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There should be no separation between what the product will be and how it will be explained—the story has to be utterly cohesive from the beginning.

Your messaging is your product.

With every piece of marketing we made, we got better at marketing. I got better at marketing. The entire company got better at marketing.

the customer needs a voice on the team. Engineers like to build products using the coolest new technology. Sales wants to build products that will make them a lot of money. But the product manager’s sole focus and responsibility is to build the right products for their customers.

That’s the job.

The money is important. We were a small company with limited resources but we invested in marketing. We invested in creating beautiful things because we knew we’d amortize the hell out of them. We used every expensive, gorgeous photo in a thousand different places; we played every high-quality video everywhere we could. The team picked the elements that would have the most impact—that we could use and reuse for years—then spent the money to do them well.

Today, ten years later, Google Nest is still using some of the photos and assets we created before we even launched our company.

Not everyone can be a great designer, but everyone can think like one. Designing isn’t something in your DNA that you’re simply born with—it’s something you learn. You can bring in coaches and teachers, classes and books to help get everyone into the right mindset.

Here’s my advice: do not vacation like Steve Jobs.

Steve would typically take two weeks off, twice a year. We’d always dread those vacations at Apple. The first forty-eight hours were quiet. After that it would be a storm of nonstop calls.

Makers often focus on the shiny object—the product they’re building—and forget about the rest of the journey until they’re almost ready to deliver it to the customer. But customers see it all, experience it all.

The customer is always right, right?

Except customer panels can’t design for shit.

Follow your curiosity rather than a business school playbook about how to make money.

Even the greatest designers in the world can’t do it alone. Most people look at Apple design and say: this is the work of Steve Jobs. This is the work of Jony Ive. But that’s not remotely true. It’s never just one or two people pouring out their genius into a sketchbook, then handing it to some lowly employees to execute. Thousands upon thousands of people design for Apple—and it’s those teams that come together and create something truly unique and wonderful.

Imagine you’re looking through your closet, getting ready for a job interview: your customer is your interviewer, your product is yourself, and you’re designing your outfit for the day. Should you wear jeans? A button-down? Is the company culture formal or informal? What do you want to project about yourself? Making that decision is a design process. Getting to the best outcome requires design thinking, even if it’s unconscious.

And it all starts with “why.”

Why does this thing need to exist? Why does it matter? Why will people need it? Why will they love it?

To find that “why,” you need to understand the core of the problem you’re trying to solve, the real issue your customers face on a regular basis.

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.

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.

Delaying hard decisions, hoping problems will resolve themselves, or keeping pleasant but incompetent people on the team might make you feel better. It may give you the illusion of niceness. But it chips away at the company, bit by bit, and erodes the team’s respect for you.

A CEO has to recognize fantastic ideas—regardless of their source. But Apple was Steve’s baby and every other baby on Earth was uglier and dumber than his.

You don’t have to be an expert in everything. You just have to care about it.

No matter your leadership style, no matter what kind of person you are—if you want to be a great leader, you have to follow that one cardinal rule.

If you want to build a great company, you should expect excellence from every part of it. The output of every team can make or break the customer experience, so they should all be a priority.

As CEO, you spend almost all your time on people problems and communication. You’re trying to navigate a tangled web of professional relationships and intrigues

a well-seasoned, experienced, and business-practical lawyer who can communicate risk effectively can be worth their weight in gold.

The danger with traditional commission-based sales models is that they create two different cultures: a company culture and a sales culture.

Most lawyers excel at two things: saying “no” (or “maybe”) and billing you.

In this job, respect is always more important than being liked.

You can’t please everyone. Trying can be ruinous.

CEOs have to make incredibly unpopular decisions—lay people off, kill projects, rearrange teams.

many CEOs get so wrapped up in their own companies that they dismiss the competition. If it wasn’t invented here, it can’t possibly be any good.

It’s the kind of thinking that kills companies, that collapsed Nokia, that toppled Kodak.

Most people are happy with 90 percent good. Most leaders will take pity on their teams and just let it slide. But going from 90 to 95 percent is halfway to perfect. Getting the last part of the journey right is the only way to reach your destination.

If a leader gets distracted from the customer—if business goals and spreadsheets full of numbers for shareholders become a higher priority than customer goals—the whole organization can easily forget what’s most important.

People have this vision of what it’s like to be an executive or CEO or leader of a huge business unit. They assume everyone at that level has enough experience and savvy to at least appear to know what they’re doing. They assume there’s thoughtfulness and strategy and long-term thinking and reasonable deals sealed with firm handshakes.

