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.

You don't want to be the best at what you do; you want to be the only one who does what you do.

You want to be so good, they can't ignore you

I don’t think you want to replicate someone else’s strategy or unique insights. You have to figure out which pieces of their success formula apply to your comparative advantages, and which ones you can leverage, and which ones you can maybe even do better than them. That’s where the art is. I’m borrowing lessons I’ve learned from a bunch of different people, from a bunch of different experiences, from a bunch of different companies, and packaging them together in my own Keith custom brew.

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.

If you’re going to attract people with extremely high potential, the first thing you have to do is let them thrive. You have to give them the degrees of freedom to do both what they can do very well, and to some extent, allow them to make mistakes.

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.

There’s nothing more valuable than reading high-quality materials. You can tap into the best thinking of all time, become an expert in many dimensions, and forge connections from different fields.

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.

I think we’ll discover in the next 20-30 years when we have more longitudinal data that most maladies are a function of poor sleep.

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.

To be successful in an efficient market, you need to figure out what your comparative advantage is and magnify it.

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.

Debating with someone who’s very good at what they do—who’s very insightful and sharp—is always a useful exercise.

I’m a better filter of other people’s ideas than I am a generator of my own. A lot of what I do is listen to ideas, riff on them—or critique them—and help other people refine them by my critiques or by my riffs.

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.