A powerful piece of advice from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang encourages a cycle of impact. First, find a way to work on the most crucial projects ("get on the critical path"). Once your involvement becomes a bottleneck, your next job is to enable others and remove yourself ("get off it") to tackle the next challenge.

The traditional approach of improving every component of a system is a reductionist fallacy. A system's performance is dictated by its single biggest constraint (the weakest link). Strengthening other, non-constrained links provides no overall benefit to the system's output and is therefore wasted effort.

During capital-constrained periods, founders must be ruthless in their focus. Every dollar and hour should go towards "killer experiments"—those that directly accrue value and hit the specific milestones required for the next fundraising round. "Cool science" that doesn't advance these goals is a luxury companies can't afford.

Instead of mimicking slow, natural signaling (a process taking over a decade), Ovelle's approach directly activates gene regulatory factors that initiate meiosis. This method is significantly faster—starting the process in just 12 days—and offers more precise control over cell generation.

Not all tasks are equal. Focus on "compounding" activities—small, high-leverage actions like creating templates or establishing processes. These tasks, like compounding interest, deliver growing returns over time and create a bigger impact than completing numerous low-value items, fundamentally shifting how teams approach their work.

Because in vitro gametogenesis is so new, there's no pre-existing talent pool. Ovelle's hiring strategy prioritizes finding intelligent scientists who can learn quickly. Scientific co-founder Merrick Smela emphasizes that his ability to train these new hires is a critical contribution to the company's success.

The temptation is to use the most advanced technology available. A more effective approach is to first define the specific biological question and then select the simplest possible model that can answer it, thus avoiding premature and unnecessary over-engineering.

Instead of arguing for more time, product leaders should get stakeholder buy-in on a standardized decision-making process. The depth and rigor of each step can then be adjusted based on available time, from a two-day workshop to an eight-month study, without skipping agreed-upon stages.

Applying the Theory of Constraints, a startup's growth is limited by a single bottleneck in its factory (pipeline, sales, or delivery). Improving onboarding is useless if you have one sales call a month. All focus must be on solving that single constraint to make progress.