There’s no reason why the future should happen only at Stanford, or in college, or in Silicon Valley.
True heroes take their personal honor so seriously that they will fight for things that do not matter.
The best place to look for secrets is where no one else is looking.
Customers won’t care about any particular technology unless it solves a particular problem in a superior way.
Elon describes his staff this way: “If you’re at Tesla, you’re choosing to be at the equivalent of Special Forces. There’s the regular army, and that’s fine, but if you are working at Tesla, you’re choosing to step up your game.
But there is no reason why technology should be limited to computers. Properly understood, any new and better way of doing things is technology.
But then I noticed a deeper result: defining roles reduced conflict. Most fights inside a company happen when colleagues compete for the same responsibilities. Startups face an especially high risk of this since job roles are fluid at the early stages. Eliminating competition makes it easier for everyone to build the kinds of long-term relationships that transcend mere professionalism.
If you treat the future as something definite, it makes sense to understand it in advance and to work to shape it. But if you expect an indefinite future ruled by randomness, you’ll give up on trying to master it.
What important truth do very few people agree with you on?” This question sounds easy because it’s straightforward. Actually, it’s very hard to answer. It’s intellectually difficult because the knowledge that everyone is taught in school is by definition agreed upon.
In business, money is either an important thing or it is everything. Monopolists can afford to think about things other than making money; non-monopolists can’t.
Startups operate on the principle that you need to work with other people to get stuff done, but you also need to stay small enough so that you actually can. Positively defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future.
The biggest difference is that cults tend to be fanatically wrong about something important. People at a successful startup are fanatically right about something those outside it have missed.
Whoever is first to dominate the most important segment of a market with viral potential will be the last mover in the whole market.
As we said, even the best venture investors have a portfolio, but investors who understand the power law make as few investments as possible.
Indefinite fears about the far future shouldn’t stop us from making definite plans today.
A good startup should have the potential for great scale built into its first design.
The actual truth is that there are many more secrets left to find, but they will yield only to relentless searchers.
Most fights inside a company happen when colleagues compete for the same responsibilities.
Question for job applicants: What important truth do very few people agree with you on?
Network effects can be powerful, but you’ll never reap them unless your product is valuable to its very first users when the network is necessarily small.