Jessica Livingston

this was not at all a normal project where you have tools. I had no tools; my approach in life was to just use my own knowledge. I know what’s going on better if I’m not going through a tool.

So it’s the end product. It not a click-through kind of a product

When people search, they’re most likely to click through because that’s when they’re looking for something.
Google has proven remarkably well that click-through is a monetizable quantity more than page impressions. You can have 100 page impressions and that has some value, but the click-through has far greater value because that’s how advertisers measure, “Is this advertising working for us or not?”

Essentially it’s a plan that says what the company is going to do, what problem it is going to solve, how big the market is, what the sources of revenue for the company are, what your exit strategy is for your investors, what amount of money is required, how you are going to market it, what kind of people you need, what the technology risks are, marketing risks, execution risks.

Entrepreneurs have to keep adjusting to . . . everything’s changing, everything’s dynamic, and you get this idea and you get another idea and this doesn’t work out and you have to replace it with something else. Time is always critical because somebody might beat you to the punch.

Even back in high school I knew I could design computers with half as many chips as the companies were selling them with

My whole life was basically trying to optimize things. You don’t just save parts, but every time you save parts you save on complexity and reliability, the amount of time it takes to understand something.

, those guys are always going to want you and it’s rare that you are going to be in the position in life where you have so little responsibility, except to yourself.

The hardest part in a startup is that you wake up one morning, and you feel great about the day, and you think, “We’re kicking ass.” And then you wake up the next morning, and you think “We’re dead.” And literally nothing’s changed.