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The Value of the Soak

In 2006, I gave a presentation at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas. My pitch was this: in creating a startup, you’re going to be faced with a thousand seemingly inconsequential decisions. Tucked among those thousands of decisions are five decisions that actually matter. These decisions will change the face of your company. What I didn’t say was that I believe it’s next to impossible to figure out which decisions matter and which ones do not.

How depressing.

Here’s the deal: you can spend a lot of energy deciding what the big decisions might be, but that’s much less important than making the decision. There’s ...

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