The ones I like (which are most of them)

1. Be Authentic. The most powerful asset you have is your individuality, what makes you unique. It’s time to stop listening to others on what you should do.

2. Work harder than anyone else and you will always benefit from the effort.

4. …Make things with your hands. Innovation in thinking is not enough.

6. Being original is still king, especially in this tech-driven, group grope world.

8. Instinct and intuition are all-powerful. Learn to trust them.

10. If all else fails, No. 2 is the greatest competitive advantage of any career.

Choice quotes:

Understanding exponents and power law distributions isn’t just about understanding VC. There are important personal applications too. Many things, such as key life decisions or starting businesses, also result in similar distributions. We tend to think about these things too moderately. There is a perception that some things are sort of better than other things, sometimes. But the reality is probably more extreme than that.

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Paul Graham: Founders. Ideas are just indicative of how the founders can think. We look for relentlessly resourceful people. That combination is key. Relentlessness alone is useful. You can relentlessly just bang your head against the wall. It’s better to be relentless in your search for a door, and then resourcefully walk through it.

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Roelof Botha: It is so rare to find people who can clearly and concisely identify a problem and formulate coherent approach to solve it.

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Roelof Botha: You can discover a lot about founders by asking them about their choices. What are the key decisions you faced in your life and what did you decide? What were the alternatives? Why did you go to this school? Why did you move to this city?

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Paul Graham: Another corollary to the power law is that it’s OK to be lame in a lot of ways, so long as you’re not lame in some really important ways. The Apple guys were crazy and really bad dressers. But they got importance of microprocessors. Larry and Sergey got that search was important.

—-

Peter Thiel: Isaiah Berlin wrote an essay called “The Hedgehog and the Fox.” It revolved around a line from an ancient Greek poet: foxes know many little things, but hedgehogs know one big thing. People tend to think that foxes are best because they are nimble and have broad knowledge. But in business, it’s better to be a hedgehog if you have to choose between the two. But you should still try and know lots of little things too.

My favorite parts:

Don’t take too much advice:

But here’s Pinterest co-founder and CEO Ben Silbermann’s advice: “Don’t take too much advice.”

“Most people generalize whatever they did, and say that was the strategy that made it work,” Silbermann said. In reality, there’s very little way of knowing how various factors contributed to success or failure.

Being comfortable as a non-engineer:

Silbermann is not an engineer, so at Google he worked in online sales and operations.

“I left, not because I didn’t love the company, but because [with] my particular background, it would have been really hard to built products,” he said. 

The fallacy of fail fast, lean, and traction:

Silbermann said, “The hard part about that idea of ‘minimum viable product,’ for me, is you don’t know what ‘minimum’ is, and you don’t know what ‘viable’ is.”

In the early days, Pinterest had “catastrophically small numbers,” Silbermann said. Nine months after launch, the site counted 10,000 users, with few of them active on a daily basis.

Silbermann said he recently picked up Eric Ries’s “The Lean Startup,” and was grateful he didn’t read it at the time, because it might have convinced him to give up at that point.

“I was part of a number of failed remote R&D attempts. The one time it worked was when we decided to abandon meetings, project documents, tracking tools, etc. Instead, we got a high quality speakerphone so everyone could overhear everyone else’s conversations, and we left it on all day, every day. It wasn’t the same as being together in person, but we did manage to get some of the human friction back.” -Chris Dixon

brycedotvc:

Close your eyes.

Imagine, if you will, a startup that meets the following criteria:

• Their recruiting process is fundamentally flawed
• Their operations are a mess
• They make engineers pretty much do everything, which leaves almost no time for coding
• They don’t (care) about charity or…