Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

by Tony Fadell

The world is full of mediocre, middle-of-the-road companies creating mediocre, middle-of-the-road crap, but I’ve spent my entire life chasing after the products and people that strive for excellence. I’ve been incredibly lucky to learn from the best—from bold, passionate people who made a dent in the world.

Adulthood is commonly thought of as the time when learning is over and living begins. Yes! I’ve graduated! I’m done! But learning never ends. School has not prepared you to be successful for the rest of your life. Adulthood is your opportunity to screw up continually until you learn how to screw up a little bit less.

The best way to find a job you’ll love and a career that will eventually make you successful is to follow what you’re naturally interested in, then take risks when choosing where to work. Follow your curiosity rather than a business school playbook about how to make money. Assume that for much of your twenties your choices will not work out and the companies you join or start will likely fail. Early adulthood is about watching your dreams go up in flames and learning as much as you can from the ashes. Do, fail, learn. The rest will follow.

“The only failure in your twenties is inaction. The rest is trial and error.” —ANONYMOUS

I needed to learn. And the best way to do that was to surround myself with people who knew exactly how hard it was to make something great—who had the scars to prove it. And if it turned out to be the wrong move, well, making a mistake is the best way to not make that mistake again. Do, fail, learn.

If you’re not solving a real problem, you can’t start a revolution. A glaring example is Google Glass or Magic Leap—all the money and PR in the world can’t change the fact that augmented reality (AR) glasses are a technology in search of a problem to solve. There’s just no reason for the general public to buy them. Not yet. Nobody can quite imagine walking into a party or the office with these weird ugly glasses on their face, creepily filming everyone around them. And even if there’s a brilliant vision for the future of AR glasses, the technology can’t deliver it yet and the social stigma will take a long time to dissolve. I’m convinced it’ll happen, but they’re still years away. On the other hand, take Uber. The founders started with a customer problem—a problem they experienced in their daily lives—then applied technology. The problem was simple: finding a cab in Paris was next to impossible and hiring private drivers was expensive and took forever. In the days before smartphones, the solution might have been to simply start a new kind of taxi or limo business. But the company’s timing was perfect—the sudden ubiquity of smartphones provided Uber with a platform and put customers into the right mindset to accept their solution. If I can order a toaster with an app on my phone, why shouldn’t I hail a car? That combination of a real problem, the right timing, and innovative technology allowed Uber to shift the paradigm—to create something that traditional cab companies cou...

Management consulting should never be your endpoint—it should be a way station, a brief pause on your journey to actually doing something. Making something. To do great things, to really learn, you can’t shout suggestions from the rooftop then move on while someone else does the work. You have to get your hands dirty. You have to care about every step, lovingly craft every detail. You have to be there when it falls apart so you can put it back together. You have to actually do the job. You have to love the job. But what happens if you fall in love with the wrong thing? If you find a product or company that’s too early—the supporting infrastructure isn’t there, the customers don’t exist, the leadership has a crazy vision and won’t budge. What if you’re deeply passionate about quantum computing or synthetic biology or fusion energy or space exploration even though there’s no sign that any of those industries will bear fruit anytime soon? Then screw it. Go for it. If you love it, don’t worry about all my advice, don’t worry about the timing.

Bill Gurley, the incredibly smart, wry, contrarian Silicon Valley VC and Texan deal maker, puts it this way: “I can’t make you the smartest or the brightest, but it’s doable to be the most knowledgeable. It’s possible to gather more information than somebody else.”

Not when people are just asking for a job. Or angling for funding. But I’ll notice people who come with something interesting to share. Something smart. Especially if they keep coming. If they sent me something cool last week and something cool this week and they keep bringing fascinating news or tech or ideas and they’re persistent, then I’ll start to recognize them. I’ll start to remember them, and respond. And that can turn into an introduction or a friendship or a referral or, potentially, a job at one of our portfolio companies. The key is persistence and being helpful. Not just asking for something, but offering something. You always have something to offer if you’re curious and engaged. You can always trade and barter good ideas; you can always be kind and find a way to help.

