The Wisdom Wall

“number three is, um, it's gonna be a cult of personality, and it's gonna be a cult of personality not just inside the company, but outside the company. And we're not gonna, you know, we're not gonna spend any money on marketing. We're not gonna put any time at IR. What we're gonna do is we're gonna put on the show of…”

“he's polarized the market very deliberately, you know, in the same way that I think a lot of great entrepreneurs do, which is, you know, people that either love him or hate him, they either love the products, hate the products, That's very helpful from a business standpoint, recruiting standpoint, because it does…”

“this in turn is why, uh, the employment, uh, uh, decisions of graduating, uh, Harvard and Stanford Business School students are such a great indicator. Yes. Possibly the best indicator of all of what's happening in the market, because, um, uh, if, if, if, if they go into tech, uh, market, it's, it's, it's, the market's…”

“it's not an accident that both Silicon Valley and Hollywood are the place, places that they are because the people involved went west as far as they could before they were literally stopped by the Pacific Ocean. Right, like, it was the ultimate selector in the build-out of the country to the people who were the most…”

“true transparency, true free speech is just, is a fundamental solvent, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, basically dissolving all centralized institutional authority. Um, and, and the reason for that is centralized institutional authority is never perfect, and, and it often has problems, and in fact, it often has very deep and…”

“The danger is not investing too cheap or too dear. The danger is literally stopping.”

“The prosaic way that I put it is, you know, it's my experience as a founder is a top tier VC is a bridge loan of credibility, uh, at a point in time when the startup maybe deserves it, but just doesn't have it yet. Mm-hmm. And that credibility is harvested in the form of primarily personnel, um, money, and brand.”

“In all three of those markets, there's massive government subsidies, federal student loan programs, federal mortgage programs, federal healthcare programs, and if you insert, you know, basic economics, if you, if you constrain supply, you cause prices to rise, and if you subsidize demand, you cause prices to rise. And…”

“I have found people willing to tolerate any level of chronic pain in order to avoid acute pain. And so people would much rather lose slowly over five years than have the conversation that involves a dramatic change to stop losing.”

“a board cannot rescue a failing company.”

“If you centralize everybody into a single giant village, you're gonna have all the dysfunctionality You're gonna have all, you're gonna have the crazed panics and freakouts of a village basically happening all the time, which is, you know, which is kind of, you know, which is in fact what we see.”

“that's sort of the core fundamental kind of truth adventure, which is, really, it's something for people with a 20, 3040, 50 year time horizon. You have to get across, you have to get all the way across the cycles.”

“And then what happens is, over time, what happens is the, the, the, and this is what I think, this is what happened to smartphones, and this is what happened with, um, and this is what I believe is happening to AI, which is the individuals get it first, adopt it first, the small businesses get it second, adopt it…”

“what most of the successful founders I work with do is they end up with a hybrid model where they're, like, deep in the details on some things, But they have a traditional system on the other hand.”