If you think your initial market might be too big, it almost certainly is.
I think anything that requires real global breakthroughs requires a degree of intensity and sustained effort that cannot be done part time, so it’s something you have to do around the clock, and that doesn’t compute with our existing educational system.
The most valuable businesses of coming decades will be built by entrepreneurs who seek to empower people rather than try to make them obsolete.
If your product requires advertising or salespeople to sell it, it’s not good enough: technology is primarily about product development, not distribution.
If your goal is to never make a mistake in your life, you shouldn’t look for secrets. The prospect of being lonely but right – dedicating your life to something that no one else believes in – is already hard. The prospect of being lonely and wrong can be unbearable.
You should focus relentlessly on something you’re good at doing, but before that you must think hard about whether it will be valuable in the future.
CREATIVE MONOPOLY means new products that benefit everybody and sustainable profits for the creator. Competition means no profits for anybody, no meaningful differentiation, and a struggle for survival.
When Yahoo! offered to buy Facebook for $1 billion in July 2006, I thought we should at least consider it. But Mark Zuckerberg walked into the board meeting and announced: “Okay, guys, this is just a formality, it shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes. We’re obviously not going to sell here.” Mark saw where he could take the company, and Yahoo! didn’t.
That’s why hiring consultants doesn’t work. Part-time employees don’t work. Even working remotely should be avoided, because misalignment can creep in whenever colleagues aren’t together full-time, in the same place, every day. If you’re deciding whether to bring someone on board, the decision is binary. Ken Kesey was right: you’re either on the bus or off the bus.
The best projects are likely to be overlooked, not trumpeted by a crowd; the best problems to work on are often the ones nobody else even tries to solve.
Entrepreneurship: you put one dumb foot in front of the other while the world throws bricks at your head.
Instead of pursuing many-sided mediocrity and calling it “well-roundedness,” a definite person determines the one best thing to do and then does it.
Unless you have perfectly conventional beliefs, it’s rarely a good idea to tell everybody everything that you know.
If you’re less sensitive to social cues, you’re less likely to do the same things as everyone else around you.
As a founder, your first job is to get the first things right, because you cannot build a great company on a flawed foundation.
Simply stated, the value of a business today is the sum of all the money it will make in the future.
You probably can’t be the Google of 2014 in terms of compensation or perks, but you can be like the Google of 1999 if you already have good answers about your mission and team.
The most successful companies make the core progression – to first dominate a specific niche and then scale to adjacent markets – a part of their founding narrative.
Thiel’s law”: a startup messed up at its foundation cannot be fixed.
Why work with a group of people who don’t even like each other?