Paul Graham's Startup Essay Highlights

This little project is not a project per se, rather a list of notes from over 210 Paul Graham's essays that can be seen on his website.

The highlights are only from his take on the topic of startups. There is a lot of useful information for people wanting to build something of their own.

The list includes stuff that seemed somewhat interesting from my perspective. A lot of great advice and insights are contained in each essay and I urge everyone to read them themselves.

Some other resources are also mentioned on my 👉 blogpost.

Ordering

The list is ordered chronologically and does not group similar topics together. Might do that in the future, who knows :)

39. How to Start a Startup (link) - March 2005

• Actually, startup ideas are not million dollar ideas,
  and here's an experiment you can try to prove it: just try to sell one.
  Nothing evolves faster than markets.
  The fact that there's no market for startup ideas suggests there's no demand.

• The way a startup makes money is to offer people better technology than they have now.

• There is one reason you might want to include business people in a startup, though:
  because you have to have at least one person willing and able to focus on what customers want.

• In nearly every failed startup, the real problem was that customers didn't want the product.
  The only way to make something customers want is to get a prototype in front of them
  and refine it based on their reactions.

• It's worth trying very, very hard to make technology easy to use.

• The way to get rich from a startup is to maximize the company's chances of succeeding,
  not to maximize the amount of stock you retain.
  So if you can trade stock for something that improves your odds, it's probably a smart move.

• Usually angels are financially equivalent to founders.
  They get the same kind of stock and get diluted the same amount in future rounds.
  How much stock should they get? That depends on how ambitious you feel.
  When you offer x percent of your company for y dollars,
  you're implicitly claiming a certain value for the whole company.
  If you give an investor new shares equal to 5% of those already outstanding in return for $100,000,
  then you've done the deal at a pre-money valuation of $2 million.

• Basically, a VC is a source of money.
  I'd be inclined to go with whoever offered the most money the soonest with the least strings attached.

• There is nothing more valuable, in the early stages of a startup, than smart users.
  If you listen to them, they'll tell you exactly how to make a winning product.
  And not only will they give you this advice for free, they'll pay you.

• More generally, design your product to please users first,
  and then think about how to make money from it.

• To make something users love, you have to understand them.
  And the bigger you are, the harder that is.
  So I say "get big slow."
  The slower you burn through your funding, the more time you have to learn.

• The most important way to not spend money is by not hiring people.
  I may be an extremist, but I think hiring people is the worst thing a company can do.
  To start with, people are a recurring expense, which is the worst kind.
  They also tend to cause you to grow out of your space,
  and perhaps even move to the sort of uncool office building that will make your software worse.
  But worst of all, they slow you down:
  instead of sticking your head in someone's office and checking out an idea with them,
  eight people have to have a meeting about it..

• The only reason to hire someone is to do something you'd like to do but can't.

• So who should start a startup?
  Someone who is a good hacker, between about 23 and 38,
  and who wants to solve the money problem in one shot
  instead of getting paid gradually over a conventional working life.

44. Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas (link) - April 2005

• If you're going to spend years working on something,
  you'd think it might be wise to spend at least a couple days considering different ideas,
  instead of going with the first that comes into your head.

• The biggest cause of bad ideas is the still life effect: you come up with a random idea, plunge into it,
  and then at each point (a day, a week, a month) feel you've put so much time into it that this must be the idea.

• The solution is at the other end: to realize that having invested time in something doesn't make it good.
  Ask yourself: is this something people will pay for?
  Is this, of all the things we could make, the thing people will pay most for.

• Reading the Wall Street Journal for a week should give anyone ideas for two or three new startups.
  The articles are full of descriptions of problems that need to be solved.

• If you want to learn what people want, read Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People.

• It's much easier to sell services than a product,
  just as it's easier to make a living playing at weddings than by selling recordings.
  But the margins are greater on products.

51. Ideas for Startups (link) - October 2005

• Trevor Blackwell presents the following recipe for a startup:
  "Watch people who have money to spend, see what they're wasting their time on,
  cook up a solution, and try selling it to them.
  It's surprising how small a problem can be and still provide a profitable market for a solution".

• The fact is, most startups end up nothing like the initial idea.
  It would be closer to the truth to say the main value of your initial idea is that,
  in the process of discovering it's broken, you'll come up with your real idea.

