Priceless advice from entrepreneurs

A thread

@JeffBezos (Amazon) - “Do something you’re really passionate about and don’t try to chase something what is kind of the hot passion of the day.”

Steve Jobs (Apple) - “You need to have a lot of passion for what you do, because it’s so hard that if you don’t love what you do and you’re doing it over a sustained period of time, any rational person would give up.”

@MichaelDell (Dell) - “I think people that look for great ideas to make money are nearly as successful as those who really try to find something they love to do or something they know they’re good at.”

Sergey Brin (Google) - “I think it’s very rewarding when you work on something you think is gonna make a big difference and even though it’s harder I think the passion brings so much more energy with it that you’re more likely to succeed.”

@garyvee (Wine Library) - “If you know exactly what you want to be you need to spend as much time with people that are actually that already.”

@eldsjal (Spotify) - “One of the things I do is I question a lot of things. Ask yourself, given everything you have today is there a way we can make this better?”

@sama (Y Combinator) - “You want an idea where you can say ‘I know it sounds like a bad idea, but here’s specifically why it’s actually a great one.’ You want to sounds crazy but actually be right.”

@drewhouston (Dropbox) - “One way to conceptualise what makes a good product is maximising the probability that someone shows up at the front door of your store or your website or whatever it is and ends up with a solved problem.”

@bchesky (Airbnb) - “Oftentimes the best methodology to start with the perfect experience of just one person, get that right and then figure out how to scale something great instead of scaling something not so great and then trying to improve it. That’s really hard to do.”

@peterthiel (Paypal) - “I think the you are starting a new business you don’t want to go after giant markets, you want to go after small markets and you want to take over those markets quickly.”

@elonmusk (Tesla, SpaceX) - “Constantly seek criticism. A well-thought-out critique of whatever you’re doing is as valuable as gold and you should seek that from everyone you can, but particularly your friends.”

@jesslivingston (Y Combinator) - “A quality that I think is important is kind of being flexible minded or open-minded. I’m not saying you shouldn’t have a vision for your idea or product, but you need to be open for changes.”

@8en (Pinterest) - “The most important thing when you’re working with people early is that you guys line up on what your goals are. You can build a small business or a huge company, but I think you really have to be aligned on that.”

@ericries (The Lean Startup) - It’s not about doing focus groups and it’s not about double-checking your vision. It really is about integrating this concept of testing your ideas rigorously throughout the product development process out the marking process, even as we scale up.

@tfadell (Nest) - “When you’re trying to differentiate, when you’re trying to do something different there’s gonna be that gut moment: Is this right or is this not right? If you’re not having doubt you’re not pushing the boundaries far enough.”

@RobertGreene (Mastery) - “Understand that naturally nobody is interested in your idea and the world couldn’t care less. You have to persuade them and you have to show that you’re the one person out there that can do it.”

@biz (Twitter) - “You have to have an emotional investment in what you’re doing. Success is not guaranteed by any means, but failure is much more likely if you don’t love what you’re doing.”

@pierre (eBay) - “Just go and do it, fail at some things and try to learn as much as possible. Take that learning to the next experience and don’t let people whom you may respect tell you it can’t be done, because they don’t have the courage to try it.”