So I do have kind of an extensive questionnaire, so we just touch on a few things, but one thing I think first and foremost is, what are your values? And I think it's really essential to do some sort of values clarification exercise. You can find a ton of them online. You can find a list of values and just pull out your core values and just compare them with each other because when you are aligned, it's great. Or when you're adjacent, it's also great. I might care a lot about excellence, Lenny, you might care a lot about learning. Fantastic. Those are great values that we can kind of, go together. I might care about excellence and you might care about work-life balance. Wow, let's talk about that because I think it's going to be really important as we go through our startup journey that we understand both of us, what does work-life balance mean and what does excellence mean?

One of the founders I worked with, he would text or Slack his co-founder on weekends and the co-founder wouldn't respond. And that was extremely frustrating to the person, to the co-founder I was talking to. And it turned out, after they finally addressed it, it really was about wanting to have some downtime and some, quote unquote, "Balance."

I'm so great at bringing things up." But the person who's close to you might say, "You seethe until you're ready to bring something up and it's really uncomfortable in the seething period." So it just gives you a little more self-awareness about how you actually handle conflict.

The other person might be a person who totally wants to talk about the conflict but wants to let it settle first and wants to also go through their own thinking process about what's important to them and might actually feel like they've resolved it themselves without having to have a conversation with you.

And if you're the person who's like, "Let's talk about it, let's talk about it, let's talk about it." And they're like, "I'm working through it myself." Now you have conflict over the conflict and it just turns into dynamic that's not necessary.

in terms of innovation and economic output, the people in these regions are about eight times more productive than the average person. These regions in 2008 were: (1) Greater Tokyo (2) Boston-Washington corridor (3) Chicago to Pittsburgh (4) Amsterdam-Brussels-Antwerp (5) Osaka-Nagoya (6) London and South East England (7) Milan to Turin (8) Charlotte to Atlanta (9) Southern California (LA to San Diego) (10) Frankfurt to Mannheim. Silicon Valley, Paris, Berlin, and Denver-Boulder also deserve a mention as having some of the highest rates of innovation per person.

Almost all startups are fragile initially. And that's one of the biggest things inexperienced founders and investors (and reporters and know-it-alls on forums) get wrong about them. They unconsciously judge larval startups by the standards of established ones. They're like someone looking at a newborn baby and concluding "there's no way this tiny creature could ever accomplish anything." It's harmless if reporters and know-it-alls dismiss your startup. They always get things wrong. It's even ok if investors dismiss your startup; they'll change their minds when they see growth. The big danger is that you'll dismiss your startup yourself. I've seen it happen. I often have to encourage founders who don't see the full potential of what they're building. Even Bill Gates made that mistake. He returned to Harvard for the fall semester after starting Microsoft. He didn't stay long, but he wouldn't have returned at all if he'd realized Microsoft was going to be even a fraction of the size it turned out to be. [4] The question to ask about an early stage startup is not "is this company taking over the world?" but "how big could this company get if the founders did the right things?" And the right things often seem both laborious and inconsequential at the time. Microsoft can't have seemed very impressive when it was just a couple guys in Albuquerque writing Basic interpreters for a market of a few thousand hobbyists (as they were then called), but in retrospect that was the optimal path to dominating microcomputer software. And I know Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia didn't feel like they were en route to the big time as they were taking "professional" photos of their first hosts' apartments. They were just trying to survive. But in retrospect that too was the optimal path to dominating a big market.