The Wisdom Wall

“What, for most tech companies, AB tests have done have been the safety blanket for management.”

“too many teams Waste time getting to a minimum viable product that they can put out in the market, and we don't have time anymore for that. We need a failure machine at the top of the funnel. We need to get to a minimum idea state that gets vibe coded.”

“I think that you owe it to, in that moral contract to your good employees, to fire the weak people. And they're not bad people. They may be really smart. They are not effective in your organization. They are not taking hills.”

“On the one hand, just predicting what comes next sounds like a pedestrian task, but if you really can predict the next word out of Einstein's mouth, you are at least as smart as Einstein.”

“these kids are disengaged. They are addicted to TikTok and Fortnite, and they have mental health problems, and all these issues that are occurring, and they're the outcome of low standards, not high standards.”

“when we designed our educational system, I think we're the only school in the world who, if a kid's not learning, it's our fault. It's the system's fault. It's not the kid's.”

“Well, I did, I did that, uh, quite a lot, and I think it's, why do you want to do that? Well, um, first of all, you, if your gut feel is good, and, you know, people don't believe in gut feel if you call it gut feel. If you call it pattern recognition, more people believe in it. But if your, if your pattern recognition…”

“For developed enterprises, it's not the best route. Uh, the best route is, to me, a much simpler one. If you create value working in a project, or you create value to whatever degree you create it, You should share in that value on a cash basis, meaning any time period, a year. Just take every year. If the enterprise…”

“I've heard a retention arguments from time immemorial, decades of, well, we do this to retain people. I think that's ridiculous. You retain people, people stay in your enterprise because they like what they do, and there's opportunity there. Uh, a handcuff, so to speak, or they stay because they haven't vested in this…”

“I would say that most successful startups are like cults in many ways”

“He said, uh, that's like saying this other guy would be a better husband for your wife. Might be true, but like, don't act on it. Like, this is your company. You need to stay in there.”

“Outliers don't have work-life balance. They have standards that follow them everywhere.”

“You actually should bring your professional self to work. You should bring the person who's going to be effective in a work environment and can work with all sorts of diverse people and be effective and doesn't bring all their morals and values and everything else in the workplace that don't have a place in the…”

“if you look at the biggest successes in the startup world over time, they were either solo founders or very unequal founders. So that, and there's counter examples to that, of course, but that was Amazon, right? Jeff Bezos was the only founder. Microsoft, it was unequal. Uh, and eventually the other founder left, you…”

“if The founder and the CEO does not exercise agency, you know, then it's actually a political game, and then you have sort of fiefdoms that are fighting it out with one another, and the leader is not there, then you enter the situation where, ah, neither the leader nor the executives have power or control or agency,…”

“That's the hours entrepreneurs have to work every week. Not 50, but 70, and entrepreneurs do work 70.”

“they're gonna tell you to, to try to, don't worry about your burn rate, just grow, grow, grow, and I said, that's not in your best interest. They say that because you, they're the ones supplying the money, and eventually, if they need to, they'll do a cram down round, and basically take it, do it at a much lower price,…”

“Warner said in the past he's not a believer in EBITDA, but, but we are. We think it's the cash that the business generates that, and so we're always saying, well, what's the multiple on EBITDA, and so we know what cash is coming, because You can, you can usually cut back on your capital if you need to.”

“you create higher returns over time by using little to no debt as weird as that is in the finance world.”

“it doesn't require a therapeutic expert who's going to undermine the parent's authority with their kids and make the kids, because it makes a kid feel like, oh, my parent, I, my problems are too big for my parents to handle, so they needed to call in this other person who's sort of more expert than they are. That's not…”

“I've seen Certain leaders be horrible and get incredible things done. They violate every book ever written about leadership and work a team to complete death and play this Machiavellian game of just when they're about to fire, just about when they're about to quit, give them enough of reinforcement”

“engineering involves applied systems design. Um, it, it has a discipline of systems design that is just vastly, like, we're not talking about slightly ahead. We're talking about a hundred years ahead, um, in, in, in, to everything else. It is not a contest when, when you, when you hold it up to, uh, sort of industry…”

“Hire smart people and then get out of their way. I think that's a waste of everyone's time. It's not even good for the, like, it's a nice story, but it's, like, dumb. It's, like, one of those would be nice if that would work, but doesn't.”

“It's actually the subjective judgments are the interesting ones because, like, the objective judgments are easy. You don't need a degree to just measure something. You know, some kid takes some test, you get a score. You can average them across everybody at the school. Who needs to have a degree for that? Like, anybody…”

“I know my, my sense from the literature is that there's been little of any success in de-biasing people, and I think that's a good thing because the biases that get identified Are essentially related to the heuristics that we've learned and are part of the experience that we have. And they only look like biases in…”

“The Chinese sort of bought censorship at the seed stage or series a stage and, um, the U S establishment has tried to institute censorship at like the post IPO stage. Okay. Which is 1000 X or 10,000 X or a 100,000 X the cost. After three billion people have gotten, you know, smartphones and social media, now you want…”

“So the actual government is what remains constant through elections. And that's, you know, the official bureaucracy of, you know, about three million federal employees, many of whom have career tenure. And if, if so, they were not elected and can't be fired. Okay. And of course it's the media corporations who, you…”

“it's a operationally a democracy if Bitcoin is legal, because then you've got freedom to exit with your money and freedom to transact. And if Bitcoin is not legal, Or if it's restricted, then it's a limited democracy or flawed democracy or non-democracy. Because it is restricting that fundamental right of exit.”

“A lot of them actually fall into socialism because they didn't work for their money. Right. Their life experience is that every, they were just born rich and other people were born poor. And it's just like a, you know, so then also there's another aspect, which is the guys who are working to become rich. Um, these…”

“And this is sometimes the weaknesses that ex-operators have when they transition into investing is thinking, oh, I can do this and I'm going to dig in on, in the company and, and get, you know, help them with growth or help them with whatever it may be. And, and it ends up acting as a crutch to the CEO. And so instead…”

“education is compliance, education is, uh, Compulsory education is coercion. Learning is serial incompetence on our way to getting better, and so the flip, the pairing, the tandem of emotional labor is, do you care enough to learn something?”

“You know, one of the challenges of the whole stock option thing is entrepreneurs and founders think that other people will be as motivated by owning part of the company as they are. They're not, not even close. It's a sort of a prize pool at the end of the game show, and it ends up becoming a massive demotivator in…”

“Level five is where I believe that the organization in a distributed fashion is outperforming at every single level, productivity, quality, employee happiness, everything, any in-person organization. Because you've embraced all the power, all the special features of this asynchronous approach and everything's better.”

“the idea that, that a board will discipline management is, is just an absolute fantasy. Uh, and that's a core kind of element of the logical structure that guides the workings of the capital markets, the equity markets, and, and the widely held publicly traded, uh, companies.”

“the only reason they would be in that chair is that they're not particularly good at rating bonds, right? Because if they had a skillset that made them good at rating bonds, what chair would they be sitting in? ... They'd be either sitting in a chair at Goldman or Morgan Stanley or their own bar or Apollo or their own,…”

“There has been a lot of stuff out in the world that says repetition creates habits, but that's actually not how it works. If you look at the study that people cite most when they're making that claim, it's a 2009, 2010 study. It was, you will see that that study showed that habit strength correlates with repetition. It…”

“these businesses take a level of focus and commitment that is otherworldly. Like, the fact that people are Even talking about life work balance, and oh, you know, you can have life work balance, and that's what's important in life, like, these are people who don't understand exactly how startups work, I think,…”

“Self-publishing used to be thought of as the last resort for, for writers. Now publishing contracts are the last resort, because as long as you own the rights, you have the freedom to make any decision you want down the road.”

“You need novelty when you're numbed out and shut down, and you need more and more novel sensation to have you get turned on. That's the way I see it. Novelty is about how we've numbed out our sexuality. Not how, no, it's not about freedom.”

“They say reflects a new moral culture in which you achieve status, not by being strong, not by being beautiful, not by being smart. You achieve status, um, by being, by emphasizing how much you've been victimized, and if you haven't been victimized, then you achieve status by standing up for people who've been…”

“It's that they've been raised with a set of norms. That's really bad for them. That makes them very bad cooperators. And if you can't cooperate, you can't be employed.”

“because of the sort of Uh, the collision of ideas and people in cities makes them more productive, uh, than, than if they were elsewhere. If you believe that to be the case, and there's like pretty good empirical data that it is, then it, you, you can't just move elsewhere. You can't, um, you can't just move to Nevada,…”

“Getting to yes is intellectually sound. There's nothing intellectually to be challenged on getting to yes. And unfortunately, that does you no good as soon as you involve human beings because none of us are intellectually sound.”

“an intellectually brilliant idea in practice, a horrible idea... Here's, here's the problem with Batman. That becomes your goal, and so therefore, if you say to yourself, and the vast majority of people who calculate their BATNA, you know, as long as I do better than my worst alternative, as soon as I get past that,…”

“this idea that excess calories is what makes us fat, Is the, and I, I'm embarrassed that I ever, never thought of this before. It's logically equivalent to saying, you know, excess money makes us rich. Or, uh, I don't know, scoring excess points in a football game will make you win. Um, you know, it's just, it's almost…”

“You add fiber, you can slow down the digestion of the carbohydrates. You can even slow down the digestion of the sugars. So that would probably help, but you've paid attention to the wrong thing. It's not the absence of the fiber. It's the presence of those other foods, and you could help more by getting the right…”

“a lot of the best investors Have that sort of touch of something on the autistic spectrum. It's, it's a little bit of detachment from other people's emotions that enables them to stand back and look and observe what other people are feeling and say, that's funny. Why does feeling that way make sense? And that enables…”

“I love M&A as a way to create value for shareholders because I don't know of another way on a risk adjusted basis on a certainty level that Is more likely to create massive shareholder value than doing sensible M&A.”

“It is to be remembered that oftentimes the most difficult competition comes not from the strong, intelligent, conservative competitor, but from the man who is holding on by the eyelids, is ignorant of his costs, and anyway has got to keep running or bust.”

