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My friend, Carmine Gallo, has written a book called The Apple Experience: Secrets to Building Insanely Great Customer Loyalty. The Apple Store is the most profitable retailer in America, generating an average of $5,600 per square foot and attracting more than 20,000 visitors a week.

In the decade since Steve Jobs and former head of retail, Ron Johnson, decided to reimagine the retail experience, the Apple Store not only reimagined and reinvented retail, it blew up the model entirely and started from scratch. In his research for The Apple Experience, Carmine discovered ten things that the Apple Store can teach any business in any industry to be more successful:

1. Stop selling stuff. When Steve Jobs first started the Apple Store he did not ask the question, “How will we grow our market share from 5 to 10 percent?” Instead he asked, “How do we enrich people’s lives?” Think about your vision. If you were to examine the business model for most brands and retailers and develop a vision around it, the vision would be to “sell more stuff.” A vision based on selling stuff isn’t very inspiring and leads to a very different experience than the Apple Retail Store created.

2. Enrich lives. The vision behind the Apple Store is “enrich lives,” the first two words on a wallet-sized credo card employees are encouraged to carry. When you enrich lives magical things start to happen. For example, enriching lives convinced Apple to have a non-commissioned sales floor where employees feel comfortable spending as much time with a customer as the customer desires. Enriching lives led Apple to build play areas (the “family room”) where kids could see, touch and play on computers. Enriching lives led to the creation of a “Genius Bar” where trained experts are focused on “rebuilding relationships” as much as fixing problems.

3. Hire for smiles. The soul of the Apple Store is in its people. They are hired, trained, motivated and taught to create magical and memorable moments for their customers. The Apple Store values a magnetic personality as much, if not more so, than technical proficiency. The Apple Store cares less about what you know than it cares about how much you love people.

4. Celebrate diversity. Mohawks, tattoos, piercings are all acceptable among Apple Store employees. Apple hires people who reflect the diversity of their customers. Since they are more interested in how passionate you are, your hairstyle doesn’t matter. Early in the Apple Store history, they also learned that former teachers make the best salespeople because they ask a lot of questions. It’s not uncommon to find former teachers, engineers, and artists at an Apple Store. Apple doesn’t look for someone who fits a mold.

5. Unleash inner genius. Teach your customers something they never knew they could do before, and they’ll reward you with their loyalty. For example, the Apple Store offers a unique program to help people understand and enjoy their computers: One to One. The $99 one-year membership program is available with the purchase of a Mac. Apple Store instructors called “creatives” offer personalized instruction inside the Apple Store. Customers can learn just about anything: basics about the Mac operating system; how to design a website; enjoying, sharing, and editing photos or movies; creating a presentation; and much more. The One to One program was created to help build customers for life. It was designed on the premise that the more you understand a product, the more you enjoy it, and the more likely you are to build a long-term relationship with the company. Instructors are trained to provide guidance and instruction, but also to inspire customers, giving them the tools to make them more creative than they ever imagined.

6. Empower employees. I spent one hour talking to an Apple Store specialist about kids, golf, and my business. We spent about ten minutes talking about the product (a MacBook Air). I asked the employee whether he would be reprimanded for spending so much time with one customer. “Not at all,” he replied. “If you have a great experience, that’s all that matters.” Apple has a non-commissioned sales floor for a reason—employees are not pressured to “make a sale.” Instead they are empowered to do what they believe is the right thing to do.

7. Sell the benefit. Apple Store specialists are taught to sell the benefit behind products and to customize those benefits for the customer. For example, I walked to the iPad table with my two young daughters and told the specialist I was considering my first iPad. In a brilliant move, the specialist focused on my two daughters, the ‘secondary’ customer who can influence a purchase. He let the girls play on separate devices. On one device he played the movie, Tangled, and on the other device he brought up a Disney Princess coloring app. My girls were thrilled and, in one memorable moment, my 6-year-old turned me to and said, “I love this store!” It’s easy to see why. Instead of touting “speeds and feeds,” the specialist taught us how the device could improve our lives.

