"As you cross the chasm, the bulk of your new customers don’t want innovation at all. They want promises kept, a lack of surprises and reasonable prices and efficiency. Shipping your improvements on a regular schedule and bringing predictability to your offering allows you to reach more people and make a bigger impact."

"Refactor your code from scratch. Spin off the cash cow and assemble a team to start something new from scratch. The new things probably won’t work at first, but if you do enough of them, your experience and persistence will pay off."

"Just about every organization hits a point where the pace of innovation slows as scale increases."

"cultural change always happens relatively slowly. Person by person, conversation by conversation. Expectations are established, roles are defined, systems are built."

"Everyday people aren’t the bottom, they are the roots, the foundation, the source of culture itself. We are the culture, and we change it or are changed by it."

"The internet would like us to focus on what happened five minutes ago. The culture understands that what happens in five years is what matters."

"Focused, persistent community action is how systems change. And systems concretize and enforce cultural norms."

"If you care, keep talking. Keep acting. Stay focused. And don’t get bored."

"When you strip away the alternative mantra of “you can pick anyone, and we’re anyone,” then you have to lean into the obligation of being the sort of provider that people would miss if you were gone. That’s not easy, but people with this sort of focus wouldn’t have it any other way."

"It’s not about getting found by everyone. A focus on experience creates something that (some) people want to look for."

"You don’t get to say, “well, we’ll just wait for the next random person to find us.” Instead, you have to choose your customers–who’s it for and what’s it for. And when you’ve identified them, the opportunity/requirement is to create so much delight and connection that they choose to spread the word to like-minded peers."

"Specificity is the way. It has nothing to do with absolute scale and everything to do with being really clear about what hook you want to be on and setting a standard for producing work that people connect to and are changed by."

"There wasn’t always a business model, but the successful startups got successful because they were relentlessly focusing on solving a problem for the customer."

"If it was hard to explain why someone needed what you were doing, you had a real problem."

"Over time, successful businesses figure out how to align their goals with the customers they serve."

"Debt is a financial miracle."

"If that property goes down in value a little bit, you lose everything."

"The reason that supply chain issues were so bad is that leveraged organizations needed to figure out how to extract every penny from their cash flow, and having less inventory on hand seemed like a smart way to eke out a bit more leverage."

"Until a shipment is late and then it all grinds to a halt."

"Because leverage multiplies the value of a short-term penny so much that they feel as if they have no choice but to choose the fragile, selfish, short-term path."

"Leverage accelerates everything. Learning to see it is a key step in understanding how to fix it."