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If a fairly good hacker is worth $80,000 a year at a big company, then a smart hacker working very hard without any corporate bullshit to slow him down should be able to do work worth about $3 million a year.

If $3 million a year seems high, remember that we're talking about the limit case: the case where you not only have zero leisure time but indeed work so hard that you endanger your health.

if you want to make a million dollars, you have to endure a million dollars' worth of pain.

startup you compress all this stress into three or four years.

There is a large random factor in the success of any company.

ways to get money, including chance, speculation, marriage, inheritance, theft, extortion, fraud, monopoly, graft, lobbying, counterfeiting, and prospecting.

You just have to do something people want.

with the rise of industrialization there are fewer and fewer craftsmen. One of the biggest remaining groups is computer programmers.

If you're in a job that feels safe, you are not going to get rich, because if there is no danger there is almost certainly no leverage.

To get rich you need to get yourself in a situation with two things, measurement and leverage.

Upside must be balanced by downside, so if there is big potential for gain there must also be a terrifying possibility of loss.

A programmer can sit down in front of a computer and create wealth. A good piece of software is, in itself, a valuable thing.

Steve Jobs once said that the success or failure of a startup depends on the first ten employees.

person who does care about money will ordinarily do better to go off and work with a small group of peers.

What is technology? It's technique. It's the way we all do things. And when you discover a new way to do things, its value is multiplied by all the people who use it.

Whereas if you solve a technical problem that a lot of people care about, you help everyone who uses your solution.

A McDonald's franchise is controlled by rules so precise that it is practically a piece of software. Write once, run everywhere.

better have a convincing explanation of why your technology would be hard to duplicate. Otherwise as soon as some big company becomes aware of it, they'll make their own, and with their brand name, capital, and distribution clout, they'll take away your market overnight.

good offense. If you can develop technology that's simply too hard for competitors to duplicate, you don't need to rely on other defenses. Start by picking a hard problem, and then at every decision point, take the harder choice