We were very, very lucky being in the first round of Y Combinator because that alone generated a lot of interest. A lot of readers of Paul Graham were just excited to see what was going to come up. And we were the first ones to launch.

If you want to succeed, you've got to be okay to just lose control.

Not everyone is going to end up being a founder of a company, but the skill of being entrepreneurial, having ideas and going through with them - that skill is so important. Everyone should be imbued with it. Because once you have that, once your brain has been wired for that, all these problems, obstacles, all these things start looking like things you can hack.

We don't even realize something is broken until someone else shows us a better way

At the end of the day, how many ads did it take to convince you to use Facebook or Twitter? It wasn't marketing or advertising that convinced you to use these services. It was their value.

Raise $500 for a thing you care about because you actually get the experience of taking an idea and actually doing it. There are fewer and fewer excuses not to.

Entrepreneur is just French for 'has ideas, does them'.