• But everytime we create something new, we go from 0 to 1. The act of creation is singular, as is the moment of creation, and the result is something fresh and strange.

  • Today’s “best practices” lead to dead ends; the best path are new and untried.

  • Technology is miraculous because it allows us to do more with less, ratcheting up our fundamental capabilities to a higher level.

  • Humans don’t decide what to build by making choices from some cosmic catalog of options given in advance; instead, by creating new technologies we rewrite the plan of the world.

  • The paradox of teaching entrepreneurship is that such a formula cannot exist; because every innovation is new and unique, no authority can be prescribed in concrete terms how to be innovative.

  • Indeed, the single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formals.

  • “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”

  • Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is even shorter supply than genius.

  • “Most people believe in X, but the truth is the opposite of X.”

  • If things change radically in the next decade then the future is nearly at hand.

  • No one can predict the future exactly, but we know two things: It is going to be different, and it must be rooted in today’s world.

  • Going from 0 → 1 : Vertical or intensive progress (Technology, doing new things)

  • Going from 1 → n : Horizontal or extensive progress (Globalization : Taking things that work somewhere and making them work everywhere. e.g. China)

  • But there is no reason why technology should be limited to computes. Properly understood, any new and better way of doing things is technology.

  • Even our everyday language suggest we believe in kind of technological end of history; the division of the world into so+called developed and developing nations implies that the “developed” world has already achieved the achievable and the poorer nations just need to catch up.

  • Spreading old ways to create wealth around the world will result in devastation, not riches. In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable.

  • The smartphones that distinct us from our surrounding also distinct us from the fact that our surrounding is strangely old: only computers and communications have improved dramatically since midcentury.

  • …it’s hard to develop new things in big organizations, and it’s even harder to do it by yourself. Bureaucratic hierarchies move slowly, and entrenched interests shy away from risk.

  • In the most dysfunctional organizations, signalling that work is being done becomes a better strategy for career advancement than actually doing work(if this describe your company, you should quit now.

  • Startup operate on principle that you need to work with other people to get stuff done, but you also need to stay small enough so that you actually can.

  • A new company’s most important strength is new thinking: even more important than nimbleness, small size affords space to think.

  • …exercise in thinking. Because that is what a startup has to do: question received ideas and rethink business from scratch.

  • “Madness is rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, nations and ages it is rare.” Nietzsche wrote (before he went made)