Silicon Valley venture capitalists develop the lean startup “release early, release often” mantra as a way to de-risk investments and avoid investing significant capital without gauging market demand, resulting in narrowing / more incremental innovation. Individual creatives might bias towards smaller projects to de-risk the possibility of inv

But life is not a portfolio: not for a startup founder, and not for any individual. An entrepreneur cannot “diversify” herself: you cannot run dozens of companies at the same time and then hope that one of them works out well. Less obvious but just as important, an individual cannot diversify his own life by keeping dozens of equally possible caree

Yes, I take a different view when it came to my role as CFO and COO. Don’t just reduce risk and cut costs—make it everyone’s job to maximize expected value while reducing risk. Also, a lot of people think in terms of tradeoffs, of either/or. But anybody can do the either/or calculation. The companies that win are thinking and.

In life, we too often allow the illusory to triumph over the real. We focus too much on things and not enough on the intangibles that make things worthwhile; too much on success (a word I’ve never liked) and not enough on character , without which success is meaningless. Amidst the twenty-first-century pressures for immediate satisfaction and amass