“you need to figure out which defaults are killing the company and change them violently. There must not be change management. Because you want the change to feel jarring.”

“Companies cannot have multiple cultures. They just can't. They just die. If you allow a company to have many different cultures, What you end up creating is you lose all short form of communication. And you end up spending a lot of time aligning people such that you can move. And it's much easier to have a uniculture…”

“Of all the variables that psychology measures, the two that I think are the most important are confidence and motivation, right? Confidence and motivation. People think it's intelligence, but it's actually not.”

“Then we see that when you take probiotics after a round of antibiotics, there is Two effects. One is that they can help lower your pH value by, for example, bifidobacteria or lactobacillus, who produce these acids, um, can have a beneficial effect, because, you know, again, good bacterias thrive in those environments,…”

“Some of the, the, these quote circular deals that people are talking about, um, enhance the probability that we'll have a correction, but also extend the time before we have one.”

“The second one is, it really encourages development of the new people that come in, because I'm gonna take an equal part of their success when they start delivering, and so I'm not, I want them to be super successful, and I'm gonna spend time, and I, and I, boy, on my way in, I felt that, like, I just felt like, you…”

“I, I, I think The, the whole industry bends towards youth for that reason and because it's a hustle business. Like, there, there's, there's always a rock you haven't looked under. And, you know, age brings children and homes and, and, and other requirements you get tied to and responsibilities, and you're just not able…”

“We learn over time, hopefully, as founders, that our instincts are almost always right, and our ideas are usually wrong.”

“my philosophy, which may sound anti-innovation, but it's actually in service of innovation, is all new fails. Until it finally doesn't. And at Zynga today, the mantra inside the company is still all new fails. If you assume all new fails, you probably won't be let down.”

“Before you have the right to do better and new, you need to be a PhD in what's already proven.”

“You, as a founder, owe it to yourself to control your own destiny and take half the valuation if it's all of the control.”

“The way I ran the company was what I called a democratic dictatorship. And I said, I want everyone, everyone's voice to be heard, and then I'll be the single vote. And I think that's the way a company should be run. I think there's one CEO, there's one chef.”

“The other thing I learned early on about the way engineers hate their jobs and, and hate their bosses is what I call the moral contract. And when I first started working with engineers, these guys, Scott and Kadir, I saw how much the engineers get screwed in these companies. They're the ones who, maybe it'll change,…”

“There is one thing I fear the most as a business leader. Regime change. Whether it's a coup d'etat or a democratic election, private businesses are always the first target.”

“That's what I'm seeing across our company just massively where like the people who were, I already thought were like 10 X are now a hundred X. Um, and so I do think you're, you're seeing like the power law of ability, um, just increased by a lot.”

“I find the best professionals, you don't have a distinction between the two to a certain extent. Work is part of life, the same way that life is part of work. So effectively, it's a, it's a circle. You do these things in a very interchangeable way, whether you're spending your time, time with your family, or you're…”

“The first is the way it's structured as a time-based system where you move up every year and you have a teacher in front of a classroom. There's basically, you have two attributes for people who do well in that system. One, It's IQ coded, which is higher IQ better, is better, and second, it's big five conscientiousness…”

“If you put this in a standard school day of six hours, it's not going to work. Like, ed tech generally has failed. And it's generally failed because the kids aren't motivated to engage with it. If you don't give them their time back, They're not going to engage”

“learning a bunch of material that is becoming commoditized. Right. LLMs are reducing, right, the value of that knowledge. Now, AI also, it's taking it away on that side, but it's also letting you learn 10 times faster.”

“there's no absolute certainties in this business. So when something feels 90% right, you do that transaction or you do that deal. And the most important thing is you do 10 of them. And you're going to be right nine times out of 10. And that's really, really good. If you wait to try and de-risk everything to the…”

“Um, the natives is that you will, I mean, they would typically perpetuate, uh, bubbles because with more passive money, they go into, you know, stocks which have done historically well and they perpetuate, uh, the moves.”

“Three years time is probably the max you can, you can look into the future.”

“But other than that, the packaging of a film or a television show or a record or a book is no different than the packaging of an idea for a digital company, for a company in technology. It's all the same. The founder's the creator. The VCs, the money in tech, the studio or the distributor, the money in the…”

“the equity that you build isn't really wealth because you, when you sell that house, you probably have to buy another one that went up in value just as much. And unless you are moving to a cheaper city, which of course that happens, You're not, you're not getting any benefit out of that.”

“Giving money, taxpayer money, to foreign multinationals never ends up producing the promised jobs. They find a way to lawyer and lobby the money into their pockets with few conditions, and as soon as they get the cash, they dash.”

“If you have a lot of pelts on the wall, you, you, you might have a little more slack. If you don't have a lot of pelts on the wall, you don't have any room. You don't have any room. You can't live on what you've done because you haven't done enough. You better know where you are. And until, if you're Troy Eggman and…”

“At the very least, you'll have to show them three or four or five skiing holidays from which they choose. Because we can't really choose in the absence of comparison.”

“my argument is that marketing is actually fat-tailed. So is innovation, and R&D, pharmaceutical research, science, ok? In other words, five to 10% of what you do delivers perhaps a 110% of the value, and therefore paying people by the hour and demanding that every quantum of effort has to be matched to a quantum of…”

“50, 50% of your effort in life, once you ensured the fact that you're not going to starve to death, die, etc., you know, you've looked after your children... Should be attempts to get lucky. In other words, what Nassim would say, I love this phrase, uh, increasing your surface area exposure to positive, positive upside…”

“quite a large part of this stuff is actually signalling to ourselves. Which is, you know, uh, because I'm worth it. I deserve this. I'm the kind of person who drives this. Uh, it provides me with a kind of ego boost, a sense of reassurance, whatever it may be.”

“if you haven't got much money, TV as a source of long-term entertainment is spectacularly cheap. So having a really good television on which to enjoy it, because you're not going to go Porsche racing at the weekend, you know, you're not going to be there, you know, effectively going to Glyndebourne or popping up to the…”

“big innovative new ideas don't require less marketing, they require more. Because you're asking people to, at the initial stages, you're asking someone to do something that nobody else has done, and you're asking them to do something they haven't done before.”

“the lesson of all tech is that loads and loads of geeks compete through, for technological numerical superiority by some measure or other, And then someone else comes along with a cute user interface and makes all the money. It's basically Steve Jobs. Yeah. Nobody's done that yet for AI.”

“And so their failure to understand the wider context within which they were operating, which is the job of marketing, Is exactly the reason nerds hate marketing, because they think in a perfect world, nerd metrics win out. But the consumer is much more bothered by the fact that when you get to the bottom of the iPhone…”

“do not define an objective which is designed to serve human beings without considering psychological factors, because you might be able to solve your problem very, very cheaply and efficiently by changing the psychology, not by changing the technology.”

“Third, understand that much political and social conflict that appears to be about principles is actually driven by envy. The principles might be real, but the anger comes from envy.”

“When you see extreme outcomes, Berkshire Hathaway's success or New Coke disasters, cult conversions, corporate catastrophes, ask what combination of tendencies created this? Be alert when multiple tendencies are being used to manipulate you. Cults have figured this out. Sales organizations have figured it out too, and…”

“go fast and, and fail. Makes sense in technology, where it's very much, um, there, there's no fixed cost, and you can repair completely. Um, I'm in a business, I call it fashion with fixed assets. It, you know, you build a restaurant, you're going to spend a million, a million and a half, two million dollars, maybe…”

“Entrepreneurs see a better opportunity and, and they're not risk takers. They're actually risk avoiders. They see that opportunity, an opportunity to serve somebody, to make a difference, to do a job better for somebody, and in the context of that, they're risk avoidant. They don't want to take risks that get in the…”

“And, and I will tell you that if you're building a business of mass scale, it isn't New York City that matters. Um, it isn't LA that matters. It's everything in between. And can you offer people something of quality and substance?”

“during raging bull markets, knowledge is superfluous, and experience is a handicap. Because if you have the, the benefit of knowing what happened in all the other blowups, you know how painful it could be. But if you've never experienced it, and every time something went wrong, it just rallied back like nothing…”

“Well, I don't think algorithms can help here. None of us know what's going to happen with the dread and wonderful word AI, but I don't think that, that predictive research Is, uh, certainly in the arena of content, worthless. It cannot tell you anything of real value in making a forward decision. It's just not…”

“Many have carried a heavy debt load pushed on them by their private equity owners, firms that use these stores and that debt to pay themselves. When you're leveraged up like that and have significant interest payments to make, you're not as nimble when things get turbulent.”

“the top leaders, like the Toby Looker, Brian Armstrong types, they already get it, and that is the most effective person to speak is the person who's leading the enterprise.”

“And so one of the things I tell founders to do is just to show up and defend yourself, you know, defend your people, defend your companies. Sam Altman is really good at this. He defends his employees. And it's very hard, even as much as with any public figure, people like to dunk and hate and insult. And when he shows…”

“If both are a yes, then you got to respond immediately. Immediately and aggressively. Right away. You can't kind of, oh, I don't know, it feels so bad, maybe it'll go away. The instinct is, let me just, maybe it'll just go away by itself. It doesn't go away by itself.”

“You have to fight story with story. There's no, like, the most powerful statistic is probably not as powerful as the median story.”

“And so the way to think about this is if you're trying to relieve pressure, you don't get to change how much force is coming at you, but you can change the surface area. You can spread it out over more surface area. You're not just attacking me. You're attacking all of us. You're not just attacking, let's say, Sub…”

“If your apology and your, um, subsequent contrition and attempt to make amends is not correlated with whether you did anything wrong, then of course everybody should come after you all the time because it's a lottery ticket, right? Just come after you and then maybe they'll get a payout. Maybe they'll get something out…”

“There's no apparent equivalent in LLMs right now. There's no reason why the LLMs get better because more people use them.”

“For an LLM, variance is bad. Originality is, is, is a lower score.”

