: ”Entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled.”

Nothing in this definition requires entrepreneurs to be starting their own companies; entrepreneurial individuals can just as easily exist within established
organizations. How one marshalls the resources to purse an opportunity may look a bit different, but the principles are very similar. (Budding intrapreneurs can find some pointers here, here, and here.)

It is true that entrepreneurs get a disproportionate share of the attention. A ton of innovation, perhaps without the same glory, is being generated simultaneously by intrapreneurs (Sony Playstation, LinkedIn’s People You May Know, and Gmail are just a few examples). As a result, smart companies encourage intrapreneurship.

If you want to solve big problems and drive real change in the world, intrapreneurship may very well be the best answer (for example, distribution and thus monetization is often much easier within established companies). So be a true entrepreneur – start pursuing an opportunity today, using whatever resources you can find.

“When you begin with ‘Everyone’ you’re just stuck: How do you make any honest decisions? How do you solve any real problems? You don’t. You start to invent people and you start to invent their problems and it’s amazing because those people and those problems line up almost exactly with what you’re building and how you’re thinking about it—imagine that. Lying to yourself is amazing for productivity. …

[Solving real problems for a real audience is] the only way you make something that lasts, because you made something that someone actually cared about.”

- Daniel Sinker in “Oh my god, don’t make things for ‘Everyone.’“