Imagine you are on the most dangerous battlefield in Iraq, as a commander making decisions that affect the lives of soldiers. How would you lead your team? In the book "Extreme Ownership," the authors, who served as task force commanders in the Navy SEALs, share their observations and experiences on the battlefield to provide insights for other teams striving for success.

Dare to Take Responsibility for Failures​

One of the authors, Jocko Willink, took full responsibility after a major incident involving friendly fire that resulted in soldier casualties, yet he was able to keep his job. This was because his superior understood a key principle: great leaders never shirk responsibility. Instead, they actively seek criticism and meticulously document ways to improve. If leaders avoid responsibility, their subordinates will follow suit.

Understand the Importance of the Mission​

On the battlefield, when Willink was informed by his commander that his elite unit would be working alongside the newly formed Iraqi army, he privately questioned the army's capability and loyalty, as well as the correctness of the orders. However, he gradually realized that this move would facilitate the smooth withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. He then communicated the mission and its purpose to his troops, ultimately accomplishing the task successfully.

Leaders should fully understand the significance of each action and communicate it to all team members before executing the mission. When there are doubts about the orders received, it is wise to pause and think carefully rather than hastily spreading concerns. Alternatively, you can seek clarification from superiors.

Actively Collaborate with Allies​

“Cover and move” is one of the most fundamental strategies of the Navy SEALs, meaning that sometimes you need to seek collaboration with allies. The book's other author, Leif Babin, once placed his team in an avoidable extreme situation by failing to use this strategy. Leaders need to look at the bigger picture and seek strategic support from other teams within the organization rather than constantly opposing them.

Clarify Priorities to Improve Efficiency​

On the battlefield in Ramadi, Babin faced a situation where his team was deep inside enemy territory, with no backup, and one team member was injured and exposed, while bombs were placed at the exit. However, after clearly identifying and addressing the three main priorities—ensuring safety, approaching the injured, and counting personnel—he was ultimately able to lead the team out of danger successfully.

The battlefield is often complex, and leaders must remain calm and seek the best solutions. Therefore, the principle of “prioritize and execute” is crucial. Leaders should first identify the highest priority tasks and focus on resolving them before shifting attention to the next priority.

Identify and Mitigate Risks in Advance​

Before conducting a rescue mission, Babin thoroughly considered various scenarios, such as ambushes with explosives and armed guards, allowing him to act smoothly and successfully mitigate risks.

Developing a comprehensive plan helps to identify and reduce risks in advance, increasing the chances of success. Additionally, leaders should promptly inform team members of relevant contingency plans. While focusing on manageable risks, they must also be aware that some risks cannot be avoided.

Why do people need the tech community?​

The composition of your tech knowledge intake

Perception of Value-frequency

In addition to disclosing the unknown unknown, the community discussions creating values in accessibility, building connections, and novelty.

	Group Discussion	Published Contents
accessibility	low	high
building connections	more	less
novelty	high	low

Case study: Value Proposition of Tech Communities​

1. For Utility
2. For Fun
3. For Career Growth

1. For Utility​

Wechaty: a Bot SDK for Wechat Individual Account

Two-layer Biz Structure:

To Business	Social CRM, AI-powered Chatbot
To Developer	Bot SDK and Service Token

Other examples:

1. Google play console discussion group
2. Some AI platform discussion group
3. Cross-platform dev tech group
4. …

2. For Fun​

Discussion groups for specific topics posted in a popular online forum could attract hundreds of people once.

e.g., Blockchain Random Discussion Group

3. For Career Growth​

Ex1. Seattle Data Science in Practice Group (WeChat 500)​

1. Focus on data science and tech in practice
2. No random discussion
3. Periodical sharing and meetup, e.g.
4. Intro to Tableau data visualization
5. Hands-on Spark Python
6. Building an ML Model from Scratch
7. Business Writing
8. Computer Vision Industry Frontline
9. …

What kinds of discussions happen in the group?

1. Article sharing and discussion
2. Job opportunities (posting resume + hiring session)
3. QA: Tech problems / solutions / best practices in daily work
4. Theories and concepts
5. Corporate ladder

Ex2. CS Career Hackers (Discord 1000+)​

CSCH is a community ranging from learners to experienced software engineers who come together to discuss programming, interviewing, career advancement, and, ultimately, how to be better engineers.

