it was not till the Industrial Revolution that wealth creation definitively replaced corruption as the best way to get rich. - Paul Graham

It's a mistake to treat investors' reasons for rejecting you as a guide to what you need to focus on, for three separate reasons: (a) much of the time they're lying, (b) when they're not, they're often mistaken, and (c) fundraising is not the primary goal anyway.

The difference between a random fact and (for lack of a better word) a non-random one is how many other facts it's connected to. The latter kind are better.

"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."