8. Follow the steps of service. The Apple Store teaches its employees to follow five steps in each and every interaction. These are called the Apple five steps of service. They are outlined by the acronym A-P-P-L-E. They are: Approach with a customized, warm greeting. Probe politely to understand the customer’s needs. Present a solution the customer can take home today. Listen for and address unresolved questions. End with a fond farewell and an invitation to return.

9. Create multisensory experiences. The brain loves multi-sensory experiences. In other words, people enjoy being able to see, touch, and play with products. Walk into an Apple Store upon opening and you’ll see all the notebook computer screens perfectly positioned slightly beyond 90-degree angles. The position of the computer lets you see the screen (which is on and loaded with content) but forces you to touch the computer in order to adjust it. Every device in the store is working and connected to the Internet. Spend as much time as you’d like playing with the products—nobody will kick you out. Creatives who give One-to-One workshops do not touch the computer without asking for permission. They want you to do it. The sense of touch helps create an emotional connection with a product.

10. Appeal to the buying brain. Clutter forces the brain to consume energy. Create uncluttered environments instead. The Apple Store is spacious, clean, well-lit, and uncluttered. Cables are hidden from view and no posters on placed on the iconic glass entrances. Computer screens are cleaned constantly. Keep the environment clean, open, and uncluttered.

The three pillars of enchantment are likability, trustworthiness, and quality. Apple’s engineers take care of quality, and the Apple Store experience personifies likability and trustworthiness. I’ve never left an Apple store without being enchanted—in fact, I seldom leave the Apple Store on University Avenue in Palo Alto without being enchanted and buying something too! Resisting Carmine’s book, like resisting an Apple Store, is futile, so just get it here: The Apple Experience: Secrets to Building Insanely Great Customer Loyalty

Over this weekend I celebrated my tenth anniversary as a Venture Capitalist. When I joined August Capital 10 years ago, things weren't so different than they are today. There had been a period of real exuberance in venture investing but it had come to an unceremonious end. The momentum in momentum investing had run out of steam. And it was back to the basics in Venture Capital -- fund smart folks building interesting companies that didn't require a pile of cash. I felt grateful then, as I do today, that I had joined a firm that focused on the fundamentals of Venture Capital and company building.

August Capital has always been a big picture firm -- build great companies for the long run and everything else will work out in the wash. I don't think that ten years ago I quite understood just how long the "long run" really was. But Venture Capital is definitely a long term business. There are hundreds (if not thousands) of opportunities in any given year to be short sighted and to optimize for the near term, but those decisions will assuredly come back to bite you. Venture Capital is about thinking long term. Venture Capital is about paying it forward. Venture Capital is about being honest, and forthcoming, and helpful and hard working. And, in the long run, you may have the good fortune to fund a great company or two along the way.

I was chatting with one of my partners recently about the fact that I wanted to write a blog post looking back at my first ten years in the venture business but that I wasn't quite sure what wisdom I could impart. He said, "that's because you're just getting started." Just getting started? Ten years and I'm just getting started? It seemed hard to imagine. Yet he was certainly right. Ten years in Venture Capital is a drop in the bucket.

In my first ten years in the Venture business, I have funded 15 companies -- that's one and a half companies a year. And of those companies, the majority were funded in the latter half of the decade and are really just getting started. While there are a few anomalies out there, the vast majority of "meaningfully large" companies require 6, 8, even 10 years to get to scale. Which means that only my earliest investments have any hope of being "meaningfully large" at this point (I guess the good news is that a half dozen of my companies will likely do around $50M or more in revenue this year, which is certainly progress, but is in no way conclusive). It probably takes about two decades for enough companies to ripen on the vine before one can know with any degree of certainty if he's going to be a good wine maker or not.

