“ Are crowds wise or dumb?

Groups of people are dumber than their constituent members when they exchange words, like in committees, boards, governments, meetings, etc.

Groups of people are smarter than their constituent members when they exchange actions. Markets are smarter than individuals because currency is a surrogate for action.

“ Dreams are meant to be grown out of, not fulfilled. The path to transcendance can pass through the point of fulfillment, yes. But if you’re doing things right, you won’t notice when you pass that point. You’ll be too busy chasing new dreams you came up with along the way.

“ When you add a developer to a team you incur at least two fixed costs. The first is in raw currency, the salary you have to pay out. The second is in lines spent—the rate of codebase growth is certain to go up.

Both fixed costs increase your burn rate; only one increase is predictable.

“ Building something is easy. Evaluating what you build is hard. Iterate between the two as fast as you can.

“ It is good for communities to fragment. As the number of people on reddit increases (which is presumably desirable) its front page descends further into lowest-common denominator images and video, as everything of substance becomes interesting only to a minority and so gets pummelled soon after submission.

“ Zawinski’s law for the web: Every website expands until it becomes a social network. Websites that cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.

“ ‘Work’ is usually doing what others tell you to. ‘Life’ is doing what you want. The modern fixation on ‘work-life balance’ becomes irrelevant if you work for yourself.