We've seen a lot of data at YC now, and the most successful companies and the ones where the investors do the best... end up giving a lot of stock out to employees- year after year after year.

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.

Oh, how unbearable is a happy person sometimes!

The thing about our choices is that after we have made them, they turn around and make us.

Photography is never real, it’s merely one of many ways of telling the truth.

I would call myself more spiritual than religious.

As I, as a worker, came to know them, the aims of German trade unions were political, and there were a number of various trade unions with varied political views.

Life is a rich strain of music, suggesting a realm too fair to be.

Why do I have to keep proving to people that I am not a liar?!

I think the first thing to do is to be aware that you can choose what you're thinking about and that your life is going down the path that you're thinking.

For my second and third pictures I won Academy Awards. Nothing worse could have happened to me.

Integrity is built by defeating the temptation to be dishonest; humility grows when we refuse to be prideful; and endurance develops every time you reject the temptation to give up.