One of my partners is fond of saying that success in the Venture business is largely a product of effective pattern matching -- observing the characteristics of successful businesses and then finding new businesses that match those characteristics in material ways. After a decade in the Venture business, it is abundantly clear that he's right; pattern matching is among the most powerful tools we VCs have. Yet without a playbook full of patterns, there's not much matching to be done. So, arguably, the first decade in Venture is all about pattern acquisition so that the second decade might be about successful pattern matching. [1] I'm looking forward to that second decade. I've got some great patterns at this point and can't wait to put them to good use.

I am certainly grateful for the incredible first decade I've had in the venture business. I owe my partners a huge debt of gratitude for betting on a punky young lawyer with no business experience and a penchant for running his mouth off. It has been my tireless effort to prove that gamble a wise one. I also owe the entrepreneurs with whom I work an equally large debt of gratitude. They have trusted me to join their teams and help steward their companies through the challenging gauntlets that each has and will face. I don't take that responsibility lightly. I value their friendships and their trust, which I hope I earn each and every day.

I may be just getting started, but I've got one hell of a running start. I look forward to my next decade with great partners like Dave Marquardt, John Johnston, Andy Rappaport, Vivek Mehra, and Howard Hartenbaum, and phenomenal entrepreneurs like Selina Tobacawalla, Al Lieb, Josh Silverman, Rene Lacerte, Martin Gates, Jim Heeger, James Currier, Rick Marini, Stan Chudnovsky, Travis Kalanick, Ben and Mena Trott, Barak Berkowitz, Chris Alden, Matt Sanchez, Dave Lerman, Kevin Sladek, Bob Philips, Bharath Kumar, Denis Stradford, Frank Rhode, Erik Swan, Michael Baum, Rob Das, Godfrey Sullivan, Paul Wasserman, Alessandro Isolani, Kevin Johnson, Touraj Parang, Philip Mobin, Konstantin Guericke, Bahman Koohestani, Bill Trenchard, Jim Everingham, Lloyd Tabb, Maynard Webb, Dave Sifry, Richard Jalichandra, Paul Ryan, Tom Lamb, Tom Furphy, Paul Hanson, Susan Wu, Don Neufeld, Rex Ishibashi, Max Ventilla, Damon Horowitz, Garrett Camp, Geoff Smith, Amit Kapur, Steve Pearman, Jim Benedetto, Bill Clerico, Rich Aberman, Ashvin Kumar, Chris Estreich, Philip Kaplan, and the thousands of other entrepreneurs in my portfolio who are working tirelessly to build amazing companies that matter. I consider myself incredibly lucky to be going into my second decade as a Venture Capitalist. I used to say "it's a great job if you can get it." Now I joke "it's a great job if you can keep it." I plan on keeping it for many years to come.

[1] Unfortunately, one of the most powerful patterns one can have in his playbook is the "Failed Company" pattern, but it's an expensive one to acquire. I suppose this is why partnerships are so helpful. I get to borrow the playbooks of my partners who have been in the business for three decades or more. It would be hard to overstate how helpful that really is.

I am fortunate to work with one of the best online marketing teams in the country. As a result, we get people almost daily asking us if we can help their company with it’s online marketing efforts.

However, we have been reluctant to do consulting because we go after a project to help build it into a highly successful company for the long term. We don’t want to work on a project for 4-5 months and then move on. Plus, it just isn’t possible to easily scale high level online marketing work. It takes high level people actually doing the work, so we are just very limited in the number of companies we could help.

A few years ago we were approached with an option that gave us equity in the company in exchange for our services and it was a great option for us. Since then we have done it with a few more companies and have found it can be extremely beneficial for companies we work with, but it is also something we enjoy. We get to help take part in building and growing a company, but we don’t have to deal with the day to day things. So we get to focus on the areas where we are the strongest.

For now, we are accepting up to one new deal per quarter and have launched a website to explain the concept. so check it out at Growth Partner.com.

My team and I have done a couple of partnerships with companies where we help them with their online marketing