Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

by Paul Graham

If you can think things so outside the box that they’d make people’s hair stand on end, you’ll have no trouble with the small trips outside the box that people call innovative.

There are only two things you have to know about business: build something users love, and make more than you spend.

Start by making something clean and simple that you would want to use yourself. Get a version 1.0 out fast, then continue to improve the software, listening closely to users as you do. The customer is always right, but different customers are right about different things;

Start by picking a hard problem, and then at every decision point, take the harder choice.9

startup should give its competitors as little information as possible.