“There's this sort of question for Apple around, does this actually change the experience of what a smartphone is, what the ecosystem is? Does it end up kind of getting Microsofted, in the sense that you're going to still, for the time being, you're still going to buy a smartphone? ... You're still going to buy the nice…”

“What Meta and Amazon want to do is to make LLM's commodity info that sold at cost. This is why Meta made it open source, because they want to make it commodity info that sold at cost, and they differentiate on top with Meta stuff, with Facebook, social, Instagram-y stuff, and they want the model itself to be just…”

“They're not being trained as managers. They're being trained as owners. If they're good owners, Bragg says, they can hire good management.”

“Every acquisition is really two acquisitions. It's the company you're buying today and the companies that might sell tomorrow. When opportunities are scarce, pay what it takes to get the asset you want. The people who nickel and dime their way out a great deal spend years regretting it.”

“You need novelty when you're numbed out and shut down. And you need more and more novel sensation to have you get turned on. That's the way I see it. Novelty is about how we've numbed our sexuality.”

“The overwhelming thing is people do not have affairs because of sexuality or sexual frustration. They have affairs because they're emotionally disconnected and alone.”

“People think, people say things like time will heal that it will not. Your brain holds onto it. It's significant survival information. When you needed, your partner wasn't there. They're no longer safe. You can't count on them.”

“The trouble is with communication skills that you can't, all the evidence, all the research says you can't use them when you need them.”

“Pay double, and you get your pick of the best workers. Turnover disappears. Theft becomes almost non-existent. People start treating your business like it's their business.”

“if you're an asset owner, it's pretty hard to be customer-centric, because your job is like, fill the asset, or you don't make money.”

“Like micromanagement and attention to detail, same, two words for the same thing, right? Attention to detail is great. Like your boss is involved in your stuff. Like that's only a problem if your boss is an idiot and out of touch and making bad decisions. But like, if your boss like genuinely cares about your work, is…”

“I always say that to people who are like building AI companies. It's just like, what a nightmare. Your, your competitors are literally AI geniuses. Like you should find a way to apply AI in some other domain. So you're not competing with the smartest people on planet earth.”

“what people really want in their life is they don't seem to care about how happy they'll be. They seem to want to be satisfied with their life. They seem to want to have a good story about their life.”

“I think changing behavior is extremely difficult. There are a few tips and, you know, a few guidelines about how to do that, but anybody who is very optimistic about changing behavior is just deluded. It's, it's hard to change other people's behavior. It's very hard to change your own.”

“I would say that independent, clear thinking is, to a first approximation, impossible. I mean, in the sense that, you know, we believe in things most of the time, not because we have good reasons to believe them. If you ask me for reasons, I'll explain you. I'll, I'll always find a reason, but the reasons are not the…”

“If you really want to improve the quality of decision making, use algorithms. I mean, whenever, wherever you can, uh, if you can replace judgments by, by rules and algorithms, they'll do better.”

“I'm much more hopeful about organizations, because organizations think more slowly, and they have procedures for thinking, and so you can control the procedures. Individual judgment is really hard to fix. Not impossible.”

“So, when I was teaching negotiations, I would say somebody does that to you, comes up with a number that's absurd. I would say, lose your temper. Make a scene. Say, I will not start the conversation from that number. It's an absurd number. I don't want to. Let's erase that number.”

“Most American corporations have fat salaries for the top people and treat the people at the end of the line as peons. I guess that is why, if you're on the ball, you can beat them.”

“Jim's new philosophy was crystal clear. No partners, no shareholders, no relatives.”

“performance appraisals for men is like, you know, he didn't deliver on all his goals. Yeah, I agree, but the guy's got really, he's got great potential. With the women, it was, she delivered on all her goals, but I think, you know, her future trajectory is not that great.”

“Yeah, I think, um, Powder and the other independents need to strongly counter position, um, or just become part of Epic Icon. Um, but you're not going to live as you were because you lose a third of your revenue and all of your profit to the epic icon, uh, family. And it partially depends where you are geographically,…”

“Yeah, I mean, we rarely ask people for references because those are so anodyne. Um, so then it's climbing through LinkedIn histories, finding cross, uh, things going to quite some lengths, um, to get references, um, that are more loyal to me, um, than they are to the candidate.”

“we came to think of loyalty as a stabilizer. So loyalty gives you, you know, if you have a bad day, you don't get instantly fired, or if your boss has a bad day, you don't quit instantly. You sort of think things through solidly over, you know, a couple months. Um, but that ultimately it was about performance, and, um,…”

“And then we generally don't do performance improvement plans, which are sort of a way to document the employee's poor performance so that you can win a suit. Instead, why not give, just give them a check? And you know, there's so few people who get put on a PIP. That then, um, you know, turn around. Um, that it's a, I…”

“entertainment is not always going to be stuff that you love or that you emulate or is admirable. There's lots of stuff in entertainment that's not admirable, um, and if you don't want to be in the entertainment business, that's fine, but if you do, this is a core part of entertainment.”

“Um, so the keeper test is a Netflix shorthand, um, for, uh, asking yourself if one of your employees were quitting, how hard would you work to keep them, um, to stay? Would you try to change their mind? And if you wouldn't, then you should proactively give them a generous severance package and try to recruit someone…”

“The moment that officers or directors of a company begin to speculate in its stock, the ruin of the company is not far away, for it is impossible to serve both the company and the stock market.”

“we've always said more games are lost than won in the National Football League, and when I say lost, I'm saying those type of things, missed opportunities, um, missed assignments, um, poor clock management, just, um, Just fumbling the situation more than the other team, um, you know, really, really playing well to win.”

“If you have a lot of pelts on the wall, you, you might have a little more slack. If you don't have a lot of pelts on the wall, you don't have any room. You don't have any room. You can't live on what you've done because you haven't done enough. You better know where you are. And until, if you're Troy Eggman and Tom…”

“So the internet was 80% startup value. It was Google, it was Amazon, you know, it was all these, these companies we now know and love. Meta, you know, um, and then mobile, the mobile revolution was probably 80% incumbent value, or 90%, right? And so that was, mobile search was Google, and mobile CRM was Salesforce, and…”

“Most incumbent companies don't care about startups, and startups have five, six years before an incumbent wakes up and realizes it's a big deal, and then tries to crush them.”

“often the CEO will promote the person who's their compliment as the next CEO, instead of finding somebody like them who can innovate and push on people and drive new products and new changes. And so often you see companies have a golden age under a founder and then decay. And the decay is because the founder promoted…”

“For very early companies, the best companies I know are almost a hundred percent in person.”

“one of the things I feel like I learned from Paul was that if in 10 minutes you cannot actually understand what's going on, uh, it means the person on the other end doesn't actually understand what's going on, and there isn't anything to understand.”

“one of the funnier quips is that, ah, you know, the second best software in the world for everything is, ah, using ChatGPT, because you can basically copy and paste, you know, almost any workflow or any data, and it's like the general purpose thing that, you know, you can just drop data into it. And it's the second…”

“the moats are not different, actually, at the end of the day. It's still, you still have to build good software, you still have to be able to sell, you have to retain customers, you have to, um, But you, you just don't need like a thousand people for it anymore. You might only need six people.”

“There are tremendous values in the stock market, but in buying stocks, not in entire companies. Buying companies tends to raise the purchase price too high.”

“It feels like a local maximum, uh, in a really obvious way to me, which is you have a bunch of code written by people, um, written in programming languages that were designed to make it easy for people to tell a computer what to do.”

“I have a strong suspicion that if we designed these systems with the role of a, uh, software engineer in mind being an operator of a machine rather than the author of the code, we could make the process Much more robust and much more productive.”

“If you're pre-training a foundation model that's the fourth best, uh, that's gonna cost you a lot of money, and the return on that investment is, is probably fairly questionable, because why use your fourth best large language model versus a frontier model or an open source one, uh, for Meta?”

“I would have a hard time personally, like, funding a, a startup that says, I'm gonna do pre-training, you know, it's, it's, ah, it's, I don't really know, like, what's your, what's your, um, differentiation in this marketplace, and I think a lot of those companies you're already seeing, Them consolidate because they…”

“the combination of, Bureaucracy and inaccurate storytelling, um, I think is the reason why companies sort of die”

“Upside will always take care of itself, and whether you shoot for 16%, 22, 29, 18, none of those matter. They're all great. What's really important is what are the risks How, what can go wrong? How bad could it get? And, um, and how do we deal with it if that happens?”

“We, we invest in backbone infrastructure, largely, and even our private equity businesses are backbone infrastructure type businesses. Therefore, what's important for us is to go to good countries with good people that you can operate with the standards we operate with, and that those countries respect rule of law and…”

“So, I definitely think that there will be this recursive improvement, but you're still going back to being rate limited by time and biological or chemical reactions. You still need to instantiate this into a physical experiment. And so you can model and simulate all you want, but then you actually have to, like, do the…”

“I think there's a ton of dry powder in venture capital and private equity, but a lot of it I call wet powder, and Because this money is basically reserved for companies and people don't realize.”

“at Sequoia, we hire for slope, not intercept. So experience obviously matters, but if you just hire for the experience and their slope is not fast, that's going to become a problem at some point. And so we really, really ask founders to think about what is the person's potential? What is their slope?”

“Um, or in sales, and here's a company that basically raised ten million dollars, and it probably was undercapitalized, but it really did highlight that you can build a company by having CAC be profitable on the first order, by being focused on customer service, and not focused on marketing.”

“It's the same as true in the, in investing in private companies. It's still much better to pick the right company and slightly overpay than to invest in something that is cheap.”

“As an example, with the combustion engine, nobody regulated the engine. We regulated what engines can go on the streets, what can go into a plane. We regulated how it was applied. But in a lab, and people were, you know, sort of doing research and trying to make the combustion engine even more powerful, being more fuel…”

“Not having FOMO is the single most important financial skill. I think it's so important that you cannot ever imagine accumulating significant wealth over your lifetime if you are susceptible to FOMO.”

