Pursue joy, not happiness. This is probably the hardest lesson of all to learn. It probably seems to you that the goal in life is to be happy. Oh, you maybe have to sacrifice and study and work hard, but, by and large, happiness should be predictable.

And this is the beginning of the end.

The root of great companies is make meaning vs. make money.

Jolt is for Windows programmers. It's typical IBM PC: it goes in brown and comes out yellow. Mountain Dew is for Macintosh programmers: it goes in yellow and comes out yellow. It's WYSIWYP.

What you learn in school is the opposite of what happens in the real world. In school, you're always worried about minimums. You have to reach 20 pages or you have to have so many slides or whatever. Then you get out in the real world and you think, 'I have to have a minimum of 20 pages and 50 slides.

An MBA is a great degree for career paths like investment banking, finance, consulting, and large companies. An MBA is not necessarily the right path for starting a tech company. You should be building a prototype, not getting an MBA in that case.

I learned how difficult it is to self-publish a book. It's complex, it's confusing, it's idiosyncratic.