Economically, you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole working life into a few years. Instead of working at a low intensity for forty years, you work as hard as you possibly can for four.

There is a conservation law at work: if you want to make a million dollars, you have to endure a million dollars' worth of pain. You get a bulk discount buying the economy-size pain, but you can't evade the fundamental conservation law.

Money is not wealth — it's just a medium for moving wealth around. A startup planning to create wealth is, whether it realizes it or not, planning to disprove the Pie Fallacy: the childhood belief that there is a fixed amount of wealth in the world.

A good hint to the presence of leverage is the possibility of failure. If you're in a job that feels safe, you are not going to get rich, because if there is no danger there is almost certainly no leverage.

At Viaweb one rule of thumb was 'run upstairs.' Between two equally valuable features, always take the harder one — not just because it's more valuable, but because it forces bigger, slower competitors to follow you over difficult ground. Like guerillas, startups prefer the mountains where the central government's troops can't follow.

A startup is not merely ten people, but ten people like you. Being small isn't what makes startups kick butt — small groups can be select. You don't want small in the sense of a village, but small in the sense of an all-star team.

Treat a startup as an optimization problem in which performance is measured by number of users. Users are the only real proof that you've created wealth — if people aren't using your software, maybe it's not just bad marketing. Maybe you haven't made what they want.

Be skeptical about any plan that centers on things you like doing — that's where your idea of what's valuable is least likely to coincide with other people's. If you like the outdoors, the business you should start is one to recover data from crashed hard disks.