“So when I'm initiating a position, I tend to scale into it. So let's say I want to take it to three percent of capital. I'll buy 50 basis points, you know, another 50 and I'll scale into it. Turns out that's wrong. The bias that I'm demonstrating the reversion is a regret aversion is if it's reached the hurdle that I…”

“the best capital you'll ever have is the capital you make yourself, and if you, if you don't want to lose control of your business, then make sure you're very profitable, don't scale too quickly, grow your business thoughtfully and painfully, uh, patiently, keep your costs down, and plow the money back in”

“our objective wasn't to make good onion rings. It was to make onion rings exactly the same as the competition, because then it's an easy sell. You don't have to have something unique, and that was not as easy as you would think, and we could make better tasting ones. We could put them in a blind test, and ours would…”

“That's the hours entrepreneurs have to work every week. Not 50, but 70. And entrepreneurs do work 70.”

“So I've seen a lot of companies have come to me that have attempted to do category creation or pretend that they're doing this new category of things, and then it's Been a disaster. Customers are just very confused. They don't understand why this is different from the existing things they're doing. They can't figure…”

“I think what happens as a company scales is you hire for a lack of weakness, not for spiky strengths. And that's institutionalized in the scale ups, interviewing panel and process. And I think that's a mistake. And that's one of the few things that leads to really mixed success in hiring execs in these companies.”

“I think consensus is really the enemy of scale. And so I used to say, whenever we're making an important decision, there should be winners in the room and losers. We shouldn't find like that negotiated settlement that everyone's happy. Somebody should be unhappy. Three or four people should walk out unhappy and one…”

“Debt is not a source of return. It is an amplifier of return. So it makes good things Be great. It can take mediocre things and destroy them. And of course it takes bad things and nukes them.”

“The reality is over a long enough period of time, that index is zero. Like it's really hard. The governance of these things is difficult. Like the, the norm for most small businesses is entropy is decay. Is dying a slow death and being wound down. Like that's, that's a norm in the small business world.”

“Investing is one of the very few endeavors in life where the harder you try, the worse you're probably going to do. And yes, there are exceptions to that. Renaissance technologies. Of course, you, you, you can name the exceptions for people who tried very hard and did very well. But for the vast majority of people,…”

“a lot of people who are very successful are just walking anxiety disorders harnessed for productivity.”

“We would pathologize ordinary behaviors and treat them to see themselves as disordered. Oh, that's just, you know, you have ADHD. Oh, that's your oppositional defiance disorder. That's why you acted out. So instead of using the sort of lay terms we've always used that have to do with character, like You know, being a…”

“Instead, we tell the kids the opposite. Your parents are divorced. You've had trauma. Let's talk about it. It's the worst thing we could do for a kid who'd been through something hard.”

“mental health is not something you work on. It's something that happens while you're living a good life.”

“if I just took video of people playing points, you couldn't tell how mentally tough or how effective they were under pressure. But if I looked at the between point time only, You could tell who were those that were actually extraordinarily good competitors and who, who were, were not. And you didn't even need to see…”

“in business, in the business world, you've got to get the major trend right. You've got to get the major trend right. And as my main business mentor, may he rest in peace, Ludwig Jesselson used to say, you can mess up a lot of things, but if you get the main trend right, you're going to make a lot of money. And…”

“one of the really Deep, dark, dirty secrets of money management. Is that, you know, if, if you were faced with the choice of, you know, you return 10% a year for the next decade, and the market does 12, or you are zero, and the market's down two. Every money manager takes the zero, but every client would take the 10,…”

“Charlie's phrase was the intelligent loss of sales. He said, you're young and you just think more is better. More is better. More is better, but more is not necessarily better. It's who do you keep out?”

“What doesn't work is giving your kids a lifestyle where they will feel like a loser if they are unable to maintain that lifestyle on their own merit. I just think that, you know, if you do the Southampton, Palm Beach, uh, uh, Aspen, like, you're creating, you're creating kids that Either you're going to have to leave…”

“I've seen just as much damage done by wealthy families trying to build character, uh, as I, as I've seen the, the, the opposite.”

“It was Charlie who told me, and I had never thought of it this way, he said, you get into a lot of trouble when you want your kids to live a different lifestyle than you're living. Uh, when you're getting a chauffeur to drive you to work, and you're telling your 15 or sixteen-year-old to go get a job at McDonald's, uh,…”

“Events don't mess up kids. Events aren't even inherently traumatizing. What, I don't like to mess up because it sounds so final, but what really impacts kids is not an event. It's the story they tell themselves about the event.”

“Wireing fear next to love is not something I recommend, because yes, what that means, I'll lay it out, is your kid will go into their adult relationships thinking loving relationships are one in which you fear your partner, and that's who they'll be attracted to.”

“And I think in general, in general, you should make the error of staying with people too long. Giving them a longer leash and, and letting them play out their hand as much as is humanly possible.”

“I think the easiest way is to throw out fake information and see how people respond.”

“We, we very quickly separate on behavior. You know, performance is something that we will give more time behavior. We won't. And that's because behavior is a choice, not a skill set.”

“I don't think a business is a family. Unfortunately, in a family, you can't fire your family, even though you sometimes want to, you have to tolerate them and deal with them. And sometimes in the most egregious way, that is just the nature of families. I mean, all the dysfunction that comes with it. Um, but in, in…”

“Emotions get in the way, and I would say that independent clear thinking Is, to first approximation, impossible. I mean, in the sense that, you know, we believe in things most of the time, not because we have good reasons to believe them. If you ask me for reasons, I'll explain you. I'll, I'll always find a reason, but…”

“If you really want to improve the quality of decision making, use algorithms. I mean, whenever, wherever you can, uh, if you can replace judgments by, by rules and algorithms, they'll do better. Now, there's big social costs to trusting, allowing algorithms to make decisions, but, but the decisions are likely to be…”

“when somebody says it doesn't make any sense that X keeps going lower, Get in the trade. It's got a lot lower to go.”

“If you give a book away, the danger is a person will read it just because it's a gift. Unless you think it's the book they should be reading. It's actually a slightly cruel act to give someone a book.”

“When it comes to yourself, you should turn yourself into a person who can do really good work, even without having a great manager. Even if you have an okay or absentee manager, you should turn yourself into a person who can do really great work.”

“What that leads to is a lot of me too products. It leads to us kind of just meeting table stakes. It leads to kind of picking the safe things. Because the safe things are, uh, you know, easy to quantify, uh, and they're safe because they're easy to quantify. Um, and look, I have nothing against those kinds of…”

“We, we very quickly separate on behavior. You know, performance is something that we will give more time behavior. We won't. And that's because behavior is a choice, not a skill set.”

“it is a lack of adjustment because if you were a perfectly balanced person, you wouldn't have any ambition. You're so happy with where things are. You barely have a reason to get up in the morning, you know?”

“There needs to be a bell curve. We want to know who is, you know, deserving of two X, three X versus who is deserving of zero. Um, so that we, we see the full spectrum, the bell curve, if you will, uh, of people that are, you know, performing, you know, incredibly well. And, uh, and the ones who are not in good…”

“You get much better sales organization when you have full alignment in the entire company so that everybody works, you know, for sales effectively. We always say that we're all working for sales here. Because they're the tip of the spear and the rest of us are really the wood behind the arrowhead.”

“great salespeople can't sell a bad product. Right. But lousy salespeople can sell a great product.”

“typically sales problems are, are product problems, but Typically that's not the, the initial assessment because, you know, you don't want your baby to be called ugly”

“some people are, you know, not good enough to keep, not bad enough to fire, you know, those are the worst cases because like, well, you know, person looks nice, speaks, speaks well, articulate, you know, but they're the ultimate passenger. They never move a dial, right? And, and, you know, those are the ones that…”

“I find that people, uh, rush, especially in fast growing companies, you know, we have hiring targets and they're just slamming bodies. And it's, it's the worst thing ever. I'd rather hire, you know, more slowly, but better than faster.”

“And sometimes stepping into that role means that you leave a lot of other things on the side. It means that you don't bring your full self to work. Nobody cares. Nobody wants that. And like you bring your best work self to work and you lead from the front and you do what you have to do.”

“when we are at our best, we're not slogging through. And great People are obsessed and they're not slogging through either. They are driven. They are motivated. They are deeply, deeply engaged. And so I find that oftentimes when we over rely on discipline, those are the times we start to see like Olympic athletes…”

“If you're unpredictable in that way, you're much less likely to be, um, taken over by an AI. You want to live your life in a way that the AI cannot They predict what you're going to do. They cannot kind of fake you or cannot imitate you.”

“Right now, the best way to think of these AI is the chat. Training, the LL, the LLMs, is that they're, um, they're the epitome of, um, wisdom of the crowd. Ok, they're wisdom of the crowd thinking. That's what it is. It's the collective, all the average people in the world, and all their average foibles, and all the…”

“In my view, and this, again, took me a long time to kind of realize this, but in my view, the worst crimes against humanity have all been done in trying to eliminate evil. And so, the lesson to me is, like, if you are in the business of trying to eliminate evil, you've got to be really careful, because that's…”

“One that works very well is be faster than your competitors at providing your customers what they want, when they want it, and where they want it. And if a company can do that two or three times faster than its competitors, it'll usually grow two to three times faster. It'll be twice as profitable.”

“most often what we see is that if you could speed up a factory or any kind of process by a factor four, In other words, I take 20% of the time, 25% of the time I used to take. Productivity is about, uh, cost position is about, uh, 20% lower. Cause I take out overhead.”

“In fact, the whole agile thing that's going on is very much of a version of time-based competition at the factory translated to software.”

“Well, I think it's also to your point, Shane, you know, even when people say equality, it really is mistreating the kid that's better at something. Why do they not get to be challenged? If you really think about it, why do they not get to enjoy school anymore? Why do they not get to feel like they're learning…”

“And I think that eighty-twenty is conventional, five-ninety, not conventional. But my experience is closer to yours. And that is one aspect where if you think about what that means time wise, it means if you can get one of those five, right, you should spend a crazy amount of time going to find them. You should spend a…”

“Think about comp systems. Think about the number of times that you'll be in a company and somebody great will be like on the fence of staying. And you'll be like, well, could we do this on compensation? Could we do this on title? And they'll be like, well, the bands don't allow that. Like you created the bands. What…”

“I don't believe you can be the best in the world at anything and be a well-balanced person.”

