Leadership requires creating conditions that enable employees to do the kinds of experimentation that entrepreneurship requires. - Eric Ries

I was finally ready to turn to the last resort: talking to customers.

Lean thinking defines value as providing benefit to the customer; anything else is waste. In a manufacturing business, customers don’t care how the product is assembled, only that it works correctly. But in a startup, who the customer is and what the customer might find valuable are unknown, part of the very uncertainty that is an essential part of the definition of a startup.

A head start is rarely large enough to matter, and time spent in stealth mode — away from customers — is unlikely to provide a head start. The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else.