Insight
Mah: Ideas are worthless is Silicon Valley's worst advice
“I think it's some of the worst advice I've ever heard in Silicon Valley.
So what's your take?
My take is that ideas are really fricking important.
And if you have the wrong idea, you'd be a great team and you're screwed.”
Assertion Supported
Mah: Jet buyers can write off $12M jet with $3M down
“Last year it was 60% upfront, but now with the new administration, it looks like accelerated depreciation is back. So if you bought a twelve million dollar airplane, financed it, you can write off the whole twelve million dollars off your tax bill, even though…”
Disclosure
Mah: I stepped down as CEO to avoid private jet backlash
“If you're an operating CEO of a company, you're going to get shat on by your employees, your customers, your investors, and I realized that that would be a problem for me a few years ago, so that's why I stopped being an operating CEO, actually.”
Prediction Held up
Jess Mah predicts artificial human egg generation from genetic material by 2028
“Let's say you wanted to be the mother of a child, not the father, and we could take your genetic material and create an egg out of that. I think that we're going to see that within the next five years.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Jess Mah predicts longevity advances will extend human lifespans past 120
“And then what's also realistic, I think, is extending our lives by 30%. I think we need to be prepared to live till we're a 120 or longer.”
Disclosure
Jess Mah is building a biotech company to rehabilitate cancer cells
“And if you could train them and coach your cells, so killing them, let's rehabilitate them, get them to integrate back in with their surroundings, then you could fix cancer. And so we're working on a company around that”
Insight
Mah: Loyalty to a single tax accountant is a major mistake
“And I think the mistake people make with taxes is they have their one tax person and that person worked with their parents and they've been loyal, but actually this is a very bad place to have loyalty. It's really good to talk to like, I've talked to dozens of…”
Insight
Mah: Incubating multiple smaller businesses can beat building one unicorn
“If I could just raise less VC money for these companies and just create more of them. And not be directly operating them, then that could add up to being just as valuable, if not more valuable than if I created one unicorn”
Disclosure
Mah: We record all meetings to build employee AI digital twins
“What we're trying to do is have all of our meetings be recorded. So even if it's in person, we're just like turning on granola and having, I have a big, one of those conference speakerphone things and it's just recording everything. And we're going to feed it …”
Disclosure
Mah: Sequoia trained scouts using investment memos of failed startups
“I was a scout for Sequoia Capital for many years.
And they would show us a bunch of these like great ideas with amazing traction, especially in consumer internet.
And then they would ask us, would you invest on this memo, yes or no?
And so we would vote, an…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Mah: Paul Graham said I'd rival Patrick Collison and Sam Altman
“Paul Graham, even he was my mentor and he's like, you're going to be one of the greatest entrepreneurs of all time. You, Patrick Halston and Sam Altman.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Mah: FDA regulations will bottleneck AI progress in medicine
“I think it's also going to be a lot harder than people think. Cause you have AI that's coming up with all these ideas, but the bottleneck is still regulatory. It's still FDA. It's still getting a clinical trial put together. That's one area where we're going t…”
Insight
Jess Mah: Elite tax strategy yields higher IRR than the stock market
“Because if taxes impact half your income potentially, if you invest just even five or 10% of your time this year to finding five amazing tax strategists, get all their advice and figure out how to apply it, 10% of your time. It's the upper bound here. And you'…”
Opinion
Jess Mah: Spending $1M annually like Bryan Johnson is unnecessary for longevity
“You don't need to pull a Brian Johnson where you're spending a million dollars a year to get 80% of the results. This is the eighty-twenty rule of Brian Johnson.”
Assertion Contradicted
Jess Mah: A partner secured full FDA drug approval for just $16M
“Tom had taken a drug called Elsonris from lab all the way through FDA approval, full approval for sixteen million dollars, which is absolutely crazy in the drug world.”
Insight
Mah: Affording a private jet requires cash flow, not massive wealth
“And the secret was you don't have to be that successful. You just have to have a big tax bill and good cash flow. And which takes success to get to that point, but it takes some success, but you think a lot less than you think actually because it's like a hous…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Mah: Many unicorn CEOs only own 5% of their companies
“Like a lot of my unicorn CEO friends, they own like five percent. Of a billion dollar company”
Insight
Mah: First-time founders should pick complex ideas to deter copycats
“One of my top criteria was complicated enough that other people won't copy me too fast. I think that's really important. If I'm a first time founder, I need to have more leg room.”
Disclosure
Mah: Exploring a corporate DOGE as a service software startup
“That, that's, I mean, one of my ideas that I'm actively exploring, and here I am sharing it with everyone here.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Mah: Thousands of vertical AI agent companies will be created
“So this is more of a thematic business area, which will be, I think we're going to see thousands of businesses doing this.”
Disclosure
Mah: Employees must think with AI before pitching me ideas
“I tell everyone before you tell me anything, think with AI as well.”
Disclosure
Mah: My company is building an AI digital twin of Shaan Puri
“We're actually doing, we're actually training one based off of you as well. So we're going to have it just watch every single video you've been part of. So it knows how to think like you'd be like, Hey, bring Sean into these conversations”
Insight
Mah: Best startup ideas are self-funded, cash-flowing, and complex
“It's roughly an idea that can cash flow that doesn't require a lot of outside funding. We could fund it ourselves. And where it's like boring and complicated enough where random people are not going to copy us that easily or reverse engineer that easily.”
Assertion Supported
Mah: Most startups in my Y Combinator batch went bankrupt
“If we look back today, most of the companies from that batch did not make it. Most of them went BK and then people took normal jobs or started new companies and then eventually found success.”
Jess Mah