"And while disruptive innovation is generally a good thing, nothing inherent to the idea implies it’s the only good thing or the best thing. Entrepreneurs should not be ashamed to admit that their ideas aren’t particularly disruptive."

"A recent report by the Center for an Urban Future laments the lack of “low-income” entrepreneurs in New York City. The entire premise of the report is strange to me, the concept that our most vulnerable populations should be responsible for creating opportunities for employment. The very definition of poverty is to be lacking the money to cover the basic needs of food, clothing, shelter and healthcare. If you can’t do that, how can you choose to spend money to start a business when it will ultimately mean yet more physical sacrifice, possibly at the expense of your health, sanity, and what little stability one might have? The risks inherent in entrepreneurship are such that the poor frankly cannot afford it, evident in the questionable success of micro-lending programs worldwide. These pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps perspectives are short-sighted products of the privileged, relieving governments and policymakers of the responsibility to abandon austerity measures and private interests and invest in the types of WPA-style projects that created the American middle class in the first place."

"Encouraging women and people of color to take more risks and be more aggressive might help somewhat, but if those risk-taking behaviors aren’t rewarded (or, in some cases, even safe), then the people who end up getting ahead will still be white men. Entrepreneurial activity will probably always entail a certain amount of risk — the only way to level the playing field would be to extend to young women and minorities the same indulgence that white boys get. It’s hard to say what this would look like — encouraging more kids to steal or get in trouble with the cops isn’t very good public policy. But there are ways in which (white) boys’ misbehavior is treated as natural and expected, even if it results in worse grades. Those who worry about boys’ education have advocated for letting boys be boys a bit more, but maybe we really need to let girls be boys."

"Producing investigative journalism on the web is not really hard (or any harder than it normally is) if you’re producing other content too i.e daily items about the latest news and trends. If your focus is purely investigations, you will struggle to build a web operation. The economics of blogging and online news publishing dictate that you must publish stories frequently. The average tech blog, for example, posts 10-20 short form articles a day. It’s how they increase their readership (and consequently, attract advertisers). But investigations can take weeks, months and years to complete. So unless you have a few hundred reporters working for you, you’ll never be able to post as much as TechCrunch. So you’ll struggle to build your audience and advertising base."

"

In 2012, Internet thought leader Maciej Cegłowski rocked the startup community with his provocative slogan ‘Barely Succeed’, challenging prospective entrepreneurs to reject the lottery culture of Silicon Valley in favor of small, sustainable projects that could give them a more realistic shot at financial independence.

Today he has unleashed the second part of his business philosophy, ‘Barely Invest’, which shatters the myth that financing is the main obstacle to creating a small technology business. In a world where social capital has become the bottleneck to success, Cegłowski intends to seize the commanding heights of the New Economy as the Internet’s premier social capitalist.

"

"Failure of your company is not failure in life. Failure in your relationships is."

"investors’ opinions are a trailing indicator. The best founders are better at seeing the future than the best investors, because the best founders are making it."

"You know whats getting really annoying? When some new startup comes out of beta and you signup, only to find it’s fledgling community is full of other startup people."

"Code Sprint Grants are for $10,000 and are designed to get going quickly (our application for interested news organizations is just six questions long) and, like all of our programs, are optimized for flexibility (we want to help in ways that will be most useful to you and the code). When the code is ready for release, it will be well-documented, open-sourced, and available to anyone to fork, modify, and implement."