Is philosophy relevant to entrepreneurs? Hell yes. It can provide the conceptual framework that allows you to notice or ignore an entire approach to solving a problem.  

I've been re-reading one of my favorite philosophers recently. His name is Gilles Deleuze, and unless you are really into philosophy, his name probably does not ring a bell. He passed away in 1995, but he was a very radical thinker, seemingly bordering on crazy... But crazy like a fox.

I think Deleuze is insanely relevant to entrepreneurship... My friends in academia would likely throw up a little bit upon reading this, but they don't read this blog anyway... And the joke is on them, because I have a very reasonable hunch that Deleuze himself would both laugh and applaud the unintended cut/paste of his ideas into an apparently market-based activity like making new kinds of software... He was a person who saw past convenient dichtomies like capitalist/anti-capitalist, at a time when that very distinction was the obvious battle line in both society and certainly within western philosophy... He was a true conceptual renegade, a bull in a china shop. His work is an ideational time bomb going off in slow-motion as global culture catches up to the approach to reality he expounded. 

Viewed from one perspective, reconsideration of boundaries can be used as a phrase to describe the entire point of Deleuze's life's work, especially once he began to undo the edifice of orthodox society and thinking in his main works.

 Be warned, Deleuze and his collaborator Felix Guattari are not an easy read. Their works are a puzzling Gordian knot of ideas, definitions that intentionally change, play with boundaries, re-arrange themselves, encourage the reader to get lost, to depart and return again. They will mess with you. The density of their work is alien-level detailed, then pulls back into completely straightforward prose... In short, their work is designed to reflect the worldview their texts describe. Check out these illustrations that a great artist named Marc Ngui did that capture the concepts of their collaboration better than anything I've ever seen.

The rhizome (the plant) is a common theme in their work. When they wrote about it in 1980, it was a major innovation to think about an abstracted, anarchic, non-linear organic network of nodes without leadership. Reading it now, it seems eerily comfortable in many ways: Its the very worldframe of our internet-based reality.

So, what's "in it" for entrepreneurs? Since 99% of readers here are not going to read a lick of their work, here are a few "riffs" that are relevant, and in my own words. I do encourage anyone interested to order a copy of A Thousand Plataeus and let it play with you. Just having it around to remind you that you CAN jam an entire system (or die trying) is in and of itself a useful totem, especially if your goal is to change the world. It also makes a great present for friends when you just want to mess with them.

A few ideas from Deleuze and Guattari to consider:

1. Let what you are be your line of escape. Artistic expression (like building a company) can take place in a ground of repeating old patterns with slight modifications and innovations, or it can attempt to rip the world apart with its very novelty. It can do this by taking what has been and completely moving away from it by sheer virtue of the new thing that becomes. In doing this, the novel thing cannot help but bring along  "old ways" for the ride, and -low and behold- it changes them in the process. This creates a bridge to novelty that other people/systems can use to cross to where you are now. Yes, your radically novel approach will be so alien that it will at first confuse and anger many, but that is the price of deep novelty. How much do you need?

2. Hardenings and Softenings. As systems of nature get established (e.g. geology, organs, politics, companies), there are parts that will crystallize and even calcify. They can be very productive, very powerful, and they may seem permanent, but they never are. They are temporary stasis points resting amidst the flows... Outside of those hardenings, there are even more powerful smooth spaces, where the crystallized system is destroyed or reconsumed into a frictionless flow... think lava, bodily regeneration, political revolutions, corporate growth and acquisition. View your work through that lense for a bit. What changes? What has hardened, what systems are flowing in the background that you're actually depending on? Can you co-opt them and harness their free-form to work for you to solve problems (even literally: crowdsourcing, user communities)

3. Embrace Opposition. Don't fear and resist the thing that is your opposite. The idea itself of an established and constant "opposite" is merely a temporary stance taken for your own advantage at that particular time. Its okay to have the enemy, to know the thing you are not, to identify boundaries, but accept that what is in opposition to you is not an eternal constant. Change -always beyond your control- is already in play and turning the wheel into a new position, a new relationship of parts. There is no privileged perspective from which you can somehow avoid this. The answer? Embrace your apparent opposition. Understand it, feel it. Know why it is, and move through fear or the unknown realizing that you may live to see yourself actually become that opposite, and then move through even further to something new yet again.

Those are a few of the hundreds of great nuggets that can be deduced from Deleuze and Guattari. I hope Mssr. Deleuze is enjoying a chuckle as I bastardize his brilliance. It is, after all, exactly what he described would happen.

