The Wisdom Wall

“Google report its quarterly report on time because there is a massive, unbelievably expensive apparatus to make sure it happens every time. And don't be evil was just a slogan. So if someone tells you I'm serious about something, great. Now show me the apparatus. Show me the commitments you've made to make sure that…”

“If you don't know what that is, you need to Ask an LLM to explain it to you and just say, Eric said founders preferred shares could potentially make me like personally an extra billion dollars someday.”

“Right now, we kind of have this dichotomy between what I call investor controlled companies and founder controlled companies. And everyone's like, you got to pick one or the other, but neither alternative is very good. What we want to create are what I call mission controlled companies.”

“MVP is simply for whatever the hypothesis is that we're trying to test, what is the most efficient way to get the validation we need about whether the hypothesis is true or not?”

“First, the first tip is write out the list of features that are necessary in your MVP, cut it in half, and cut it in half again and build that.”

“if you're asking whether you should pivot or not, you probably know the answer already. That's the first thing to just like straight up say, we will, like people call me sometimes. They're like, I want to know if I have product market fit. Like, well, the fact that you have time to call me and ask me this question…”

“At the end of the day, AI is a management technology. It, like, the thing it does is manage intelligence and other intelligences.”

“all kinds of famous companies where the thing that destroyed them was not competition. It was not someone else came up with a better product. No. Their very success became a liability, because the more gold in the goose, the greater the temptation to butcher.”

“If you're serious about being mission driven, you have to show me that you cannot profit except by achieving the mission. That's the audit we have to do.”

“corporations, organizations are the oldest form of artificial intelligence on the planet. They are an example of this emergent intelligence, the same scientific principle that makes the transformer architecture work and appear intelligent. That same principle is at work in organizations. Organizations are literally…”

“When you make something put out into the world, on the one hand, you don't have any control about what happens next. And yet I do think we bear a certain responsibility about was it in fact net positive, but was it helpful to people?”

“When I, when I was a consumer of books, I hated it when authors would come out with a second edition that would destroy what was beautiful about the first edition, including the mistakes. Because like in their attempt to put disclaimers on everything and make everything more nuanced, you'd like totally lose the thrust…”

“quality is defined by the customer. And if we don't know who our customer is, we literally don't know what the word quality means.”

“compromising that in the name of going fast is stupid, right? Like write crappy code. You spend more time firefighting than you do writing code in the future. So a certain amount of craft is just about keeping your options open. And actually it's, it's very much like favorable to speed using like the right, the right…”

“having a respect for craft, for design, for perfection, that increases the need for experimentation and testing for all the other stuff.”

“Like, there's nothing that was a faster career accelerator than being known in the industry as the person who stands for that principle so much that you got fired over it.”

“Like, one of the genius things about it is, like, at the end of the day, you do run out of money. The thing, you're forced to declare bankruptcy, that's actually a really positive feature of the system.”

“one of my main takeaways of that entire process is that it's always too early until it's too late.”

“as a leader, you have to understand that the most consequential decisions that will affect any organization's life are almost by definition made when no manager is present.”

“that is what it's called when you change the strategy, but try to have Fidelity to the vision that we, it needs a name because we do it all the time.”

“It's a scientific theory, which means that, that whatever works is lean startup. So if someone comes up with something new and it works, we can't be threatened and upset about it. We have to adopt it.”

“first time founders especially are usually very stubborn about this and they don't want to do it. It's like, look, you tell me what you believe. I don't have to be right. And I want to just double check that you're right. What, by however we do it.”

“The thing I learned is that if people are having trouble coming with MVP, the problem is usually upstream in the chain of deductive reasoning from the vision down to the MVP. It's like usually people are just not super clear on what do I want to learn, and it's the most common reason is because people don't want to…”

“the number one lesson of the scientific method is if you can't fail, you can't learn. And so if you set yourself up in a position where psychologically you can't admit that something didn't work, you can't learn.”

“Where people get into trouble, I think, is when they want to use craft as an excuse to not get any feedback.”

“far worse is to be in a company that won't die, a zombie undead company that you hate, but you can't leave.”

“Oftentimes the vision is discovered more than chosen in these stories.”

“if it was truly a complete shutdown, start over again, nobody and nothing in common. I was like, that is not a pivot. But that's just actually quite rare. Usually there's some critical insight or element of the first thing that is carried over into the second thing.”

“The thing that makes sense is to pick actions today that make ethical sense in a wide variety of future scenarios. And do those.”

“we've established hierarchical gatekeeping, like structures, because that was the only way to manage the volume of information that had to be processed for that thing to happen.”

“if you want your organization to be trustworthy, the promises it makes, if you want to win the public's trust by making promises they can believe, you have to embody those promises in the structure of the organization itself, so that even if you weren't there, the promise would be kept.”

“My favorite interview question of all time is to ask people to describe a best practice that they learned in their career, and to really get into it. Like, tell me the story of how you learned the best practice, like how, you know, whatever, whatever, and you just let them go on, and then you'd be like, great. Tell me…”

“The most important thing you have to do in a product is make trade off decisions. And if you just let people make their own trade off decisions, it's totally different. It's really difficult to have any kind of coherent design like thrust. And so the idea is like, this is the person who makes those two. If there's a…”

“And it's actually, there's not that many things it can be. Like, it might be because you gave them a synthetic notification, like, hey, please come back to my product, and they did. It could be because some kind of organic notification took place, like, that is, like, they got an email from a friend on your platform…”