If you're in your early 20s and you're hanging out with a bunch of other people in their early 20s, nobody has a sense of the kinds of problems that real 'workers' run into every day. They're running into a completely different set of problems like 'what's the party going on right now that I should be going to?

I think because of the iPhone and the fact that we now have a ubiquitous internet, our creativity in the startup space is 10 times different. Every single industry, every single market, is going to be technology-driven in some way. There's an infinite opportunity for startups because now you can go and solve problems that previously looked like they had nothing to do with technology.

If you don't go to every level of your company, you distance yourself from the marketplace and from your people.

All we're really doing is repeating technologies that were tried 10, 20, 30 years ago... it's just that it was too expensive, too unusable, and we didn't have the enabling technologies to make it possible.

Tip: Take the stodgiest, oldest, slowest moving industry you can find. And build amazing software for it.

If you're waiting for encouragement from others, you're doing it wrong. By the time people think an idea is good, it's probably too late.

Any time where the delta b/w what is possible and how things work today is at its widest, that's an opportunity to go build new technology.