1. 501c3 nonprofit
2. QA
3. no politics, religion, or other controversial topics

What kinds of discussions happen in the group?

1. QA (career, programming, machine learning, system design, coding challenges)
2. moderation
3. resume review
4. ask a manager
5. meetups

Blockchain and dev community​

Challenges​

1. Utility value.
2. Unverified market segment.
3. Align topics with the company's growth.
4. Techies are not interested in generic marketing campaigns.

Solutions​

• Engineering Blog - that can be subscribed and separated from generic marketing contents for investors.
• Discussion Groups - on Topics like:
  1. distributed systems
  2. blockchain
  3. IoT
  4. DApp
  5. FinTech
  6. SCM
• Weekly Tech Review - sharing experiences and resources

Why does it align with the company?​

• brand-awareness - Like all the other engineering blogs, it helps the company build the engineering brand.
• conversion - user base for engaging and even conversion. e.g. Hubspot's inbound marketing.
• partnership - deepen the relationships with our dev partners by co-host online / offline events.
• private domain traffic / community economy - put our community dev tools (XRC20, XRC721) into wider audiences and grow with the private domain traffic
• use cases collect problems or use cases that developers meet in their daily work

How to initiate the effort for Blockchain companies?​

Twitter + Engineering Blog + Discussion Groups

1. prepare ten engineering blogs first and write / post one per week.
2. moderate Discord and WeChat groups on distributed systems, blockchain, IoT, DApp, FinTech, SCM, and so on.
   1. launch campaigns among study groups and forums
   2. kindly share with our techie friends and groups
   3. online + offline events with our tech partners
3. trial and error by providing high-value contents and launching campaigns

In the growth cycle of a company, the focus and measurement methods vary at each stage. This article focuses on early-stage startups, especially Series A, examining how VCs evaluate your pitch. What would make Greylock invest in you? How do you distinguish between a good idea and an early business that VCs can invest in?

Do You Need a VC?​

Out of every 500,000 new businesses with employees, only about 1,000 are VC-backed (0.2%). Under what circumstances does your business need a VC?

1. Can you succeed without venture capital?
2. Are you willing to give up some ownership in exchange for a partner?
3. Do you have enough ambition to build a transformative business?
4. Will you focus on rapid growth? What is the capital expenditure (CapEx) needed to get from here to there?

Why Do Startups Fail?​

The top five reasons:

1. No market
2. Run out of money
3. Wrong team
4. Outcompeted
5. Pricing/cost issues

Regarding the "no market" issue, entrepreneurs have various validation methods. Some solve problems they've experienced for years, while others conduct surveys, interviews, showcase prototypes, or even co-develop products with customers. Good products are honed over time and can be costly, making feedback and direction crucial. What does your feedback loop look like? How do you convince yourself and VCs that this is a real opportunity?

Products and Channels Are Equally Important​

• In recent years, the internet and mobile channels have enabled many companies to rise.
• Many tech giants have deep moats, not because no one can create better products, but because of their distribution channels.

Series A Pitch Deck Template​

1. Agenda
2. Problem
3. Team
4. Mission & Approach
5. Market Positioning
6. Any proof?
7. Defensibility
8. Go-to-market / Distribution
9. Market / Landscape
10. Roadmap
11. Plan

The Power of a Good Story​

A company is a continuously repeated good story told to employees, investors, media, customers, and partners until it becomes a reality.

Do You Really Understand the Term Market?​

1. When exploring new markets, the market is unknown, and you only have assumptions.
2. The best strategy for niche-and-next against large companies is to focus and simply solve one problem well.
3. Once you have a niche, expand the problem scope.

Geoffrey Moore's Positioning Template

Problem	Explanation
For	A specific target market
Who	Has needs and opportunities
Product name is	A product category
Its selling point	What benefits it offers and why people buy
Unlike	Competitors or alternative products
It differs in	Describing the main differentiating points

Moats​

Moat	Company
Technology	Google, Intel, Oracle
Ecosystem	Apple, Microsoft, Docker, YouTube
Network Effects	Facebook, Snap, LinkedIn, IG, Tencent
Marketplace	Airbnb, Uber, Alibaba
Product Leadership	Workday, Salesforce, ServiceNow
Distribution	Slack, Quip, Dropbox, Atlassian

In addition to the above, AI products acquiring unique datasets are also becoming a moat. This moat creates positive feedback: you may start without collecting data, but as more data accumulates, your product improves.

