One thing that founders always underestimate is how hard it is to recruit.

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.

Animals may be our friends, but they won't pick you up at the airport.

I always avoid not working.

And we live in a French Quarter a lot of the time, in New Orleans. And the camaraderie of everybody there. Everybody takes care of each other.

I am no more lonely than the loon in the pond that laughs so loud, or than Walden Pond itself. What company has that lonely lake,I pray?

When Guante started, they thought he'd be like popcorn, one of the most popular things around.

A leaf that is destined to grow large is full of grooves and wrinkles at the start. Now if one has no patience and wants it smooth offhand like a willow leaf, there is trouble ahead.

I would have wanted to be a rock star, a lead singer, if I wasn't a model. I'd go touring in a bus with my band. In my next life, that's the plan.

In pageants, you are evaluated from head to toe and its obviously all about looks, and as vain as that is, they can also bring you lots of opportunities to do amazing things.

In a difficult business, no sooner is one problem solved than another surfaces - never is there just one cockroach in the kitchen.

You're all the world to me. Whenever i can't see you... I die a little.