53. How to Fund a Startup (link) - November 2005

• During this time you'll do little but work, because when you're not working, your competitors will be.
  My only leisure activities were running, which I needed to do to keep working anyway,
  and about fifteen minutes of reading a night.
  I had a girlfriend for a total of two months during that three year period.
  Every couple weeks I would take a few hours off to visit a used bookshop or go to a friend's house for dinner.
  I went to visit my family twice. Otherwise I just worked.

• The reason is that investors need to get their capital back.
  They'll only consider companies that have an exit strategy—meaning companies that could get bought or go public.

• So when do you approach VCs? When you can convince them.
  If the founders have impressive resumes and the idea isn't hard to understand,
  you could approach VCs quite early.
  Whereas if the founders are unknown and the idea is very novel,
  you might have to launch the thing and show that users loved it before VCs would be convinced.

61. The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn (link) - April 2006

• Of course, "release early" has a second component, without which it would be bad advice.
  If you're going to start with something that doesn't do much, you better improve it fast.
  What I find myself repeating is "pump out features."
  And this rule isn't just for the initial stages.
  This is something all startups should do for as long as they want to be considered startups.

67. How To Present to Investors (link) - August 2006 (rev April 2007, September 2010)

• Investors' main question when judging a very early startup is whether you've made a compelling product.
  Before they can judge whether you've built a good x, they have to understand what kind of x you've built.
  They will get very frustrated if instead of telling them what you do, you make them sit through some kind of preamble.

69. The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups (link) - October 2006

1. Single founder;

• Starting a startup is too hard for one person.
  Even if you could do all the work yourself, you need colleagues to brainstorm with,
  to talk you out of stupid decisions, and to cheer you up when things go wrong.
  The last one might be the most important.
  The low points in a startup are so low that few could bear them alone.
  When you have multiple founders, esprit de corps binds them together in a way that seems to violate conservation laws.
  Each thinks "I can't let my friends down."
  This is one of the most powerful forces in human nature, and it's missing when there's just one founder.

2. Bad Location

3. Marginal niche;

• Most of the groups that apply to Y Combinator suffer from a common problem:
  choosing a small, obscure niche in the hope of avoiding competition.
  If you make anything good, you're going to have competitors, so you may as well face that.
  You can only avoid competition by avoiding good ideas.

• I think this shrinking from big problems is mostly unconscious.
  It's not that people think of grand ideas but decide to pursue smaller ones because they seem safer.
  Your unconscious won't even let you think of grand ideas.
  So the solution may be to think about ideas without involving yourself.
  What would be a great idea for someone else to do as a startup.

4. Derivative Idea;

• Many of the applications we get are imitations of some existing company.
  That's one source of ideas, but not the best.
  If you look at the origins of successful startups, few were started in imitation of some other startup.
  Where did they get their ideas?
  Usually from some specific, unsolved problem the founders identified.

• Instead of starting from companies and working back to the problems they solved,
  look for problems and imagine the company that might solve them.
  What do people complain about? What do you wish there was.

5. Obstinacy;

• So don't get too attached to your original plan, because it's probably wrong.
  Most successful startups end up doing something different than they originally intended,
  often so different that it doesn't even seem like the same company.
  You have to be prepared to see the better idea when it arrives.
  And the hardest part of that is often discarding your old idea.

• Fortunately there's someone you can ask for advice: your users.
  If you're thinking about turning in some new direction and your users seem excited about it, it's probably a good bet.

6. Hiring Bad Programmer
7. Choosing the Wrong Platform
8. Slowness in Launching;

• One reason to launch quickly is that it forces you to actually finish some quantum of work.
  Nothing is truly finished till it's released;
  you can see that from the rush of work that's always involved in releasing anything, no matter how finished you thought it was.
  The other reason you need to launch is that it's only by bouncing your idea off users that you fully understand it.

• Several distinct problems manifest themselves as delays in launching:
  working too slowly;
  not truly understanding the problem;
  fear of having to deal with users;
  fear of being judged;
  working on too many different things;
  excessive perfectionism.
  Fortunately you can combat all of them by the simple expedient of forcing yourself to launch something fairly quickly.

9. Launching Too Early;

• What's the minimum you need to launch?
  We suggest startups think about what they plan to do, identify a core that's both
  (a) useful on its own and
  (b) something that can be incrementally expanded into the whole project,
  and then get that done as soon as possible.

• The early adopters you need to impress are fairly tolerant.
  They don't expect a newly launched product to do everything; it just has to do something.

10. Having No Specific User in Mind;

• You can't build things users like without understanding them.
  The most successful startups seem to have begun by trying to solve a problem their founders had.

