My real mantra for my life is "empower others".

The most powerful sign is that your work no longer enchants you - it's not deep, delightful, and mutually satisfying. When this happens, it may be time to look for new challenges.

For me, while writing I am an engineer, so if I decide to change the format, I want to add a section, to move a section, reorganize the section, anything I want to do, I just boot words, and I do what I want to do. So, I feel completely empowered when I'm a writer.

I'm a lousy predictor of the future.

People are free or cheap. Marketing: using Twitter or blogs. Cheap or free. Infrastructure: call up Amazon, call up Rackspace, terabytes of data in the clouds, thousand dollars, two thousand dollars.

Knowledge is great. Competence is great. But the combination of both encourages people to trust you and increases your powers of enchantment. And in this world, the combination is a breath of fresh air.

"No one is doing what we're doing." This is a bummer of a lie because there are only two logical conclusions. First, no one else is doing this because there is no market for it. Second, the entrepreneur is so clueless that he can't even use Google to figure out he has competition. Suffice it to say that the lack of a market and cluelessness is not conducive to securing an investment. As a rule of thumb, if you have a good idea, five companies are going the same thing. If you have a great idea, fifteen companies are doing the same thing.