venturing.in

Category: Notes

  • Starting In A Market Everyone Is Laughing At

    If you start a company in a market everyone knows is going to be big, then you will have a ton of competition. If, however, you start a company in a market everyone is laughing at, you won’t have too many competitors.

    – Fred Wilson

  • Hyperlearners

    For a highly motivated learner, it’s not like knowledge is secret and somehow the Internet made it not secret. It just made knowledge easy to find. If you’re a motivated enough learner, books are pretty good. Now, if you’re the kind of person who gets stuck on Chapter 5 and will give up if you don’t have someone to answer questions, don’t try and pick up the Feynman lectures on physics. That’s true whether it’s online or offline. A MOOC (massive open online course) is an attempt to gather a group and encourage students, almost like a typical classroom, forcing you to interact during the lecture so that it kind of wakes you up and keeps you engaged. A hyperlearner doesn’t have to have those things.

    – Bill Gates

  • Missionaries vs Mercenaries

    The greatest companies are led by missionaries, not mercenaries.

    – John Doerr

  • Confusing State and Society

    Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.

    – Thomas Paine

  • Pursuing Something Important

    Pursue something so important that even if you fail, the world is better off with you having tried.

    – Tim O’Reilly

  • Outsourcing and Modularity

    Outsourcing makes sense only when components are modular.

    – Clayton Christensen

  • Better

    It’s very easy to be different, but very difficult to be better.

    – Jony Ive

  • Teaching Longing

    If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

    – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

  • Reason and Freedom

    The relationship between reason and freedom is reciprocal: when men are rational, freedom wins; when men are free, reason wins.

    – Ayn Rand