The pace we can hit with AI is directly dependent on our pace of making good decisions. Previously, things would take a while anyway and we'd make decisions along the way. Now, once we've made a decision, we can ship very quickly. Hesitation has become a very clear cost, and so one of the most important things we can…
Visit joel.is → RSS feedOn Hacker News Feb 2012 – Nov 2012
Life, Learning & Writing 5Startups 4Tech Industry & Business 3Society, Policy & Culture 1
Now that it’s almost two years since I first had the idea for Buffer , and with the year and a half before that which I worked on my previous startup, I’ve started to notice a few patterns amongst the ups and downs that come with building a startup.
The other day I was listening to Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People and and I found it amazing how this book, which has now sold over 15 million copies, originally started:
This morning, my alarm sounded at precisely 5:50am. Within a few minutes, I was up and had my running shoes, shorts and a t-shirt on. Minutes later at 6am, I opened my MacBook Air, switched to the desktop with TextMate open and got coding. I worked for just under one hour on some important new functionality for Buffer…
"The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out; the brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. The brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They are there to stop the other people!" - Randy Pausch
"The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers." - Thomas Jefferson
I’ve been fortunate enough to meet with some outstanding first-time entrepreneurs on a few different days during this week. In almost every case I can really feel the passion and determination they have, and I know that if they will just continue there is every chance that eventually they will be very successful.
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." - Aristotle
I’ve realised there was a time I didn’t believe people would pay for a product. In my mind, it was a myth. As an entrepreneur, it’s so vital to overcome that.