Startups are as impersonal as physics. You have to make something people want, and you prosper only to the extent you do. There is no boss to trick, only users, and all users care about is whether your product does what they want.

On why gaming the system stops working in startups.

Trust your instincts about people. If someone seems slippery, or bogus, or a jerk, don't ignore it — this is the one case where it pays to be self-indulgent. Work with people you genuinely like and have known long enough to be sure.

The one area where founder instincts should be trusted.

Young founders 'play house' — they make up a plausible idea, raise money at a good valuation, rent a cool office, hire a bunch of people, and then gradually realize how completely fucked they are, because while imitating the outward forms of a startup they neglected the one essential thing: making something people want.

Don't start a startup in college. Starting a startup is like a brutally fast depth-first search, and most people should still be searching breadth-first at 20. You're not sacrificing anything by waiting — you're more likely to succeed if you do.

The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. Turn your mind into the type that startup ideas form in unconsciously: (1) learn a lot about things that matter, (2) work on problems that interest you, (3) with people you like and respect. The third part is also how you get cofounders.

Get to the leading edge of some technology — 'live in the future,' as Paul Buchheit put it. When you reach that point, ideas that seem uncannily prescient to others will seem obvious to you. You may not even realize they're startup ideas, just things that ought to exist.

The fractal stain metaphor: every moving point on the edge of technology is an interesting problem.

Heuristic for whether you have a taste for interesting ideas: whether you find known boring ideas intolerable. Could you endure studying literary theory, or working in middle management at a large company?

It never gets any easier. The nature of the problems change — you worry about construction delays at your London office instead of a broken air conditioner — but the total volume of worry never decreases; if anything it increases. Facebook is running Zuckerberg as much as he's running Facebook.