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there is not a fixed amount of wealth in the world. You can make more wealth.
Suppose you own a beat-up old car. Instead of sitting on your butt next summer, you could spend the time restoring your car to pristine condition. In doing so you create wealth. The world is — and you specifically are — one pristine old car the richer. And not just in some metaphorical way. If you sell your car, you’ll get more for
A programmer can sit down in front of a computer and create wealth.
wealth is something that’s made, rather than being distributed,
A great programmer, on a roll, could create a million dollars worth of wealth in a couple weeks.
This is why so many of the best programmers are libertarians. In our world, you sink or swim, and there are no excuses.
An experienced programmer would be more likely to think is that all? The top 5% of programmers probably write 99% of the good software.
Wealth is whatever people want,
You get up in the morning and go to a new set of buildings, and do things that you do not, ordinarily, enjoy doing.
If wealth means what people want, companies that move things also create wealth.
Nearly all companies exist to do something people want.
In a company, the work you do is averaged together with a lot of other people’s.
A more direct way to put it would be: you need to start doing something people want.
A job means doing something people want, averaged together with everyone else in that company.
In a big company you get paid a fairly predictable salary for working fairly hard. You’re expected not to be obviously incompetent or lazy, but you’re not expected to devote your whole life to your work.
Companies are not set up to reward people who want to do this.
the official fiction is that you are already working as hard as you can.
To get rich you need to get yourself in a situation with two things, measurement and leverage.
You need to be in a position where your performance can be measured, or there is no way to get paid more by doing more. And you have to have leverage, in the sense that the decisions you make have a big effect.
A good hint to the presence of leverage is the possibility of failure.
If you’re in a job that feels safe, you are not going to get rich, because if there is no danger there is almost certainly no leverage.
Starting or joining a startup is thus as close as most people can get to saying to one’s boss, I want to work ten times as hard, so please pay me ten times as much.
A big company is like a giant galley driven by a thousand rowers. Two things keep the speed of the galley down. One is that individual rowers don’t see any result from working harder. The other is that, in a group of a thousand people, the average rower is likely to be pretty average.
Ideally, you are getting together with a group of other people who also want to work a lot harder, and get paid a lot more, than they would in a big company.
Steve Jobs once said that the success or failure of a startup depends on the first ten employees. I agree. If anything, it’s more like the first five.
You fry eggs or cut hair one customer at a time. Whereas if you solve a technical problem that a lot of people care about, you help everyone who uses your solution. That’s leverage.
A McDonald’s franchise is controlled by rules so precise that it is practically a piece of software.
Write once, run everywhere.
run upstairs. Suppose you are a little, nimble guy being chased by a big, fat, bully. You open a door and find yourself in a staircase. Do you go up or
down? I say up.
we deliberately sought hard problems.
We delighted in forcing bigger, slower competitors to follow us over difficult ground.
something that was hard for us would be impossible for our competitors.
It is that you’re 30 times as productive, and get paid between zero and a thousand times as much.
A startup is like a mosquito. A bear can absorb a hit and a crab is armored against one, but a mosquito is designed for one thing: to score.
No energy is wasted on defense.
We would have much preferred a 100% chance of $1 million to a 20% chance of $10 million, even though theoretically the second is worth twice as much. Unfortunately, there is not currently any space in the business world where you can get the first deal.
companies doing acquisitions are not looking for bargains.
For potential acquirers, the most powerful motivator is the prospect that one of their competitors will buy you.
In both cases, what it all comes down to is users.
What they go by is the number of users you have.
In a startup, you’re not just trying to solve problems. You’re trying to solve problems that users care about.
Treat a startup as an optimization problem in which performance is measured by number of users.
treating a startup as an optimization problem will help you avoid another pitfall that VCs worry about, and rightly — taking a long time to develop a product.
wealth is what people want. If you plan to get rich by creating wealth, you have to know what people want.
A restaurant can afford to serve the occasional burnt dinner. But in technology, you cook one thing and that’s what everyone eats.
Take away the incentive of wealth, and technical innovation grinds to a halt.
Remember what a startup is, economically: a way of saying, I want to work faster. Instead of accumulating money slowly by being paid a regular wage for fifty years, I want to get it over with as soon as possible.
governments that forbid you to accumulate wealth are in effect decreeing...
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The problem with working slowly is not just that technical innovation happens slowly. It’s that it tends not to happen at all. It’s only when you’re deliberately looking for hard
