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With the analytics tools today, it’s easy to measure hundreds if not thousands of different metrics for your business. Cutting through all the chaff to determine the most important or insightful metrics can be quite a challenge.

Below are the ten metrics I’ve found to be most useful in board meetings. They answer the questions of how should a startup founder might measure the business at the highest level. You should have many more metrics than these, but I’ve highlighted the ones that I recommend presenting to your board and reviewing each week.

If at any time in the past ten years, you might have asked someone at Intuit about the size of the QuickBooks user base, they would have told you the same number: about 4M.

This figure hasn’t grown because Intuit’s customer base, the small-and-medium business market, is a leaky bucket. On the small end of the spectrum, about 750,000 businesses are created each year and about the same number fail. On the upper end of the spectrum, successful medium sized businesses (and the larger, more valuable Quickbooks customers) outgrow Intuit’s products and upgrade to enterprise accounting packages provided by Oracle and others of their ilk. It’s no surprise then that QuickBooks suffers from high churn rates, characteristic of the SMB market.

Over the past few weeks, there has been a new refrain among consumer mobile startups that I’ve met with: we’re designing for normal people or normals as Chris Dixon would put it.

There are a few reasons for this trend. First, there is a movement towards great design. Second, there is a wave to reinvent and reimagine core applications of the mobile phones. The apps shipped with the standard OS were ports of their desktop counterparts. Only now, after using these cloned applications for a while, do we understand how email, phone, calendar, etc should evolve. Third, machine learning technologies make magical experiences possible like priority inbox or Google Now.

You fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders - The most famous of which is “never get involved in a land war in Asia”

There is a land war being fought on the web and it’s for files and filesystems. Incumbents and startups alike are duking it out. And things are really starting to get interesting.

The startups, Dropbox and Evernote, reinvented the file system as a synchronized, cross platform file system abstracting the hardware and the data. Now they are moving up the stack. Dropbox’s acquisition of Mailbox and renewed focus on photographs and attachments and Evernote’s every growing battery of point applications like Skitch, Food, Hello and Peek aim to drive further file creation and user engagement within their notebooks.

An entrepreneur shared this quote with me a few weeks ago.

The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.
William Gibson, quoted in The Economist, December 4, 2003

I remembered it this morning when I drove past a Google self-driving car and then again a few minutes later when a Tesla whipped past me and a third time during the same commute when I dictated an email to my mobile phone. Sometimes living in the Bay Area does feel like the living in future.

Steve Sinofsky, executive at Microsoft for 24 years penned an insightful post on the five data biases plaguing product decisions. It can be easy for any founder, product manager, marketer or engineer accept a data point at face value as the rationale behind a decision.

But understanding the nuances and biases of the data, questioning the data, is often just as important as the result. The corollary point argued in his post is data isn’t strategy - data can’t be blindly used to inform product design and decision making because the data might be “lies, damned lies and statistics”.

In social media, like the real world, there’s quite a lot of gossip going on behind your back. At least on the Internet, you can measure it.

Dubbed dark social, this “invisible” sharing brings 40% of the visitors to my blog and similar amounts of traffic to other content sites. The Atlantic Monthly, which receives 5M monthly uniques, reports 60% of traffic from dark social

Like its distant cousin dark energy, dark social is a massive and to date little understood force despite its importance. Dark social clicks originate from instant messages, emails containing links and links embedded in tweets opened in TweetDeck among other sources.

During the life of a startup, the question of outsourcing can arise frequently whether for PR, marketing, product design, sales or engineering.

Outsourcing can be very attractive: consultants bring new points of view, relevant experience and (potentially) immediate results. Of course, consultants charge high fees and after their contract expires they leave with their knowledge and insights in tow.

Founders may be challenged when deciding when and what to outsource. To simplify the decision, reflect on your startup’s key competencies needed to win your market. Like people, startups must focus on a few key skills to be successful. Typically, startups win share by focusing on their strength: product design, sales effectiveness, marketing deft or technology advantages.

In a world of socially curated news, there is no place for RSS. I wrote last year:

Social streams solve the problem most RSS readers faced: the inbox with 1000+ items to read and no way to sift through them.

Socially curated news syndicated through social networks (Facebook, Twitter) and content networks (LinkedIn, Quibb, HackerNews) solves the relevance problem that RSS never could address.

Brian Shih, former Google Reader PM, wrote an excellent, passionate post-mortem on the product on Quora, where he underscores the importance of the social forces at play on Google Reader.

How much is the most valuable brand in the world, Coca-Cola worth? $77.8B. That’s 45% of the company’s market cap.

Often times, winners create advantages in a market through brands. These brands evoke emotions within consumers: feelings of trust (Visa), of aspiration (Nike), of adventure (RedBull). And if the brand is strong enough, it replaces the generic term: tissues/Kleenex, internet search/Google, glass cleaner/Windex.

In Silicon Valley, we tend to believe that better products win markets. It’s atypical to overhear a conversation at Blue Bottle Coffee or at YCombinator about brand building - brand attributes, values, positioning. Instead, our exchanges focus more on technology and more recently, design.