And let me tell you, there is nothing in the world that feels better than helping your hero in a meaningful way and earning their trust—watching them realize you know what you’re talking about, that you can be relied on, that you’re someone to remember. And then seeing how that respect evolves as you move on to the next job, and the next. That’s the great thing about heroes. You can use their inspiration to drive you. If you do it right, and listen carefully, they’ll share decades of learning. And then, one day, you might return the favor.

One of the hardest parts of management is letting go. Not doing the work yourself. You have to temper your fear that becoming more hands-off will cause the product to suffer or the project to fail. You have to trust your team—give them breathing room to be creative and opportunities to shine. But you can’t overdo it—you can’t create so much space that you lose track of what’s going on or are surprised by what the product becomes. You can’t let it slide into mediocrity because you’re worried about seeming overbearing. Even if your hands aren’t on the product, they should still be on the wheel. Examining the product in great detail and caring deeply about the quality of what your team is producing is not micromanagement. That’s exactly what you should be doing. I remember Steve Jobs bringing out a jeweler’s loupe and looking at individual pixels on a screen to make sure the user interface graphics were properly drawn.

As a manager, you should be focused on making sure the team is producing the best possible product. The outcome is your business. How the team reaches that outcome is the team’s business. When you get deep into the team’s process of doing work rather than the actual work that results from it, that’s when you dive headfirst into micromanagement. (Of course sometimes it turns out that the process is flawed and leads to bad outcomes. In that case, the manager should feel free to dive in and revise the process. That’s the manager’s job, too.)

But I also realize that what motivates me may not be what motivates my team. The world is not made up entirely of Tony Fadells (and let us all be grateful for that). There are also normal, sane people with lives and families and lots of things they can and need to do, all pulling at their time. So as a manager, you have to find what connects with your team. How can you share your passion with them, motivate them? The answer, as usual, comes down to communication. You have to tell the team why. Why am I this passionate? Why is this mission meaningful? Why is this small detail so important that I’m flipping out right now when nobody else seems to think it matters? Nobody wants to follow someone who throws themselves at windmills for no reason. To get people to join you, to truly become a team, to fill them with the same energy and drive that’s bubbling within you, you need to tell them the why.

Most people don’t even want to acknowledge that there are opinion-driven decisions or that they have to make them. Because if you follow your gut and your gut is wrong, then there’s nowhere else to cast blame. But if all you did was follow the data and you still failed, then clearly something else was wrong. Someone else screwed up. This is often a tactic of people who are trying to cover their asses. It’s not my fault! I just went where the data sent me! The data doesn’t lie! That’s why some managers and execs and shareholders demand data even when there is none and then chase that imaginary data directly into the abyss. These are the kinds of people who won’t question their directions and drive their car right off a cliff. If at all possible they want to erase the human element—human judgment—from the equation. These are also the people who will call in the big-league, very expensive (and in my opinion worthless) consultants at the drop of a hat. They’ll happily second-guess your decision, then rip it right out of your hands and pass it to people who have no context or understanding of your product, company, or culture.

So don’t just hit them with the classic “This is Jane, this is her life, and this is how her life changes when she uses our product” slide. Helping people see things from the customer’s perspective is a critical tool, but it’s just part of what you need to do. Your job in this moment is to craft a narrative that convinces leadership that your gut is trustworthy, that you’ve found all the data that could be gleaned, that you have a track record of good decisions, that you grasp the decision makers’ fears and are mitigating those risks, that you truly understand your customers and their needs and—most importantly—that what you’re proposing will have a positive impact on the business. If you tell that story well, if you bring people along with you on that journey, then they will follow your vision, even if there’s no hard data to back you up.

But pushing for greatness doesn’t make you an asshole. Not tolerating mediocrity doesn’t make you an asshole. Challenging assumptions doesn’t make you an asshole. Before dismissing someone as “just an asshole,” you need to understand their motivations. There’s a world of difference between being emphatic and passionate to benefit the customer versus bullying someone to appease your own ego. It’s not always an obvious difference to the person on the other end. It’s hard to walk into a hurricane and think, Ah, this is a passionate hurricane. I just need to let it blow for a little while and then present some helpful data. But some hurricanes can be reasoned with. Some cannot. So here’s how to deal with people like me, how to talk down a hurricane: ask why. It’s the responsibility of a passionate person—especially a leader—to describe their decision and make sure you can see it through their eyes. If they can tell you why they’re so passionate about something, then you can piece together their thought process and either jump on board or point out potential issues.

