We do what we know will work. Whether it's deciding on new products to build, how to allocate resources, or technologies to use, we don't take unnecessary risks.

How do we know what works? We listen to our gut. Our experience, intuition, and knowledge combined give us a very good idea of whether an outcome will be positive. Data is nice, but if we're relying on data because our gut doesn't tell us, we're gambling.

Doing what is certain isn't the only reasonable way to run a business. There's nothing wrong with "go big or go home" if you're okay with going home. But we aren't. Early on, we decided there would be no starting over. We would not spend years of our lives building a product or company that failed.

A consequence of making failure an unlikely outcome is, on average, a reduction in speed and magnitude of success. In practical terms it means growing off revenue rather than investment. That's an acceptable trade-off for us. What's most important is we're always making forward progress and we minimize cases where in retrospect we feel we wasted time.

Over time, what we know will work changes. We now know things that will work that we didn't when we started. And, of course, we learn from our failures. Many of our failures, it turns out, were due to not listening to our gut.