Brad Feld

“Failure is a key part of entrepreneurship, but, as with many things in life, attitude impacts outcome”
― Brad Feld, Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist

“as you'll learn, there really are only two key things that matter in the actual term sheet negotiation—economics and control.”
― Brad Feld, Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist

“Several of her students were engrossed in their work, but when she asked one of them, a PhD student named David Merrill, to give me a quick demo of his project, he readily agreed. Merrill walked us over to a three-foot-wide mockup of a supermarket shelf stocked with cartons of butter, Egg Beaters, and cereal, and he happily slipped on a Bluetooth-enabled ring he had been tinkering with when we interrupted him. He pointed directly at a box of cereal, and a light on the shelf directly below it glowed red. This meant, he told us, that the food didn’t fit the nutritional profile that he had programmed into the device. Perhaps it contained nuts or not enough fiber. He told me that there were a lot of “really cool technologies” making this happen—an infrared transmitter/receiver mounted on the ring, a transponder on the shelf with which it communicated, and a Bluetooth connection to a smart phone that could access the wearer’s profile in real time, to name a few. It was easy to see how this “augmented reality interface,” as Merrill called it, could change the experience of in-store shopping in truly a profound way. But what really impressed me during this visit was the close working relationship he clearly enjoyed with Maes. He called her “Pattie,” and my impression was that they engaged in give-and-take like true collaborators and colleagues.”
― Frank Moss, The Sorcerers and Their Apprentices: How the Digital Magicians of the MIT Media Lab Are Creating the Innovative Technologies That Will Transform Our Lives

“But the grind has begun. The windows don’t open, and even the availability of near-constant jokes about Jews and Mormons fails to stem the tide of frustration, decay. We’ve reached the end of pure inspiration, and are now somewhere else, something implying routine, or doing something because people expect us to do it, going somewhere each day because we went there the day before, saying things because we have said them before, and this seems like the work of a different sort of animal, contrary to our plan, and this is very very bad.”
― dave eggers

“When Baby Boomers grow up and write books to explain why one or another individual is successful, they point to the power of a particular individual’s context as determined by chance. But they miss the even bigger social context for their own preferred explanations: a whole generation learned from childhood to overrate the power of chance and underrate the importance of planning. Gladwell at first appears to be making a contrarian critique of the myth of the self-made businessman, but actually his own account encapsulates the conventional view of a generation.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“Eroom’s law—that’s Moore’s law backward—observes that the number of new drugs approved per billion dollars spent on R&D has halved every nine years since 1950.”
― Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future