What Constitutes a Good Team?​

Can you:

1. Define the right things?
2. Attract the best team?
3. Build the product?
4. Think independently?
5. Execute quickly?
6. Keep learning continuously?

Evidence and Data​

Create a 3 to 5-year plan; it doesn't need to be overly precise. If you don't know the benchmarks to measure against, read the S-1 of relevant companies.

	Year 1	Year 2	Year 3	Year 4	Year 5
Profit Drivers
Profit
Cost Drivers
Gross Margin
Sales and Marketing Expenses
Cash Flow
Team Size

Also, consider the important unit economics:

1. Expected number of users per account
2. Customer acquisition cost
3. Gross margin
4. Customer churn/up-sell
5. Cost drivers

Be realistic and honest when facing data. :)

Overall, VCs Look for These Traits in Startups​

1. A strong, ambitious team that attracts talent, with a founder/company fit.
2. A unique, simple, and compelling value proposition.
3. A strategy to dominate the market.
4. High-profit, capital-efficient growth.

Finally, Here’s a Word of Encouragement​

There has never been a better time than now to become an entrepreneur.

Look to the stars while keeping your feet on the ground. Formulate a strategy and aim to dominate globally.

For centuries, our economy has revolved around physical assets. With technological advancements, the modern economic landscape has changed, and the most significant investments and assets are increasingly occurring and existing in non-physical forms.

The highest-valued companies, including Facebook, have their core assets in intangible assets such as software, branding, and development capabilities, rather than real estate or factories. Companies built on intangible assets operate differently from those relying on physical assets due to certain characteristics. From the book "Capitalism without Capital," we summarize the three key characteristics of intangible assets.

1. Rapid Scalability​

Businesses that rely on physical assets share a common drawback — they are easily constrained. When we need more production capacity, we must invest in acquiring more physical assets. In contrast, intangible assets are not subject to such limitations, allowing for rapid expansion in a short period. The scalability of intangible assets is particularly evident in the tech industry. For instance, the development of a software application can often lead to millions of downloads. This means that an increasing number of intangible asset-intensive companies can grow to astonishingly large scales.

However, this rapid scalability also brings the possibility of monopolies, posing significant challenges for new companies entering the market.

2. High Risk and Irrecoverability​

Physical assets tend to outperform intangible assets in terms of value stability. Even if physical assets depreciate, they are unlikely to be completely unwanted at the time of sale, whereas intangible assets are different. Intangible assets are difficult to quantify and cannot be recovered once issues arise, becoming sunk costs that investors have already incurred and cannot reclaim.

Brands do not have mature markets: on one hand, because brand value is hard to assess; on the other hand, a company's failure often leads to the complete disappearance of its brand value. Therefore, if a company relying on intangible assets fails, all previous investments will be lost. In reality, intangible investments carry extremely high risks and can vanish overnight.

3. Ease of Replication​

Intangible assets are generally easier to replicate than physical assets, making them susceptible to theft by competitors; they can be an idea or a concept. Thus, when a tech company creatively solves a problem, a surge of imitators and competitors typically follows. The iPhone is a prime example. To capture a larger market share, competitors often continuously engage in technological improvements and further innovations.

The ease of replication also brings issues of abuse and plagiarism. Policymakers in the intangible economy need to strengthen robust protection of intellectual property to ensure that innovators are not discouraged.

Over the past centuries, our economy has always revolved around physical assets. However, due to the development of technologies, the forms of the modern economy have changed drastically, and investments and assets in increasing numbers become non-physical, namely, intangible.

Nowadays, many of the most prominent companies in the world, such as Facebook, possess a significant amount of intangible assets, including software, branding, and development capacity, instead of real estate or factories. Companies built with intangible assets, for some reason, behave differently from those reliant on physical assets. The book Capitalism without Capital introduces three main characteristics of intangible assets.

1. Intangible assets can expand rapidly​

Businesses based on physical assets have one disadvantage in common: they are easy to be limited. When we need more production capacity, we have to invest more tangible assets. However, intangible assets do not have such limits, and they can expand rapidly in no time, which is particularly evident in the tech industry. For example, one mobile app can attract millions of downloads.

Intangible-intensive companies can likely grow incredibly large and finally become monopolies, creating enormous challenges to new entrants in the same industry.

