Doing the Enough Thing

You shouldn’t need 10-12 hours to get enough good work done

Time is incredibly valuable, and to ask for someone’s time you should have a good reason for it

There are quite a few down sides to taking a lot of venture capital money...

How about not setting goals at all and just trying to do the best you can?

The thing that surprises me most for people coming out of school is how poorly school teaches them to write and communicate

Just because other people are doing it this way does not mean that that's how you should do it

Goals and metrics are just made up targets. If you don’t hit them, you’re bound to be disappointed.

The fact that communication is speeding up with things like texting and work messaging apps, does not mean our responses to these messages should be speeding up as well

I find that the more I pay attention to industry trends and who’s doing what, the less free my mind is. You’re just colored by what everyone else is doing and you don’t have as much space for your own thoughts.

You DON'T need millions of customers - just take care of the ones that you have really well

I just want to make a great product, work with great people, be intellectually challenged, and have a good life outside of that

Your tasks expand in proportion to the time you allow them

One of the great ways to ‘win’ in business is to just stick around. And one of the ways to stick around is to just become profitable.

Every business eventually dies, but often times they kill themselves

If someone decides to work here, they're saying no to a million other opportunities - I feel like I have to respect that and create a place where they can do their best work.

School is a means to certain ends, but it's not the means to any end.

We don't have any goals or any metrics for success.

You could end up with a feature that customers absolutely love, but it might have destroyed moral internally. To me, that’s not a good outcome.

I have a hard time with tech businesses that are held up as successful examples of businesses but are actually fundamentally terrible businesses

Building some self-awareness and really knowing yourself is probably the most important lesson [for kids to learn] ultimately

Here's how Jason Fried and his product development team at Basecamp choose which projects to work on

If you're only measuring the output and the outcome in terms of like customers felt about a product, but you're not really thinking about how people building it actually felt about it, I think you're missing a big big picture.

I much prefer to pay attention to things outside my industry...

...As long as you're staying in business and you're making more money than you spend...I respect you.

Always figure out what the right to do is in any given situation. You might not always do the right thing, but know what the right thing is.

Advantages of a small business compared to a big tech company