Umarbek

The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won't make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won't create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren't learning from them.

"What important truth do very few people agree with you on?"

Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.

The single word for vertical, 0 to 1 progress is technology. Properly understood, any new and better way of doing things is technology.

From the Founding Fathers in politics to the Royal Society in science to Fairchild Semiconductor's "traitorous eight" in business, small groups of people bound together by a sense of mission have changed the world for the better.

A new company's most important strength is new thinking: even more important than nimbleness, small size affords space to think.

"Madness is rare in individuals, but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule."

The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself.

Creating value is not enough; you also need to capture some of the value you create.

Capitalism and competition are opposites.

All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.

Competition means no profits for anybody, no meaningful differentiation, and a struggle for survival.

Higher education is the place where people who had big plans in high school get stuck in fierce rivalries with equally smart peers over conventional careers like management consulting and investment banking.

Amid all the human drama, people lose sight of what matters and focus on their rivals instead.

Winning is better than losing, but everybody loses when the war isn't one worth fighting.

For a company to be valuable it must grow and endure, but many entrepreneurs focus only on short-term growth. They have an excuse: growth is easy to measure, but durability isn't.

As a good rule of thumb, proprietary technology must be at least 10 times better than its closest substitute in some important dimension to lead to a real monopolistic advantage.

Every startup is small at the start. Every monopoly dominates a large share of its market. Therefore, every startup should start with a very small market. Always err on the side of starting too small.

The perfect target market for a startup is a small group of particular people concentrated together and served by few or no competitors.

Sequencing markets correctly is underrated, and it takes discipline to expand gradually.

What really matters is generating cash flows in the future, so being the first mover doesn't do you any good if someone else comes along and unseats you. It's much better to be the last mover.

"Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances.… Strong men believe in cause and effect."

Instead of pursuing many-sided mediocrity and calling it "well-roundedness," a definite person determines the one best thing to do and then does it.

A startup is the largest endeavor over which you can have definite mastery. You can have agency not just over your own life, but over a small and important part of the world.

You are not a lottery ticket.

The biggest secret in venture capital is that the best investment in a successful fund equals or outperforms the entire rest of the fund combined.

It does matter what you do. You should focus relentlessly on something you're good at doing, but before that you must think hard about whether it will be valuable in the future.

Every correct answer is necessarily a secret: something important and unknown, something hard to do but doable.

You can achieve difficult things, but you can't achieve the impossible.

You can't find secrets without looking for them.

A great company is a conspiracy to change the world; when you share your secret, the recipient becomes a fellow conspirator.

Companies are like countries in this way. Bad decisions made early on, if you choose the wrong partners or hire the wrong people, for example, are very hard to correct after they are made.

Founders should share a prehistory before they start a company together; otherwise they're just rolling dice.

A company does better the less it pays the CEO, that's one of the single clearest patterns I've noticed from investing in hundreds of startups.

The most valuable kind of company maintains an openness to invention that is most characteristic of beginnings.

No company has a culture; every company is a culture. A startup is a team of people on a mission, and a good culture is just what that looks like on the inside.

If you can't count durable relationships among the fruits of your time at work, you haven't invested your time well, even in purely financial terms.

Talented people don't need to work for you; they have plenty of options.

The only good answers are specific to your company. But there are two general kinds of good answers: answers about your mission and answers about your team.

The best thing I did as a manager at PayPal was to make every person in the company responsible for doing just one thing.

Every company is also its own ecosystem, and factional strife makes it vulnerable to outside threats. Internal conflict is like an autoimmune disease.

The best startups might be considered slightly less extreme kinds of cults. The biggest difference is that cults tend to be fanatically wrong about something important. People at a successful startup are fanatically right about something those outside it have missed.

If you've invented something new but you haven't invented an effective way to sell it, you have a bad business, no matter how good the product.

Superior sales and distribution by itself can create a monopoly, even with no product differentiation. The converse is not true.

If you can get just one distribution channel to work, you have a great business. If you try for several but don't nail one, you're finished.

Look around. If you don't see any salespeople, you're the salesperson.

Computers are complements for humans, not substitutes. The most valuable businesses of coming decades will be built by entrepreneurs who seek to empower people rather than try to make them obsolete.

A great technology company should have proprietary technology an order of magnitude better than its nearest substitute.

Founders are important not because they are the only ones whose work has value, but rather because a great founder can bring out the best work from everybody at his company.

Our task today is to find singular ways to create the new things that will make the future not just different, but better to go from 0 to 1. The essential first step is to think for yourself.