You can't predict if this [your company] is going to be a billion-dollar thing, or a million-dollar thing, or a 10 billion-dollar thing. No one really knows. You should just focus on building something you think is interesting and valuable for people that gives you the lifestyle you want, and then just be happy where you are ... Then, if it happens... great, but it's probably not going to change your life drastically if you're already pretty content with what you have.

I think Reid's [Hoffman] quote was accurate maybe 10 years ago... But the truth is, the bar for where your product needs to be today is so much higher. And yes, you should be embarrassed because I think the best founders will perpetually be embarrassed—Patrick and John [Collison] from Stripe are probably still embarrassed—but you have to have an insanely high level of product quality. You just do.

To be interested in something before it's sexy, before it has the potential to make you a lot of money, I think, is pretty, pretty important. Otherwise, I think you're just going to get out-run. The NFT marketplaces that are doing well today are not the ones that were started in 2021; they're the ones that were started in 2017/2018.

People see someone's success pattern and say, 'That's the way that I need to become successful,' but the truth is, if you're starting out today, the way that you become successful is going to look very different.

It doesn't matter how amazing your team is or how fast you ship features, the market you're in is going to determine most of your growth.

Those are the people that I look for—the people who want something so badly that they just figure out how to do it ... They just get started, and then they figure things out as they go.

Gumroad could be 30 times bigger in volume and scale, and my job would roughly be identical. That's the beauty of software. That's the point of automation.

The skill that's been really top-of-mind for me, right now, is the ability to save other people time.

That’s what being present is to me—just really focusing on the present moment and noticing as many things as possible, which sounds easy, right? It’s almost paradoxical. You’re obviously here. What does that mean? You’re obviously looking out through your eyes. You’re smelling things through your nose. But if I said, 'Okay, how many times did you blink in the last three seconds?', you wouldn’t even remember the last time you blinked.

I think people underestimate how hard it is to reach product-market fit and how, once you reach it, literally nothing else matters at that point—you're just scaling.

There's this interesting shift you can now do that wasn't really possible five to ten years ago, which is you can actually build an audience before you have a product.

People don't really give a shit about you, and I think that's great. I think most people care about a few people—their family, their friends, some other folks in their life, but truthfully, you just can't care about everybody. You can't love everybody. You can love people kind of like how Jesus loved everybody, but you can't really sacrifice parts of yourself for other people, like a parent would for their children.

Silicon Valley is a game of finding these crazy, outsized returns ... 30% of your companies die, 30% of your companies return less than 1x, and so you kind of need the last third... to return over 10x of the initial principal capital.

Even though 10% of my portfolio is crypto... 80% of the pitches I hear nowadays have some crypto component to it.

Raise venture [capital] if there's something you want to do that you just don't have the profit stream to do.

The reason, I think, people don't often read a lot of these old books is because that social incentive goes away. You read this book, and then you're smarter, but that's it.

I really believe that humanity in the future, if we want to get to whatever the paragon of civilization is, it will be decentralized.