Startup ideas, work-life balance, and speed

Welcome back to the Z Fellows newsletter! Every Monday we share 3 ideas - to help you build companies, ship products, and create your life's work.

1: Paul Graham on Facebook and Good Startup Ideas

“While demand shaped like a well is almost a necessary condition for a good startup idea, it’s not a sufficient one. If Mark Zuckerberg had built something that could only ever have appealed to Harvard students, it would not have been a good startup idea.

Facebook was a good idea because it started with a small market there was a fast path out of. Colleges are similar enough that if you build a facebook that works at Harvard, it will work at any college. So you spread rapidly through all the colleges. Once you have all the college students, you get everyone else simply by letting them in.” — Paul Graham

Source: How to Get Startup Ideas

2: Jensen Huang on Work-Life Balance

“Building Nvidia turned out to have been a million times harder than I expected it to be, any of us expected it to be. And at that time, if we had realized the pain and suffering, and just how vulnerable you’re going to feel, and you know, the list of all the things that could go wrong, I don’t think anybody would start a company.

Nobody in their right mind would do it. And I think that that’s kind of the superpower of an entrepreneur - they don’t know how hard it is, and they only ask themselves, ‘How hard can it be?’ And to this day, I trick my brain into thinking, ‘How hard can it be?’ because you have to still, when you wake up in the morning, ‘Yep, how hard can it be?’

Everything that we’re doing, how hard can it be? Omniverse, how hard can it be? I’m still enjoying myself immensely, and I’m adding a little bit of value, but that’s really the trick of an entrepreneur. You have to get yourself to believe that it’s not that hard because it’s way harder than you think.

I work from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to bed, and I work 7 days a week. When I’m not working, I’m thinking about working, and when I’m working, I’m working. I sit through movies, but I don’t remember them because I’m thinking about work. I’m thinking about what the company can be and if there are things that we could do even better or sometimes it’s just trying to solve a problem. Sometimes it’s imaging the future. You’re fantasizing, you’re dreaming. I mean, that’s incredible.” — Jensen Huang

Source: Acquired Podcast

3: Sam Altman on Speed

“Move faster. Slowness anywhere justifies slowness everywhere.

2021 instead of 2022. This week instead of next week. Today instead of tomorrow.

Moving fast compounds so much more than people realize.”

Source: Sam Altman

See you next Monday,

- Jay + The Z Fellows Team

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