Hacking and painting have a lot in common. In fact, of all the different types of people I’ve
known, hackers and painters are among the most alike.
What hackers and painters have in common is that they’re both makers.

If I could get people to remember just one quote about programming, it would be the one
at the beginning of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs.
Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.

Measurement and Leverage
To get rich you need to get yourself in a situation with two things,
measurement and leverage.
You need to be in a position where your performance can be measured.
And you have to have leverage, in the sense that the decisions you make have a big effect.

Smallness = Measurement
Steve Jobs once said that the success or failure of a startup
depends on the first ten employees
Technology = Leverage
Use difficulty as a guide not just in selecting the overall aim of your company, but also at decision points along the way.
What this meant in practice was that we deliberately sought hard problems. If there were two features we could add to our software, both equally valuable in proportion to their difficulty,
we’d always take the harder one. Not just because it was more valuable, but because it was harder.
This is not just a good way to run a startup. It’s what a startup is.
Venture capitalists know about this and have a phrase for it: barriers to entry.
Here, as so often, the best defense is a good offense. If you
can develop technology that’s simply too hard for competitors to
duplicate, you don’tneed to rely on other defenses. Start by picking
a hard problem, and then at every decision point, take the harder
choice.

Get Users
I think you should make users the test, just as acquirers do.
Treat a startup as an optimization problem in which performance
is measured by number of users.
Now we can recognize this as something hackers already know to avoid:
premature optimization. Get a version 1.0 out there as soon as
you can. Until you have some users to measure, you’re optimizing
based on guesses.