If you wanted to build an Internet startup in 2005, you had to buy your own servers and hire someone to manage it. Now, that's unheard of.
Background updating is absolutely the future.
Tech companies tend to do tech best.
Never put your family, friends, or significant other low on your priority list. Prefer a handful of truly close friends to a hundred acquaintances.
There is a lot of stuff I like. I love backpacking. I love going to an island where I can just sit on the beach and read or scuba dive and sail. I do a lot of that. I still go backpacking around Europe in the summers and staying in hostels. I love that.
Being a public company is really terrible for most companies. I'd say Facebook and Google have done a pretty good job of standing up to the incredible quarterly pressure to hit numbers, but most companies - and I've observed a lot now - don't do a very good job of that.
