20VC: Biggest Lessons From Scaling Opendoor's Scaling Journey, How To Implement Systems for Growth & The Right Way To Structure Customer Discovery Processes with Julia DeWahl, Angel Investor

The customer is not meant to be the one coming up with a vision for your product. They're there to share their feelings, concerns, and frustrations. It's the responsibility of the product builder to synthesize what they've heard and envision the future.

Generalists tend to thrive in environments where there are a lot of nebulous problems to solve and where no overly specific skill set is needed. This happens time and time again within fast-growing startups.

People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

One of my favorite questions to ask customers is, 'How would you describe Opendoor to a friend?' ... It's best to use a customer's own words in marketing that's going back out to those same customers.

I would encourage everyone to start a startup. Why not? Most people don't think or dream big enough, and just going through the process would allow them to think about what they might work on and what it would take to create a company. I think that's really valuable thinking in and of itself.