"Hype gets in the way. Every ounce of energy invested in vanity metrics and success theater could have gone into building real value instead. Real entrepreneurship - not the caricature from pop culture and mass media - is boring, tedious, and extremely difficult. It’s anything but cool: product prioritization meetings, deciding which customers to listen to and which to ignore, and valiantly trying to keep the vision alive in the face of contradictory facts. To recruit people into that business, the real innovation business, should be our goal. I hope all of us are ready to reach out to those founders and would-be founders and nurture and support them through the hard times. That will create real value."

Ries (via brycedotvc)