But some days, it’s high school. Some days, it’s kindergarten.

Lawyers love to win—they will never give up the fight, will battle to the death. But this is business. Death is not an acceptable option. You don’t get a great ROI with death.

The old commission model is an anachronism. It’s outdated and rewards all the worst behavior. But it is useful for one thing: weeding out the assholes.

There are a lot of movies about terrible sales cultures—Boiler Room, The Wolf of Wall Street, Glengarry Glen Ross. They’re sensationalized, but not by much. The hypercompetition often breeds the kind of ego-driven, boozy, locker-room backslapping where everyone ends up at a strip joint, trying to drink each other under the table.

My dad was on commission but he would often sacrifice a sale in order to build a personal connection. The best salespeople are the ones who maintain relationships even if it means not making money that day.

Those are the salespeople you want on your team.

Instead of making the office so luxe that employees would never leave, we spent our money on meaningful benefits for them and their families—better health care, IVF, the stuff that really changes people’s lives.

Google’s culture works for them—there’s a reason a lot of people never leave the mother ship.

But that culture is enabled and driven by the fact that Google’s search and advertising business pretty much prints cash. Even Googlers call it the “Money Tree.” It’s turned Google into a place of wild abundance where anyone can more or less do anything—or sometimes nothing at all.

Or maybe your product will thrive but your business will disintegrate. You’ll work and work to create your own company, pour your life into the never-ending grinder of people problems and org design and meeting after meeting after meeting. And then you’ll hand this gleaming jewel over to people who promise to love it and polish it and help it shine—and they’ll let it slip through their fingers, fall to the dirt.

That happens sometimes.

In the end, there are two things that matter: products and people.

What you build and who you build it with.

The things you make—the ideas you chase and the ideas that chase you—will ultimately define your career. And the people you chase them with may define your life.

It’s incredibly special to create something together with a team. From nothing, from chaos, from a spark in someone’s head, to a product, a business, a culture.

When you’re a founder, leaving your company can feel like a death.

You pour so much of your time, your energy, yourself into this business and then all of a sudden it’s gone. A limb hacked off. A friend you’ve loved dearly and grown up with, gone forever.

They say “A captain should go down with the ship.” I say bullshit. If the ship is obviously sinking, then the passengers will probably notice—at that point it’s the job of the captain to stay aboard until everyone’s safely in the lifeboats. However, if you’re a CEO or high-level executive and you can see the water level rising before everyone else, then it’s your responsibility to signal clear and present danger to your team. And there’s no clearer sign that something ain’t right than you walking out the door.

That’s the real twist of the knife when you leave, especially if it’s contentious—the new regime usually chops your projects into pieces just to leave their mark and show that nothing of yours remains. They even take the pictures of the founders and early team off the walls. You have to know it’s coming and still walk away.

It’s your job as a CEO to constantly push your company forward—to come up with new ideas and projects to keep it fresh and alive. Then it’s your job to work hard on those new projects, to be as passionate about them as you were about the original problem you came there to solve. In the meantime, other people on your team focus on your core business, optimizing the pieces that are already set up.

The experience of being a Google employee is not normal. It’s not reality. Clive Wilkinson, the architect of the massive, luxurious Googleplex, has even come to recognize it. He now calls his most famous work “fundamentally unhealthy.” “Work-life balance cannot be achieved by spending all your life on a work campus. It’s not real. It’s not really engaging with the world in the way most people do,” he said.

All acquisitions come down to what you’re trying to do when you’re buying a company—do you want to buy a team? Technology? Patents? Product? Customer base? Business (that is, revenue)? A brand? Some other strategic assets?

Google is reluctant to fire people, many less-than-stellar performers just shift from team to team ad infinitum.

But most CEOs who are on the brink of failure just shut their eyes and wait for the crash. There’s often so much of their ego wrapped up in being a CEO, so much time and work. People spend their entire lives striving to lead a company. They make it the center of their self-worth and their identity.

You can’t assume acquisition will mean acculturation. That’s why Apple doesn’t really buy companies with large teams. They only acquire specific teams or technologies, usually very early in their life cycle when they’re pre-revenue. That way they can easily be absorbed and Apple never has to worry about culture.

When two fully formed companies merge, their cultures need to be compatible. Just like any relationship, everything ultimately comes down to how well people get along, what their goals are, what their priorities are, and what drives them crazy. Fifty to 85 percent of all mergers fail due to cultural mismatches.