Technology innovation is the most common trigger for launching a new market or upending an existing one. - Reid Hoffman

entrepreneurs don’t think what they’re doing is crazy — though other people do, because it’s threatening to the status quo.

As Paul saw it, the projections, the spreadsheets, the grand marketing plans were all secondary. First, you had to build something that a tiny cohort of users would love. If they loved it, presumably millions of others would, too. And since love tends to be shared, your product or service would have the best kind of marketing, the kind money couldn’t buy — and it would grow and grow. Paul’s point was that in order to build something Brian’s core user would truly love, he needed to meet them where they live — literally. He had to talk to them, listen to them, watch them, and try his best to understand them. And as Paul told Brian, this was the moment to seize that opportunity. “It’s the only time,” Paul said, “you’ll ever be small enough that you can meet all your customers, get to know them — and make something directly for them.” In 2013, Paul would codify this advice in his famous essay “Do Things That Don’t Scale,” which also serves as #6 of my Counterintuitive Rules of Blitzscaling.

We don’t know of a single start-up that succeeded without starting out as single-threaded. That focus is the key to beating larger competitors in the early stages of a company’s existence.