With mild regret, I will be uninstalling Foursquare from my iPhone tonight. I've been using the app for several months now, with the explicit goal of determining if it added anything useful to my life. My current answer: No. And I'm kind of bummed about that. I anticipate and hope there will be a reason to re-install it in the future, but this is a post about why it doesn't work for me today.

As a disclaimer, I think the app is well designed and incredibly creative... It just doesn't help me, at all. I don't think I'm the target user profile.

Here are the major reasons behind my 'checking out' of Foursquare:

1. Echo Chamber. Many of my friends are on the app, but my Foursquare social network is seemingly too inactive and anemic for me to ever use the app to successfully find anyone. At a recent industry conference, I was able to locate a friend and find out that he was there at the same time. I get it at venues like that, which would also include bars, concerts, clubs, etc. But I don't go to bars and I don't live in SF... So, not my everyday scene. Sure hope Sheri is at Whole Foods again soon, we almost were there at the same time once... What would've I done if we were? Does that matter?

2. Accumulated Indifference to Information. I don't care that an acquaintance of mine just arrived at the Ferry Building... congrats on another successful morning commute from Marin, John. So, I'm pretty sure John doesn't care that I'm at the dry cleaner, either (I'm the mayor of mine. Woot.) Its a schism in my social expectation that somebody I only know through business keeps going to the same taqueria in the Mission. Some folks might find that entertainingly voyeuristic... which it is for maybe a week... then after that it's just useless information. 

3. Weak Reinforcement. In psychology, there is a concept of variable reinforcement, wherein you vary the reward schedule for doing a given task, which makes you do more work to achieve it. Foursqaure badges work on this premise, but they're way too variable. I unlocked a ton of badges early on, then I got nothing for a long time. Nada. Forget for a moment that badges themselves are useless... the point is that if you are going to use a badging system to reward behavior, it needs a stronger reinforcement system to be effective. It must be resilient to many usage profiles. And beyond badges, you have the Mayorship reinforcement... which became a diminishing return for me. I have 18 friggin' mayorships. I didn't even try to get them. I just checked-in everywhere I went (primarily in Berkeley where I live) to see what happened. Here's what happened: I got a bunch of mayorships. Some I cared about because I like the venue (Books Inc. on 4th Street, Zushi Puzzle, etc.)  But I can tell you, the 17th mayorship is not exciting. I don't care anymore. You can have them, I'm not defending them anymore.

4. It's Work. I eventually became mad at myself for bothering to take the time to check-in at places for the sole reason that I was using an app that measures actions by "checking in". Am I really standing here checking in with an iPhone app while I wait for my latte?... The definition of crazy... The past few weeks, I've really resented the self-imposed location fascism that I allowed myself to fall into with this damn thing. It's work to open the app, wait for the connection, check-in... and then have nothing else happen: Location registered. Friends notified. Null.

Maybe I'm just not the target user: I'm a late 30s non-partying guy in Berkeley who apparently wants you to know that he goes to bagel shops, vegan restaurants, bookstores and his dry cleaners with great regularity. Yawn. On the flipside, I'm a forgiving early adopter evangelist with a robust social network... I should care, but I don't care about this app anymore, except in the vague intellectual way that I admire the entrepreneurial effort behind it and I hope the team can figure it out. They've got a smart small team and smart money behind them.

What will get me back? Not sure. Economic incentives might work, but that seems far off. Obvious and deeper integration with my "base" FB social graph would help... But my FB updates, which I can already do easily from my iPhone, satisfy that requirement.

For now, this is my Foursquare check-out... That means that Clean Living Dry Cleaners on Solano Ave has an uncontested mayorship up for grabs, if you care.

I'm sitting here at a cafe, thinking about the interplay of narcissism
and utility in the context of social applications... That's how lame my Friday nights are :)

Fun personal exercise... Draw an X/Y graph, with Narcissism as the Y
and Utility as the X, and map how you personally feel about various
social apps out there.

There is no objective measurement here, but I find that the apps I
have a "hard time with" are low on utility (for me) and and least
moderately narcissistic.

There is a magic zone where high narcissism is twinned with utility
and creates a great feedback loop. I think Facebook and Twitter
dominate that realm right now.

Just a rough idea, but thought I'd throw it up here, literally on the
back of a napkin.

