Quotes from Randall E. Stross

Graham excuses himself for a moment to go over to his laptop and look up what he had written in his notes after their interview. When he returns, he reports that he had written the following: "Insanely energetic founders. Fund for the new idea." So Graham is not going to be the one who encourages them to pursue

consumer investing," that is, working with businesses that sold directly to the broad public and whose fate would be determined by marketing, positioning, segment leadership, and branding. In short, businesses based on mastering consumer psychology.

Edison's admirers endowed him with fantastical powers that would permit him to invent anything he wished (one

In Silicon Valley, most engineers work on projects that will never be completed- this holds true at large companies as well as small. If engineers are lucky enough to witness the rare day when the product is completed and launched, they will, in the overwhelming majority of cases, witness the product's failure in the marketplace.

advice: "In general, don't hide your disasters. We're not going to take the money back." He says this lightly, as if delivering a joke, but it is reassuring for the founders to hear. They laugh, perhaps with a touch of relief.

Bell invented the telephone while tinkering with acoustic telegraphy; Edison invented the phonograph while tinkering with the telephone.

The pen would enjoy a second life years later, in the 1890s, when converted into the first electric tattoo needle.)

Young Bell and Edison were the same age, each improving the major invention that the other had come up with first, Edison following Bell, then Bell following Edison. Edison, in fact, had been close to devising a working telephone himself. After Bell's success, the next best thing for Edison was to come up with an indispensable improvement, the carbon transmitter that captured the human voice far better than Bell's magnetic design. Edison

But one immediate benefit of the press's marveling was that the extensive coverage supplied Edison with creative ideas about how the phonograph could be adapted for many more uses than telegraphy or senatorial speeches.

his own willingness to practice Morse code "about 18 hours a day." (Edison's capacity for extended bursts of work would be his principal vanity his entire life.) This intensive tutelage soon enabled him to become a professional telegraph operator.

The collective value of a typical venture capital portfolio will go down before it goes up—the pattern is called the J curve—because the companies that are not going to survive die before the best performers begin to shine and pull the value of the portfolio up with them. That,

Launch Fast" is Paul Graham's mantra. Move from the idea to a minimally functional product as quickly as possible. Only by getting a product into the hands of customers, even if the product is only a prototype, is it possible to know what customers want.1 Launching fast is how to make something people want. Judging by the advice that they

Graham conveys the sense that good ideas are plentiful, waiting for someone to come along and pluck them off the ground. "There's a bunch of things like that," he says.

many of his pranks involved electric shock—these stunts gain interest in retrospect, knowing as we do of Edison's future work on the ultimate instrument of shock, the electric chair. In

invention should not be pursued as an exercise in technical cleverness, but should be shaped by commercial needs.

Nor did he regard his partial deafness as an impediment. He claimed that the deafness was actually an advantage, freeing him from time-wasting small talk and giving him undisturbed time to "think out my problems." Late in life he would say that he was fortunate to have been spared "all the foolish conversation and other meaningless sounds that normal people hear.

HAVING ONE'S OWN shop, working on projects of one's own choosing, making enough money today so one could do the same tomorrow: These were the modest goals of Thomas Edison when he struck out on his own as full-time inventor and manufacturer. The grand goal was nothing other than enjoying the autonomy of entrepreneur and forestalling a return to the servitude of employee.

way out, Greenberg told a couple of the