You should talk to people and make connections because you’re naturally curious. You want to know how other teams at your company work and what people do. You want to talk to your competitors because you’re all working to solve the same problems and they’re taking a different approach. You want your projects to be successful, so you don’t just talk to your immediate teammates at lunch—you grab lunch with your partners, your customers, their customers, their partners. You talk to everyone: get their ideas and their perspectives. In doing so you may be able to help someone or make a friend or strike up an interesting conversation.

And yes, you’ll probably drive your boss nuts. Going around your manager is always touchy. I drove my managers completely insane every time I sidestepped them to reach out to some other executive. So if they ask, tell your boss what you’re doing—and tell them why. This is a time to ask for forgiveness, not permission. Explain that you’ve talked to them (and you should have first) but nothing is getting fixed. Tell them what you’re worried about and your proposed solutions; explain who you’re reaching out to and what you hope to accomplish. But if you take this route—if you go around your boss and start making a fuss all over the company—make sure the issues you’re raising are not about yourself. I remember we had a huge all-hands meeting at Apple once—these meetings would only happen two, maybe three times a year. And a guy stands up during the Q&A and starts asking Steve Jobs why he didn’t get a raise or a good review. Steve looks at him in stunned disbelief and says, “I can tell you why. Because you’re asking this question in front of ten thousand people.” He was fired shortly thereafter.

And remember that even if leadership acknowledges that you’re right and promises a major shift, it may take a while for anything to change. Or it may never change. But it’s worth it to try. Quitting anytime things get tough not only doesn’t look great on your résumé, but it also kills any chance you have of making something you’re proud of. Good things take time. Big things take longer. If you flit from project to project, company to company, you’ll never have the vital experience of starting and finishing something meaningful. Jobs are not interchangeable. Work is not just a sweater you can take off when things get hot. Too many people jump ship the second they need to dig in and really push through the hard, grinding work of making something real. And when you look at their résumés you can instantly see the pattern.

People are easily distracted. We’re wired to focus our attention on tangible things that we can see and touch to the point that we overlook the importance of intangible experiences and feelings. But when you’re creating a new product, regardless of whether it’s made of atoms or electrons, for businesses or consumers, the actual thing you’re building is only one tiny part of a vast, intangible, overlooked user journey that starts long before a customer ever gets their hands on your product and ends long after. So don’t just make a prototype of your product and think you’re done. Prototype as much of the full customer experience as possible. Make the intangible tangible so you can’t overlook the less showy but incredibly important parts of the journey. You should be able to map out and visualize exactly how a customer discovers, considers, installs, uses, fixes, and even returns your product. It all matters.

But the longer I made things—at General Magic, at Philips, at Apple—the more I realized that many things don’t need to be made. After the iPod a lot of people started pitching me their devices. People would say, “Tony’s the hardware guy—he’ll love your idea.” And the first thing I did when someone proudly handed me their beautifully polished prototype was put it aside. “How can you solve your problem without this?” They would be astonished. How could the “hardware guy” not want to check out my cool gadget? People often get excited about making something with atoms—they dig into the design, interface, colors, materials, textures—and instantly become blind to simpler, easier solutions. But making anything with atoms is incredibly difficult—it’s not an app that you can copy and update with a click. The only time hardware is worth the headache of manufacturing and packaging and shipping is if it’s critically necessary and transformative. If hardware doesn’t absolutely need to exist to enable the overall experience, then it should not exist. Of course, sometimes you do need hardware—it can’t be avoided. But when that happens, I still tell people to put it away. I say, “Don’t tell me what’s so special about this object. Tell me what’s different about the customer journey.”

The screwdriver was never just for installation. It had ripple effects all the way up and down the customer journey. A vital part of the customer experience is post-sale. How do you stay connected to your customer in a way that’s actually useful? How do you keep on delighting people instead of just marketing to them, selling and selling until they’re sick of you? Our thermostat was made to be on people’s walls for ten years. By design, it would become like a piece of art—occasionally admired and adjusted, mostly fading into the background. But every time they opened the random-stuff drawer in their kitchen, they’d see the cute little Nest screwdriver. And they’d smile.

