StartupThoughts is a collection of the best things ever said about starting things.
Every founder works mostly in the dark. The people in here worked in the same dark, and a few of them wrote down what they found. When you are stuck, one good sentence from someone who has been stuck in the same place is worth more than a whole shelf of advice.
So this is a quiet place. No feed, no scores, no comments, no popups, no tracking. One thought at a time, big enough to read, with a link back to wherever it actually came from.
Every quote here is attributed to a real person and traced to a real source — an essay, a book, a talk, a letter, an interview. If you find something misattributed, that is a bug, and it should be fixed.
Much of it comes from closer to home than the usual Silicon Valley canon: the scholars of Bukhara and Khorezm who worked out how to think carefully about the world, poets like Navoi and Abai who were unusually blunt about work and money, and founders building in Tashkent, Almaty and Bishkek today. Where a line was not said in English, the original is printed underneath.
The best way to use it is to press random thought until one of them lands.
Anyone can add a thought. It takes a minute and needs no account.
StartupThoughts is a totally free non-commercial site, here only for your inspiration.
It is modelled on MusicThoughts, Derek Sivers’ quiet place to think about music, which has been doing this since 1999.