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Palihapitiya: Business works like poker; flawless execution can still fail

Chamath Palihapitiya · Pain, Power & The Game Nobody Wins | Chamath Palihapitiya x Nikhil Kamath | People by WTF · Nikhil Kamath · Mar 2, 2026 · at 17:28

Investor Chamath Palihapitiya discusses his psychological shift from viewing business success as a life-or-death pursuit to treating it as a probabilistic game.

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“And now I see it just as a game. It's like playing poker. There's like hands you in, there's hands you lose. Sometimes you have, you're on a heater and you just like everything works. And sometimes no matter flawless execution, nothing works.”

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