Wensing, M.

The lesson I’ve drawn is that it’s important for us to build higher-value apps.

Kan went on to posit that if you have smart people working on trying to make something people want and they don’t give up, they will eventually be successful. But, he said, founders need to be in it for the long haul, noting that it took eight years for the founding team of Justin.tv before they ended up selling Twitch to Amazon

All in all, Veeva is a very special business. It’s the canonical example of a highly specialized SaaS business serving a small number of customers very well. This focus on one use case enables the company to command premium revenue per account and ultimately create one of the most efficient SaaS companies in history.

The first thing you have to understand is the selling price is a function of your ability to sell and nothing else.

in New York, Fab paid $250,000 per month for two floors of office space.

It’s also a solid piece of evidence that shows that paid-up-front app sales are not a sustainable way to make money on the App Store.

You do not understand your own present in any meaningful way. You are merely able to function within it.

This is why product-driven businesses tend to reverse yet another customer-driven business mantra: sell aspirin, not vitamins (i.e., sell to painful, immediate concerns that must necessarily be addressed, not to painless long-term concerns that perhaps don’t need to be). That wisdom, which is practically a Golden Rule for customer-driven businesses, is precisely what product-driven businesses don’t do.

The pivot is the strategic reorientation action by which accumulating visioning-process debt is periodically paid down.

The key to getting to the right outcome was to keep from getting married to either the positive or the dark narrative.

Wal-Mart “same store sales were down for the first two weeks of February thanks to “continued severe winter storms.””

Wal-Mart posted $129.7 billion in fourth quarter 2014 revenue

In other words, if you want to build a company that grows like mad or wins its market by dominating its niche, don’t worry about optimizations at first. Nail the major things.

don’t get stuck on tweaks and incremental features: they don’t matter anywhere near the order of magnitude as the big, core principle stuff.

We don’t want our viral engines of growth to rely on the fact that our product is free. We want users to refer their peers because we bring massive value to their business, an order of magnitude more than the couple of bucks a month we charge them.

In contrast, our free beta users had suggested more icons for the metrics dashboard. For the ability to upload individual customer photos. For custom colour coding labels.