Make sure the thing you are working on is something you love.

Once a quarter, Amy and I go off the grid and totally disconnect. It's totally doable and it will change your life.

You can’t motivate people, you can only create a context in which people are motivated.

When everyone starts sounding the same, that's when you know the words and phrases have become clichés. Instead of speaking in clichés, I encourage people just to be themselves, let their passion burn brightly, and go work on things they love spending their time on.

It’s not about having a Silicon Valley attitude—it’s about having an entrepreneurial attitude. It’s about partnering with other organizations in and around your area. It’s about thinking big with entrepreneurs that sit next to you in your coworking space. It’s about collaborating with tech gurus, social media wizards and community leaders at cool business events. It’s the people that make a community an entrepreneurial one—not the location—and it’s up to you to contribute.

Startups are transforming our society. Over the past 100 years, we've gone from an industrial era, where a hierarchical structure dominated business and society, to a post information era where the network is rapidly disrupting the hierarchy and transforming the way we work and live.

Building a startup community is not a zero-sum game in which there are winners and losers: if everyone engages, they and the entire community can all be winners.