The speed of market evolution gives you a lot more chances to use your advantage over a big company.

Startups usually win on big platform shifts.

Paul Bucheit looked at the traits of our best founders to distil down what they were.

He came up with: Frugality, focus, obsession, and love.

These are things you should be able to say about what you're doing, and you as a founder.

One of the most important jobs you have as a founder is to never lose momentum.

For the first few years you never take your foot off the gas.

Startups are not the best choice for work-life balance.

But especially on the early days, startups survive on their own momentum.

Startups, especially in their early days, often win by moving very quickly.

You want people who're willing to act with much less data than they'd like to have,

and if it doesn't work, they adapt quickly and try something else.

most of which will be bad, turns out to be super important to have on the team.

The whole world will tell you why you're gonna fail as a startup.

If you don't have that internal fire of belief, if you don't have people who say:

"You know what, we're gonna do this no matter what the haters say, we're gonna figure it out."

If you don't have the spirit of optimism on the team, it's very hard to succeed.

Building a great team, other than picking the right market and building a great product,

is the most important thing you do.

All founders go through a transition where you switch from building a product to a company.

And building a company is really about the team.

The entire startup ecosystem is best set up to support companies with a low chance of success but

that are huge if they work.

And I think going for something that's huge if it works will attract the best people.

Having courage of your convictions, being a clear leader, saying "We're gonna do this!"

And that's why even in the face of a lot of doubt that seems really correlate with success.

It's really important to think when starting a company:

Cause getting talent and mind share is really hard in the current environment.

And people are interested in startups that matter!

Someone at the startup has gotta be the person that's gonna recruit, sell the product, talk to press

And this requires someone who can infect with enthusiasm the whole world!

It's very hard to succeed wildly without that! It's very hard to build a team at all without it.

Real trends are those that early adopters use obsessively and tell their friends how much they love.

A fake trend is one where people may buy the product, but don't use it or at least not enough.

The most important startups, are the ones that start in small markets that're growing very quickly!

11 years ago the market for iPhone apps was zero dollars! Not huge!

What you want to do is identify a market that's gonna grow and be able to ride that elevator!

If you can build a product so good that people spontaneously tell their friends about it

you've done 80% of the work that you need!

Think of Google, Facebook, etc, you probably found out about them cause a friend told you:

"You've gotta try this! It's great!"