Every product should have a story, a narrative that explains why it needs to exist and how it will solve your customer’s problems. A good product story has three elements: » It appeals to people’s rational and emotional sides. » It takes complicated concepts and makes them simple. » It reminds people of the problem that’s being solved—it focuses on the “why.”

He used a technique I later came to call the virus of doubt. It’s a way to get into people’s heads, remind them about a daily frustration, get them annoyed about it all over again. If you can infect them with the virus of doubt—“Maybe my experience isn’t as good as I thought, maybe it could be better”—then you prime them for your solution. You get them angry about how it works now so they can get excited about a new way of doing things. Steve was a master of this. Before he told you what a product did, he always took the time to explain why you needed it. And he made it all look so natural, so easy.

A good story is an act of empathy. It recognizes the needs of its audience. And it blends facts and feelings so the customer gets enough of both. First you need enough insights and concrete information that your argument doesn’t feel too floaty and insubstantial. It doesn’t have to be definitive data, but there has to be enough to feel meaty, to convince people that you’re anchored in real facts. But you can overdo it—if your story is only informational, then it’s entirely possible that people will agree with you but decide it’s not compelling enough to act on just yet. Maybe next month. Maybe next year. So you have to appeal to their emotions—connect with something they care about. Their worries, their fears. Or show them a compelling vision of the future: give a human example. Walk through how a real person will experience this product—their day, their family, their work, the change they’ll experience. Just don’t lean so far into the emotional connection that what you’re arguing for feels novel, but not necessary.

If you’re going to pour your heart into creating something new, then that thing should be disruptive. It should be bold. It should change something. It doesn’t have to be a product—Amazon was a disruptive service long before they got into making their own hardware. You can disrupt how things are sold, delivered, serviced, financed. You can disrupt how they’re marketed or recycled. Disruption should be important for you personally—who doesn’t want to do something exciting and meaningful?—but it’s also important for the health of your business. If you’ve truly made something disruptive, your competition probably won’t be able to replicate it quickly. The key is to find the right balance—not so disruptive that you won’t be able to execute, not so easy to execute that nobody will care. You have to choose your battles. Just make sure you have battles.

But that’s the tricky thing with disruptions—they’re an extremely delicate balancing act. When they fall apart it’s usually for one of three reasons: You focus on making one amazing thing but forget that it has to be part of a single, fluid experience. [See also: Figure 3.1.1, in Chapter 3.1.] So you ignore the million little details that aren’t as exciting to build—especially for V1—and end up with a neat little demo that doesn’t actually fit into anyone’s life. Conversely, you start with a disruptive vision but set it aside because the technology is too difficult or too costly or doesn’t work well enough. So you execute beautifully on everything else but the one thing that would have differentiated your product withers away. Or you change too many things too fast and regular people can’t recognize or understand what you’ve made. That’s one of the (many) issues that befell Google Glass. The look, the technology—it was all so new that people had no idea what to do with it. There was no intuitive understanding of what the thing was for. It’s as if Tesla decided out the gate to build electric cars with five wheels and two steering wheels. You can change the motor, change the dash—but it still has to look like a car. You can’t push people too far outside their mental model. Not at first.

The iPod was Apple’s only successful new non-Mac product in fifteen years. At times it accounted for more than 50 percent of Apple’s revenue. It was hugely popular and still growing fast. It defined the company for millions of non-Mac customers. But we decided to eat our own. We had to make the iPhone, even though we knew it could, probably would, kill the iPod. It was an enormous risk. But with any disruption, the competition only wallows in Denial and Anger for so long. Eventually they reach Acceptance, and if they’ve got any life left in them, they’ll start working furiously to catch up to you. Or you may inspire a whole new wave of companies who can use your initial disruption as a stepping-stone to leapfrog you. When you can see the competition nipping at your heels, you have to do something new. You have to fundamentally change who you are as a business. You have to keep moving.

The lesson is about when and how vision and data should guide your decisions. In the very beginning, before there are customers, vision is more important than pretty much anything else. But you don’t have to figure out your vision all by yourself. In fact, you probably shouldn’t. Locking yourself alone in a room to create a manifesto of your single, luminous vision looks and feels indistinguishable from completely losing your mind. Get at least one person—but preferably a small group—to bounce ideas off of. Sketch out your mission together. Then fulfill it together. In the end, you may create something magical and world-changing. But then again, you might not.

