Quoting Paul Graham:

You haven’t seen someone’s true colors unless you’ve worked with them on a startup.

I would rather cofound a startup with a friend than a stranger with higher output. Startups are so hard and emotional that the bonds and emotional and social support that come with friendship outweigh the extra output lost.

My relationship with my cofounder went from just being friends to seeing each other all the time, fretting over the finances and cleaning up shit. And the startup was our baby. I summed it up once like this: "It’s like we’re married, but we’re not fucking."

the energy to keep a company going in lieu of unburdening success isn’t free; it is siphoned from the founders themselves.

Everyone said how determined and resilient you must be, but going through it made me realize that the determination required was still understated.

If you are persistent, even problems that seem out of your control (i.e. immigration) seem to work themselves out.

I’ve been surprised again and again by just how much more important persistence is than raw intelligence.

One reason founders are surprised is that because they work fast, they expect everyone else to. There’s a shocking amount of shear stress at every point where a startup touches a more bureaucratic organization, like a big company or a VC fund. That’s why fundraising and the enterprise market kill and maim so many startups

But I think the reason most founders are surprised by how long it takes is that they’re overconfident. They think they’re going to be an instant success, like YouTube or Facebook. You tell them only 1 out of 100 successful startups has a trajectory like that, and they all think "we’re going to be that 1."

Because we’re relaxed, it’s so much easier to have fun doing what we do. Gone is the awkward nervous energy fueled by the desperate need to not fail guiding our actions. We can concentrate on doing what’s best for our company, product, employees and customers.

If you spend all your time programming, you will fail.

There is no such thing as a killer feature. Or at least you won’t know what it is.

Build the absolute smallest thing that can be considered a complete application and ship it.

Why do people take too long on the first version? Pride, mostly. They hate to release something that could be better. They worry what people will say about them

Doing something "simple" at first glance does not mean you aren’t doing something meaningful, defensible, or valuable.

Don’t worry what people will say. If your first version is so impressive that trolls don’t make fun of it, you waited too long to launch.

Now, when coding, I try to think "How can I write this such that if people saw my code, they’d be amazed at how little there is and how little it does?"

Over-engineering is poison.

Product development is a conversation with the user that doesn’t really start till you launch.

It’s so important to launch fast that it may be better to think of your initial version not as a product, but as a trick for getting users to start talking to you.

When you let customers tell you what they’re after, they will often reveal amazing details about what they find valuable as well what they’re willing to pay for.

To benefit from engaging with users you have to be willing to change your idea. We’ve always encouraged founders to see a startup idea as a hypothesis rather than a blueprint.

With a startup, I think you should find a problem that’s easy for you to solve. Optimizing in solution-space is familiar and straightforward, but you can make enormous gains playing around in problem-space.

When someone is determined, there’s still a danger that they’ll follow a long, hard path that ultimately leads nowhere.

Fast iteration is the key to success.

When you can’t get users, it’s hard to say whether the problem is lack of exposure, or whether the product’s simply bad. Even good products can be blocked by switching or integration costs:

Assume you won’t get money, and if someone does offer you any, assume you’ll never get any more.

The mistake is to be optimistic about things you can’t control. By all means be optimistic about your ability to make something great. But you’re asking for trouble if you’re optimistic about big companies or investors.

The degree to which feigning certitude impressed investors.

A lot of what startup founders do is just posturing. It works.

Founders who fail quickly tend to blame themselves. Founders who succeed quickly don’t usually realize how lucky they were. It’s the ones in the middle who see how important luck is.

Creating wealth is not a zero-sum game, so you don’t have to stab people in the back to win.

Your job description as technical founder/CEO is completely rewritten every 6-12 months. Less coding, more managing/planning/company building, hiring, cleaning up messes, and generally getting things in place for what needs to happen a few months from now.

Everyone’s model of work is a job. It’s completely pervasive. Even if you’ve never had a job, your parents probably did, along with practically every other adult you’ve met.

Unconsciously, everyone expects a startup to be like a job, and that explains most of the surprises.

You probably can’t overcome anything so pervasive as the model of work you grew up with. So the best solution is to be consciously aware of that. As you go into a startup, you’ll be thinking "everyone says it’s really extreme." Your next thought will probably be "but I can’t believe it will be that bad." If you want to avoid being surprised, the next thought after that should be: "and the reason I can’t believe it will be that bad is that my model of work is a job."