“The recipe for great work is: very exacting taste, plus the ability to gratify it.”

“Don't ignore your dreams; don't work too much; say what you think; cultivate friendships; be happy.”

“If you want to make money at some point, remember this, because this is one of the reasons startups win. Big companies want to decrease the standard deviation of design outcomes because they want to avoid disasters. But when you damp oscillations, you lose the high points as well as the low. This is not a problem for big companies, because they don't win by making great products. Big companies win by sucking less than other big companies. ”

“There is all the more reason for startups to write Web-based software now, because writing desktop software has become a lot less fun. If you want to write desktop software now you do it on Microsoft's terms, calling their APIs and working around their buggy OS. And if you manage to write something that takes off, you may find that you were merely doing market research for Microsoft.”

“You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible.”

“Dressing up is inevitably a substitute for good ideas. It is no coincidence that techincally inept business types are known as "suits.”

“A startup is like a mosquito. A bear can absorb a hit and a crab is armored against one, but a mosquito is designed for one thing : to score. No energy is wasted on defense. The defense of mosquitos, as a species, is that there are a lot of them, but this is little consolation to the individual mosquito.”