Dressing up is inevitably a substitute for good ideas. It is no coincidence that technically inept business types are known as 'suits'.

Everyone by now presumably knows about the danger of premature optimization. I think we should be just as worried about premature design - designing too early what a program should do.

Small-business customers are very conservative and very cheap. We don't have to explain ourselves for the most part.

Dressing up is inevitably a substitute for good ideas. It is no coincidence that technically inept business types are known as 'suits'.

I suppose I should learn Lisp, but it seems so foreign.

For the most ambitious young people, the corporate ladder is obsolete.

A programming language is for thinking about programs, not for expressing programs you've already thought of. It should be a pencil, not a pen.

We don't have to go that far to sell our beer because our immediate accounts sell so much. Places that sold 10 cases before, now they're selling 30.

Empirically the way you get a product visionary as CEO is for him to found the company and not get fired.

I get a lot of criticism for telling founders to focus first on making something great, instead of worrying about how to make money. And yet that is exactly what Google did. And Apple, for that matter. You'd think examples like that would be enough to convince people.

If you could replace high-school yearbooks, that could be a lot of money. It's so clearly waiting for someone to come along.

If you imagine someone with 100 percent determination and 100 percent intelligence, you can discard a lot of intelligence before they stop succeeding. But if you start discarding determination, you very quickly get an ineffectual and perpetual grad student.

If you really understand something, you can say it in the fewest words, instead of thrashing about.

In the startup world, 'not working' is normal.

It's hard to say exactly what it is about face-to-face contact that makes deals happen, but whatever it is, it hasn't yet been duplicated by technology.

Like having a child, running a startup is the sort of experience that's hard to imagine unless you've done it yourself.

One startup I dream of funding is the one that kills the record companies.

Some people just get what they want in the world.

Startups often have to do dubious things.

There are plenty of smart people who get nowhere.

What I tell founders is not to sweat the business model too much at first. The most important task at first is to build something people want. If you don't do that, it won't matter how clever your business model is.

When Facebook first started, and it was just a social directory for undergrads at Harvard, it would have seemed like such a bad startup idea, like some student side project.

You know your business model is broken when you're suing your customers.

The way to do really big things seems to be to start with deceptively small things.

Relentlessly prune bullshit, don’t wait to do things that matter, and savor the time you have.

This is a good plan for life in general. If you have two choices choose the harder.

The most important thing is not to let fundraising get you down. Startups live or die on morale. If you let the difficulty of raising money destroy your morale it will become a self fulfilling prophecy.

You know your business model is broken when youre suing your customers.

In programming the hard part isn't solving problems, but deciding what problems to solve.

Natural resources are so vast that no single individual or business is going to protect them; they don't have an incentive to.

The bronze powder business, however, no longer required my personal attention, and was well managed by those I had chosen as the guardians of a secret, which was long and honourably kept.

I have done things politically, and I've been running a business at the same time, but I sort of joke that to some extent I do more than most legislators have done in their whole careers, and I've been doing it as a part-time job.

Howard Hughes himself was a regular at the restaurant, and in a way it became his headquarters, too. Howard had recently relocated to Las Vegas, so when he wanted to do business in Los Angeles, he went into the back of our restaurant to use the telephone.

Prosperous farmers mean more employment, more prosperity for the workers and the business men of every industrial area in the whole country.

My parents were amazing people who had no business being together - and they knew it.

We mean by "politics" the people's business - the most important business there is.

Slovakia's joining the OECD in 1999 is totally dependent on meeting economic reforms required such as transparency and legislation that permits fair and open conduct of trade and business.

The way the business things work in Russia is you have to meet people, you have to go through a certain amount of etiquette and business things are done just simply by a shake of the hand and whether they like you or not.

I make no claim to being a business genius. You can make so much money in this business that it loses its value.

It costs a great deal of money to do a musical, and the more money involved, the more big business influences the artform.

It's a very hard and competitive business in which you have to fight every day in order to impose yourself.

I know the history of the record business so well because I followed Billie Holiday into the record studios. It was so primitive compared to the sophisticated business today.

Chicago kept industry, attracted new business, became the center for convention trade and transportation.

I have been, and will go on, fighting that damnable, dirty, rotten business with all the power at my command.

All business success rests on something labeled a sale, which at least momentarily weds company and customer.

I knew an actor's career goes up and down and back up again. Your standing in this business can't be your whole identity; otherwise, you're doomed.

The surest way to return to the people's business is to listen to the people themselves: We need to drop this whole scheme of federally controlled health care, start over, and work together on real reforms at the state level that will contain costs and won't leave America trillions of dollars deeper in debt.

Again, I say I will be glad to tell what songs I have ever sung, because singing is my business.

You have to be a star to be in this business.