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When you have an idea for a startup, ask yourself: who wants this right now? Who wants this so much that they'll use it even when it's a crappy version one made by a two-person startup they've never heard of? If you can't answer that, the idea is probably bad.

In practice the link between depth and narrowness is so strong that it's a good sign when you know that an idea will appeal strongly to a specific group or type of user.

it's not a sufficient one

Facebook was a good idea because it started with a small market there was a fast path out of. Colleges are similar enough that if you build a facebook that works at Harvard, it will work at any college. So you spread rapidly through all the colleges. Once you have all the college students, you get everyone else simply by letting them in.

When you find the right sort of problem, you should probably be able to describe it as obvious, at least to you.

Live in the future and build what seems interesting.

For some reason, the more a project has to count as research, the less likely it is to be something that could be turned into a startup.

gravitate toward solving users' problems

Worrying that you're late is one of the signs of a good idea.

It's exceptionally rare for startups to be killed by competitors—so rare that you can almost discount the possibility.

if the beachhead consists of people doing something lots more people will be doing in the future, then it's probably big enough no matter how small it is.

At Harvard, which holds the largest endowment in the country at $31 billion, the student body recently voted to ask the school to do so. With roughly half the undergraduates voting, 72 percent of them supported the demand.

Mr. McKibben’s goal is to make owning the stocks of these companies disreputable, in the way that owning tobacco stocks has become disreputable in many quarters.

Long-standing collaborations with urban, rural and Native American communities around the state—in issues of the environment, K-12 education and higher education preparedness, public health, community and economic development and more—continue years later to contribute to the well-being of the state of Michigan and its citizens.

oversharing and status anxiety, the two great scourges of the modern world.

being anxious that our status might be falling or — the horror, the horror! — disintegrating

Number of Twitter followers shrinking or not growing as fast as your friends’? Status anxiety attack begins. No e-mails or texts received in the past 78 minutes? Status anxiety attack accelerates. Got unfriended or discover by chance on LinkedIn that your 29-year-old college roommate is now running an agribusiness fund out of St. Louis that has assets of $47 billion and owns half of Madagascar? Status meltdown kicks in. The only antidote, the only means to push that status up again, it seems, is to keep sharing more and more.