If you wait for your product to be perfect, you will never finish. But it’s very hard to know when you’re done—when you need to stop building and just put it out into the world. When is it good enough? When are you close enough to your vision? When are the inevitable issues ignorable enough that you can live with them? Typically your vision is so much greater than what materializes in V1. There’s always another revision, always something else you want to do, change, add, tweak. When do you tear yourself away from what you’re making and just . . . stop? Ship it. Set it free. See what happens. Here’s the trick: write a press release. But don’t write it when you’re done. Write it when you start.

Then weeks or months or years later, as you’re getting close to finishing, as you’re debating what makes it in, what gets cut, what matters, what doesn’t—take out your press release. Read it. If you launched right now, could you more or less send that press release into the world and have it be mostly true? If the answer is yes, then congratulations: your product is probably ready, or at least pretty close. You have achieved the core of your vision. Everything else is most likely a “nice to have,” not a priority. Of

The external heartbeat, the constraint, drives the creativity, which fuels the innovation. Before you launch V1, your external deadline is always a little wobbly. There are too many unknown unknowns to write it in stone. So the way you keep everyone moving is by creating strong internal deadlines—heartbeats that your team sets their calendar to: 1. Team heartbeats: Each individual team makes its own rhythm and deadlines for delivering their piece of the puzzle. Then all the teams align for . . . 2. Project heartbeats: These are the moments when different teams sync to make sure the product still makes sense and all the pieces are moving at the right pace.

So keep your project small as long as you can. And don’t allocate too much money at the start. People do stupid things when they have a giant budget—they overdesign, they overthink. That inevitably leads to longer runways, longer schedules, and slower heartbeats. Much, much slower. Generally any brand-new product should never take longer than 18 months to ship—24 at the limit. The sweet spot is somewhere between 9 and 18 months. That applies to hardware and software, atoms and bits. Of course, there are things that take longer—research can take decades, for example. But even if it takes ten years to research a question, regular check-ins along the way ensure you’re still chasing the right answer. Or still asking the right question. Every

Look at Google. Its heartbeat is erratic, unpredictable. It works for them—mostly, sometimes—but it could work so much better. Google arguably only has one big external heartbeat each year at Google I/O—and most teams don’t bother aligning with it. They typically launch whatever they want whenever they want throughout the year, sometimes with real marketing behind it, other times with simple email campaigns. That means they can never communicate with their customers in a cohesive way about their entire organization. One team does this, another does that, their announcements either overlap or ignore obvious opportunities to create a narrative. And nobody, not customers, not even employees, can keep up. You need natural pauses so people can catch up to you—so customers and reviewers can give you feedback that you can then integrate into the next version. And so your team can understand what the customer doesn’t.

After you’ve launched your V1, then two to four times in that year, you should be announcing something to the world. New products, new features, new redesigns or updates. Something meaty that’s worth people’s attention. It doesn’t matter if you’re a big or tiny company; if you’re building hardware or apps, B2B or B2C, this is the right rhythm for customers. For humans. Any more announcements or big changes and you’ll start confusing people, any fewer and they’ll start forgetting about you. So have at least one really big launch and another one to three smaller launches every year. Apple’s external heartbeat used to thump loudest at the annual MacWorld conference in San Francisco. That event drove the pace of the whole company. The biggest announcements always had to happen at MacWorld.

Far too many people expect profitability, for the product and the business, right out of the gate. When I was at Philips I watched most new product categories and businesses on their slate get cancelled—even for products that were almost ready to ship. Built. Tested. Done. They would die on the vine because the top brass were protecting themselves. Any execs joining the team always wanted a near guarantee that new products would make money. [See also: Chapter 2.2: Data Versus Opinion: Most people don’t even want to acknowledge that there are opinion-driven decisions.] They demanded to be shown ahead of time that the unit and business economics of the product were sound. But that was impossible. They were asking us to predict the future with near 100 percent confidence. They were asking for proof that a baby could run a marathon before it had even learned to walk.

