The way you get deals done and the way you get good terms, is to have a competitive situation.

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.

He sat staring before him, seeing nothing but a long line of Mortimers, inexhaustable and prolific to the end of time.

I strongly object to wrong arguments on the right side. I think I object to them more than to the wrong arguments on the wrong side.

It took me a long time to realize you don't choose what you're famous for.

Leo Hurwicz is the father of mechanism design theory and has inspired much of my work, and Roger Myerson is an old friend and collaborator and a tremendous economist.

It's a simple formula for me now, I don't play any song I don't want to play.

I'm excited about what the future holds. I'm not a fortune-teller; I have no idea how it will play out. People say, "What are you going to do?" I don't know. I kind of love that not knowing.

Thou, O God, dost sell us all good things at the price of labor.

Give me an educated mother, I shall promise you the birth of a civilized, educated nation

There's nothing half so real in life as the things you've done... inexorably, unalterably done.

I am fiercely independent and I probably wouldn't be if it wasn't for the way in which I was brought up