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

We live in a highly individualistic culture. When we’re shopping for a vacation we’re primarily thinking about Where. The travel companies offer brochures showing private beaches and phenomenal sights. But when you come back from vacation, you primarily treasure the memories of Who — the people you met from faraway places, and the lives you came in contact with.

— Spend 2012 on the Right Side of the Haimish Line