2. Intangible assets are high-risk and irrecoverable investments​

Physical assets are relatively more stable than intangible assets in terms of value. Although physical assets may depreciate, they can always find a buyer in the market at a lower price. The case of intangible assets is a bit complicated. It’s hard to calculate the investments in intangible assets and recover the costs if anything goes wrong.

There is no mature secondary market for brands: on the one hand, the brand value is difficult to estimate; on the other hand, the brand may lose all the value if the business fails. Therefore, intangible assets are high-risk investments and may drop to zero overnight.

3. Intangible assets are easy to be duplicated​

Your competitors can steal your intangible assets with little difficulties. When a tech company solves a problem innovatively, many imitators and competitors spring up. iPhone is a good example. And in order to obtain a larger market share, competitors always keep improving the current technology and try to innovate further.

However, being easy to be duplicated brings up a problem of abuse. Policymakers in the intangible economy should enhance the protection of intellectual property rights.

Working together is very important. Even a genius like Turing needs others’ help to crack the Enigma code. But what is the key factor in team success? Many people believe it is the skills and abilities of team members. Well, the truth may surprise you.

At the beginning of the book The Culture Code, the author introduces a funny competition held among groups of kindergartners, business school students, and lawyers in which the participants need to create the tallest possible structure with uncooked spaghetti, tape, strings, and a marshmallow. Unexpectedly, the game ends with the triumph of kindergartners. How can it happen? When looking back, we discover that business school students usually analyze the problem first, discuss the right strategy, and quietly form a hierarchy. At the same time, kindergartners just start experimenting together and keep trying.

From the different approaches, we can see a good group culture, which can boost the overall performance values, more internal interaction and communication than the skills of group members.

There are three skills to create this kind of group culture.

1. Create a safe working environment​

People can perform at their best in a familiar environment, and that’s why creating a safe working environment is so crucial. The sense of safety usually comes from internal familiarities and connections. If you want to make others feel relaxed and safe, it’s essential to let them know you are paying attention to what they have to say. Sometimes, proper feedback is needed too, which can both increase interactivity and let people feel they are needed.

2. Show your vulnerabilities to build trust​

Although it might sound strange, showing your vulnerabilities actually helps to improve the group performance. We always look at the ways people around us behave and pick up some patterns. Admitting your shortcomings to others indicates they can do the same too. And this will enhance the mutual trust within the group.

Meanwhile, sharing vulnerabilities also conveys the expectation of cooperation. When group members know you rely on their help, they can feel comfortable to rely on you in return. Then everyone is going to know he or she does not have to handle everything on their own.

3. Establish a common purpose and emphasize​

The pursuit of a common goal is critical to group performance. The common goal refers to beliefs and values behind people’s actions. Gabriele Oettingen, a psychology professor at New York University, has proved in several studies that, communications over the common purpose can help to unite members and achieve goals.

Repetition is necessary for emphasizing the common purpose within the group. You can put it over again and again in regular meetings or make it into short tag lines. Repeat ten times or a hundred times if necessary.

Teamwork is crucial. Even geniuses like Turing need help from others to crack the Enigma. So, what are the key factors that enable a team to succeed? People naturally believe it is the abilities and levels of individual members, but the reality might surprise you.

At the beginning of The Culture Code, the author describes an interesting competition among kindergarten children, business school students, and lawyers: participants had to build the tallest structure possible using raw spaghetti, tape, string, and marshmallows. The competition ended with the kindergarten children winning. Why did the seemingly least capable group manage to defeat the others? Upon reviewing the competition, we found that business school students typically analyzed the problem first, discussed the right strategy, and then quietly established a hierarchy; whereas the kindergarten children simply started building and experimenting with different approaches.

A strong team culture emphasizes communication among team members rather than individual skills. Such a culture maximizes overall performance. To foster a positive team culture that enhances collective performance, there are three key skills.

1. Create a Safe Work Environment​

People are more likely to unleash their full potential in a familiar environment, so creating a safe space is crucial. The sense of safety within a team comes from familiarity and connection among its members. If you want to cultivate a safe work environment, it is essential to learn to listen and let others know they are heard. When people know that what they say is being listened to and valued, they feel secure. You can provide appropriate feedback while listening, which enhances interaction and makes people feel needed.

2. Be Vulnerable to Build Trust​

Although it may seem counterintuitive, showing vulnerability can indeed enhance team performance. We often observe the behaviors of those around us and learn by imitation. Admitting your weaknesses and mistakes to team members shows that they can do the same. This helps to strengthen internal trust among the team.

