Companies that I've been very involved with, that have had a very bad first hire in the first 3 or so employees never recover from it.

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.

The future is not a result of choices among alternative paths offered by the present, but a place that is created - created first in the mind and will, created next in activity.

For people with patience, time with a dog is a little slice of heaven.

Are you sure you weren't adopted?""Mom would like to think so, but it was a natural birth, so her memory's real clear.

Everything is a present. Everything. This I learned to be thankful for everything.

Love can be a terrible curse, Eragon. It can make you overlook even the largest flaws in a person's behavior.

There's a lot of great movies that have won the Academy Award, and a lot of great movies that haven't. You just do the best you can.

Women don't take care of themselves because they take care of everybody else.

God sent his Singers upon earth With songs of sadness and of mirth, That they might touch the hearts of men, And bring them back to heaven again.

Maps are a way of organizing wonder.