In the beginning of a company, there is no management and this actually works really well.

No matter what you choose, build stuff and be around smart people.

You can create value with breakthrough innovation, incremental refinement, or complex coordination. Great companies often do two of these. The very best companies do all three.

Founders are usually very stingy with equity to employees and very generous with equity to investors. I think this is totally backwards.

Obsess about the quality of the product.

In general don't start a startup you're not willing to work on for ten years.

Everyone starting a startup for the first time is scared, and everyone feels like a bit of an imposter.

No growth hack, brilliant marketing idea, or sales team can save you long term if you don't have a sufficiently good product.

You have to be decisive. Indecisiveness is a startup killer.

Execution gets divided into two key questions: 1) can you figure out what to do and 2) can you get it done.

If you don't need it yourself, and you're building something that someone else needs, realize you're at a big disadvantage.

Stop looking to others for inspiration. Stop looking at past accomplishments. Be your own inspiration today and for tomorrow.

When you seek first to develop relationships based on personal and human ground, you will surely gain interest of another party.

The worst thing that can happen to you as an artist is for you to lose faith in yourself.

Proclaim not all though knowest, or all though owest.

The reticent volcano keeps His never slumbering plan - Confided are his projects pink To no precarious man.

Making music, creating lyrics comes very naturally to me.

Rereading Candide, I was struck by the link between optimism and the optimal, the idea that we have been placed in this optimal world rather than some other.

For six years, I kept my five Olympic medals wrapped in a plastic bread bag beneath my bed.

I just don't know how to stitch words in a predictable way sometimes. It's a weird instinct I've developed.

Creativity is dynamic, it asserts life, frees the human spirit, conquers mental lassitude and illness, and makes real the outrageous potential of the universal imagination.