I was talking to an aspiring young entrepreneur last night at a party. She's in the early stages of founding her first company and asked if I'd be willing to help her out. Her company is not in my strikezone, but I know I can help with some block and tackle basics, so I instantly said "yes". Then this morning, I just got off the phone talking to another early stage veteran who politely took my call to help me hash out a challenge at a new venture I'm working with... In 12 hours, I was on both sides of the kind of interaction that makes Silicon Valley what it is. I sometimes wish it were more explicitly acknowledged, so here's my swing at it:

Rajeev's Rule

 "When any sincere individual or group of people asks for my assistance in pursuit of their business dream, I will strive to help them in any way that I can, be it small or large."

So, who is Rajeev?

This open ethos of collaboration was perfectly embodied in the late Rajeev Motwani, Stanford professor and advisor to countless hundreds of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, including most famously, a couple guys named Larry and Sergei. He was taken from the world far too young, but like many others, I had the opportunity to collaborate with Rajeev successfully several times over the last 10 years... I don't think I ever saw Rajeev say "no" to helping an entrepreneur: listening to their ideas, making a quick helpful introduction, meeting for coffee to hash out a problem, answering their emails with humility and promptness.

Much has been written since Rajeev's passing about his One-of-a-Kind role in Silicon Valley, and rightly so. But while his uniqueness as a historical personality is indisputable, his generous spirit has no scarcity bounds and we should all strive to emulate his ideal.

 I think its fitting to refer to this generosity amongst entrepreneurs as "Rajeev's Rule" in his honor.

When I co-founded my most recent company back in 2007, my partner Steve and I shook hands on a commitment to bootstrapping this one with 100% self-funding. This decision was made not because we have anything against venture money, as both of us have had and currently enjoy positive experiences with venture-backed firms. We simply hypothesized that we had a capital efficient business model that could work as a self-funded play. We knew that if we could run hard to profitability on our own funds, we'd enjoy huge flexibility in how we run the firm, in perpetuity. We both agree today that it was absolutely the right call: We turned profitable in our first 12 months in the market and now we're growing very strongly into 2010. The gambit worked for us. This is the first time I've done a startup without any outside funds, and looking back now on the first 2 years, I have some insights that might help other entrepreneurs as they struggle with the very real question of growing organically (that is, your own money, or that of your friends and family that comes without institutional structures) or taking outside angel or VC money. It really comes down to a few variables around what you're capable of doing in your first year...

These are 5 questions to ask yourself if you're thinking of bootstrapping with modest funds:

1. Can you start selling quickly? If your initial business model requires an unspecified development or R&D period before you can even think about customers and a pricing model, its going to be almost impossible to self-fund your company to profitability unless you have really deep pockets and don't mind revising your spend plans every step of the way (not recommended.) We build software, but we also knew what we were building and exactly how long it would take -right down to the week- (thank you, Agile development methodologies!) in order to deliver a complete offering to our first paying customers.

2. Will customers pay you quickly? Its one thing to know you can build something you can sell quickly, but do you know if people or businesses will actually pay you? Seems obvious, but find out before you start. We actively interviewed prospective buyers of our software service before we wrote the first lines of code. We showed them detailed product mockups and how it would be used. We added capabilities they wanted. We talked to all kinds of users involved in the purchasing process. Doing that, we confirmed that if we built it, a handful of awesomely wonderful "believers" would buy it from us. Most importantly, we confirmed our payment terms. We pursued this as a collaborative process, and we came up with a pricing model that worked for them and us. Consumer and B2B plays have different paths to this knowledge, but you need to follow that process.

3. Can you build only things you can sell? Brutal discipline in offering design is non-optional. There is very little room for hunches about product acceptance when you're building on a shoestring. If somebody won't buy it, don't even think about building it or adding it, no matter how cool. We made this mistake at a feature level in our software a couple times in the first year... We allowed our desires to supercede direct market feedback. Those features are now long dead, but the cost of lost development cycles taught us a key lesson: You cannot be too obsessive about confirming that every aspect of your product is both desired and supportive of your revenue model  (confirmation = people who don't work for you saying that they want it and will pay for it.)

4. Can you commit to a true hiring process? As there is so little room for error in the first year of a bootstrap, you need to eliminate the possibility of an expensive dud hire. The way to do this is by having a true process. If you can work with folks you've worked with in the past, that's your best bet -get "the band" back together. If you have to hire strangers, then don't settle for less than total rockstars. Really dig deep on all potential hires. Take your time to get it right. If they are developers, demand to see some new work from designers, make back-end developers do real code challenges (our policy is that if a developer candidate whines about a code challenge, move on, no matter how talented they are) Give market or customer facing candidates personality tests (again, if they whine, move on), conduct background references, do brainstorming sessions to see how they work... Leave literally nothing to chance, or you will suffer for it financially and operationally. Of course, even if you do all of this, you'll still likely screw it up... We did all of this and we made one hiring mistake in our first year, but we solved it quickly, which is the next point.

