“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.”

“If Apple were to grow the iPod into a cell phone with a web browser, Microsoft would be in big trouble.”

“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. ”

“Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.”

“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.”

“People who write about politics, whether on the left or the right, have a consistent bias: they take politics seriously.”

“Someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly.”