One of my goals in telling this story is to puncture some of the myths that attach themselves to narratives like ours. But it’s equally important to me to show how and why some of the things we did at the beginning—often unwittingly—worked. It’s been over twenty years since those first car rides with Reed, and in that time, I’ve come to realize that there are things we discovered that, applied broadly, can influence a project’s success. Not exactly laws, not even principles, but hard-won truths.