11. Raising Too Little Money
12. Spending Too Much
13. Raising Too Much Money
14. Poor Investor Management
15. Sacrificing Users to (Supposed) Profit;

• When I said at the beginning that if you make something users want, you'll be fine,
  you may have noticed I didn't mention anything about having the right business model.
  That's not because making money is unimportant.
  I'm not suggesting that founders start companies with no chance of making money
  in the hope of unloading them before they tank.
  The reason we tell founders not to worry about the business model initially
  is that making something people want is so much harder.

16. Not Wanting to Get Your Hands Dirty;

• Nearly all programmers would rather spend their time writing code
  and have someone else handle the messy business of extracting money from it.
  And not just the lazy ones.

• If you're going to attract users, you'll probably have to get up from your computer and go find some.
  It's unpleasant work, but if you can make yourself do it you have a much greater chance of succeeding.

• If you want to start a startup, you have to face the fact that you can't just hack.
  At least one hacker will have to spend some of the time doing business stuff.

17. Fights Between Founders

18. A Half-hearted Effort;

• Statistically, if you want to avoid failure, it would seem like the most important thing is to quit your day job.
  Most founders of failed startups don't quit their day jobs, and most founders of successful ones do.

• In other words, starting startups is just like everything else.
  The biggest mistake you can make is not to try hard enough.
  To the extent there's a secret to success, it's not to be in denial about that.

73. Why to Not Not Start a Startup (link) - March 2007

• All the reasons you aren't starting a startup, and why most (but not all) should be ignored:

1. Too young
2. Too inexperienced
3. Not determined enough
4. Not smart enough
5. Know nothing about business
6. No cofounder
7. No idea
8. No room for more startups
9. Family to support
10. Independently wealthy
11. Not ready for commitment
12. Need for structure
13. Fear of uncertainty
14. Don't realize what you're avoiding
15. Parents want you to be a doctor
16. A job is the default

76. The Hacker's Guide to Investors (link) - April 2007

• There are several types of investors.
  The two main categories are angels and VCs:
  VCs invest other people's money, and angels invest their own.

78. The Equity Equation (link) - July 2007

• In the general case, if n is the fraction of the company you're giving up,
  the deal is a good one if it makes the company worth more than 1/(1 - n).
  For example, suppose Y Combinator offers to fund you in return for 7% of your company.
  In this case, n is .07 and 1/(1 - n) is 1.075.
  So you should take the deal if you believe we can improve your average outcome by more than 7.5%.
  If we improve your outcome by 10%, you're net ahead, because the remaining .93 you hold is worth .93 x 1.1 = 1.023.

• You can use the same formula when giving stock to employees, but it works in the other direction.
  If i is the average outcome for the company with the addition of some new person,
  then they're worth n such that i = 1/(1 - n). Which means n = (i - 1)/i.
  For example, suppose you're just two founders and you want to hire an additional hacker
  who's so good you feel he'll increase the average outcome of the whole company by 20%.
  n = (1.2 - 1)/1.2 = .167.
  So you'll break even if you trade 16.7% of the company for him.
  That doesn't mean 16.7% is the right amount of stock to give him.
  Stock is not the only cost of hiring someone: there's usually salary and overhead as well.
  And if the company merely breaks even on the deal, there's no reason to do it.
  I think to translate salary and overhead into stock you should multiply the annual rate by about 1.5.
  Most startups grow fast or die; if you die you don't have to pay the guy,
  and if you grow fast you'll be paying next year's salary out of next year's valuation, which should be 3x this year's.
  If your valuation grows 3x a year,
  the total cost in stock of a new hire's salary and overhead is 1.5 years' cost at the present valuation.

• Let's run through an example.
  Suppose the company wants to make a "profit" of 50% on the new hire mentioned above.
  So subtract a third from 16.7% and we have 11.1% as his "retail" price.
  Suppose further that he's going to cost $60k a year in salary and overhead, x 1.5 = $90k total.
  If the company's valuation is $2 million, $90k is 4.5%. 11.1% - 4.5% = an offer of 6.6%.

81. How Not to Die (link) - August 2007

• Another feeling that seems alarming but is in fact normal in a startup
  is the feeling that what you're doing isn't working.
  The reason you can expect to feel this is that what you do probably won't work.
  Startups almost never get it right the first time.
  Much more commonly you launch something, and no one cares.
  Don't assume when this happens that you've failed.
  That's normal for startups.
  But don't sit around doing nothing. Iterate.

• As long as you've made something that a few users are ecstatic about, you're on the right track.
  It will be good for your morale to have even a handful of users who really love you, and startups run on morale.

