The best entrepreneurs know this: every great business is built around a secret that’s hidden from the outside. A great company is a conspiracy to change the world; when you share your secret, the recipient becomes a fellow conspirator.

If they don't go to law school, bright college graduates head to Wall Street precisely because they have no real plan for their careers.

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.

The something of somewhere is mostly just the nothing of nowhere.

Under perfect competition, in the long run no company makes an economic profit.

There's been a lot companies that have shown "zero to one" kind of growth in the computer, internet software age. Facebook and Google are zero to one companies. Apple's iPhone was the first smartphone that really works, and of course, then you scale it horizontally, but the vertical component was really critical. Space X would also be one.

Forget startup companies. The next frontier is startup countries.