5. Are you willing to cut a loss before its an actual loss? Here, a "loss" could be a non-productive hire, a bad product decision, a demanding customer, a recurring unneeded expense... literally anything that your gut is telling you COULD become a problem, lose it now, no matter how much your brain is telling you that your gut might be wrong. Your gut is probably right, but even if you're just being paranoid, you have to keep this raft afloat to profitability so you must execute with uncomfortable certitude.

In short, product, operational and fiscal paranoia is the fuel of the bootstrapped business in its first year. The paranoid self-funders who survive their first year in business can aspire to become well-adjusted entrepreneurs when they turn profitable.

Happy to hear any other perspectives on this.

Just had an interesting insight with an entrepreneur friend of mine over the weekend. Alex is a technologist I'm working with on an early stage company just getting off the ground. We were colllaborating on an issue throughout the weekend. In the spirit of levity, I made an offhand comment about this weekend being heavily tilted towards the  "work" side of the "work vs life" balance.

But, Alex made an interesting retort with total sincerity, "I disagree. The notion that there should be balance between work and life is the problem itself. Its all just life flatspace with different nodes of activity. The more connectivity and intensity amongst the nodes, the more robust and novel the life."

Alex is right. It seems small, but its a useful reframe of mental model, especially if you are burning really long hours per week and fighting this sense that your "out of balance"... Instead, one can consider that you have a flatspace that is your entire life of activity. Some things you fill it with are professional, some are recreational. Some take lots of concentrated effort, some are relaxing. Some are stressful, some are blissful. Combining all of them creates novelty and robustness for all of your life's activity. The emphasis then becomes one of shaping an aggegrate quality of experience, regardless of whether it might be have been parochially defined as "work" or "play".

For any startup, there is an ever-shifting balance required between the desire to "Get Stuff Going" (Momentum) and the desire to "Get Stuff Just Right" (Perfection).

While the qualities of Momentum and Perfection are obviously both very important, I would argue that Momentum should always trump Perfection early on. Getting confused on this can screw up a company before it even gets started.

Momentum is the fuel for literally every aspect of the young company's operational success: Team assembly, product development, funding and revenues.

Starting a company is an unnatural act. It therefore requires an immense amount of energy to successfully come into being and reach the point of profitable self-sufficiency. The key to getting to that self-sufficiency is creating cycles of energy that become increasingly Perfected with every iteration... Think of it this way: Momentum buys you iterations to achieve Perfection. We have to plan intensely and well, get as close to a Perfect hire/product plan/market plan/capital raise as we can, then you have to just go execute, because that is how Momentum is established.

I would rather get things 80% right and be moving forward with increasingly effective (read: historical error-correcting) execution than to have perfected an aspect of the company at the expense of getting momentum. This might seem obvious, but its sometimes tricky to catch ourselves when we are inadvertently elevating Perfection above Momentum.

Here are 10 random examples that a team might be elevating Perfection over Momentum. I'm sure you can think of more:

1. Waiting for the entire team to get assembled to start developing product. (Start building what you can with who you have!)
2. Shopping for ideal funding terms when the ones you have are good enough (There is a big opportunity cost to execution for a small team to hunt the perfect whale for funding)
3. Trying to bake-in details of today's market reality into a product that won't be out for a year (You're probably over-designing.)
4. Developing go-to-market plans that hinge on contingent future successes ("When we achieve x, then y is a slam dunk. So, we should have z in 12 months.)
5. Holding off on a launch of a product because one or two key features are behind schedule
6. Not pursuing a big customer because you think they'll say no because the product is not "feature-rich" yet
7. Letting customer/user requests for features drive your product planning to excess (fear of disappointment)
8. Holding off on doing something because a future rockstar employee (architect, sales VP, new CEO) is supposed to be onboard in "the next month or so" (Rule of thumb: If something is truly happening at any time in the next 2 months, you'd already know exactly when. If you don't know exactly when, its at least a quarter away.)
9. Not firing an employee because you think you can fix their deficiencies in short order (aka, "Perfect" their wrongs... Newsflash: You can't usually do this in a startup. You made a bad hire. Get over it and get rid of them as fast as you legally and ethically can, even if it means a few things drop. Preserving team momentum and standards are worth it.)
10. Waiting to pursue additional funding until you think the company is in "optimal position" to get a good valuation. (It will take longer than you think, and you risk slowing everything down and decreasing negotiation leverage. Go for it early.)

