Steve Jobs on building product, Sam Altman on coming up with ideas, and Airbnb's original UI

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: Steve Jobs on building product

“We didn’t build Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not.

We weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build.

When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back.

For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.“​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Source: Steve Jobs Playboy Interview

2: Sam Altman on coming up with ideas

“Having ideas is among the most important qualities for a startup founder to have—you will need to generate lots of new ideas in the course of running a startup.

The best ideas are fragile; most people don’t even start talking about them at all because they sound silly. Perhaps most of all, you want to be around people who don’t make you feel stupid for mentioning a bad idea, and who certainly never feel stupid for doing so themselves.

Stay away from people who are world-weary and belittle your ambitions. Unfortunately, this is most of the world. But they hold on to the past, and you want to live in the future.“

Source: Idea Generation by Sam Altman

3: Airbnb’s original UI

Source: Brian Chesky

Best of The Week

See you next Monday,

- The Z Fellows Team

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