• So when you release something and it seems like no one cares, look more closely.
  Are there zero users who really love you,
  or is there at least some little group that does?
  It's quite possible there will be zero.
  In that case, tweak your product and try again.
  Every one of you is working on a space that contains at least one winning permutation somewhere in it.
  If you just keep trying, you'll find.

• All of you guys already have the first two.
  You're all smart and working on promising ideas.
  Whether you end up among the living or the dead comes down to the third ingredient, not giving up.

• So I'll tell you now: bad shit is coming.
  It always is in a startup.
  The odds of getting from launch to liquidity without some kind of disaster happening are one in a thousand.
  So don't get demoralized.

86. Six Principles for Making New Things (link) - February 2008

• I like to find
  (a) simple solutions
  (b) to overlooked problems
  (c) that actually need to be solved, and
  (d) deliver them as informally as possible,
  (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then
  (f) iterating rapidly.

• If you can just avoid dying, you get rich.
  So many startups get demoralized and fail when merely by hanging on they could get rich,
  you have to assume that running a startup can be demoralizing.
  That's why I've never done another startup. The low points in a startup are just unbelievably low.

• If you know it's going to feel terrible sometimes,
  then when it feels terrible you won't think "ouch, this feels terrible, I give up."
  It feels that way for everyone.
  And if you just hang on, things will probably get better.

98. A Fundraising Survival Guide (link) - August 2008

1. Have low expectations
2. Keep working on your startup
3. Be conservative
4. Be flexible
5. Be independent
6. Don't take rejections personally
7. Be able to downshift into consulting (if appropriate)
8. Avoid inexperienced investors
9. Know where you stand

105. Startups in 13 Sentences (link) - February 2009

• Paul Buchheit: it's better to make a few people really happy than to make a lot of people semi-happy.

1. Pick good cofounders
   The reason to launch fast is not so much that it's critical to get your product to market early,
   but that you haven't really started working on it till you've launched.
   Launching teaches you what you should have been building.

2. Launch fast

3. Let your idea evolve (iterate)

4. Understand your users

5. Better to make a few users love you than a lot ambivalent

6. Offer surprisingly good customer support
   Go out of your way to make people happy. They'll be overwhelmed; you'll see.
   In the earliest stages of a startup, it pays to offer customer service on a level that wouldn't scale,
   because it's a way of learning about your users.

7. You make what you measure

8. Spend little
   Most startups fail before they make something people want,
   and the most common form of failure is running out of money.
   So being cheap is (almost) interchangeable with iterating rapidly.

9. Get ramen profitable
   Once you cross over into ramen profitable, it completely changes your relationship with investors.

10. Avoid distractions
    Nothing kills startups like distractions.
    The worst type are those that pay money: day jobs, consulting, profitable side-projects.

11. Don't get demoralized
    Though the immediate cause of death in a startup tends to be running out of money,
    the underlying cause is usually lack of focus.

12. Don't give up
    Even if you get demoralized, don't give up.
    You can get surprisingly far by just not giving up.

13. Deals fall through

• Understand your users. That's the key.
  The essential task in a startup is to create wealth;
  the dimension of wealth you have most control over is how much you improve users' lives;
  and the hardest part of that is knowing what to make for them.
  Once you know what to make, it's mere effort to make it, and most decent hackers are capable of that.
  Understanding your users is part of half the principles in this list.
  That's the reason to launch early, to understand your users.
  Evolving your idea is the embodiment of understanding your users.
  Understanding your users well will tend to push you toward making something that makes a few people deeply happy.
  The most important reason for having surprisingly good customer service is that it helps you understand your users.
  And understanding your users will even ensure your morale,
  because when everything else is collapsing around you,
  having just ten users who love you will keep you going.

116. Ramen Profitable (link) - July 2009

• Ramen profitable means a startup makes just enough to pay the founders' living expenses.

• If you're already profitable, on however small a scale, it shows that
  (a) you can get at least someone to pay you,
  (b) you're serious about building things people want, and
  (c) you're disciplined enough to keep expenses low.

• When these companies fail, it's usually because
  (a) people wouldn't pay for what they made, e.g. because it was too hard to sell to them, or the market wasn't ready yet,
  (b) the founders solved the wrong problem, instead of paying attention to what users needed, or
  (c) the company spent too much and burned through their funding before they started to make money.

• A startup's destination is to grow really big; ramen profitability is a trick for not dying en route.

123. What Startups Are Really Like (link) - October 2009

• Build the absolute smallest thing that can be considered a complete > application and ship it.

