Resist the temptation to get a job. Instead, play. Find something you enjoy doing. Do it. Over and over again. You will become good at it for two reasons: you like it, and you do it often. Soon, that will have value in itself.

— Don’t work. Be hated. Love someone.

Once you close that round and you get your Techcrunch hit, it’s all now in the past. Having a syndicate of all these famous top-notch investors doesn’t magically create great products. The only metric that matters now has a binary outcome. Have you built something that people want? If yes, prove it. If no, you didn’t make it.

— Did everybody see what just happened? The pendulum has swung.

Of course the story is the same when the company “runs off a cliff without leaving skidmarks,” never having extracted a single dime from a single person. The same struggle, same uncertainty, same near-impossibility.

So how do you tell the difference between the chaos that leads to unthinkable success and that which leads nowhere at all?

I’m not sure you can.

— It’s a torturous chaos until it isn’t