Paying attention is more important to reliability than moving slowly. Because he pays close attention, a Navy pilot can land a 40,000 lb. aircraft at 140 miles per hour on a pitching carrier deck, at night, more safely than the average teenager can c...
The recipe for great work is: very exacting taste, plus the ability to gratify it.
Users are a double-edged sword. They can help you improve your language, but they can also deter you from improving. So choose your users carefully, and be slow to grow their number. Having users is like optimization: the wise course is to delay it.
The most important thing is not to let fundraising get you down. Startups live or die on morale. If you let the difficulty of raising money destroy your morale, it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I suppose I should learn Lisp, but it seems so foreign.
A programming language is for thinking about programs, not for expressing programs you've already thought of. It should be a pencil, not a pen.
For the most ambitious young people, the corporate ladder is obsolete.
Small-business customers are very conservative and very cheap. We don't have to explain ourselves for the most part.
We don't have to go that far to sell our beer because our immediate accounts sell so much. Places that sold 10 cases before, now they're selling 30.
In the startup world, 'not working' is normal.
If you really understand something, you can say it in the fewest words, instead of thrashing about.
When Facebook first started, and it was just a social directory for undergrads at Harvard, it would have seemed like such a bad startup idea, like some student side project.
There are plenty of smart people who get nowhere.
Some people just get what they want in the world.
Startups often have to do dubious things.
Empirically the way you get a product visionary as CEO is for him to found the company and not get fired.
One startup I dream of funding is the one that kills the record companies.
At every period of history, people have believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you risked ostracism or even violence by saying otherwise. If our own time were any different, that would be remarkable. As far as I...
If you leave a bunch of eleven-year-olds to their own devices, what you get is Lord of the Flies. Like a lot of American kids, I read this book in school. Presumably it was not a coincidence. Presumably someone wanted to point out to us that we were ...
Being strong-willed is not enough, however. You also have to be hard on yourself. Someone who was strong-willed but self-indulgent would not be called determined. Determination implies your willfulness is balanced by discipline.