• When you let customers tell you what they're after,
  they will often reveal amazing details about what they find valuable as well what they're willing to pay for.

• Fast iteration is the key to success.

• When you can't get users, it's hard to say whether the problem is lack of exposure, or whether the product's simply bad.

125. Organic Startup Ideas (link) - April 2010

• The best way to come up with startup ideas is to ask yourself the question: what do you wish someone would make for you.

149. Startup = Growth (link) - September 2012

• A startup is a company designed to grow fast.

• You have to know that growth is what you're after.
  The good news is, if you get growth, everything else tends to fall into place.
  Which means you can use growth like a compass to make almost every decision you face.

• For a company to grow really big, it must
  (a) make something lots of people want, and
  (b) reach and serve all those people.

• If you want to start a startup, you're probably going to have to think of something fairly novel.
  A startup has to make something it can deliver to a large market,
  and ideas of that type are so valuable that all the obvious ones are already taken.

• The growth of a successful startup usually has three phases:
  There's an initial period of slow or no growth while the startup tries to figure out what it's doing.
  As the startup figures out how to make something lots of people want and how to reach those people,
  there's a period of rapid growth.
  Eventually a successful startup will grow into a big company.
  Growth will slow, partly due to internal limits and partly
  because the company is starting to bump up against the limits of the markets it serves.
  Together these three phases produce an S-curve.
  The phase whose growth defines the startup is the second one, the ascent.
  Its length and slope determine how big the company will be.

• If there's one number every founder should always know, it's the company's growth rate.
  That's the measure of a startup. If you don't know that number, you don't even know if you're doing well or badly.

• A good growth rate during YC is 5-7% a week.
  If you can hit 10% a week you're doing exceptionally well.
  If you can only manage 1%, it's a sign you haven't yet figured out what you're doing.
  We usually advise startups to pick a growth rate they think they can hit,
  and then just try to hit it every week. The key word here is "just."
  If they decide to grow at 7% a week and they hit that number, they're successful for that week.

• So you'll be willing for example to hire another programmer,
  who won't contribute to this week's growth
  but perhaps in a month will have implemented some new feature that will get you more users.
  But only if (a) the distraction of hiring someone won't make you miss your numbers in the short term,
  and (b) you're sufficiently worried about whether you can keep hitting your numbers without hiring someone new.

• A company that grows at 1% a week will grow 1.7x a year,
  whereas a company that grows at 5% a week will grow 12.6x.
  A company making $1000 a month (a typical number early in YC) and growing at 1% a week
  will 4 years later be making $7900 a month,
  which is less than a good programmer makes in salary in Silicon Valley.
  A startup that grows at 5% a week will in 4 years be making $25 million a month.

• Growth is why startups usually work on technology -- because ideas for fast growing companies are so rare
  that the best way to find new ones is to discover those recently made viable by change,
  and technology is the best source of rapid change.
  Growth is why it's a rational choice economically for so many founders to try starting a startup:
  growth makes the successful companies so valuable that the expected value is high even though the risk is too.
  Growth is why VCs want to invest in startups: not just because the returns are high
  but also because generating returns from capital gains is easier to manage than generating returns from dividends.
  Growth explains why the most successful startups take VC money even if they don't need to:
  it lets them choose their growth rate.
  And growth explains why successful startups almost invariably get acquisition offers.
  To acquirers a fast-growing company is not merely valuable but dangerous too.

151. How to Get Startup Ideas (link) - November 2012

• The very best startup ideas tend to have three things in common:
  they're something the founders themselves want,
  that they themselves can build,
  and that few others realize are worth doing.

• By far the most common mistake startups make is to solve problems no one has.

• Why do so many founders build things no one wants?
  Because they begin by trying to think of startup ideas.

• You can either build something a large number of people want a small amount,
  or something a small number of people want a large amount.
  Choose the latter.

• Paul Buchheit says that people at the leading edge of a rapidly changing field "live in the future."
  Combine that with Pirsig and you get: Live in the future, then build what's missing.

• Because a good idea should seem obvious, when you have one you'll tend to feel that you're late.
  Don't let that deter you. Worrying that you're late is one of the signs of a good idea.

• You don't need to worry about entering a "crowded market"
  so long as you have a thesis about what everyone else in it is overlooking.

• When searching for ideas, look in areas where you have some expertise.

• Live in the future and build what seems interesting.
  Strange as it sounds, that's the real recipe.

