startups

Paul Buchheit: Then you have what we do with PCs, and that's technically pretty challenging__o take this big network of machines that are unreliable and build a big, reliable storage system out of it.

Try to imagine the calamity of that: Zack, age twenty-eight, with no management experience, gets training from Dave, a weekend rock guitarist, on how to apply a set of fundamentally unsound psychological principles as a way to manipulate the people who report to him.

It is best to be the CEO; it is satisfactory to be an early employee, maybe the fifth or sixth or perhaps the tenth. Alternately, one may become an engineer devising precious algorithms in the cloisters of Google and its like. Otherwise, one becomes a mere employee. A coder of websites at Facebook is no one in particular. A manager at Microsoft is no one. A person (think woman) working in customer relations is a particular type of no one, banished to the bottom, as always, for having spoken directly to a non-technical human being. All these and others are ways for strivers to fall by the wayside _ as the startup culture sees it _ while their betters race ahead of them. Those left behind may see themselves as ordinary, even failures.

Julius used to say that we stood on the shoulders of giants. To me it always seemed like we were in their shadow. It never occurred to me that we were the shadow that they projected, and that one day we would rise up and overwhelm them

What did journalists know of tech, anyway? Who gave a damn about the press? We were the Good Guys. Changing the World. Doing the Important Stuff.

The goal - at least the way I think about entrepreneurship - is you realize one day that you can't really work anyone else. You have to start your own thing. It almost doesn't matter what the thing is. We had six different business plan changes, and then the last one was PayPal.If that one didn't work out, if we still had the money and the people, obviously we would not have given up. We would have iterated on the business model and done something else. I don't think there was ever clarity as to who we were until we knew it was working. By then, we'd figured out our PR pitch and told everyone what we do and who we are. But between the founding and the actual PayPal, it was just like this tug-of-war where it was like, "We're trying this, this week." Every week you go to investors and say, "We're doing this, exactly this. We're really focused. We're going to be huge." The next week you're like, "That was a lie.

Even in zazen you will lose yourself. When you become sleepy, or when your mind starts to wander about, you lose yourself. When your legs become painful___hy are my legs so painful?___ou lose yourself. _-__ou just sit in the midst of the problem; when you are a part of the problem, or when the problem is a part of you, there is no problem, because you are the problem itself. The problem is you yourself. If this is so, there is no problem._-__hen you start to wander about in some delusion which is something apart from you yourself, then your surroundings are not real anymore, and your mind is not real anymore. If you yourself are deluded, then your surroundings are also a misty, foggy delusion. Once you are in the midst of delusion, there is no end to delusion. You will be involved in deluded ideas one after another. Most people live in delusion, involved in their problem, trying to solve their problem. But just to live is actually to live in problems. And to solve the problem is to be a part of it, to be one with it.

Jean-Baptiste Say may have coined the term 'entrepreneur' but he totally missed the opportunity to put it on a t-shirt and sell it.

Every day is full of opportunities, but an opportunity is full of only so many days.

The most important thing is not to let fundraising get you down. Startups live or die on morale. If you let the difficulty of raising money destroy your morale, it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

..determination is the most important quality in a founder, open-mindedness and willingness to change your idea are key, and all startups face rejection at first.

I enjoy self-publishing & sending publishers rejection letters. They're like, 'Who is this guy?' And I'm like, 'the end of your industry.

You do not necessarily have to get before you do but when you do, you shall get

We are not creators; only combiners of the created. Invention isn't about new ingredients, but new recipes. And innovations taste the best.

When strategy, culture, and brand harmonize, they amplify one another and resonate loud and clear.

Do you know great minds enjoy excellence, average minds love mediocrity and small minds adore comfort zones?

A product in the marketplace is the result of thought in an inner space and action more than the common place.