The answer (or at least the proximate cause) may be that the Europeans rode on the crest of a powerful new idea: allowing those who made a lot of mon… - Paul Graham

Helping students come up with good startup ideas is like hooking them up to the deck catapult of an aircraft carrier. If you succeed, they're gone. What are they supposed to do, not work on the idea? And working on a startup is incompatible with being a student.

Trying to make founders describe their products in simple everyday language is like trying to push together the north poles of two magnets.

People often email me with big-sounding ideas (reinvent commerce, change the way people meet, transform scientific research), and the bigger the idea sounds, the less interested I am. Truly big ideas don't sound big initially.