What’s the essence of your product?

There’s a great interview in Inc Magazine with Jim Collins (from Built to Last and Good to Great fame) and in it he talks about the stages of entrepreneurship. But before talking about the stages, he gives a great quote from Steve Jobs before he returned to Apple:

“I invited Steve to my entrepreneurship class at Stanford in 1988 or ‘89. He was doing NeXT at the time. He said, “We aren’t creating computers. We are creating bicycles for the mind.” That was his phrase. He said the most efficient locomotive vehicle is a bicycle, and you could create a bicycle for the mind. It just happened to be a personal computer. Now, that way of looking at a business is very different from thinking.”

I love thinking beyond just a single product, and instead in terms of the essence of what you’re trying to do. Jobs was trying to build a better tool for the mind. Us? We’re just trying to make your small pieces a little less loosely joined.

We’ll let you know when we’re ready.