Fortunes are built during the down market and collected in the up market.
There is no luck, you work hard and study things intently. If you do that for long and hard enough you're successful.
You have to have a big vision and take very small steps to get there. You have to be humble as you execute but visionary and gigantic in terms of your aspiration. In the internet industry it's not about grand innovation, it's about a lot of little innovations: every day, every week, every month, making something a little bit better.
No one remembers how you got there, only that you got there.
Starting is easy. Finishing is hard.
Excellence is everything today, and most people aren't excellent. If you're not excellent - like truly excellent at what you do - you're toast.
If you can't sell your product, it's not a product-it's a hobby.
Longevity is a big part of credibility.
If everybody has a voice, then you end up with something average.
People's reputations are made in the bad times more than the good times.
The thing about angel investing, which I get into in the book a lot is, you actually don't have to understand the idea, you don't have to know if the idea is going to win, you just need to know if a founder's going to win in their life. I can just tell by looking at somebody if they'll be successful in their life. I don't even have to have a conversation. I just look at their eyes while they're talking and it becomes very clear to me.
When you come from nothing, you're basically just trying to get escape velocity, which means you and your family don't have to worry about being broke and that's all I ever cared about.
Be amazing. Be everywhere. Be real
Art is an adventure that never seems to end.
The currency of blogging is authenticity and trust.
I get a lot of emails from entrepreneurs. The best ones are short, to the point and include some question and/or the product
Average people push great people out of a company.
Blogging is great, and I read blogs all day long. However, my goal is really to have a deep, meaningful discussion with people. For some reason, I'm able to accomplish this best via email.
Perhaps we are looking at this from a wrong perspective; this search for the truth, the meaning of life, the reason of God. We all have this mindset that the answers are so complex and so vast that it is almost impossible to comprehend. I think, on the contrary, that the answers are so simple; so simple that it is staring us straight in the face, screaming its lungs out, and yet we fail to notice it. We're looking through a telescope, searching the stars for the answer, when the answer is actually a speck of dirt on the telescope lens.
You should know what makes one photo brilliant and another. Why one illustration is instructive and another is banal. Why one blurb is clever and another is trying too hard. Why one video is brilliantly entertaining and another is cheesy. Bottom line: you should want to do great work with a great team-no matter the cost.
The currency of blogging is authenticity and trust... you pay folks to blog about a product and you compromise that. I would almost care about this, but it's so obvious to everyone that this is either a joke or an idiot that there is nothing more to say.
I've developed some deep relationships over the past couple of years blogging and I realize that those relationships manifest themselves in the links I find when I do my x a daily ego search over at Technorati.