“If you take that class to an extreme, or that view of, of, like, everything's an option, um, you start viewing everything in life with a cost-benefit analysis, including people, including pleasure, including you know, things that are less tangible, um, but are, but are the essence of what makes life life. Um, and it's…”

“yeah, humans, there will probably be some consequences. So you should only pull out the, ah, the geoengineering, ah, fix if it's otherwise unmitigated disaster. Just like they wouldn't crack my chest open if I went into the emergency room with a hangnail. They reserve that for a very special set of circumstances.”

“I always have like maybe 12 or 13 people reporting to me, which a lot of people always wondered how I did that, but I had to have Every discipline need to be on that team, because if not, then if you have the haves and the have nots on the leadership team, you got to keep explaining to the people you haven't around the…”

“that even if you could take away the depression or the trauma or give somebody, you know, the perfect life and everything they wanted, once they've developed the disease of addiction, they have addiction, and if you don't intervene for that problem, it's, it's typically not going to resolve the Uh, you know,…”

“a lot of what can both drive addiction but also motivate people to get into recovery is the shame they feel for their behaviors related to their use. If that shame, um, you know, becomes destructive shame, it will perpetuate the addictive cycle, but if we can turn it into pro-social shame, then it can help motivate…”

“Now, there's one corollary to that, Shane, that's really important, and that is zero tolerance for violating this process of working, the business plan review, the creating value roadmap, including everybody, uh, all stakeholders on the leadership team. Zero tolerance for violating that operating process, and zero…”

“in order to hero, you need victims. And then that means you are requiring people to be disempowered so you can hero. And that's not such a, you know, that's how we're just going to create more battles amongst us.”

“I actually think even concepts like roadmaps and, and just generally plans are actually overrated. Um, I think, um, uh, like a road, the best possible roadmap is have a very clear guide view of what matters to your, um, merchants. Have a super, um, strong model of your own capabilities, um, um, as a company, uh, and…”

“The best thing founders can do is subtraction. This is surprising, but, like, it's, it's, it's the, the, the reason, like, it's much, much, much easier to add things, um, than it is to, uh, to, to, to, to remove things.”

“a lot of, uh, multi-billion dollar companies, um, uh, in, in technologies are, like, come from, there is sort of three, four, five year period of startup creation, right? Which was this, Extreme Goldilocks zone of, um, uh, everything was changing. Mobile, SaaS, internet, broadband, um, remember broadband? All these…”

“I think a great entrepreneurship is actually extracting amazing innovative ideas out of now much, much, much more innovative larger companies than existed previously, um, and bringing them to other fields, and I think that's a good form factor for entrepreneurship.”

“Shopify's stock price is like this crazy function over time based on, again, sentiment, market value. So tying everyone's lifetime earnings, really, but like to this other thing, which is like wildly swinging compared to the thing that we are all working on. Feels like just such a Pattern violation I think. Right?…”

“everyone pays lip service to innovation, but innovation costs you a lot. Innovation is a, if you want this, every single, like, solving any single problem in a company is tenix as hard as it is if you don't.”

“Pareto principle alone tells you that first 80% of every field can be done 20% of the time. You, you, you can, you can, you can develop easily five fields, um, for, uh, in, uh, to, to, to a degree of eight out of 10, um, While the specialist is just looking at primary topic, right? So, um, and frankly, this is even…”

“the problem is, in any other case, you reward the most prepared, and the most prepared are usually the people with the most time, and they with the most time are not usually people working on important things, right?”

“many leaders, if they have a red item, first of all, that embarrasses them, they think they're not doing their job, as opposed to that red item is a gem. We, I clap when you have a red because you're not the, you're not red. It's your item's red.”

“Because a lot of, a lot of cultures are you only bring an issue if you have an answer. That doesn't allow it working together the way we're talking about, where you can move quickly on the, on the issues.”

“once they join this environment and you, and you have these expected behaviors, And they're the right expected behaviors, and you start acting this way, then you start being this way. So gradually, your mindsets, and your beliefs, and your values, they all start to move this direction.”

“if you can make, like, if you can make twice as many decisions at half the, kind of, um, half the precision, that's actually often better. Um, uh, and then given the fact that sort of the, uh, rate of improvement of decision making with additional time almost necessarily tends to kind of Flatten out. I think that most…”

“I'm inclined to say, I don't know if I actually believe this, but I'm inclined to say in response to that question that decision making in organizations is slightly overrated, uh, in that organizations are not like investment entities, um, or funds or managers, uh, in that organizations, well, with investing, it's…”

“And in the course of doing that research, we just started to see undeniable evidence that that approach to achievement has some serious flaws.”

“And actually like a lot of what, what we do that facilitates making these kinds of important discoveries is to actually set us up, set ourselves up for having effective serendipity, which is not the way that we, you know, talk about things when you talk about setting an objective and just moving towards it.”

“We cannot make progress in certain kinds of extremely complex problems, which education is one of those. Um, simply by just laying out some, uh, assessment system and then trying to follow it towards this global objective, which is just incredibly complex to get to.”

“if the, if the actual stepping stones that lead to where we want to go are counterintuitive, in other words, they're not what you would expect, then the metrics are useless, right? Because they won't detect those stepping stones because they don't look like what the metrics are trying to detect. And if you think about…”

“evolution, it's a very unique thing in the sense that it's kind of like a search or like a learning algorithm that discovered everything that was ever created in nature in a single run. This is very different from like what you see in typical machine learning, which is like, We're going to try to solve a very hard…”

“Like too often people will be dependent upon the press. Like there's a press good or bad. And actually that, that maybe is only At best, very lightly correlated with whether the company is doing well or poorly.”

“when I, when I kind of go through the entire world, there's basically two places that embody this fighter pilot terminology called an OODA loop, observe, orient, decide, act. It's how fast you make these decisions through this kind of, this framework, both as individuals in a society. And it's Silicon Valley in China.”

“So that shows quite beautifully, elegantly, that the foundation for spatial thought is also the foundation for conceptual thought, for conceptual relations, Because what the grid cells are doing is mapping, um, relationships among single items. So that, that is one cornerstone of, of the claim I've been making that…”

“What blocks insight is that organizations say they want insights, and they want innovation, And they really don't, but they're, they're being serious. They think they want insights, but insights are disorganizing. As you point out, insights make you change the way you think, make you change all kinds of things. And,…”

“If the person says, I can't think of any mistakes. To me, that means this person may be competent, but it certainly is not an expert. Experts are well aware of their mistakes and their mistakes eat at them until they can, they can sort of imagine what I should have done is this and, and figure out a way around it.”

“I may be an investor and I have a track record of calling the market right in the last five times. And people say, wow, he really knows what he's talking about. But there are lots of people who are trying to predict which way the market is going to go. And some of them are going to get it right by chance. And people…”

“I like to say like most successful people are just an anxiety disorder harnessed for productivity.”

“There was a clear negative correlation between spending time with me and getting better.”

“Your biggest challenge as a coach is one thing, customer selection. You pick the right customer, your coaching process always works. You pick the wrong customer, your coaching process will never work.”

“never make your value as a human being conditioned on the results of what you're trying to achieve. Never do that. It's a fool's game. It is a fool's game for two reasons. One, you don't control the outcomes. There are a million variables impacting anything we're trying to do in life today. You don't control that. And…”

“Every decision in life is made by the person who has the power to make the decision. Make peace with that. Not the smartest person, the best person, a fair person, a logical person, a wonderful person, a rational person, or even a sane person. Every decision is made by the person who has the power to make the decision.”

“they are okay to be mocked or have lower dignity or lower status as long as they get the, the financial upside of it. So I think that's where the status and wealth driven societies mindset comes in that they are absolutely okay to reduce their status as long as they win the commercial side of the deal.”

“And I think, therefore, a lot of Western companies struggle to make monetize from these markets. They can get a lot of DAUs and MAUs from this market, but rarely ARPU from this market because they don't understand what people pay for over here.”

“So products that sell convenience and save you your time rarely monetize, which monetize a lot in the Western society, because everybody understands the value of hours.”

“By design, gross margins exist when you allow human beings to jump their social status. And gross margins disappear when you do not help them increase their social status.”

“every time the delta of efficiency score is greater than or equal to four, three things happen. It's an irreversible behavior. Once you experience a delta four product or service, you cannot go back. Uh, there is obviously very, very high tolerance... The third thing is, which I call as a UBP, a unique brag-worthy…”

“The core human game is to constantly improve our social status so that we improve our mating success or our success of our progeny.”

“I think being shameless Is most important ingredient in ability to connect dots. Shameless people make more conjectures without any fear of judgment.”

“I found an interesting hypothesis that the fastest way to make somebody feel okay about what they're ashamed of is to make them feel proud about it. For example, the path to from shame to normalcy is through pride, uh, which has obviously used and misused in different ways.”

“everything that we are proud of are the Handles that we give to other humans to manipulate us. So every time, everything that I write on Twitter as things that I'm proud of, like people's intros and descriptions are the trigger points put in public.”

“In fact, I believe that all the people who demonstrate the need to be fans are the people who are easiest to offend, ah, in life. I think being fan or having favorites is telling the world that you're extremely easy to offend.”

“people are not more intolerant. They are just running out of processing power per day more than anybody else in the humanity ever did. So it's not unusual. To like authoritarian leaders, because I can't process all this information.”

“When does a startup become a big company? Like, is one billion dollar valuation makes you a big company? I think the answer is very simple. When you reduce, uh, The concentration of people with very high slope in the company.”

“I mean, I think that's right, and I think this is one of the reasons we're seeing so much more anxiety in our college students today, right, is that they've never, they've never had a chance to, to mess up. They've never had a chance to do it on their own, and so when they finally have to do it, it seems really scary,…”

“a lot of the unhappiness hit that comes with poverty isn't necessarily a not having money hit, it's a not having time hit. You know, so she argues that time famine comes with, you know, being low income, and it's actually the time famine that's a real hit on well-being, more so than the money famine.”

