Public school teachers are in much the same position as prison wardens. - Paul Graham

If you want to start a startup and don't know what to build, one way to get ideas is to ask if there's something you could create that would help your peers to make money. Any startup that helps people make money tends to (a) be popular and (b) make money itself.

So the optimal plan, if you can manage it, is to have a few trusted friends you can speak openly to. This is not just a way to develop ideas; it’s also a good rule of thumb for choosing friends. The people you can say heretical things to without getting jumped on are also the most interesting to know.

"When Bauhaus designers adopted Sullivan's "form follows function," what they meant was,
form should follow function. And if function is hard enough, form is forced to follow it,
because there is no effort to spare for error.
Wild animals are beautiful because they have hard lives."