At the same time, displaying your shortcomings expresses an expectation for collaboration. When you show that you rely on others for help, they can also comfortably acknowledge their need for assistance. Over time, everyone understands that they shouldn’t bear everything alone, naturally fostering a sense of unity within the team.

3. Establish Common Goals and Reinforce Them​

A steadfast pursuit of common goals is key to good team performance. A team's common goal refers to the beliefs and values that motivate the actions of its members. This common goal clarifies the team's self-identity and communicates it to the outside world. Psychologist Gabriele Oettingen has demonstrated through several studies that communicating common goals helps unite members and makes achieving those goals easier.

To deepen members' impressions, repetition is essential. To express things more clearly, repeating them ten or even a hundred times is worthwhile. You can repeatedly convey the company's mission in meetings or turn the goals into catchy slogans.

Data Domain is a data backup service provider that went public in its sixth year after founding and was acquired by EMC two years later, becoming EMC's second fastest-growing business after VMWare. The CEO of Data Domain shares the story and logic behind this in the book "Tape Sucks," which may be the best SaaS book I've read in recent years.

The company's background is venture-backed, with top-tier investors. Most team members hold PhDs, indicating that the problems the company solves are quite challenging; top talent is more interested in solving difficult problems than merely interesting ones. There were four founders: one with an academic background, one with an engineering background, one with a product background, and one an expert in data. The author joined the company a year and a half after its founding, just before the Series A funding was about to transition to Series B, and became the CEO.

The problem the company addresses is using hard drives for data backup, replacing cheaper but less reliable tapes. This is also the title of the book and the company's slogan: "Tape Sucks, Move On."

No Pain, No Gain​

Only the Federal Reserve can create new money; everyone else's money is obtained from others. Narrowly speaking, most businesses are zero-sum games.

So when starting a company, you need to understand from whom you are earning your money. With limited budgets, what will they stop buying once you enter the picture, and what will they buy instead? Who are you replacing, and why will you succeed in replacing them?

"Creative destruction," or "no pain, no gain," is a fundamental truth in business; you better understand whose lunch you are stealing.

Target a product category that is being questioned or is declining; this increases your chances of success. Do not target a product category that is on the rise.

Start from Applications or Use Cases, Not Technology​

Company operations always consume resources. When you launch a missile, if there is no target, it will continuously consume fuel and eventually fall.

Make Customers Happy​

"Everything revolves around the customer" is a common saying, but how can you truly achieve this?

Everyone in the company should listen to and discuss user feedback. Before receiving the first round of funding, the company had already gathered specific feedback about the product from dozens of customers. The importance of all other ideas ranks behind customer feedback.

This has two benefits:

1. Maintains focus
2. Aids sales: Customers prefer to work with vendors who genuinely care about their business and learn from them. For specifics, refer to the HBR 1993 article on Customer Intimacy.

Not every business is buyer-driven; for example, the iPod was not created because customers wanted it.

Create Your Own Blood Supply​

Buying things is hard; selling your product directly is more challenging than letting someone else sell it. However, the authors decided to build their own marketing and sales teams for several reasons:

1. Intermediaries put you further away from customers, making it harder to achieve intimacy.
2. You become dependent on others, losing control over your destiny.
3. No one will want to sell your product more than you do.
4. You can only take home 10-20% of the profits.
5. They believe their product is genuinely good, so if competitors sign agreements with intermediaries, it must be because they cannot compete with them directly.
6. If the company's goal is to go public, this approach is more controllable and predictable.
7. If you find strong salespeople, it not only strengthens you but weakens your enemies. This is what victory is; Ulysses S. Grant once said that victory is breaking the enemy's will to fight.

Building a marketing and sales team is fraught with challenges and can take years. Essentially, it involves continuously finding ways to make the sales team

1. Efficient
2. Cost-effective

Building a marketing and sales team is a costly endeavor, so a crucial prerequisite is that their product has an 80% margin.

To control expenses, marketing and sales are done together.

Clarify Sales Channels​

1. Direct sales: buy if you want,
   1. If you don't buy, your competitors will.
   2. If you don't buy, your customers will.
2. Omnichannel strategy: large suppliers correspond to saturated channels and big clients, which can attract small and medium clients directly. The omnichannel strategy does not affect profit margins; with intermediaries, prices are slightly higher, and without them, they are lower.

