It's much better to first make a product a small number of users love than a product that a large number of users like. Even though the total amount of positive feeling is the same, it's much easier to get more users than to go from like to love.

The best ideas sound bad but are in fact good. So you don't need to be too secretive—if it's actually a good idea, it likely won't sound like it's worth stealing. It's easier to do something new and hard than something derivative and easy, because people will want to help you and join you if it's the former.

Cofounder breakups are one of the leading causes of death for early startups, and we see them happen very frequently when founders met for the express purpose of starting the company. The best case is a good cofounder you know well; the next best is being a solo founder; the worst case by far is a bad cofounder.

Growth (as long as it's not 'sell dollar bills for 90 cents' growth) solves all problems, and lack of growth is not solvable by anything but growth. Founders and employees who burn out nearly always work at startups without momentum—the prime directive of great execution is 'never lose momentum.'

It's very hard to be both obsessed with product quality and move very quickly. But it's one of the most obvious tells of a great founder. I have never, not once, seen a slow-moving founder be really successful.

Counterintuitively, it's good if you're growing fast but nothing is optimized—all you need to do is fix it to get more growth. Favorite investments are in companies growing really fast but incredibly un-optimized; they are deeply undervalued.

It's important that you distort reality for others but not yourself. You have to convince other people that your company is primed to be the most important startup of the decade, but you yourself should be paranoid about everything that could go wrong.

When investors tell you no, believe the no but not the reason. Anything but 'yes' is a 'no'—investors have a wonderful ability to say 'no' in a way that sounds like 'maybe yes.' The way to get investors to act is fear of other investors taking away their opportunity, so run conversations in parallel.