Daniel Gross- Pioneering The Future of Startups, Frameworks for Entrepreneurs and Challenging Yourself!

I think, as a society, we want more variety, we want more choice, we want more weirdness. We don't want to live in a world where there are four or five large tech companies. It'd be great to live in a world where there are a thousand small tech companies. I think in order to create that, we need to literally create and generate more founders. I don't think it's that the world is lacking in sufficient IQ or people that would be smart enough or people that would be gritty enough; I think it's that the world is lacking in a way to kind of radicalize people to pursue their passions.

The world really doesn't care about how much effort you put in; the world really cares about how much output you have. You want to be working hard and smart, not just hard.

In certain properites in the world—the internet being one of those worlds—you can grow much faster than you anticipate. That is the big thing people don't realize. They're sending 10 emails a week, not a 100,000 emails a week. They're trying to grow revenue $1,000 a month, not $1,000,000 a month.

For wherever you want to be—in terms of revenue, how much money you have, how many users you have—you could take whatever number that is, plug it into a spreadsheet, and just set 5% growth as your target weekly. It starts out really easy, but if you manage to keep the pace, you get to large numbers very quickly.

Humans aren't born with the sense that they can start a company that turns into Amazon. Statistically, the odds are that it won't happen. But when it does happen to someone, it'll be started by the same person as you—as the person listening to this.

I think it's impossible for a mortal to build a product and have it be successful with literally no edits ... I think it's very possible for someone to build something that's directionally good and try to get feedback from customers.

For me, being able to produce something that other people find worthwhile, that other people find useful—be that an email, a piece of software, anything really—that, for me, is joy.

There are thousands of amazing companies—your next Stripe, Facebook Pinterest, Snapchat, whatever—that are GitHub repos with 10 commits in them where the person then gave up because they lost motivation.

The only amount of goodness you need in your product is you need sufficient goodness so that people will use it so that they will give you feedback.

Negotiating against a VC is, I think, flat-out unfair. You're doing a negotiation for the fourth time probably in your life and they're doing it for the fourth time this week.

We are the average of the people we spend time with, and you want to figure out ways to spend time with great people to increase your average.

As humans, I think it's actually fairly healthy that we look for a sense of accomplishment from other humans. If we didn't have that, we would all off be doing crazy things—maybe bad things.

Handshakes will go away [post-COVID-19] because not doing handshakes is fine. They're not a requirement for humans. It's not oxygen.

You often need a recession for super-talent to concentrate and for real great outcomes to happen.

I'd much rather take a bet on someone who will be able to play a thousand chess games than take a bet on someone who seems like they have merely the energy to play one but, statistically, maybe they have high odds of winning that one game.