10 lessons from founders for building a successful startup

1. User experience is everything

It always has been, but it's still undervalued and under-invested. If you don't know user-centered design, study it. Hire people who know it. Obsess it. Live and breathe it. Get your whole company on board.

–Evan Williams, Twitter co-founder

2. No growth hack, brilliant marketing idea, or sales team can save you long-term if you don't have a sufficiently good product.

–Sam Altman, Y Combinator president

3. Quality is more important than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles

This couldn't be any more accurate. At first, they all want the same thing: more website traffic. Well, more traffic doesn't necessarily mean more sales and revenue. Focusing on quality traffic over quantity always produces better results. Less is often more.

–Steve Jobs, Founder of Apple Inc

4. Make something people want" includes making a company that people want to work for.

–Sahil Lavingia, Gumroad founder

5. As an entrepreneur, you have to be OK with failure

–Alexa von Tobel, LearnVest founder

6. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.

–Elon Musk, SpaceX and Tesla Motors CEO

7. We must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want or what we think they should want.

–Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup

8. Don't start a company unless it's an obsession and something you love.

–Mark Cuban, serial entrepreneur and investor

9. Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough

Facebook was struggling with monetization when the majority of its user base became mobile, but its team moved fast and now the company is beating Wall Street's expectations.

–Mark Zukerberg, CEO at Meta

10. If you're competitor-focused, you have to wait until there is a competitor doing something.

Being customer-focused allows you to be more pioneering.

–Jeff Bezos, Executive Chairman of Amazon