There is value in being the guy that no one is quite sure about.  ”What’s he going to do next?”  ”What’s he thinking?” ~Andy Swann

1. The Car – it is more risky to ride in the backseat of a car with someone else in control in the driver’s seat.  Drive your own car, at least you can determine where it goes.
2. The Party – this is the analogy I’m really going to botch but apparently Neal was the President of the KU MBA program even though he wanted to quit (and eventually did) and was also the guy who sat in the back of the classroom.  He said when Accenture and all of the consulting groups would come in to recruit, they stood in front of the class and gave a speech and then were swarmed by all the brown-nosers immediately afterwards looking for jobs. He and his buddies would sit in the back and basically laugh because they knew consulting wasn’t for them.  Why not?  If they went the consulting route, they knew they were limited…$80k plus $5k signing bonus, probably up to six figures in a few years and eventually making partner and capping out at about $300k per year.  It would require travel every week so they wouldn’t be home from Monday through Thursday or Friday…every single week.  In other words they were limited. They knew if they joined the “consulting party”, they would have to be home by midnight at the latest.  However, if they did their own thing and became entrepreneurs, there were no limitations. If they chose the “entrepreneur party”, they could essentially blow it out all night if they wanted.  Why limit yourself?
3. The Cathedral – “everyone lays bricks…I don’t care if you are Steve Jobs or Steve Ballmer or whoever, everyone goes to work and lays bricks.”  So if everyone lays bricks, why not build a beautiful Cathedral modeled exactly how you want?  In other words, build a company that embodies everything you believe…morals, ethics, values, and the right people.

Neal gave a really good talk to an audience that was probably really tough to fit under a common speaking theme. I walked away very impressed and look forward to meeting him in person one of these days. If you ever have the chance, I highly recommend hearing him speak.

If you want to take on a problem as big as the ones I’ve discussed, don’t make a direct frontal attack on it. Don’t say, for example, that you’re going to replace email. If you do that you raise too many expectations. Your employees and investors will constantly be asking “are we there yet?” and you’ll have an army of haters waiting to see you fail. Just say you’re building todo-list software. That sounds harmless. People can notice you’ve replaced email when it’s a fait accompli. [4]
Empirically, the way to do really big things seems to be to start with deceptively small things. Want to dominate microcomputer software? Start by writing a Basic interpreter for a machine with a few thousand users. Want to make the universal web site? Start by building a site for Harvard undergrads to stalk one another.
Empirically, it’s not just for other people that you need to start small. You need to for your own sake. Neither Bill Gates nor Mark Zuckerberg knew at first how big their companies were going to get. All they knew was that they were onto something. Maybe it’s a bad idea to have really big ambitions initially, because the bigger your ambition, the longer it’s going to take, and the further you project into the future, the more likely you’ll get it wrong.
I think the way to use these big ideas is not to try to identify a precise point in the future and then ask yourself how to get from here to there, like the popular image of a visionary. You’ll be better off if you operate like Columbus and just head in a general westerly direction. Don’t try to construct the future like a building, because your current blueprint is almost certainly mistaken. Start with something you know works, and when you expand, expand westward.
The popular image of the visionary is someone with a clear view of the future, but empirically it may be better to have a blurry one.  ~Paul Graham essay March 2012

We don’t do focus groups – that is the job of the designer. It’s unfair to ask people who don’t have a sense of the opportunities of tomorrow from the context of today to design. ~Sir Jonathan Ive, Apple’s SVP of Industrial Design  HERE

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle. ~Steve Jobs

Most people settle. I am proud to say I have not. The general public sneers at this. I do not. Don’t worry about me, maybe you should worry about yourself…settler.

He says that people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it, and that the most successful people start with an inspired drive and then work outward to a particular function. ~Charlie O’Donnell on Simon Sinek’s 2009 TED talk

A little exasperated, he said something along the lines of:

Startups don’t compete with airlines by purchasing a bunch of planes, hiring a bunch of pilots and locking up a bunch of terminals at airports. Startups compete with airlines by inventing videoconferencing.

It’s as though he was channeling Buckminster Fuller who said:

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

The problem with building these new models is they often look silly and inconsequential in light of their larger, more established contemporary.

~Taken from BRYCE DOT VC Feb 27, 2012

The most powerful weapon is to move somebody emotionally…so if you send out a signal as love, you will receive the same signal back.

Free money.