The Ledger, every show

“I mean, to me, it just feels, you know, strictly anti-Asian, actually.”

“Hype. Anything that gets this much attention this quickly at the tail end of a bubble. Is because people are grasping for something. Of course there are applications that will turn out to be wildly interesting and profound, but we're so early on that journey. …”

“If a product does not make life better, faster, easier, cheaper for a customer, It hasn't yet found product market fit. We are a long way from that with any of the generative AI applications that we've seen.”

“When I was at Dropbox, one of the large, I won't say who, but one of the largest investors in the world In tech told me that they had run a survey of all the investments they'd ever made. And the founders that didn't actually talk to them, refused to take thei…”

“There is no doubt that one or two of those living dead companies will figure out a spectacular pivot over the next decade and builds unbelievable products that millions or tens of millions or hundreds of millions of people use. And that's one or two out of pro…”

“I think the biggest mistake operators make when they give advice to founders is it's purely out of the lens of their experience in the environment and the circumstances with the tools and the capabilities that they had available to them. And all those macro th…”

“There is no doubt That one or two of those living dead companies will figure out a spectacular pivot over the next decade and builds unbelievable products that millions or tens of millions or hundreds of millions of people use. That's one or two out of probabl…”

“You don't make generational wealth if you're employee 500 at a ten billion dollar company.”

“From August on something like 95% of private schools were open, while in California, basically no public schools were open.”

“To realize that the teachers unions had so much sway that they could almost redirect scientific policy in this country.”

“So basically I think this will be true for what I might, again, I'm just making this up at 98% of these companies. Strip the business down to the core. So you generate whatever, you know, whatever that means. Don't waste more time on it if it's not working. An…”

“The first person I ever fired, I won't, obviously won't say who they are, but it was a person in a leadership role at Dropbox and was clearly not delivering results. And Sequoia basically staged intervention with me. So Brian Schreier, who was on our board was…”

“And I think that's actually the biggest thing that's missing from remote work is there are things that I learned from watching working for some of the best people in our business or other businesses”

“I think the biggest mistake operators make when they give advice to founders is it's purely out of the lens of their experience in the environment and the circumstances with the tools and the capabilities that they had available to them. All those macro things…”

“And I think that's actually the biggest thing that's missing from remote work. There are things that I learned from working for some of the best people in our business or other businesses.”

“You can't pay somebody professionally to clean your teeth unless they're supervised by a dentist. And so that's kind of an interesting notion because it's not that complicated a task, and as a result of needing that supervision, it ends up costing way more.”

“I think the creators are the ones who are going to run everything. And technical people have a much easier path to creation than business people, but I actually think anybody can create things.”

“I mean, basically the thing to look for is where is a lot of capex go? And where is that, that thing not running 24 seven? ... And so as a result of that, your activation energy in those examples is low because somebody else has put all the infrastructure in p…”

“And so if your friend circle is not super diverse, your early employee base is not going to be super diverse.”

“Well, it turned out, I think their entire engineering team is in Beijing. The fully loaded cost per engineer, if I remember correctly, including equity and everything else, was 40,000 dollars a year. The fully loaded cost for any other software company has got…”

“I do think it's problematic that these universities, you know, 95% of the faculty vote for one party. That's, strikes me as not a healthy environment to, not conducive to teaching people kind of broad thinking.”

“He was actually the person who kept the talent bar at Dropbox as high as he did. Like Dropbox has that well-earned reputation for being a place where lots of talented people worked, and it would have, the bar would have easily come down if it wasn't for him.”

“If PayPal sold to eBay for fifty billion, I doubt the intensity and commitment to pursuing startups would have stayed that, would have been as high for as many of them. Certainly some, but not most.”

“We tried it for two years at Wonderco Harry and just blew it up. I just, I got us new offices starting, I mean, starting this month and next month.”

“Over the last six or nine months, the idea of hard work being the priority of a startup, it's back to the top of the list, that your job is to fight for customers and build cool products and recruit the best people, and this doesn't sound like rocket science, …”

“There's not going to be many after this whole recession is done that are worth ten billion, but Dropbox will be because it's just a cash flow machine.”

“The premise behind Aura is that over the last 20 years, all of our digital lives have gotten more and more complicated and interesting, and yet every single person knows that security and privacy online are worse than they've ever been. And if you fast forward…”

“What we try to find are what are areas where there's nobody working on it, and usually the reason there's nobody working on it is the activation energy that's required to get it going is too high, and that's why buying companies can actually be a really Great.”

“We were both investors in Garden Health, which, you know, we might revolutionize how cancer is detected and how early it is. It might become part of our, you know, annual screening is just to get a blood test.”

“There were a number of propositions that were on the ballot last November that were fairly, you know, extreme progressive, I would call them, and they all failed.”

“My view is I would rather be surrounded by people who are out on a limb To be surrounded by people who are not out on a limb, even if they believe they should be, you know, that like, that's like that fear of putting yourself out there because you know, what's…”

“So, my single biggest fear for Silicon Valley is the cost of living. And the reason that matters is if you're a startup and you need to pay your engineers 250,000 dollars to, so that they can afford to live, almost by definition you can't afford that many engi…”

“Not only are they going to have changed the history of the world when it comes to COVID, I think they're going to change every type of disease that we know of.”

“Stay within your circle of competence. What doesn't matter is how big that circle is. What matters is knowing where the boundary actually is. I think that's where people get themselves in trouble all the time, is at that boundary.”

“One of the fascinating things is Roku bought the content library, and my understanding is in, like, the first two weeks of that content launching on Roku's ad-supported platform, it's the most popular content on there.”

“We own a product called VPN Super, which is pretty consistently like a top 10 productivity app on iOS. It was built by a four person team in Singapore. This thing gets 200,000 downloads a day.”