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This is probably the only business plan ever written for a corporation that was actually correct in hindsight.
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What about business plans? Should we be writing business plans as founders? Google wrote a business plan. There was
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a run by a fellow named Solar and I saw it years later and it was actually correct. And I told Solar that this is
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probably the only business plan ever written for a corporation that was actually correct in hindsight. So what I
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prefer to do and this is how I teach it at Stanford is try to figure out what the world looks like in 5 years and then
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try to figure out what you're going to do in one year and then do it right. So if you can basically say this is the
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direction, these are the things we're going to achieve within one year and then run against that as hard goals, not
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simple goals, but hard goals, then you'll get there. And the general rule, at least in a consumer business, is if
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you can get an audience of 10 or 100 million people, you can make lots of money, right? So if you give me any
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business that has no revenue and 100 million people, I can find a way to to monetize that with advertising and
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sponsorships and donations and so forth and so on. Focus on getting the user right and everything else will follow.
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The Google phrase is focus on the user and everything else is handled.