153. Do Things That Don't Scale (link) - July 2013

• The most common unscalable thing founders have to do at the start is to recruit users manually.
  Nearly all startups have to.
  You can't wait for users to come to you.
  You have to go out and get them.

• There are two reasons founders resist going out and recruiting users individually.
  One is a combination of shyness and laziness.
  They'd rather sit at home writing code than go out and talk to a bunch of strangers
  and probably be rejected by most of them.
  But for a startup to succeed, at least one founder (usually the CEO) will have to spend a lot of time on sales and marketing.
  The other reason founders ignore this path is that the absolute numbers seem so small at first.
  This can't be how the big, famous startups got started, they think.
  The mistake they make is to underestimate the power of compound growth.
  We encourage every startup to measure their progress by weekly growth rate.
  If you have 100 users, you need to get 10 more next week to grow 10% a week.
  And while 110 may not seem much better than 100, if you keep growing at 10% a week you'll be surprised how big the numbers get.
  After a year you'll have 14,000 users, and after 2 years you'll have 2 million.

• Your first users should feel that signing up with you was one of the best choices they ever made.
  And you in turn should be racking your brains to think of new ways to delight them.

• It's not the product that should be insanely great, but the experience of being your user.

• The feedback you get from engaging directly with your earliest users will be the best you ever get.

• Like paying excessive attention to early customers,
  fabricating things yourself turns out to be valuable for hardware startups.
  You can tweak the design faster when you're the factory,
  and you learn things you'd never have known otherwise.

• Another consulting-like technique for recruiting initially lukewarm users is to use your software yourselves on their behalf.
  We did that at Viaweb. When we approached merchants asking if they wanted to use our software to make online stores,
  some said no, but they'd let us make one for them. Since we would do anything to get users, we did.
  We felt pretty lame at the time. Instead of organizing big strategic e-commerce partnerships,
  we were trying to sell luggage and pens and men's shirts.
  But in retrospect it was exactly the right thing to do,
  because it taught us how it would feel to merchants to use our software.
  Sometimes the feedback loop was near instantaneous:
  in the middle of building some merchant's site I'd find I needed a feature we didn't have,
  so I'd spend a couple hours implementing it and then resume building the site.

154. How To Convince Investors (link) - August 2013

• How do you seem like you'll be one of the big successes?
  You need three things: formidable founders, a promising market, and (usually) some evidence of success so far.

• A formidable person is one who seems like they'll get what they want,
  regardless of whatever obstacles are in the way.

• 156. How To Raise Money (link) - September 2013
       A typical trajectory might be (1) to get started with a few tens of thousands
       from something like Y Combinator or individual angels,
       then (2) raise a few hundred thousand to a few million to build the company,
       and then (3) once the company is clearly succeeding,
       raise one or more later rounds to accelerate growth.

• Don't raise money unless you want it and it wants you.

159. The Fatal Pinch (link) - December 2014

• Now that you know about the fatal pinch, how do you avoid it?
  Y Combinator tells founders who raise money to act as if it's the last they'll ever get.

196. Billionaires Build (link) - December 2020

• The ideal combination is the group of founders who are "living in the future"
  in the sense of being at the leading edge of some kind of change,
  and who are building something they themselves want.

• All these founders were building things they and their peers wanted,
  and the fact that they were at the leading edge of change meant
  that more people would want these things in the future.

• As long as you have some users, there are straightforward ways to get more:
  build new features they want, seek out more people like them,
  get them to refer you to their friends, and so on.
  But these techniques all require some initial seed group of users.

• "How do you know people want this?"
  The most convincing answer is "Because we and our friends want it."
  It's even better when this is followed by the news that you've already built a prototype,
  and even though it's very crude, your friends are using it, and it's spreading by word of mouth.

• The best thing you can do in a YC interview is to teach the partners about your users.
  So if you want to prepare for your interview,
  one of the best ways to do it is to go talk to your users and find out exactly what they're thinking.
  Which is what you should be doing anyway.

• It's all about users.
  The most reliable way to become a billionaire is to start a company that grows fast,
  and the way to grow fast is to make what users want.

• Startups usually win by making something so great that people recommend it to their friends.

207. How to Work Hard (link) - June 2021

• There are three ingredients in great work: natural ability, practice, and effort.
  You can do pretty well with just two, but to do the best work you need all three:
  you need great natural ability and to have practiced a lot and to be trying very hard.

• Bill Gates, for example, was among the smartest people in business in his era,
  but he was also among the hardest working. "I never took a day off in my twenties," he said. "Not one."