people then products then traffic then revenue. - Peter Thiel

If you think something hard is impossible, you’ll never even start trying to achieve it. Belief in secrets is an effective truth.

A startup is the largest endeavour over which you can define mastery. You can have agency not just over your own life, but over a small and important part of the world.

Amazon made its first 10x improvement in a particularly visible way: they offered at least 10 times as many books as any other bookstore. When it launched in 1995, Amazon could claim to be “Earth’s largest bookstore” because, unlike a retail bookstore that might stock 100,000 books, Amazon didn’t need to physically store any inventory — it simply requested the title from its supplier whenever a customer made an order. This quantum improvement was so effective that a very unhappy Barnes & Noble filed a lawsuit three days before Amazon’s IPO, claiming that Amazon was unfairly calling itself a “bookstore” when really it was a “book broker.