So when we started work on the Nest Protect smoke and CO alarm, our second product, you’d think it would be easier. That everything we’d built already would let us skip a few steps. But the second you start a new product, you have to hit the restart button—even if you’re at a big company. Sometimes it’s even harder the second time around because all the infrastructure that’s been built up for the first product gets in the way. So you’ll still need to go through at least three generations before you get it right. You make the product. You fix the product. You build the business. You make the product. You fix the product. You build the business. You make the product. You fix the product. You build the business. Every product. Every company. Every time.

Before you commit to executing on an idea—to starting a company or launching a new product—you should commit to researching it and trying it out first. Practice delayed intuition. This is a phrase coined by the brilliant, Nobel Prize–winning economist and psychologist Daniel Kahneman to describe the simple concept that to make better decisions, you need to slow down. The more amazing an idea seems—the more it tugs at your gut, blinds you to everything else—the longer you should wait, prototype it, and gather as much information about it as possible before committing. If this idea is going to eat up years of your life, you should at least take a few months to research it, build out detailed (enough) business and product development plans, and see if you’re still excited about it. See if it will chase you.

If you’re reading this book, you’re probably curious and engaged. And that means you will encounter many, many, many good ideas in your life. It seems like good ideas are everywhere. But the only way to know if they’re truly great—meaningful, disruptive, important, worth your time—is to learn enough about them to see their huge potential risks, the vast downsides, the icy blue Titanic-sized shitshow that lurks just below the surface. At that point you’ll probably set that idea aside. You’ll move on to other opportunities, other jobs and journeys. Until you realize that no matter what you do, you can’t stop thinking about that one idea. That’s when you stop running from it and start chipping away at the risks, one by one, until you’re confident enough that they’re worth taking.

In those very, very early days you want people who are there for the mission above all. You’re looking for passion, enthusiasm, and mindset. And you’re looking for seed crystals. Seed crystals are people who are so good and so well loved that they can almost single-handedly build large parts of your org. Typically they’re experienced leaders, either managers of large teams or super-ICs who everyone listens to. Once they’re in, a tidal wave of other awesome people will typically follow.

That’s what you need when you’re going to start a company or start a huge new project—a coach. A mentor. A source of wisdom and aid. Someone who can recognize a brewing problem and warn you about it before it happens. And someone who will quietly inform you that it’s dark right now because your head is jammed up your own ass, and who will give you a few tips to quickly remove it. You can make do without a cofounder. You can survive for a while without a team. But you can’t make it without a mentor. Find at least one person who you deeply trust and who believes in you. Not a life coach or an executive leadership consultant, not an agency, not someone who’s read a lot of case studies and is ready to charge you by the hour. And not your parents—they love you too much to be impartial. Find an operational, smart, useful mentor who has done it before, who likes you and wants to help.

So if you don’t have a CEO who will go to bat for you, if you don’t have compensation packages that will attract a great team, if you don’t have the resources of a giant company but all of the overhead, then don’t try to start your project inside someone else’s business. Your best option is probably to go it alone. Either let your idea die or start a real startup. Many startups are founded by entrepreneurs who just left big companies. They saw a need, pitched their bosses, got rejected, then struck out on their own. I watched it happen with Pierre Omidyar at General Magic. In his spare time, he wrote up some code to let people auction off collectibles to each other. When it started picking up steam, he asked if General Magic would be interested in it. No, thank you, was the answer; that’s a ridiculous idea. So he got a waiver from General Magic that said they claimed no rights to his work, quit, and started a small startup called eBay.

I’ve seen way too many people come out of the corporate world, decide to start a company, and be completely unprepared for what it takes. If they’ve never been on a small team starting from scratch, they’re often a fish out of water. They spend too much money too fast. Hire too many people. Don’t put in the time, don’t have the startup mentality, can’t make hard decisions, are buried by consensus thinking. They end up making mediocre products or nothing at all. Don’t let that be your story. If you want to start a company, if you want to start anything, to create something new, then you need to be ready to push for greatness. And greatness doesn’t come from nothing. You have to prepare. You have to know where you’re headed and remember where you came from. You have to make hard decisions and be the mission-driven “asshole.” [See also: Chapter 2.3: Assholes: Mission-driven “assholes.”

