Joe Gebbia

On entrepreneurship as a muscle

“Entrepreneurship is an act. It’s a habit. It’s a muscle that you build over time that you can start at any point in life. It doesn’t matter how old you are. But if somebody’s sitting around, waiting for the big idea to come to them it’s not going to happen. You gotta go out into the world and you gotta start making stuff.” (from Boardroom)

On doing things that don’t scale

“We had this Silicon Valley mentality that you had to solve problems in a scalable way because that's the beauty of code. Right? You can write one line of code that can solve a problem for one customer, 10,000 or 10 million. For the first year of the business, we sat behind our computer screens trying to code our way through problems. It wasn't until our first session with Paul Graham at Y Combinator…it was the first time someone gave us permission to do things that don't scale, and it was in that moment, and I'll never forget it because it changed the trajectory of the business.” (from First Round Capital)