“Eventually born, and this epigenomic information that tells cells how to behave, we think breaks down over time, and that results in diseases, tissue dysfunction, so, you know, you start to look older, you can't clear toxins, you can't think well, your nerve cells don't work well, you become less able to see at night,…”

“What we've realized is that in addition to be being antioxidants, they actually turn on those longevity pathways, the sirtuins. They work on mTOR. There's another one called AMPK, which senses blood sugar and energy. And by eating plants that in general Make these molecules, and especially plants that are stressed…”

“And what I think is going on is that it's not the high pressure that's important. It's the decrease that you're becoming pseudo hypoxic. Your body thinks it's running out of oxygen when it's just coming down from a high level. And my lab has shown in mice that pseudo hypoxia Um, is a real thing, and, uh, and is…”

“The biological clock, this, the scratches on the CD that we talked about earlier, they start at conception. The egg and the sperm come together, even an embryo, even a fetus and a young baby, they're aging. We can measure this on this clock.”

“Truly reset the age of the body and diseases of aging, like Alzheimer's and heart disease, even cancer will go away if we become young again.”

“There's no reason why a 120 needs to be the maximum human lifespan. There is nothing in biology that says that there is a limit, and there are many species that live a lot longer than us.”

“This crackdown demonstrated insecurity. When you need to do something like that, um, it indicates that you feel you, you can't just, you know, go and put out a megaphone and be like, hey, people, I'm listening to you, you know, we'll figure it out, and there's a mutual trust, right? You feel you need to do Not quite…”

“A paper that came out last week that does not have any independent replications is not science in the same way Maxwell equations is. And that's, that, that quantitative axis is very important. Science is not about prestigious citations. It's about independent replications.”

“Point being that you can build effectively a chain of custody for data. From the instrument, right. To the paper, to the chain of citations that leads you to the premise and conclusion that you're supposed to base your life on today. That is what I think we need to build towards rather than trust me, trust me, trust…”

“It's not about the developed world and developing world. It's about the ascending world and descending world. Like that's about rate of growth, not simply about statics. So just to elaborate on that, your Brooklyn woke is actually rich, but in the descending class and a kid in India or Nigeria with a smartphone may be…”

“with pseudonymity, you can reboot under different identities, and so cancellation is not permanent. Pseudonymity, there's a very strong moral case for pseudonymity because it prevents both cancellation and discrimination.”

“if it does centralize and control something totally, then the value poof vanishes, right? Because a blockchain, it'll just get marked all the way down to market. It'll get marked down to zero. So you grab it, you centralize it, and then it's like sand through the fingers.”

“getting like a huge chunk of the recent searches on your new blockchain-based search engine, blockchain, block explorers are basically the stealth threat to search.”

“After age 25, the brain doesn't change unless it's self-directed change, so don't expect anybody to change unless it's self-directed. Forget trying to get people to change. It does not work. It works with children. It does not work with adults unless it's self-directed plasticity, and there is tons of literature to…”

“don't fall into the self-deception that you have a better understanding of what's happening than they do. Use that, that position and that visibility to gain some perspective, but then listen, talk, do everything else you can and support the person on the ground because ultimately they do know better. They, they have a…”

“the truth is, if you sit back in D.C. and you listen to what the military tells you, you know, the military, God bless us, will say what we want to be true. It's not that we're lying, but we've been given a mission and we desperately want it to be going well, and so there's a tendency to portray it that way.”

“When you take a holistic view, what you find is that there is almost nobody who is completely resilient to that diet of six hours of sleep on all of those different measures. So some people are resilient to a lack of sleep in some domains, but they will be vulnerable in other domains.”

“They say within a couple of minutes, you know, five minutes later, oh gosh, you know, I feel so much better. All right. I'm ready to face the world. And you think that that's the caffeine. That's nonsense. The caffeine isn't probably, you know, working within your system at peak plasma concentrations until certainly 10…”

“Sleep is not like a light switch. Sleep is much more like landing a plane, that it takes time for you to descend down onto the terra firma of healthy, good sleep at night. And the reason I'm nervous when people say, look, I get into bed and I, you know, as soon as my head hits the pillow, I'm fast asleep. That probably…”

“it proposes this basically three-step process, um, and sort of, uh, you know, step one is basically just, like, flat out ignore, right? New technologies are just, like, dismissed. All, all the experts and all the people who are kind of in power, you know, just kind of say, okay, this thing is not going to matter. It's…”

“I think what we have now is kind of at the, at the sort of deepest level, what we have is kind of this big fight between people who want to use the internet to basically reinforce top-down power, uh, versus people who want to use it to disrupt top-down power.”

“There's a point a lot of people reach where they're just done with new ideas. It's like the general version of the problem. It's just like, okay, like I got through the PC. I got through the internet. Um, I got Facebook. All right. I got, okay. Food delivery works, but like TikTok, like really, right? It's just too…”

“we're in the fluke business, right? Like the whole point of this is to get the flukes. Um, and so of course that person should get full credit for the fluke, right? And in fact, I hope they go make 10 more investments and get another fluke.”

“human motivation is not about carrots and sticks. It's not about pain and pleasure, but rather it's just about one thing. All human behavior is spurred by the desire to escape discomfort. Everything we do, we do for just one reason, the desire to escape discomfort, even the pursuit of pleasurable sensations.”

“Once you start playing that game, You're going to lose to whoever plays that game more ruthlessly. You know, if you're going to be on the side of supposedly factual evidence-based reality, you got to stick with that.”

“You know, if you look at the basic GE toolkit that I grew up with, it was almost the perfect match for private equity where You took a company, you had five years to turn it around. You didn't have to make big bets on products and technology. And so I, I think to a certain extent, some of the people, uh, who left GE…”

“And I think that is partially why Shake Shack has succeeded is that it's a fine dining version of a fast food restaurant. I call the category fine casual because I don't know too many situations where you've had a mashup of all these people who started Shake Shack came from restaurants like Union Square Cafe and…”

“Moreover, the danger is that we'll get very used to having relationships with essentially servants who do what we want and laugh at our jokes and are much more submissive than any human relationship would be.”

“And, and the thesis was is that sevens kill companies. And what that means is that, you know, when someone is a four, you just know they're not doing the job, they're not up for it, and let's, let's take them out of the system. But the problem with the seven Is that you don't get to that point because that person will…”

“That's so, so wrong, because things rarely come to a vote. It's always about what's that conversation around the table. And someone who has a seat at the table is participating in whatever strategic conversation you're having can really change the direction of a company.”

“You know, I would say Postmates could be executing a 10 X DoorDash's execution, but because DoorDash had a strategy that let them just be, you know, so much better than any substitute because it's a lot better to be Better. It's a lot easier to be better than the competition when you have no competition or your…”

“Position sizing is the most important thing. Being too timid on the few good ideas that come your way is like the biggest mistake people make.”

“And the best rule of thumb that I learned was if this management team was good at allocating capital, before I walked in the door, the assumption that they would continue to be good was a really good assumption. And if they were really bad at it, no matter what story they told, and how smart they seemed, and how…”

“And I just figure if I can't figure it out, they don't want me to figure it out. And I got to go to the next one. I mean, I'll, I'll spend a lot of time doing it, but if I can't figure it out, then I just assume that's intentional. And I don't view that as a good thing.”

“Another big thing we learned is, near as I can tell, there is no correlation between consensus decisions and intelligent decisions. In the history of corporate history, most great decisions are taken where there's still substantial disagreement still in the air, and they are taken without a need for consensus.”

“What's a job? It's all your eggs in one basket. You basically have made a highly undiversified portfolio bet. Oh, and by the way, you have very little control over it. You're exposed to, if it turns out that the people running the company are idiots, or they make really bad decisions, you've made a bad bet that other…”

“One set of companies changes the recipe about 80% over, say, 30 years, and the other changes the recipe about 20%. Which group is the more successful companies? The 20% change. Which surprised us. We thought that what you would find is that the companies that are the most successful are going to change the most in a…”

“if you are asking questions about, like, you know, underachievement and, you know, closing the achievement gap, etc., and, um, you know, the antidote that's offered is like, well, we should teach kids about growth mindset and grit and agency. Then you might be overlooking, you know, the massive problem that stands in…”

“In that sense, they really, you know, the airplane and the boat really have evolved. It's not a metaphor. It's what's actually happening to them.”

“Picking winners and saying, I want this technology to be developed by such and such a date has a pretty awful track record and is likely to end up by the losers picking the governments. In other words, you know, the wrong people end up getting the grants and the subsidies because they're very well politically connected…”

“what I discovered was that distraction, the leading cause of distraction and research bears this out. The leading cause of distraction is not what we call external triggers. It's not the stuff outside of us. But rather distraction begins from within what we call the internal triggers. That is the leading cause of…”

“time management requires pain management. Time management requires pain management. You'll always be distracted by something, right? If it's too much news, too much booze, too much football, too much Facebook, it doesn't matter. Something is going to distract you unless you understand what feeling you are trying to…”

“And I kept finding this ratio that's like 20 to one everywhere in successful platforms, not in fake platforms, like it's not on the Facebook platform. Facebook made like 90% of the dollars in that ecosystem, but in others.”

“You need to be growing in the article, I say, 20% month over a month, but it can be 10%. It just needs to be sort of exponential or, or so. Or polynomial or whatever the correct math term is. And if you're doing that, you can stay on this path. If you're not doing that, it's going to be tough. It really, you know,…”

“Analyze data, collect as much data, analyze it rigorously to determine causes of effects in this other part of the world. Imagine possibilities and choose the one for which the most compelling, uh, argument can be made. And he said, the job of human beings in that former world is to understand the causes of the effects…”

“I think the only, the only useful reason for wanting to be on a board, uh, is, uh, is that you think Uh, a well-functioning board is integral to the success of, uh, democratic capitalism. Now, how many people think that that's the reason for being on a board? Not, not many. Like, and most of the reasons for wanting to…”

“the economy is underpinned by delusion in, in, in that, uh, we do know that nine out of 10 kind of startups expire with a hundred percent of the, the, uh, resources kind of wasted. If anybody Thought those were the odds that they personally were facing. They wouldn't do it, but they, everybody is deluded, self…”

“rarely do husband-wife teams work out for a number of reasons, but not least of which, in our view anyway, you know, let's say that the wife is the CEO and the husband is the CTO or the CFO, You know, their direct reports are rarely gonna, you know, not gonna go to the CEO and complain about the CFO.”

“when it comes to emotion, as with almost everything in, in biology, um, variation is the norm. There isn't one anger. You have a whole population of angers that you can feel, and your brain doesn't conjure them randomly. It conjures them according to your brain's best guess of what's going to work in a particular…”

“It translates into depression, anxiety, heart disease, diabetes. They're all metabolic illnesses that come from a debt, running a deficit in your body budget.”

“neurodegeneration that happens in Alzheimer's disease or even normal aging, Is really about trimming your metabolic budget.”

“It doesn't matter whether you're thinking or feeling or seeing or hearing or whatever. It's all the same mechanisms. Your brain is taking in sense data from the body and from the world, and it's using past experiences to make sense of what that means.”

“You don't have an emotional brain. You don't have a rational brain. There's no part of your brain that's devoted to emotion that isn't used when also in moments when you are being rational.”

“if you get a group of scientists who all have different backgrounds and different assumptions, and they come together in consensus, you can be much more sure that what you're observing is, uh, very likely to be the case in this circumstance. Right. However, you have no diversity in science and you have really, you…”

“there are other times in your career when really the most strategic thing to do is to say yes to everything because it can be like lottery tickets, you know, like if you got nothing going on and somebody's offering you an infinite amount of lottery tickets for free, well, then how many do you want? You know, I'll take…”

“And the real danger of relying too much on algorithms to detect those cancerous cells is that if you are too good at detecting them, you're not just good at detecting the ones that then go on to be a problem. You're also going to be good at detecting the ones that are nothing to worry about. And hence, potentially…”

“if you're inside a company and your pay depends on that company, that's that great Upton Sinclair quote, right? You can never tell a man anything if his wallet depends on him not hearing it. That's something like that. If you're inside a company and everybody else believes and your economic well-being is dependent on…”

“I do think either accidentally or deliberately our system has evolved to one in which the people who should be taking the really big risks and then reaping the really big rewards, it's turned into a system where those people can reap the really big rewards, but they've managed to push the risk onto other people. And…”

“A fracked well declines really sharply after the first year, which means in order to keep production levels up, you have to keep reinvesting. So you're on this capital treadmill, and that's why the industry has not been financially viable, because you have to keep reinvesting billions of dollars in order to keep…”

“having index funds as major holders of securities in stable market conditions actually reduces the liquidity of companies, and it means that sort of hedge funds and more active investors who are making day-to-day buy and sell decisions actually push securities around more.”

“I give a lot of credit to the folks at Muddy Waters who have unearthed a meaningful number of fraudulent companies, and I've yet to find an example of a regulator finding a fraudulent company. It's either a journalist often being fed by a short seller or a short seller that has been, is, you know, the one to identify…”

“airplanes are not going to stop flying because airlines go bankrupt. What will happen is, you know, the, the, Owners of the planes, the lessors of the planes, and or the bondholders will end up, you know, controlling airlines.”

“The, the market you can't short today is basically, or difficult to short today is the, is the venture backed market. And that's why you're, you're, You're going to see, that's why the WeWorks of the world are allowed to happen and billions of dollars of money gets wasted.”

“what people don't realize is if they just waited six months until the product was in market, then they could talk to a customer, and when the customer says, I love this product, and the customer's not the founder's cousin or former sorority sister or fraternity brother or former employer, it's like an actual customer,…”

“You know, and so if there's no penalty for revision, kids have no problem doing it again. The reason they don't want to do it again is if they get a D and they're like, oh my God, she's never going to change my grade. You know, why am I going to ever do it again? I'll just throw it away. You know, I don't give grades…”

“Now, sometimes, often, viruses evolve to be less lethal and more contagious because, you know, like, if you, if it's like Ebola and somebody dies in a pool of blood, then, you know, they don't spread it very far, right? The Ebola virus actually sort of, it kills people before they, they can spread it, right? But, ah,…”

“This is in a weird way, like, like a forced de-globalization, radical forced de-globalization, because, um, all the things that were benefits, like economies of scale, large groups of people, big crowds, and so on, are now big demerits, at least in real life. And so it forces very small scale in the physical…”

“insights are the bedrock of a great startup. And the, the failure mode in insight development is to live in the present and to look for market white space. Because if you're, if you're looking for gaps in today's markets, chances are lots of people have tried that. And if you're looking for gaps in today's markets,…”

“we'd be better off charging a price when the product's half done, because, you know, then we're going to find out how visceral is the pain and how compelling is the value that we're here to deliver for them.”

“And you know, you're on the right scent when they say, oh yeah, we tried that already before, but it didn't work. And most people think that's bad, but it's good. And the reason it's good is because they know they have the problem. And they've actually done something to try to fix it and they failed at fixing it.”

“product market fit can be thought of as progressively eliminating all Herbie's until there are no more Herbie's. And then you're in a mode where you can invest in growth because it's frictionless.”

“what I found is that when you replace the CEO involuntarily, you almost always make the company worse.”

“Fish are much more efficient at creating aerodynamic shapes, or hydrodynamic shapes actually, than, than planes are. I think we're looking at the wrong direction. We should be looking under the sea as, as opposed to looking at standard aerodynamic shapes when we want to do new aircraft design.”

“we're actually very bad at assessing human beings for jobs. Um, actually worse than random in many cases”

“We've never looked for, you know, the word passionate marriage is a contradiction in terms. We've never looked for passion in the same place where we looked for security and anchoring and somebody with whom to pay the checks and fix the house. These two things were separate for all of history. Love stories took place…”

“Hypnotists turn it around, and they say, no, we are rationalizers. We are people who make decisions for reasons we don't understand, and then we explain them to ourselves after the fact, so that we are rationalizing irrational species who can be rational 10% of the time.”

“entrepreneurs don't really like taking risk. People who write about them and report on them think they're taking risk, but the person who's actually betting their life really thinks it's going to work, or else why would you bet your life?”

“you look at all those people, all those billionaires working their heads off, and they're clearly not doing this because they need more money. They're trying to get more money, and they're trying to get more money because that would be an indication that they're good at what they do. I think mostly it's a proxy.”

“I think changing behavior is extremely difficult. There are a few tips and, you know, a few guidelines about how to do that, but anybody who is very optimistic about changing behavior is just deluded. It's, it's hard to change other people's behavior. It's very hard to change your own.”

“And it turns out that you can really expect losers, potential losers, to fight a lot harder than potential winners. And that's the reason that reforms so frequently fail, and that when they succeed, they're almost always way more expensive than anticipated, and they're more expensive because you have to compensate the…”

“we believe in things most of the time, not because we have good reasons to believe them. If you ask me for reasons, I'll explain you. I'll, I'll always find a reason, but the reasons are not the causes of our beliefs. We have beliefs because mostly we believe in some people, and we trust them, and we adopt their…”

“If you really want to improve the quality of decision making, use algorithms. I mean, whenever, wherever you can, uh, if you can replace judgments by, by rules and algorithms, they'll do better.”

“So in general, you know, more educated people make better judgments, I think, on average, but people decide I'm going to make better judgments. I don't think that's very hopeful. I'm much more hopeful about organizations, because organizations think more slowly, and they have procedures for thinking, and so you can…”

“I think it's pretty clear that people prefer leaders who are intuitive and who are overconfident. Uh, leaders who deliberate too much are viewed with suspicion, you know.”

“psychologists live in a, when they hook up their hypotheses, they're in a Within subject situation, but then they make guesses about what will happen between subjects, and they're completely lost between clear intuitions and strong intuition. We have no way of calibrating ourselves. So that makes us wildly…”

“They, they, that myth that there's an entrepreneur and there's a company builder and they're different animals is simply wrong. It's the, it's a simply a matter of choice and do you decide to become that?”

“one of the key things we learned in Good to Great was this notion of you don't start with a vision. You start with confronting the brutal facts. And this ability, this very stoic ability to just simply say, let's begin with the very best accounting of the brutal facts that we can, that enhances your ability to see more…”

“The answer is we can find no evidence that they had that, or that they even necessarily had better analysis. So then you have to step back and say, well, it's not necessarily that they have better information. It's not necessarily that they had better data. It's not necessarily that they saw things in the industry that…”

“But I don't think you want to find a flywheel at only 10 turns. If it's a great flywheel, So maybe we'll talk in a minute about the Amazon flywheel, because that's what stimulated me further thinking about Amazon. Would it be so bad to pick up a flywheel when it's already at a million turns, but you can understand it…”

“Luck is asymmetric as a cause. We cannot make the case of luck as the cause of a great company in any of our research. It's more of the flywheel effect over time, and return on luck, capitalizing on things, and cumulative, right? So good luck cannot cause a great company. But bad luck can be the cause of the death of a…”

“the more turbulent the environment, the greater the results accrue to those that have a twenty-mile march and stay consecutively with consistency on the their 20 mile march.”

“Almost none of our, the companies we studied that were great companies that fell, fell because of complacency. They fell because of overreaching.”

“So if you can be that definition of rebellion, You can be the thing that the parents hate, that they can say they love. That's how you get to be Elvis Presley, The Beatles, Sinatra. You can't get that big by people just liking your art.”

“when we think about big problems that society faces, when we think about problems like child abuse or problems like poor achievement in school or problems like failing marriages, we often have the intuition that we need kind of commensurately big solutions to these big problems. That is, if we're having a big problem,…”

“Technology is for our brains, what sugar is for our gut. You know, our, our bodies have a natural craving for cheap calories and our brains have a natural craving for connection. And what sugar is doing to, you know, fatten us up because we weren't prepared for this bounty of cheap calories. Well, we weren't prepared…”

“I realized that as soon as a publisher owned that ebook, right, they were going to jack up the price to protect their other ebooks. Um, and this is something a lot of authors don't think about your, your competition for them. Like the people that own your book, your, your book competes with their latest, greatest thing…”

“Um, unless there's a reversion clause and most publishing contracts have them, but they're laughable. Uh, they usually just say, as long as the book is in print, the publisher retains the rights. And we talked about print on demand earlier. Now publishers can just move this book from an offset print run of Thousands of…”

“the overwhelming thing is people do not have affairs because of sexuality or sexual frustration. They have affairs because they're emotionally disconnected and alone.”

“People think, people say things like, time will heal. It will not. Your brain holds onto it. It's significant survival information. When you need it, your partner wasn't there. They're no longer safe. You can't count on them. Your brain will hold onto that.”

“The trouble is with communication skills that you can't, all the evidence, all the research says you can't use them when you need them. I mean, I'm pretty good at all this stuff, but when I'm having a fight with my partner, I don't use all my skills. It's my amygdala that's in control, not my prefrontal cortex.”

“No, relationships are an alive organism. They're a living relational system. And, you know, there's a certain point where, no, you can't breathe life into it.”

“and so from age eight to 12, I think, is a sensitive period where kids are supposed to have adventures with other kids, um, they play all kinds of games, they self-organize, and what we've done is we've taken that critical period, and we've said, stop, you don't get that anymore.”

“So any parents who are listening to this podcast, I urge you to follow a few simple rules. That is two hours a day of screen time. And actually, the Apple controls are very good for that. The new ones just out a few months ago are actually very good for that. Two hours a day total screen time, um, not counting…”

“it leads to an attitude in which everyone is afraid to judge on a case-by-case basis, and the response is pretty much always to give the students what they want. So individual professors do that. Administrators do that. Um, and so if students are saying that something is threatening or violent or dangerous or…”

“Ideas of trauma are important in psychology and psychiatry, but now trauma has expanded to mean just unpleasant experience.”

“If you're a homo sapien, you evolved for group combat, you evolved for confirmation bias and motivated reasoning. We're not really evolved to be academics or Or, or scientists searching for a truth in an unbiased way. We evolved to basically, you know, CYA and, and, and win in social competitions.”

“the five best candidates for being the taste buds of the moral sense, or the moral foundations were, Care, you know, care and compassion because we're mammals. We nurture our young. Fairness, reciprocity versus cheating. We're all sensitive to that. Loyalty, you know, group loyalty versus betrayal. Authority versus…”

“self-awareness is easier to train in world-class leaders than self-acceptance. Most of them have a superstitious belief that if they granted themselves a moment of self-acceptance, they'd lose their edge. That absent being constantly, um, self-critical, self-evaluatory with a slightly negative spin, uh, absent that…”

“The antidote to fear is not courage. The antidote to fear is acceptance.”

“The optimum is, what is it, five to one? Five to one, positive interactions to negative interactions, and it's not better to have a bigger ratio of positive and negative, like 10 to one is not better because of what you're describing. If it's 10 positive interactions or 50 positive interactions before any negative one,…”

“If you enable a back door, which is what some governments are requesting, um, it is really naive to think that that back door would only be accessed by that government who wants it.”

“you could kind of view the, the written word Uh, as a temporary blip, actually, in human communication, where we did not have a way to transmit the spoken and seen words of people globally. So what we did is we minified everything. We compressed everything to this format where you write stuff down.”

“Every single one of them die. Often they kill themselves though. Um, they don't change. They don't do something right. They don't pay attention to customers. They get cocky. They get greedy, whatever it might be. It's usually those things. It's not, um, that's a competitor has more money than you and outspends you.”

“Now, I don't think volatility is risk. I think, I think risk is the probability of bad outcomes.”

“All that's important, but what really matters is understanding human nature and psychology, and so, 90% of our successes and 99% of our problems in our companies are us playing armchair psychologist and trying to diagnose, why is this team not effective?”

“And there's probably a dozen such scientists in the war in the country. Where that you in the US where you can go and find these people and the postdocs and where they sort of, ah, traverse to and find that diaspora and develop relationships with them, stay close to them. They in turn are going to attract the postdocs…”

“all the imagery that's going to be coming off of these satellites is going to be commoditized, and the real value is going to be the processing of that using artificial intelligence and machine learning to look at different spaces over different times to make insights for hedge funds and corporate espionage and all…”

“but then I see an advisory board with one or two people, and for me, these are, like, red flag people. They're, like, total BS scientists or promoters or, like, authors that I think are full of it, and I just, like, shake my head, and to me, it's a It's a signal of bad judgment for the CEO who doesn't know how to…”

“If you look at a directional arrow of progress in energy, you went from carbohydrates to hydrocarbons to uranium, and the undeniable arrow of progress there was more and more energy density per unit of raw material. When you discover the directional arrow of progress, to me, it's almost like this universal principle.…”

“And so, when the team has total consensus, we typically make an investment, and we've typically been very wrong.”

“If you learn a little bit about a lot of things, you'll be able to generalize and kind of think about anything. Well, no, you won't, because you've never learned how to think. At Oxford and Cambridge, the belief is learn one thing really well, and then you can learn anything else really well.”

“there are really only two ways you can change someone's thinking. You can either change the, the questions that person asks, or you can provide them with more inspired answers. Those are really only two levers.”

“when somebody says it doesn't make any sense that X keeps going lower, get in the trade. It's got a lot lower to go.”

“Every fundamental analyst believes he or she using exactly the same tools that every other and information and information that every other MBA, former MBA student has acquired reading security analysis is going to discover something no one else has discovered.”

“I would tell you that 19 times out of 20, when those two groups disagree, the bond traders are right and early. They are right and early. When I say 19 times out of 20, really I mean 99 times out of a hundred. If you want to find out when a stock is going to be in trouble, follow the corporate bonds of that company.”

“For example, the hardest commodity to predict is oil... and I will tell you that no, there is no consistent leader of those three groups, and I believe the reason for that is that oil is traded by the sovereign nations. So, so the sovereign nations that control the supply of oil also trade it, right?”

“In fact, it's academic performance is inversely related to self-esteem.”

“Praise dependent, reward dependent children make wonderful henchmen for bullies. They will do the bullies bidding because they want whatever reward that bully is dangling in front of them.”

“what Shopify allows People to do is like have, you know, for 29 dollars a month get something that gets them pretty close to having all the things that Jeff had to build for himself when he started Amazon, right?”

“So the problem, I think, what makes it rarer that companies, great copies are created outside of them, is partly because, um, then, um, Secondary market people read the books from primary market people, they get the wrong lessons.”

“One of the most, like, biggest differences in, um, primary, in secondary places is, if I hire someone, we are probably, like, the chance that we are gonna still work together in a decade from now is super high. It just, it's, it's, it's, it's a different, it's just different in this way. That doesn't sound like a big…”

“I think the world we are actually spending our time in, like, we've almost built throughout the last hundred years, every company that solves a complicated problem. And so the only kinds of problems that are now left are what's usually referred to as complex problems.”

“I found there's a lot of great companies, um, that suddenly became not great because, um, Through, especially when they are founder-led, they were comfortable in a world of complexity where things aren't so measurable and so clear, um, but where you optimize for the holistic total and saying, hey, the product needs to…”

“one thing that happened with Shopify, uh, which made actually, made making Shopify actually really hard, is that, um, we did not really have competent competitors. It's really, it's really almost, it's really, really, really hard to build a company if you don't have an obvious enemy.”

“root causes are really rare, and, uh, again, events don't happen in sequence, and are cause and effect all the way through. Um, the world is loopy, um, it's not, you know, and, um, everything, like, if something is bad, and you want to change it, there's usually something that reinforces the bad behavior, and we have…”

“once the media lost its power and its gatekeeper status, The parties, at the same time, because they were inextricably tied to the media, lost their power and gatekeeping status, and no one sort of realized this happened until, really, Obama came along and came out of nowhere and totally overwhelmed the party's choice,…”

“The news covered Trump because people wanted to see more Trump. They wanted, they, and so the news in media organizations were responding To the incentives that they had in a world where they were no longer gatekeepers, they were sort of serfs in Google and Facebook's kingdoms, and, and what else would they do? If they…”

“I mean, the, the, the, we are switching from a world where it used to be a world where market power and, and economic power and social power was gained by controlling supply. To a new world where, where power is gained by controlling demand.”

“The fundamental difference between, let's say, a newspaper previously that controlled the printing presses and Facebook. Is that Facebook has the users such that suppliers, and this being content organizations, new organizations, have no choice but to go to users on Facebook's terms.”

“the real sort of problematic angle to Google and Facebook is less the consumer front end and more the advertiser back end such that it's not really viable to build a mass market advertising business in the current day because Facebook and Google are so dominant.”

“if you realize that there is still going to be digital advertising, The alternatives to Google and Facebook are going to be hurt way more. Like is, is every site with advertising on it going to get permission from users for each of the individual ad networks that runs on the site? Like, like if you think about the…”

“the implication of aggregation theory is that to be large and to be dominant is the, is the natural state of affairs because of these feedback loops. Like the, the end state for an aggregator is to be, to win it all, to take it all.”

“So a lot of these decisions to settle in and be safe and comfortable, they're individually rational. Like, it's, it's good to be safe, right? Stress is, is, is a bad thing. But when our society collectively makes this decision, there are ways in which we're all worse off because we live in a much less dynamic country.”

“We exhausted a lot of the low-hanging fruit from combining fossil fuels with powerful machines and electricity and communications, and that, that's all to the better, but we've now entered a world where people find it hard to imagine a future very different from the present, and when people talk about progress, they…”

“Uh, but that said, a country cannot remain complacent forever. And I argue that eventually, you know, something has to give, you need a way to pay the bills, you need dynamism again, and you start seeing disruptions in your complacent life.”