Quotes from Jessica Livingston

Starting a startup is a process of trial and error. What guided the founders through this process was their empathy for the users. They never lost sight of making things that people would want.

Pick a big enough project, something that's really hard, something that over the years you can work on.

Over the years, I've learned that the first idea you have is irrelevant. It's just a catalyst for you to get started. Then you figure out what's wrong with it and you go through phases of denial, panic, regret. And then you finally have a better idea and the second idea is always the important one.

the less energy people expend on performance, the more they expend on appearances to compensate.

I think there are very few people who have a capacity to see the future. So it can be difficult when you are talking about something where nothing about it exists yet.

Much better to figure out where the marketplace is going to be in a few years, focus on providing a solution to that, and let the market forces catch up to you.

Venture capitalists, with the exception of people like Don Valentine, would tell you that they'd rather fund a great team than a great idea. The reason is that if they have a bad idea, great teams can figure out a better one. Mediocre people even with a great idea can screw it up in its execution. Or if they have a bad idea, then they aren't going to be in a position to think about how to change it. They're just going to pursue it blindly.

Wozniak: Well, we added up to the total everything that was needed. If there was anything that neither one of us knew how to do, Steve would do it. He'd just find a way to do it. He was just gung ho and pressing for this company to be successful. And me, I was pretty much only in my technical head with the circuits.

I didn't really want to patent it because, for one, I don't like software patents, and, two, if you patent it, you make it public. Even if you don't know someone's infringing, they will still be getting the benefit. Instead, we just chose to keep it a trade secret and not show it to anyone.

People like the idea of innovation in the abstract, but when you present them with any specific innovation, they tend to reject it because it doesn't fit with what they already know.

Because you'll go through so many changes, I don't think it pays off to overanalyze the first business plan, for example. The first business plan is there to make sure you can use Microsoft Word.

when you build only software that you absolutely need, you don't get more software than you'll actually use.

A startup is a company that builds some kind of technology that people want. The mistake that a lot of founders make is to build something they think users want, but that users don't actually want. - Paul Graham

Some famous person said, Success is 50 percent luck and 50 percent preparedness for that luck. I think that's a lot of it. It's being ready to take advantage of opportunities when they arise.

A company that is not designed to create high-tech products is very unlikely to have the culture or the DNA that it takes to create high-tech products. So if you are a high-tech person in that company, then you're basically a glorified typist in some sense. It's very unlikely that the kind of people who would be successful in an entertainment company would even understand what programmers do that makes them more than typists.

A lot of the machines that Google is built on—commodity is the polite word for them—they're regular PCs and so they're not always the most reliable.

The really dramatic growth happens when a startup only has three of four people, so only three or four people see that, whereas tens of thousands see business as it's practiced by Boeing or Philip Morris.

In big companies, there's always going to be more politics and less scope for individual decisions. But seeing what startups are really like will at least show other organizations what to aim for. The time may soon be coming when instead of startups trying to seem more corporate, corporations will try to seem more like startups. That would be a good thing.

Paul Buchheit: Then you have what we do with PCs, and that's technically pretty challenging—to take this big network of machines that are unreliable and build a big, reliable storage system out of it.

determination is the most important quality in a founder, open-mindedness and willingness to change your idea are key, and all startups face rejection at first.

Livingston: What is the key to excellence for an engineer? Wozniak: You have to be very diligent. You have to check every little detail. You have to be so careful that you haven't left something out. You have to think harder and deeper than you normally would.

Apparently sprinters reach their highest speed right out of the blocks, and spend the rest of the race slowing down. The winners slow down the least. It's that way with most startups too. The earliest phase is usually the most productive. That's when they have the really big ideas. Imagine what Apple was like when 100% of its employees were either Steve Jobs or Steve Wozniak.

I'd say determination is the single most important quality in a startup founder. If the founders I spoke with were superhuman in any way, it was in their perseverance.

Programmers have not been professionals because they haven't really cared about quality.