The more directly you can reach customers, the more power you have.

When to Persist and When to Give Up​

When not making money, focus on conserving strength; once you find a good breakthrough point, spend resources quickly and efficiently. In the growth S-curve, there are two key questions to repeatedly ask yourself:

1. When will the breakthrough point come?
2. Once the breakthrough point arrives, can you invest enough resources for growth?

Cash is the fuel that allows the business rocket to fly; if the fuel runs out before reaching escape velocity, the rocket will fall.

Set and collect data evidence to reach milestones for securing the next round of funding.

Growing Pains of the Team​

The company faced a ceiling in team growth due to insufficient guidance for leadership and being overly stingy in hiring managers.

Initially, almost everyone was an independent contributor focused on getting things done. No one was dedicated full-time to recruiting and performance management. Without proper processes in place, it was impossible to onboard new hires effectively.

In the early stages, growth is always more important than profitability; slightly managing the efficiency and rate of cash burn allows the company to survive. Consequently, when sales reached 40 to 50 million, there were only two finance staff. The desire to survive led to a reluctance to hire unnecessary managers and raise funds.

Hire Potential Stars Instead of Superstars​

When the company is still small, the people you want may not want you; if you can't hire superstars, you can hire potential stars. Good potential stars have the following characteristics: full of energy, enthusiastic, ambitious, smart, hardworking, and eager for the job.

After hiring many potential stars, the company even developed a culture of "everyone has a mission to prove themselves."

Rapid Experimentation​

How does the company achieve rapid experimentation?

1. Lead by example from the top. Quickly and openly acknowledge, address, and summarize mistakes.
2. Prohibit a culture of punishing mistakes or settling scores later. Whether people or machines, mistakes and errors are inevitable; sincerely learn from them to avoid repeating them, or create a mechanism where making mistakes does not cause harm.

Are Large Banks Suitable Initial Target Customers?​

No. Because large bank customers:

1. Are overly picky
2. Are too conservative, leading to long sales cycles

Startups should focus on places where they can quickly sell products, rather than getting bogged down with large banks.

The key is to find traction. Data Domain found traction in the mid-market and channels, avoiding trouble, increasing installations, refining products, and making customers happy.

Once mid-market customers are secured, then pursue high-end clients.

Lead by Example, Experience the Battlefield, and Stay Motivated​

In a brawl, what kind of leader is most motivating? Of course, it's the leaders who charge to the front and beat the enemy. Similarly, as the CEO in charge of sales, the most motivating thing is to travel for a few days, meet five or six customers daily, and return to share experiences and customer feedback with the team.

If you don't do this, you will distance yourself from your team members, making it harder to relate and understand each other.

The marketplace is like a battlefield; if employees cannot feel the cold wind of competition every day, if they cannot sense their efforts defeating bloody opponents, if they cannot feel the atmosphere of the battlefield, how can you expect them to be motivated and work hard?

Express Humanity with Authenticity​

The first rule of leadership is to be yourself and be the person you want to be. Two reasons:

1. If you don't feel worthy of being followed, and you have to follow others, how can you expect everyone to follow you? They can directly follow the people you follow.
2. People can easily see through pretentiousness; if you pretend, you will come across as lacking enthusiasm, preferences, humanity, and energy, and no one will remember what you said.

How to be an authentic leader? == Publicly show your determination, enthusiasm, energy, passion, and relentless desire for success.==

For example, the author participates in triathlons and makes controversial statements. When questioned about why a large tech company could replicate their technology in six months, the author responds without hesitation: "You can send a thousand women to have babies, but no matter how many there are, it still takes nine months; software development is the opposite of economies of scale: the more people involved, the slower the progress."

CEOs Must Overcome Ego​

• The CEO is not the owner of the company; the investors are.
• Arrogant CEOs often lack self-awareness, while outsiders can easily see it.
• Never miss the opportunity to praise others; if the company does well, you will receive all the accolades, which is not solely your achievement.
• A self-centered leader often says "I" instead of "we," and "my" instead of "our."

Start Internationalization Early​

No matter where you conduct sales, it takes a long time; it's best to start early.

The Board Does Not Operate the Company​

• The board supervises and advises but should not operate the company.
• Listen to the majority's opinions, consult with a few, and make your own decisions.
• Sometimes a company grows beyond the board's level of experience.

