“Live in the future, then build what's missing.” Essay: How to Get Startup Ideas, 2012 visionstartups
“The best startup ideas seem at first like bad ideas.” Essay: How to Get Startup Ideas, 2012 startupsvision
“The best thing software can be is easy, but the way to do this is to get the defaults right, not to limit users' choices.” executioncustomers
“Software has to be designed by hackers who understand design, not designers who know a little about software. If you can't design software as well as implement it, don't start a startup.” executionstartupsproduct
“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 can tell it isn't.” leadershipriskmindset
“If you try to solve a hard problem, the question is not whether you will use a powerful enough language, but whether you will (a) use a powerful language, (b) write a de facto interpreter for one, or (c) yourself become a human compiler for one.” mindset
“As a rule of thumb, the more qualifiers there are before the name of a country, the more corrupt the rulers. A country called The Socialist People's Democratic Republic of X is probably the last place in the world you'd want to live.” leadership
“A programming language is for thinking of programs, not for expressing programs you've already thought of.” mindset
“I've seen occasional articles about how to manage programmers. Really there should be two articles: one about what to do if you are yourself a programmer, and one about what to do if you're not. And the second could probably be condensed into two words: give up.” executionleadership
“At any given time, there are only about ten or twenty places where hackers most want to work, and if you aren't one of them, you won't just have fewer great hackers, you'll have zero.” mindset
“Google never did any advertising. They're like dealers; they sell the stuff, but they know better than to use it themselves.” risk
“European public opinion will apparently tolerate people being fired in industries where they really care about performance. Unfortunately the only industry they care enough about so far is soccer.” leadership
“Why do people move to suburbia? To have kids! So no wonder it seemed boring and sterile. The whole place was a giant nursery, an artificial town created explicitly for the purpose of breeding children.” executionleadershipinnovation
“Nerds serve two masters. They want to be popular, certainly, but they want even more to be smart. And popularity is not something you can do in your spare time, not in the fiercely competitive environment of an American secondary school.” executionmindset
“While the nerds were being trained to get the right answers, the popular kids were being trained to please.” mindset
“If you leave a bunch of eleven-year-olds to their own devices, what you get is Lord of the Flies.” mindset
“The other thing that's different about the real world [compared to high school] is that it's much larger. In a large enough pool, even the smallest minorities can achieve a critical mass if they clump together.” mindset
“Nerds aren't losers. They're just playing a different game, and a game much closer to the one played in the real world.” mindset
“There's no switch inside you [high school students] that magically flips when you turn a certain age or graduate from some institution. You start being an adult when you decide to take responsibility for your life. You can do that at any age.” execution
“It's not so important what you [high school students] work on, so long as you're not wasting your time. Work on things that interest you and increase your options, and worry later about which you'll take.” mindset
“The world changes fast, and the rate at which it changes is itself speeding up. In such a world it's not a good idea to have fixed plans.” mindset
“The most dangerous form of procrastination is unacknowledged type-B procrastination [putting off important things to do unimportant things], because it doesn't feel like procrastination. You're "getting things done." Just the wrong things.” executionfailure
“If you work on something you can finish in a day or two, you can expect to have a nice feeling of accomplishment fairly soon. If the reward is indefinitely far in the future, it seems less real.” vision
“Another reason people don't work on big projects is, ironically, fear of wasting time. What if they fail? Then all the time they spent on it will be wasted. (In fact it probably won't be, because work on hard projects almost always leads somewhere.)” executionleadershipfailure
“I think the way to "solve" the problem of procrastination is to let delight pull you instead of making a to-do list push you.” executionmindset
“The first type of judgement is the type where judging you is the end goal... But in fact there is a second much larger class of judgements where judging you is only a means to something else.” mindset
“The more you realize that most judgements are greatly influenced by random, extraneous factors—that most people judging you are more like a fickle novel buyer than a wise and perceptive magistrate—the more you realize you can do things to influence the outcome.” executionleadership