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"People refer to those things as their mistakes, but I think it's more accurate to say that they help to reduce choices and align the [company's] direction with the right path." --Jon Kayyem

"What makes him special is his ability to judge which problems are the best to work on. Perhaps the most important skill for a researcher is being able to identify which problems you have a good chance of solving and which solutions would be most important." – John Preskill

Why be normal?

"One famous venture capitalist looked at my business plan and said that it was an excellent treatise on solar energy, but it wasn't a business plan." --Richard Swanson

I knew a little molecular biology, but I had no notion of what you could do experimentally. It reminded me of electronics, the idea that you had these tools to splice things together in an ordered way, that you could reengineer things in the cell to do something else. --Mark Goulian

You don't have to pay any of the money back, the government won't ask for equity in your business, and you keep full control of the intellectual property that you develop. Venture investors--if you can find any--will not be so kind.

"It is definitely an asset to work with more than one system. It opens us up to different ways of thinking and keeps us flexible and less likely to sink into dogma. The differences in how the various systems are wired are as important as the similarities." --Sabeeha Merchant, University of Wisconsin, Madison.

"To found a company and then stay on the outside, the company can take all sorts of different directions. If you really want to have influence, the only way to do that is to join it." - Corey Goodman