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.

Even if you have no interest in starting a company, having the experience of having ideas and doing them, that's muscle to exercise because that's what people are going to want to see. That's what makes you different.

If you have things or are involved with things that turn on, it's going to have code. And there are so many people - let's pick on the historians - even as a historian, let's say I ended up going the road of being a historian, just knowing some basic scripts, any kind of automation would have made me a 10 times better historian because I wouldn't have to sit there changing every file name to "1234" and then "12345." It can have a transformative value.

The Internet is, as a communication platform and a learning platform, unparalleled because whether you want to learn something or share something, it's simply a few clicks away.

No, everyone has great ideas, but what makes a difference, especially online, or just in life, is actually doing it; getting that first version out there.

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.

It takes discipline not to let social media steal your time.