It's difficult to get large groups of people, to the extreme levels of focus and productivity that you need, for a startup to be successful.

Be suspicious of any work that is not building product or getting customers.

Because so few people make an actual long term commitment to what they're building, the ones that do have a huge advantage.

There's at least a hundred times more people with great ideas than people that are willing to put in the effort to execute them well.

You only get points when you make something the market wants. So if you work really hard on the wrong things, no one will care.

Another way of looking at this, is that the best companies are almost always mission oriented.

The natural state of a start-up is to die; most start-ups require multiple miracles in their early days to escape this fate.