Genius

“Genius has the fewest moving parts.”

“It turns out that there's plenty of complexity with 25 people that you have to do this type of thing to.”

“Yeah, so run into the spike is basically the idea that whenever you're trying to decide what to do, you should do the thing you don't want to do. So there's always, when you're making a decision, you're like, well, it's this or that, and like, I know what I wa…”

“It's also a thing where we believe that for anything you do that's valuable, you kind of have to pay the toll of, like, getting there. Like, there's a bridge to get to doing the thing that's valuable, and you have to walk across the bridge, and there's someone…”

“You know, the worst thing is the best thing. Like, the worse the project is, the better it is to get it out there, and then really perfect it in public to the extent it needs to be perfected.”

“Yeah, there are artists who, you know, take, 10 years, 15 years between projects, between an album, or between their next film, or whatever, and then there are artists who put out thousands of songs, or whatever, and we think that in the art of trying to build…”

“It's called Seeing Like a State by Jim Scott, and it basically sort of is a long argument against sort of making a grand plan, And then trying to execute it, and it's just, it's gonna go awry, so don't make a grand plan, do an incremental thing.”

“You know, you can't really run a business if it's loaded with Or do a creative project with someone if it's just totally loaded with unspoken emotional stuff.”

“And the answer, the actual reality is just trust your normal voice, and that will make you seem more appealing, and that will be just more fun and better. And so it's just write like you would say it.”

“Like, we're always going to be changing. We're always going to be doing what's best for the company. It doesn't mean that too much change can't be disruptive to actual effectiveness and productivity. Like you still have to like, think about that. But we are no…”

“If you are feeling comfortable, you are not moving fast enough, you're not pushing hard enough, and it's kind of a corny, like, cliche at this point, but I think it's very true, and so, you know, if you work here, you shouldn't expect to feel comfortable, but …”

“Don't fill up on bread. Like another way of saying this is just like, don't work on stupid shit that seems like it might be good. There it's so, there's so many small projects you can do that seem like they're valuable. You can have so many pieces of bread bef…”

“I think the sort of challenge is, when you're thinking about worse is better, you're thinking about doing small things, you don't wanna, there's a reality, which is you don't wanna release some huge, You know, in the software context, some huge feature in whol…”

“Whenever we had a hard problem and we went into a meeting with a lawyer or an investor or a YC partner or some kind of expert thinking, this is the meeting where someone's going to tell us like what to do. And it's so great that we have access to this. It just…”

“Everything you think that's messed up is actually messed up. Like there's a tendency, you come into a place, you see something messed up, you think, oh, it's me, like I'm not seeing the real deal, like I must not know what's up. No, if you think it's messed up…”

“That's what, you know, we were having a good-natured board meeting, and the, sort of, slogan of, as we presented our 32 isms or whatever to them Was sort of like, more, more engineers, fewer isms, I think was the basic, like, rallying cry”

“And so as we build out our product, which is allowing people to annotate any website, Not just stuff on our site. We think this is going to be a key part of how people read and write journalism.”

“I think it's the mark of a charlatan to try and explain simple things in complicated ways. And it's the mark of a genius to explain complicated things in simple ways.”