Finding startup ideas is a subtle business, and that's why most people who try fail so miserably. It doesn't work well simply to try to think of startup ideas. If you do that, you get bad ones that sound dangerously plausible. The best approach is more indirect: if you have the right sort of background, good startup ideas will seem obvious to you. ... See more

For the past decade, our idolatry of startups and innovation has meant the focus has been: What can we disrupt? How fast can we grow? How big can we get? How much can we raise?

Founders are taught to possess enough faith that they can build something very big very fast. This creates a pressure cooker of responsibility that distorts reality to the p... See more

In those days there was no money yet in this microcomputer business, and big experienced companies and investors, analysts—those kind of people, that are trained in business and much smarter than we were—they didn't think that this was going to be a real big market. They thought it was going to be a little hobby thing, like home robots or ham radio

... See more