Sublime

If I had to put the recipe for genius into one sentence, that might be it: to have a disinterested obsession with something that matters.

The end goal is not to find flaws in the things you're told, but to find the new ideas that had been concealed by the broken ones.

As Paul Graham said in his essay “Do Things That Don’t Scale”: A lot of would-be founders believe that startups either take off or don’t. You build something, make it available, and if you’ve made a better mousetrap, people beat a path to your door as promised. Or they don’t, in which case the market must not exist. Actually startups take off becau

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The question to ask about an early stage startup is not "is this company taking over the world?" but "how big could this company get if the founders did the right things?" And the right things often seem both laborious and inconsequential at the time.

Paul Graham is fond of a Silicon Valley saying: “You make what you measure.”6 The act of measuring some aspect of performance leads to caring about that one thing and lavishing your attention on it, which, in turn, leads to improving it. He suggests that startups set a specific weekly target for growth, which can be measured in terms of revenue or

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When I encounter a startup with a lame-sounding idea, I ask "What Microsoft is this the Altair Basic of?" Now it's a puzzle, and the burden is on me to solve it. Sometimes I can't think of an answer, especially when the idea is a made-up one. But it's remarkable how often there does turn out to be an answer. Often it's one the founders themselves h... See more

What are you excessively curious about — curious to a degree that would bore most other people? That's what you're looking for.