Momentum is extremely powerful, but it means developing a tolerance for imperfection. We are not in the business of Perfect, we're in the business of making things happen that get closer to Perfect over time. "Fail forward fast" is a great saying by Tom Peters. That's exactly what we're talking about here when we value Momentum over Perfection.

I've been fortunate to be close to the Stumbleupon team since the earliest days, first as an early user of Stumbleupon and then as the company's first investor and advisor who helped them get moved, incorporated and set up here in Silicon Valley. I have to say that I continue to be amazed at the number of things that the Stumbleupon team "got right" in its trajectory. Like all companies, it has its many warts and weaknesses, but it really nailed so many of the important things that are "must dos" for a startup.

Here's my list of things that the SU team did exceptionally well that contributed directly to their successful 14 month-to-$75 million exit to eBay in 2007 (and will likely inform their continued success post-spinout from eBay):

1. GOOD INITIAL TIMING. Stumbleupon started quietly in a downturn when nobody was paying attention. Talk about anonymity: Imagine it is the tail end of the last recession and you are 3 guys freezing up in Calgary with no tech business experience and no real funds and you decide to build a button that delivers random webpages as a downloadable toolbar for Firefox only... Not a lot of attention coming your way.  But, as many of us are finding in this most recent downturn, that is a massive blessing. Crazy ideas in recessions are a hallpass to create massive distance between you and any future competitor. You get more iterations and more failures under your belt without penalty. Best of all, you can execute in a space that doesn't even actually exist yet. When SU started, here is a shortlist of common things today that did not yet exist: Tag clouds, YouTube, bookmarking services like del.icio.us, Mechanical Turk, Digg, the concept of non-directed search ("discovery" today), plug-in or app stores and suffice to say, "web 2.0" was not yet a glimmer in Tim O'Reilly's eye (well, okay, maybe a glimmer. He's pretty smart.) Geoff, Garrett and Justin were riffing on all of these themes without identifying them. It was very fluid, very fast and a ton of fun. Everyone sensed something unique was happening, but did not have words for it yet.

2. RABID FREAK ADDICTS. The early community in Stumbleupon was full of people who gave up their lives to the algorithm (you know who you are, since you're probably the first people reading this post...) Understand that these people aren't just "raving fans", they're "Rabid Freak Addicts" (RFA herein) These users, a tight subset of the first 100,000 or so users of SU, were very unique. They are largely still intact as a core today and are the silent backbone of the community. These are people who way back then already had 20,000 stumbles under their belt. RFA pretty much lived to Stumble. They cared about the community deeply. They policed it, managed content, innoculated SU against spam, corrected category errors, tested features and drove the founders crazy... But there was a clear understanding that this group of Stumblers was critical. Their recommendation feedback on pages was essential to the success of the community and it wouldn't have worked without them. Any startup needs its version of RFA. In an enterprise startup, the RFA might be less freaky, but you want folks who take you beyond hardcore. You need a small cadre of hyper-passionate customers to make your play get escape velocity.

3. A BOOTSTRAPPING MENTALITY. The founders of SU did not have outside funds until they had already started generating revenues from their own proprietary advertising model, which is still its primary revenue source today. It was never an option to the founders to rely on some never-never future revenue stream by monetizing eyeballs and Adsense. They built their own way of making ad revenues with sponsored stumbles. It worked and its still a high leverage revenue stream that has never been successfully duplicated by a competitor. Most importantly, the founders had the mentality that they MUST have a revenue model. Was it perfect? Nope, but it was self-contained and basically true to the user experience and was therefore accepted by the community. This attitude then greatly informed how Justin, Garrett and Geoff looked at fund-raising when we got set up in San Francisco. They wanted just enough to hire folks and attract talent and not a penny more. One can argue the pros and cons of that attitude, but I would submit that its better to learn to get by on crumbs and then move to a small balanced meal rather than going hog wild at Old Country Buffet the moment that you can. There are exceptions to every rule, and I can argue either side of this depending on the company, but I think history bears out the value of "caloric restriction" on the early funding front for consumer web software plays.

