Jay Marcyes

The minimum viable product has a lot of similarity to Gall's law. In that it's a simple product that's needed at launch, and complexity can be added over time.

"A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system."

John Gruber points out that seems to be the key to Apple's success...

If there’s a formula to Apple’s success over the past 10 years, that’s
it. Start with something simple and build it, grow it, improve it,
steadily over time. Evolve it.

What's really interesting about the minimum viable product, Gall's law, and Apple is that every other company, when attempting to compete against Apple, throws out the minimum viable product and starts out with something too complex, which never works out well for the other company (E.G., Microsoft's Zune).

Now back to the interview itself, my favorite quote was on the growth curve that every entrepreneur wants:

if you look at the traditional hockey stick shaped curve, it’s flat for an awful long time.

There was also this great thought on just randomly throwing features on the wall hoping they stick rather than testing and rapid prototyping in order to see if the feature is worth the overall investment time:

then we just stopped being able to drink our own Kool-Aid, because we were just wrong so often, it became harder and harder and harder for us to convince ourselves that it was a good financial investment to just randomly try the next new thing versus actually trying to say, “Hey, is there a way that we can increase the probability of having a successful feature.”

Also check out part 2 of the interview.