A winning team feels good and keeps winning. A team that hasn't won in a while gets demotivated and keeps losing.

Be suspicious of any work that is not building product or getting customers. It's easy to get sucked into an infrastructure rewrite death spiral.

AirBnB spent 5 months interviewing their first employee, before they hired someone and in their first year, they only hired 2 people.

The tenth social network, and limited only to college students with no money, also terrible. Myspace had won.

We've seen a lot of data at YC now, and the most successful companies and the ones where the investors do the best... end up giving a lot of stock out to employees- year after year after year.

Someday, you need to build a business that's difficult to replicate. This is an important part of a good idea.

By the way, that's my number one piece of advice if you're going to join a startup: pick a rocket ship.