The Wisdom Wall

“we see at Silicon Valley where, you know, kind of there, these guys get under pressure and, you know, they kind of feel anxious or whatever, and they decide that, you know, somebody tells them about psychedelics and they try it and, and they kind of come out the other end as a changed person. And, and they kind of come…”

“this maybe is like the core thesis behind our firm, which is it's, you're much more likely to build something important in the 21st century if you start with the founder and train them on management than you are to start with the manager and try to train them on being a founder, on creating new things.”

“our theory of it was what we call death of the middle, or we sometimes, the negative way to frame it is death of the middle. The positive way is the barbell, uh, which is what's happened in all these other industries, which is basically the, the industry gets stretched apart like taffy. Um, and, and, and what you, what…”

“the idea of a, like, partnership of equals or even a hierarchical partnership, like, it just breaks at some point because there's just too much internal dissension. It is too hard to coordinate, and then everybody's fighting for slices of what was viewed at the time to be a fixed size pie. Um, and so none of the, none…”

“Silicon Valley between, call it, 1950 to 2010, was primarily just in the tools business, right? Primarily the companies that, you know, starting with Hewlett Packard, the companies that we all backed and built were basically just building tools, and you'd build a tool like an operating system or a disk drive or…”

“Because the winning AI companies are raising, you know, 1,000,000,010 of billions, in some cases, hundreds of billions of dollars. Right. The old world of ten million or thirty million dollar, fifty million dollar checks, you know, where VCs tap out, it's just not a relevant, a relevant thing anymore.”

“And in fact, the people who invent the technology are often like the least qualified people to understand the long-term implications because they're just, they're too, they're too buried in the specifics of the here and now.”

“Just because, like I said, I don't think an external impact is enough to keep people going, or at least I've seen way too many people who had a high level of external impact, and then at some point they just stopped.”

“we just have this, like, fundamental view that technology is, like, on balance an enormously powerful force in the world, and, uh, basically that the big problem with the world is that there's, you know, there's not enough technology, there's not enough information, there's not enough intelligence.”

“The problem with his argument is that assumes the managers are going to do a good job. Right. And I think if there's like one dominant theme that we're seeing in the last, you know, 30 years, you know, in the West, for sure, it's like managers generally, you know, writ large are not doing a great job. Or another way to…”

“the thing a manager never does unless they're under duress is, is, is reconsider fundamental assumptions. Like they hate that, like that, like, That's not the whole point of running something big is you don't have to do that. You get to run the big thing at scale. You don't have to like go in and like reinvent it from…”

“To get kind of the holy grail of the large scale organization that's still innovating, either you need two people involved who are able to balance each other. And by the way, you could say this is like Steve Jobs and Tim Cook, you know, would be a canonical example. Or by the way, early on, Zuckerberg and Sheryl…”

“a lot of the best founders are, you know, I think Like, zero percent neuroticism. Like, they just don't get emotionally phased by things that happen, which is a superpower when you're an entrepreneur. But having said that, some of the great entrepreneurs are, in fact, very neurotic.”

“So it basically turns out every new technology is greeted with what they call a moral panic, right? So and a moral panic basically is whatever this new technology is or this new form of media is, it's going to ruin everything. It's going to ruin everything. It's going to ruin society. It's going to ruin morality. And…”