Going Public​

By the fifth and a half year, the company's cash flow had been positive for some time, and it wasn't lacking in operational funds; why go public?

1. When competing with giants, a publicly traded company with financial transparency reassures customers.
2. Investors need liquidity.
3. It makes operations more standardized.

Be sure to bring in people with the right industry experience to help you.

Acquisition​

Two years later, NetApp and EMC competed to acquire the company; they chose EMC because:

1. Their product line was too narrow, threatened by comprehensive data center solution providers.
2. EMC offered a full cash acquisition.

Corporate Culture​

In business, the essence of culture is a collective value system—a group of people reaching a consensus on what is valuable and what is not.

Whether you are there or not, whether you define it or not, company culture will exist; good culture makes the company a more pleasant place, so its value is self-evident. The author even believes that company culture is the only form of sustainable differentiation.

At that time, the culture formed throughout the company was called RECIPE:

• Respect
• Excellence
• Customer
• Integrity
• Performance
• Execution

Challenges to cross the chasm​

1. Lack of customers
2. Existing customer’s payment cannot cover the next period
3. Unaligned demands from different visionaries
4. Competitions from alternatives
5. Unsatisfaction from investors

Analogy to Invasion of Normandy​

Analogy: it’s aggression, as the Allied invasion of Normandy on D-Day, Our long-term goal is to take over the mainstream market that is currently dominated by an entrenched competitor.

Solution: focus on a niche market that is

1. Readily achievable
2. Leverage-able for long-term success

If we do not take the niche, we do not worry about our next targets.

Why niche-and-next strategy?​

The niche-and-next strategy is counterintuitive and thus hard to stick to. If we do not adhere to it, it is like lighting a fire without kindling.

Reference-able customers are satisfied ones​

It is ==fatal== to be a sales-driven company; our company should be a market-driven one. Unfortunately, following this strategy takes discipline because leaders can hardly resist the temptation to make short-term money.

The sole goal of the company at this stage should be creating a pragmatist customer base that is reference-able for the mainstream markets.

To achieve the goal, we must ==ensure the first set of customers completely satisfy their buying objectives with the whole product — a generic product that is needed for the customer to have a compelling reason to buy.== The key indicator of this effort is the word-of-mouth reputation among buyers.

Be a niche market leader to sell to pragmatists​

Another reason to be niche focused is that we need to achieve market leadership because pragmatists customers want to buy from market leaders. However, you are small and are still crossing the chasm, so the only available strategy is to take a “big fish, small pond” approach.

One common mistake that website builders make is designing their sites like a product brochure. They go to great lengths to provide visitors with extensive details, but in reality, such websites fail to retain users.

The reason is that most people do not want to spend a lot of time figuring out how things work. They prefer to find answers through trial and error or simply by clicking around.

From a user's perspective, a good website allows them to discover what they need through their own exploration and experimentation. Based on the content from Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited, we have summarized four essential principles for designing a good website.

Start with a Clear and Simple Navigation Bar​

When users first visit a website, they often struggle to understand the scale of the site. Without knowing the website's structure, they may choose to leave. This is why a navigation bar is so crucial. On every page, users should be able to locate their current position, return to the homepage, search for keywords, and find information on how to use the site. Most importantly, the navigation bar must be clear and straightforward.

Design an Impressive Homepage​

The homepage is typically the most frequently visited page on the entire site, making its importance undeniable. Users' first impression of our website also depends on the homepage. Therefore, it is essential to design a visually striking homepage. Additionally, we need to ensure that the homepage conveys the most important information to visitors—our website's vision and goals. For example, we could include a tagline next to the website logo that describes the site's vision.

Use Visual Hierarchy to Present Information​

Users generally do not read text line by line when visiting a website; instead, they skim through the text to retrieve the information they need. If we want to convey specific information to users, we should learn to utilize visual hierarchy. The rule is simple—highlight key information. This way, users will understand what to focus on and where to click.

Improve Loading Speed on Mobile Devices​

A few years ago, creating responsive web pages was just a nice-to-have feature, but now it is essential. With the rapid advancement of mobile devices, users have increasingly high expectations for mobile websites and tend to spend more time surfing on their phones. At the same time, users are more likely to lose patience when loading speeds are slow. On one hand, we need to continually enrich and enhance the content and interactivity of mobile pages; on the other hand, we should strive to improve the loading speed of mobile websites to create the best user experience.