There are few sources of energy so powerful as a procrastinating college student.
You can’t distinguish your group by doing things that are rational and believing things that are true. If you want to set yourself apart from other people you have to do things that are arbitrary and believe things that are false.
People who write about politics, whether on the left or the right, have a consistent bias: they take politics seriously.
The recipe for great work is: very exacting taste, plus the ability to gratify it.
It’s hard to do a really good job on anything you don’t think about in the shower.
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.
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.
If you’ll laugh about something one day, you may as well start now.
Dressing up is inevitably a substitute for good ideas. It is no coincidence that technically inept business types are known as ‘suits’.
What I tell founders is not to sweat the business model too much at first. The most important task at first is to build something people want. If you don’t do that, it won’t matter how clever your business model is.
It’s hard to say exactly what it is about face-to-face contact that makes deals happen, but whatever it is, it hasn’t yet been duplicated by technology.