Founders & startups fail when they try to solve problems they’re not connected to or haven’t personally experienced.

For a product to be viral, the founder has to:

• Make it so great that it advertises itself.
• Embed growth within it.

If you work really hard at something, you can achieve great things. New York embodies that for sure. Everyone here is dreaming, everyone here is doing. You pull anyone over on the street and they’ll tell you what they’re excited about and what they’re moving towards.

At the end of the day, ...

So many of the brilliant, creative minds of our generation came from Tumblr. Creative directors at massive companies, and people running their own agencies, all recognize themselves as Tumblr kids.

• Tumblr is all about curating other people’s content, as opposed to creating your own (an...

If you decide to build a startup but can’t relate to the problem, you’ll constantly be spending time on market research. But, if you can relate to the problem, YOU ARE the market research (and the customer).

Often, your intuition can tell you things that would be impossible to measure with ...

A framework for assessing ideas:

If you and your co-founder both agree on an idea, one of you should still play devil’s advocate (even if you’re a solo founder, try coming up with several reasons why the idea might, in fact, be a bad one).

You don’t have to be an engineer anymore to build a software company. You just have to know how to give explicit details and draw a sketch of what you want – then, you can hire someone to build it.

However, one of the best skills you can learn is coding. Coding and petroleum engineering job...

You don’t have to be completely original to succeed in life:

• Google built off of other existing search engines.
• Wikipedia wasn’t the first online encyclopedia.
• Bitcoin was far from the first cryptocurrency.