One vector:

“I always recommend to select an early-stage start-up by evaluating who your manager will be, a far narrower task and one that is often manageable earlier in your career with less beta than assessing the prospects for a startup.

If your manager is stellar, at a minimum, you will learn and stretch your abilities. Moreover, if your manager is an outstanding engineer or director of something or first-class entrepreneur, he will have many exciting opportunities in next 1-10 years and if you are talented and display an outstanding work ethic he will be begging you to join him at his next endeavor.” — Keith Rabois

This is very accurate. Well said, Keith.

Our brain’s pleasure circuits lead us to optimize short-term happiness (cake!) over long-term healthiness (obesity, coronary heart disease, diabetes). — Aza Raskin, Mozilla

Something to reflect on.

People like Instapaper because of the features it has now and the way they’re designed into the app. If I let users steer product decisions, the result would be a massive codebase producing a bloated, cluttered product full of features that hardly anyone used at the expense of everyday usability and polish on the features that matter. Like Microsoft Word. Or Firefox.

By listening too much to outside suggestions, I’d destroy the very reason why I’m receiving them.

– Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper