people will copy the idea as soon as the market is proved out. No matter how novel, once your idea starts making money the clones will come out of the woodwork. The reason is that it’s always easier to check a solution than to find a solution in the first place.

If you are choosing between two projects of equal scientific interest, pick the one with the larger market size. And do that calculation up front, not at the end of your six year PhD program.

In a great market – a market with lots of real potential customers – the market pulls product out of the startup. The market needs to be fulfilled and the market will be fulfilled, by the first viable product that comes along. The product doesn’t need to be great; it just has to basically work. And, the market doesn’t care how good the team is, as long as the team can produce that viable product.

Work backwards from the press release: Amazon writes the press release before they build the product. In doing this, you will find yourself figuring out what features are news and which ones are noise.

As important as the execution is, without a clear vision of where you want your company to go you will never come up with an idea that others want to copy.

A good founder is thus capable of anticipating which turns lead to treasure and which lead to certain death. A bad founder is just running to the entrance of (say) the “movies/music/filesharing/P2P” maze or the “photosharing” maze without any sense for the history of the industry, the players in the maze, the casualties of the past, and the technologies that are likely to move walls and change assumptions

In other words: a good idea means a bird’s eye view of the idea maze, understanding all the permutations of the idea and the branching of the decision tree, gaming things out to the end of each scenario

If you can verbally and then graphically diagram a complex decision tree with many alternatives, explaining why your particular plan to navigate the maze is superior to the ten past companies that fell into pits and twenty current competitors lost in the maze, you’ll have gone a long way towards proving that you actually have a good idea that others did not and do not have.

Larry Ellison said, “Choose your competitors carefully, as you will become a lot like them.”

The most important tasks are those that get you to the maze exit, or at least a treasure chest with some powerups.

In terms of execution heuristics, perhaps the best is Thiel’s one thing, which means that everyone in the company should at all times know what their one thing is, and others should know that as well.

The most important consideration in this decision is your own ambition and personal utility function: can you tolerate the failure of your business? Because if you can’t go to zero, you shouldn’t try to go to infinity

free or heavily discounted customers generally don’t value the product and are counterintuitively the most troublesome; paying customers are surprisingly more tolerant of bugs as they feel like they’re invested in the item.

To get to a billion dollars in annual revenue ($1B), you need either a high price point or a large number of customers.

Note in particular that low price points require incredible levels of automation and indus- trial efficiency to make reasonable profits. You can’t tolerate many returns or lawsuits for each $1 can of Coke. Relatedly, high price points subsidize sales; it is not 100,000 as much sales time to sell a house as it is to sell a can of Coke, but it is 100,000 as much revenue.

market size determines how much money you can raise, which in turn determines how many employees you can support

Among other things, you won’t capture the entire market, but only a portion. And if it’s going to take three years, that $1.5M could go towards something that has a chance at a $1B+ market.