The Only Way To Win Is To

A Start Up Is An Institution Designed To Thrive In The Soil Of Extreme Uncertainty

You Know How People Always Talk About How Vision Is The Key To Entrepreneurship And Perseverance And Really Seeing What Other People Don't See? We Can Actually Redeem A Fair Amount Of That Folk Wisdom.

Most Start-up Companies Fail And It Is Smart Public Policy To Help Entrepreneurs Increase Their Odds Of Succeeding. But, The Biggest Loss To Our Economy Is Not All The Start-ups That Didn't Make It: It's The Ones That Might Have Been Created But Weren't.

Science And Vision Are Not Opposites Or Even At Odds. They Need Each Other. I Sometimes Hear Other Startup Folks Say Something Along The Lines Of: 'if Entrepreneurship Was A Science, Then Anyone Could Do It.' I'd Like To Point Out That Even Science Is A Science, And Still Very Few People Can Do It, Let Alone Do It Well.

The Mistake Isn't Releasing Something Bad. The Mistake Is To Launch It And Get Pr People Involved. You Don't Want People To Start Amping Up Expectations For An Early Version Of Your Product. The Best Entrepreneurship Happens In Low-stakes Environments Where No One Is Paying Attention, Like Mark Zuckerberg's Dorm Room At Harvard.