This week, we are talking about the importance of the first customer to your new business and how it just changes everything. Today, I want to talk about a very important lesson that you learn from your customers. I'll do that right after this.

I started my first business when I was 24. It was a summer camp at Stanford and MIT. I stood there every evening, giving the children back to their parents, and I was talking to the parents and learning what they thought was going on. It was very different from what I thought they should be hearing. I was hoping they would be hearing about the great education that we were providing and the fun water balloon fight that we had had. No, they were talking about their children smiling for the first time, and I realized that we had found something very important. Our kids were very unhappy, and we were making them happy for the first time ever, and that's what we were really doing. We weren't really running a summer camp; we were making kids happy.