Founders need to figure out what the message of the company is going to be.

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 ultimate success of a life depends on character and not on achievement.

Being fearless precisely when you are most scared is the best hack.

Oppressors can tyrannize only when they achieve a standing army, an enslaved press, and a disarmed populace.

The controversy as to whether socialism is possible has been settled by the fact that it exists, and it is a fundamental axiom of my philosophy, at any rate, that anything that exists, is possible.

Stop fighting. Everyone's a person too. And take care of the Earth, please.

So much depends, therefore, upon our maintaining gospel perspective in the midst of ordinariness, the pressures of temptation, tribulation, deprivation, and the cares of the world.

A pessimist is somebody who complains about the noise when opportunity knocks.

I'm not like, overly anxious or nothing like that, because sometimes when you're overly anxious it kind of brings a weird energy around and I just like to just take things one day at a time.

I am in regular contact with Prime Minister [Shinzo] Abe. We have met several times this year [2016].

The Steinway piano is the most harmonious implement for musical intention. It completes what is beautiful and artistic.