As CEO, everyone looks to you to set priorities and culture. Aim high but care for others. Bad CEOs maintain status quo.Know when it's time to step down based on personal fit, investor pressure, or succession planning. Leadership means responsibility, not power.

Becoming CEO


Build a complementary team of smart yet imperfect people. Invest in training eager newcomers. Conduct cross-functional hiring with cultural immersion.Make recruiting a priority at all levels. Fire with empathy as needed. Diversity and collaboration enables excellence.

Hiring

No one is ever fully prepared beforehand.Readiness comes through diverse work experience, mentor guidance, cofounder balance, and recruiting strong teams. But ultimately you only know once you take the leap.Have faith in your abilities, knowledge, and judgment. Embrace the uncertainty. Manage risks. Then take the plunge and give your all to make the venture succeed.

Are You Ready? 

Seek out revolutionary companies creating novel technologies that solve real customer pain points on a large scale. Ensure the leadership and infrastructure can support the bold vision and adapt as needed.Joining these rare companies with potential for disruption signals opportunities for career growth and industry impact.

Get a Job 

<ul><li>Consider alternatives to management for satisfaction and influence.</li><li>Managing means stopping your previous specialized work to enable others.</li><li>It requires an array of learned skills - communication, hiring, mentoring, goal-setting, conflict resolution.</li><li>Hands-on work, individual contributor roles, and tech lead paths offer similar pay, sway, and fulfillment.</li><li>But if you desire to manage, embrace the challenge wholeheartedly.</li></ul>

Just Managing

The best marketing is just telling the truth.

Serve either consumers or businesses, not both masters. Your entire focus from branding to product should revolve around deeply understanding your one core customer. Split focus divides strategies and delivery.Choose your one north star, whether B2B or B2C, and build your company culture, product, marketing, sales, and support specifically for them.

You Can Only Have One Customer

If you're not having doubt, you're not pushing the boundaries far enough.

<ul><li>Involve marketing through product development. Use it to prototype branding narratives.</li><li>Ensure consistent messaging across all customer touchpoints. While marketing requires creativity, make it analytical and truth-based.</li><li>Tell your product's honest story creatively across the entire customer journey.</li></ul>

A Method to the Marketing 

Some decisions rely heavily on sufficient data analysis. Others follow personal intuition, with insufficient data to eliminate doubt.Aim for balance - double down on data where available, but have courage to follow your vision when needed. Overanalysis causes paralysis.Experience builds judgment to determine when to leverage data versus when to trust your gut and lead based on vision.

Data Versus Opinion

<ul><li>Prototype the entire user journey, not just the core product.</li><li>Map out the complete experience customers have discovering, evaluating, installing, using, troubleshooting, and even returning your offering.</li><li>Visualize often overlooked intangible interactions surrounding your physical or digital product.</li><li>Customer satisfaction depends as much on these subtle nuances as the concrete product itself.</li></ul>

Make the Intangible Tangible

Great ideas solve a clear “why” first, address widespread customer problems, and persistently intrigue you despite hurdles. Before committing, thoroughly research, prototype, gather data, build business and product plans.If it remains compelling after informed analysis, you have a winning concept. Delay initial intuition. Let potential overcome early excitement.Time and rigor separate great ideas from passing fascinations.

How to Spot a Great Idea

Essential reads for entrepreneurial growth, curated by Lenny Rachitsky.

strategy

Strategy

books

Books

startup

Startups

entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship

business

Business

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

productivity

Productivity

timemanagement

Time Management

Lenny’s Top Business Books

Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making, written by Tony Fadell, is a 2022 book that provides insights on how to develop products that are meaningful and have lasting value. The book covers topics such as understanding customer needs, building the right team, setting goals and timelines, embracing failure, and much more. Fadell's book is full of examples from his own experience as well as advice from other successful entrepreneurs and innovators.  

**New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USAToday Bestseller**Tony Fadell led the teams that created the iPod, iPhone and Nest Learning Thermostat and learned enough in 30+ years in Silicon Valley about leadership, design, startups, Apple, Google, decision-making, mentorship, devastating failure and unbelievable success to fill an encyclopedia.So that’s what this book is. An advice encyclopedia. A mentor in a box. Written for anyone who wants to grow at work—from young grads navigating their first jobs to CEOs deciding whether to sell their company—Build is full of personal stories, practical advice and fascinating insights into some of the most impactful products and people of the 20th century.Each quick 5-20 page entry builds on the previous one, charting Tony’s personal journey from a product designer to a leader, from a startup founder to an executive to a mentor. Tony uses examples that are instantly captivating, like the process of building the very first iPod and iPhone. Every chapter is designed to help readers with a problem they’re facing right now—how to get funding for their startup, whether to quit their job or not, or just how to deal with the jerk in the next cubicle.Tony forged his path to success alongside mentors like Steve Jobs and Bill Campbell, icons of Silicon Valley who succeeded time and time again. But Tony doesn’t follow the Silicon Valley credo that you have to reinvent everything from scratch to make something great. His advice is unorthodox because it’s old school. Because Tony’s learned that human nature doesn’t change. You don’t have to reinvent how you lead and manage—just what you make. And Tony’s ready to help everyone make things worth making.