What nerds miss is that it takes hard work to make sales look easy.

No company has a culture; every company is a culture.

There is perhaps no specific time that is necessarily right to start your company or start your life. But some times and some moments seem more auspicious than others. Now is such a moment. If we don’t take charge and usher in the future - if you don’t take charge of your life - there is the sense that no one else will.

I think China thinks information technology is less important than we think it is in the US, economically, and more important politically. And so Chinese internet companies are extremely political, they're protected behind the great firewall of China, and investment in Alibaba is good as long as Jack Ma stays in the good graces of the Chinese communist party. Alibaba is largely copying various business models from the US; they have combined some things in interesting new ways, but I think it's fundamentally a business that works because of the political protection you get in China.

If you think your initial market might be too big, it almost certainly is.

The road doesn’t have to be infinite after all. Take the hidden paths.

You'll attract the employees you need if you can explain why your mission is compelling: not why it's important in general, but why you're doing something important that no one else is going to get done.