So you should always pay very close attention to how a VC treats you when they should be on their best behavior—when you’re getting along in the process and it seems like you might come to an agreement. If they start screwing around with you then, it should always ring alarm bells in your head. Here are a few other warning signs: VCs who promise everything under the sun to get you to sign, then don’t deliver. Often they’ll repeat themselves over and over, telling you just how much personalized attention you’ll get, how much help, how much this or that. Make sure to talk to other startups who’ve worked with them to find out what they actually offer when they’re not in sales-pitch mode. VCs who force the timing—who give you a term sheet to sign right here, right now—to make you feel panicked. A VC once gave me a term sheet as I was walking out of the meeting and pushed me to sign it on the spot. I asked if this was a used car dealership and told him I’d only sign after I read the terms. Greedy VCs who will invest only if they can take an outsized piece of your company. Typically a VC needs between 18 and 22 percent to make their model work—step carefully if they begin asking for more. And don’t assume they’re the only game in town—if your gut is telling you to keep looking, then keep looking. Some VCs court very inexperienced startups with the intention of pushing them around and telling them what to do rather than allowing the founder and CEO to run the company. Mentorship ...

So you don’t want your first pitch to be in front of the very top VC in your area. VCs talk to each other, so if one casts you aside, the others in that class may pass as well. If you can, pitch a “friendly” VC first—one that will give you feedback and help you improve and then, hopefully, welcome you back a second time. Remember that you don’t have to come in perfectly polished for that first meeting. You can say, “I’d like to give you an early look at this. Maybe it would be of interest to you. I’d love to get your comments on it.” Listen to their feedback and learn from it. You don’t have to take every word of advice or criticism, but you should understand the reasons behind it and adjust accordingly.

then hit an air gap and are near bankruptcy before desperately grabbing whatever funding they can get. Always start the pitching process when you don’t actually need money. You want to be in a position of strength, not buckling under the pressure and making bad choices. You should also remember to watch out for the holidays—August, Chinese New Year, Thanksgiving through New Year. People forget that VCs take vacations, too.

Here are a few more tips to keep in mind as you’re going through the process: Don’t play games. Just as you don’t want an investor who plays games with you, they will lose interest in you if you’re not up front and honest with them. Listen to people’s feedback on your pitch and your plan, change it when it makes sense, but hold on to your vision and your “why” and don’t rearrange yourself based on the whims of every investor you talk to. Be clear with investors on how much money you need and exactly how you’re going to spend it. Your job will be to create value for investors and ensure you’re hitting major milestones to raise the valuation of the business. That way the next time you raise money you won’t dilute existing investors, employees, or yourself. Entrepreneurs think their valuation should always increase, even when they don’t hit the milestones they set out for themselves. But investors are running a business—if you don’t deliver, you don’t get a valuation increase and your own stock position dwindles. You may also need to dilute more because you’ll need to give extra stock to employees to retain them through the hard times. Don’t assume you’ll get a valuation like other companies around you. Every investment stands on its own. Investors don’t like to see when founders or executives are “fully vested”—they want to make sure you have skin in the game. You may have to “re-vest” some of the shares you have already to demonstrate your commitment to new investors. Remem...

The best thing about angel investors is that they aren’t beholden to LPs. They simply believe in you. They want to help you. And there’s nobody looming over their head demanding an immediate profit.

Steve Jobs was clear about the lesson he’d learned and made sure we all learned it, too: any company that tries to do both B2B and B2C will fail. Is your customer Jim the Millennial, who saw your ad on Instagram then bought your product as a Christmas present for his sister? Or is it Jane the CIO of a Fortune 500 company who answered a cold email from your sales team, negotiated pricing and different product features for months, and now needs a team of customer success agents to train the five thousand employees under her? You cannot hold both those people in your head at the same time. You cannot make a single product for two completely opposite customers—for two different customer journeys.

But even these companies have a fully B2C brand. That’s the other rule: if you cater to both, your marketing still has to be B2C. You can never convince a regular person to use a B2B product that’s obviously not meant for them, but you can convince a company to use your product if you appeal to the human beings inside that company. That’s ultimately how, despite itself, Apple found itself firmly in the enterprise. After the iPhone launched, CIOs were slow to clear it for business use. And while CEOs usually cede anything IT-related to the CIO, this time the CEOs rose up and demanded change. They loved their iPhones. So did their employees. And they wanted to use them at the office. It was Apple’s success at creating something for consumers that led to their success in the enterprise.