Steve Jobs birthday party invitation. I turn 30 in 11 months and this hit just the right note.

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The toast reads as follows:

“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

Perhaps he didn’t know it in 1997 when he recorded this, but that is absolutely Steve Jobs describing himself. He was crazy enough to think he could change the world. And he did.

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source: TechCrunch

“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do” – Steve Jobs

Hire and promote first on the basis of integrity; second, motivation; third, capacity; fourth, understanding; fifth, knowledge; and last and least, experience. Without integrity, motivation is dangerous; without motivation, capacity is impotent; without capacity, understanding is limited; without understanding, knowledge is meaningless; without knowledge, experience is blind. Experience is easy to provide and quickly put to good use by people with all the other qualities.

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Another way to decrease the risk is to join an existing startup instead of starting your own. Being one of the first employees of a startup is a lot like being a founder, in both the good ways and the bad. – Paul Graham

Startups hire smart, energetic people with a lot of potential, while established businesses often look for someone to come do the same job that he did at his last workplace, and nothing more. Who do you think gets better results?

We’re part of something bigger, not just counting days ’til the weekend or tallying up freelance hours. We’re here to change the world!

Source: oDesk

There is a 100/10/1 “rule of thumb” with social services. 1% will create content, 10% will engage with it, and 100% will consume it. If only 10% of your users need to log in because 90% just want to consume, then you’ll end up with the vast majority of your users in the logged out camp. Don’t ignore them, build services for them, and you can slowly but surely lead them to more engagement and potentially some day into the logged in camp.

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A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption of our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider to our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favour by serving him. He is doing us a favour by giving us the opportunity to do so. — Mahatma Gandhi

[...] It’s good to know the market but the competition is irrelevant. The market is big. Winning comes by knowing the customer better, executing better, and continuing to work on the problem after sane people have cashed out. If a competitor is going to scare you, you shouldn’t have started a business in the first place. Every big market or successful business will attract competitors anyway. Always assume competition. — Babak Nivi, Venture Hacks

“I always recommend to select an early-stage start-up by evaluating who your manager will be, a far narrower task and one that is often manageable earlier in your career with less beta than assessing the prospects for a startup.

If your manager is stellar, at a minimum, you will learn and stretch your abilities. Moreover, if your manager is an outstanding engineer or director of something or first-class entrepreneur, he will have many exciting opportunities in next 1-10 years and if you are talented and display an outstanding work ethic he will be begging you to join him at his next endeavor.” — Keith Rabois

This is very accurate. Well said, Keith.

Our brain’s pleasure circuits lead us to optimize short-term happiness (cake!) over long-term healthiness (obesity, coronary heart disease, diabetes). — Aza Raskin, Mozilla

Something to reflect on.

People like Instapaper because of the features it has now and the way they’re designed into the app. If I let users steer product decisions, the result would be a massive codebase producing a bloated, cluttered product full of features that hardly anyone used at the expense of everyday usability and polish on the features that matter. Like Microsoft Word. Or Firefox.

By listening too much to outside suggestions, I’d destroy the very reason why I’m receiving them.

- Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper

“Remember there are 3 kinds of people; Those that MAKE it happen, those that WATCH it happen, and those that wonder WHAT happened. These startups are people that MAKE it happen. They should be respected and supported by those of us in the later two categories.” — Don Dodge

Don, well said.

Curiously enough, what got Segway into this problem was that the company was itself a kind of Segway. It was too easy for them; they were too successful raising money. If they’d had to grow the company gradually, by iterating through several versions they sold to real users, they’d have learned pretty quickly that people looked stupid riding them. Instead they had enough to work in secret. They had focus groups aplenty, I’m sure, but they didn’t have the people yelling insults out of cars. So they never realized they were zooming confidently down a blind alley.

– Paul Graham, YCombinator

My take:

- I agree, raising “too much” capital for an idea is poison. Having to do a lot with a little instills discipline, and forces one to be uber-resourceful, razor focused, and quite frankly a little paranoid :) I’m extremely lucky to have mentors like David who have drilled this mantra into my head. We achieved a lot with little at both Lookery and Compete.com, and now Shareaholic.

- Iterative design is the way to go. All of us that create applications for which we can push updates and upgrades at-will at not much cost are blessed. Criminal not to take advantage of this gift.

- Focus groups? Community Managers (= everyone in the company) should be curating the feedback loop from in the field – talking to real users, asking them how we can improve our products, create the most value for them, and knock down the most roadblocks in the process — in short, make their lives easier.

Users first, always.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos explaining his philosophy and commitment to the customer-service culture of Zappos:

• Obsess over customers. For Amazon, everything starts with the customer. While they pay attention to competitors, they don’t let competitors drive what they do.
• Invent. Amazon listens to customers, recognizing the need to invent solutions for them, since they can’t do it themselves. Jeff see this as a critical part of what Amazon does — invent on behalf of customers.
• Think long term. Amazon strategists try to look five years out. They don’t worry about taking actions that, while they might pay immediate dividends for customers, won’t pay off for the company or its investors for five to seven years. They have a willingness to be misunderstood, since so many people only understand short-term needs and short-term thinking.
• It’s always Day 1. There are always more opportunities to invent more for customers. It’s never over or too late.

via Dave Morgan, CEO of Simulmedia.

“When we were working on our own startup, back in the 90s, I evolved another trick for partitioning the day. I used to program from dinner till about 3 am every day, because at night no one could interrupt me. Then I’d sleep till about 11 am, and come in and work until dinner on what I called “business stuff.” I never thought of it in these terms, but in effect I had two workdays each day, one on the manager’s schedule and one on the maker’s.”

– Paul Graham, YCombinator

Wow, this is very similar to my schedule these days.

To give a fund’s investors a 20% annual return, the firm needs to triple the money raised within a six-year period, Kopelman said. For a $400 million fund, that means returning $1.2 billion to investors. Since VCs typically don’t want the risk of holding more than 20% of the companies they invest in, they have to help build a few companies with a total of $6 billion in market value. But in the past few years only a handful of companies have sold or gone public for more than $1 billion. “You sit there and say, ‘Holy crap, that model doesn’t work,’ ” said Kopelman.

What’s a venture capitalist to do? For Kopelman and other super angels, the answer is to get small. Super angels still aim for billion-dollar exits, but their model doesn’t hinge on home runs. Instead, they can profit by hitting singles and doubles and reducing their strikeouts.

– Josh Kopelman, First Round Capital in a BusinessWeek interview.

On work ethic:

Something that my dad always told me growing up, which is a simple piece of advice that really shaped my approach to life and to business.

My dad worked for Ford for 30 years. When I was a kid, he’d say: “If you’re going to do a job, do a job. If you’re not going to do a job, don’t do a job.” What he meant was, if you really want to accomplish anything, you have to be committed, motivated, tenacious and smart about what you do. That’s really just the essence of the American work ethic, but it’s one of the most important things I ever learned.

Lessons on leadership from growing from 30 employees to 90,000:

I’ve come to believe that to be a great leader, you have to combine thought leadership, business leadership and great people management. I think most people tend to focus more on one of those three. I used to think it was all about thought leadership. Some people think it’s all about your ability to manage people. But the truth is, great leaders have to have a mix of those things.

The most challenging part of his job:

Finding the right balance between optimism and realism. I’m an optimist by nature, and I start from the belief that you can always succeed if you have the right amount of focus combined with the right amount of hard work. So I can get frustrated when progress runs up against issues that should have been anticipated or that simply couldn’t have been foreseen. A realist knows that a certain amount of that is inevitable, but the optimist in me always struggles when progress doesn’t match my expectations.

Read the entire New York Times interview here.