4. SIGNAL TO NOISE DETECTION. The entire team from development to marketing at SU was very good at separating transient trends from resonant ideas with long-term impact. By the time the guys were down in San Francisco, the web 2.0 frenzy was revved and running strong. Because the team was from elsewhere and socially removed from Silicon Valley culture, they were wallflowers in the larger community (Garrett has now single-handedly made up for lost time :-) This was useful for perspective-building, as there was a ton of pressure and uncertainty surrounding the team about what the "right" moves were. "Be more like Digg", "emphasize social networking more", "develop a non-toolbar version ASAP"... On the whole, I think the founders did a great job ignoring pretty much everything that was distracting to their core mission of making a better stumbling experience. "Stumble is not web 2.0" was often uttered within the company office. Being in that community but not of it was critical to the team's focus.

5. SITUATIONAL AWARENESS. The founders of SU had a very good sense of larger macro-trends happening around them. They did not need to sell the company to eBay or any other company and they easily could have "gone long" and raised an insane amount of money from the best names in venture capital. Many very smart people were encouraging them to do so. However, I recall several intense and candid conversations where they all looked at the market arc taking place around them and realized that it simply was not sustainable. The web 2.0 bubble had created a once-in-a-lifetime situation and the founders wanted to execute into that opportunity. They had seen the rising M&A valuations of other extremely young companies like theirs and they correctly ascertained that it would not continue to rise indefinitely. Discussions of the larger economic environment also informed their thinking: would there be a tech recession in 2008? (they suspected it was 50/50) When would the next exit ramp be if so? 2011? 2012? Given the very small amount of funding they had taken at that time (a little over $1 million) the decision to sell was still completely theirs to decide...  in the future, with future funding, they knew that would not be the case. I think they made the right move. The real lesson for other entrepreneurs is that they had a keen situational awareness of their wider market realities and they were willing to act on their own best judgement.

Lots of great learning from a fascinating young company. I look forward to watching the guys do it again :-)

My favorite restaurant in the world is a little sushi place in San Francisco. Roger, the owner/chef, is pictured center here with me and one of my good friends, Om. Roger is a true culinary genius. He's one the most passionate people I've ever met and there's so much a guy like him can teach anyone doing a startup.

1. Treat Work Like a Hobby. Roger works six days a week at his restaurant and he almost never takes a vacation. If he does, the whole place closes. He calls being a sushi chef his "hobby". I love that. He is not being coy, either. It reflects an honesty about vocation that is really rare. He loves to play, and his play is his work. Your startup should definitely be your hobby... just maybe not your only one...

2. Create An Experience. Roger loves to entertain his guests. His meals become a true experience from start to finish. The stories behind the fish, the banter, the creativity as he makes up a new dish on-the-fly, the revelation of something new he's experimenting with.  He knows that what surrounds a food makes the sensation of eating it all the more enjoyable. The same thing applies to whatever it is you're building in your company. If you're just pushing a product out the door, you're just serving cold fish... the opportunity to make your customers part of a larger mission/experience is a highly desirable goal.

3. Don't Take No For An Answer. When you first come to his place and sit at the sushi bar, Roger will ask you what you don't like. He may well then proceed to give that very thing to you if he senses that your objection is merely from a lack of exposure. I've seen it time and time again. "I hate Salmon"... up comes a plate with 4 kinds of Salmon, "Just try these. If you don't like them, you never have to eat Salmon again." He's made many a new Salmon lover, Mackerel lover, Octopus lover or Sea Urchin lover with this method... The lesson here is obvious: Customers don't always know what they like or dislike, they only think they do. Sometimes it pays to push their boundaries, just do so in a comforting way.

4. Go For Quality, Not Cost. Roger orders all of his fish directly himself every single day and he only buys what is fresh. He the only sushi chef in the city with several kinds of uncommon fish on any given day... stuff like flying fish or pencil fish or rare Japanese fish like Kinki. He buys the best because that's what his customers want. But they want it because Roger introduced them to that level of quality. If he had stayed focused exclusively on more cost-effective options, none of us would have the benefit of his exemplary artistry. In the tech industry, the same rules apply: "Pay" for quality people, resources, design, and even "pay" to get quality customers, especially in the early stages...  Pervasive hallmarks of quality add up to an entirely different level of execution. It sets the DNA of everything you do. Note that in the business case, the currency you pay might be time (waiting for the right hire) or labor (working to get it done right), not just money.

Roger is a joyous man operating at the apex of his profession. Whenever I see somebody like this, I know there's tons to be learned. You just have to shut up and watch... and in this case, eat!