The World of Tech Startups ...
... "is one of the few places where you can do things as intellectually interesting as academia but potentially have a bigger impact on the world."
-- Chris Dixon
Your daily dose of inspiring quotes for entrepreneurs, mixed with the occasional photo from my iPhone.
I'm the Founder of reMail, a mobile email startup.
Previously, I was the VP Engineering at Xobni (makers of a rockin' Outlook plugin), a Software Engineer at Google (makers of awesomeness in general), and a grad student at ETH Zurich (makers of smart people since 1855, such as Albert Einstein, John von Neumann, Santiago Calatrava, Herzog & de Meuron, Urs Hoelzle, and Niklaus Wirth).
This Posterous is for scribbling down inspiring and uplifting quotes that I come across. Positive vibes and good karma. Being an entrepreneur is hard and sometimes discouraging - come here for your daily dose of positivity.
(Yes, I'm going to try to post every single day!).
You can find my "real" blog at http://www.gaborcselle.com/blog - that's where I post original content, although less frequently.
My Twitter is at http://www.twitter.com/gabor.
Oh also, mail me your quote suggestions - my email address is on my homepage.
"Pitch yourself"
"There is a widespread myth that the most important part of building a great company is coming up with a great idea. This myth is reflected in popular movies and books: someone invents the Post-it note or cocktail umbrellas and becomes an overnight millionaire. It is also perpetuated by experienced business people who, for the most part, don’t believe it. [...] The reality is ideas don’t matter that much. First of all, in almost all startups, the idea changes – often dramatically – over time. Secondly, ideas are relatively abundant."
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Speed of Suggestions vs. Speed of Reality
This is one of my favorite quotes on the speed of suggestions vs. speed of reality:
"And although I had programmed my own website (in HTML, don’t get overexcited) when I was a freshman in college, this entire year has been a huge crash course in the realities of web development. I remember having absolutely no tolerance for any problems with websites I visited. In fact, when Jakob and I started dating, he would ask me for feedback on Vimeo, and I used to draw up long lists of detailed fixes and then get pissed when they weren’t implemented immediately. Oh, HAHAHAHAHAHAHA (ironic laughter). I was sweetly, but idiotically naive. I could write an entire essay on how my eyes have been opened, but I’ll sum it up like this: designing a navigable website isn’t always as quick ‘n easy as you would like/hope/expect. That’s just the way things are! Nothing to cry about, but you stop being a perfectionist REAL fast. Not to mention, magazines (and other websites) also have huge design teams whose entire job is to think about how the site looks and feels and reads and functions. We just have us."
-- Julia Allison, Please Keep in Mind
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IKEA instructions
I wish everything hard in life came with IKEA instruction pictographs like this one.
In other news, my sleeping-on-a-mattress-on-the-floor days are over, I now have a real bed, assembled and comfy. Good stuff.
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Wall Street Smarts
“The financial system nearly collapsed,” he said, “because smart guys had started working on Wall Street.” He took a sip of his martini, and stared straight at the row of bottles behind the bar, as if the conversation was now over.
-- Read this New York Times Op-ed by Calvin TrillinComments [0]
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