It is even more difficult to get a man to understand something when his identity depends on his not understanding it. - Paul Graham

It’s obvious that biotech or software startups exist to solve hard technical problems, but I think it will also be found to be true in businesses that don’t seem to be about technology. McDonald’s, for example, grew big by designing a system, the McDonald’s franchise, that could then be reproduced at will all over the face of the earth. A McDonald’s franchise is controlled by rules so precise that it is practically a piece of software. Write once, run everywhere. Ditto for Wal-Mart. Sam Walton got rich not by being a retailer, but by designing a new kind of store.

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

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