#1 “If everyone loves your idea, I might be worried that it’s not forward thinking enough.”

• Ps - don’t keep your startup idea secret

#2 “How do you develop a good idea that looks like a bad idea? You need to know a secret — in the Peter Thiel sense: something you believe that most other people don’t believe. How do you develop a secret? (a) know the tools better than anyone else; (b) know the problems better than anyone else; and/or (c) draw from unique life experience.”

• “Founders have to choose a market long before they have any idea whether they will reach product/market fit. In my opinion, the best predictor of success is whether there is what David Lee calls ‘founder/market fit.’ Founder/market fit means the founders have a deep understanding of the market they are entering, and are people who ‘personify their product, business, and ultimately their company.’”

#3 “[The] business of seed investing, and frankly, early-stage entrepreneurship, is so much about getting good information. And almost all of that information, unfortunately, is not published.”

#4 “Ideas …matter, just not in the narrow sense in which startup ideas are popularly defined. Good startup ideas are well developed, multi-year plans that contemplate many possible paths according to how the world changes.”

#5 “There is a widespread myth that the most important part of building a great company is coming up with a great idea.” “What you should really be focused on when pitching your early stage startup is pitching yourself and your team. Of course a great way to show you can build stuff is to build a prototype of the product you are raising money for. This is why so many VCs tell entrepreneurs to ‘come back when you have a demo.’ They aren’t wondering whether your product can be built – they are wondering whether you can build it.”

#6 “What the smartest people do on the weekend is what everyone else will do during the week in ten years.” “Hobbies are what the smartest people spend their time on when they aren’t constrained by near-term financial goals.”

#7 “This era of technology, it seems to be the core theme is about moving beyond bits to atoms. Meaning technology that affects real word, and transportation and housing and healthcare and all these other things, as opposed to just moving bits around. And those areas tend to be more heavily regulated and, this issue is only beginning to be significant and will probably the defining issue of the next decade in technology.”

#8 “Anyone who has pitched VCs knows they are obsessed with market size.” “If you can’t make the case that you’re addressing a possible billion dollar market, you’ll have difficulty getting VCs to invest. (Smaller, venture-style investors like angels and seed funds also prioritize market size but are usually more flexible – they’ll often invest when the market is “only” ~$100M). This is perfectly rational since VC returns tend to be driven by a few big hits in big markets.”

#9 “There are two kinds of investors: Ron Conways who try to create value by finding good people and helping them create something great, and others, who want a piece of someone else’s things. The builders and the extractors. Avoid the extractors.”