The Wisdom Wall

“I think value investing is not a winning strategy when it comes to being an angel investor most of the time.”

“Another thing that I think is worth hiring earlier, um, that almost no one does, is a full-time fundraiser. Let's say you hire someone like really, really great, and their full-time job is to raise money for the company. Um, you hire them after your B round, and you say, you know what, by the time we raise our C round,…”

“I think the biggest PR hack you can do is to not hire a PR firm. Just pick three or four journalists that you develop really close relationships with, that like you, that understand you, that you get. Um, and then you contact them yourself. They will cover every story you ever give them, and they'll actually pay…”

“When should the founders think about hiring a professional CEO? Never. Um, you, if you look at the most successful companies in tech, um, they are run by their founders for a very long time, um, sometimes forever.”

“it seems to me like the demand for sufficiently high quality intelligence at a sufficiently low price is effectively uncapped.”

“I think the key of her is not the little piece of hardware. It's that this thing got to a point where it could run in the background and feel like a sort of AI companion.”

“when the clock cycle of the industry changes this much, startups almost always win, and we've probably never seen it change this much.”

“I, I cannot recall ever thinking until like after starting OpenAI that they were going to be so obviously related. That, you know, the, that energy would be the eventually the fundamental limiter on how much intelligence we could have.”

“Most of the world still does not understand the value of, like, a fairly extreme level of conviction on one bet.”

“I, I had been telling people for a while, I thought that The level two to level three jump was going to happen, but then the level three to level four jump was, level two to level three was going to happen quickly, and then the level three to level four jump was somehow going to be much harder and require some…”

“In fact, I think in 2018, at least in Silicon Valley, it's easier to start a hard startup than it is to start an easy startup.”

“all of the really great businesses I know, um, have an answer to this question. And in fact, the better they are, the more they pretend not to.”

“We, we've noticed that it is almost impossible to, you can make a lot of mistakes as a company, but if you screw up the first five, seven hires, it's almost impossible to get through that.”

“most of the time you lose one extra money, but occasionally you do get to make a hundred or a thousand X, and that, uh, for the same reason slot machines are so satisfying, is incredibly addictive.”

“I would say 80% of investors outsource 80% of their decision making to what other people think about an investment opportunity, but the problem is everyone does that, and so there's this weird schooling effect where a company gets hot for no discernible reason, or it fits a trend or whatever, and then everybody wants…”

“this idea that we're available and we're open, um, I think this was in the two or three most important secrets of YC. This was something that we did that was really different. Other people hadn't done it before.”

“Speaking of the really big companies, I think, I don't know if this was always true, I suspect it may have been, but I think today, it is easier to start a hard company than an easy company.”

“Yeah, I think, ah, you know, the most interesting companies start with a TAM of nearly zero, and it's like, ah, very bad investors are the ones that are super focused on the TAM of today. Very good investors are focused on the TAM of 10 years from now.”

“the number one most important insight about how to blitz scale is that the good kind of blitz scaling is when you are not having to generate demand as you go, but that you first got the product right.”

“I, you know, you can, people talk about working smarter all they want. There's nothing that makes up for, like, working smarter and a lot of hours.”

“people that run these perfectly non-chiotic organizations somehow never build great companies. So, so the trade-off is we're going to accept a little bit of chaos, um, in exchange for a shot at one of these massive great companies, and founders just have to sell that to their teams.”

“my, my, my version of this is you want to hire for values first, aptitude second, and skills third. And I think, um, the problem with most executive recruiters is that they reverse that order.”

“The general framework That I think about when building, when adding people to a team, which is I think what defines culture, is what, what is going to be this person's net effect on the output vector of the organization? And there are people who are brilliant and can get a lot of work done themselves and would add to…”

“Certainly when you get to the stage where people that were used to knowing everything don't know everything, ah, that, I, I think more early employees leave over that than anything else, and, and it's, it's really tough to say what to do about that. Um, it's people that have gone from being sort of absolutely in the…”

“The one mistake that I think companies really make in this is they decide that they need a lot of people, they can't get them, and so they're going to just, like, double salaries or triple salaries. They're just gonna, like, start way overpaying for people, and that's the one that seems impossible to turn back down in…”

“Founders that were obsessed with their own personal liquidity when the company had nothing turned out to like fail most of the time. And so investors learned that if founders pushed on this in the seed round, It was a very, very bad sign.”

“As a general rule, don't start any acquisition conversation, unless you're willing to sell, ah, for a pretty low number.”

“In fact, a lot of the companies that I've been very involved with that have had a very bad first hire in the first three or so employees never recover from it. It just kills the company.”

“If someone's choosing between like McKinsey and joining your startup, um, very unlikely that that person's going to work out at the startup.”

“Boards add value to business strategy only rarely. Um, but very frequently you can use them as a forcing function to get the company to care about metrics and milestones.”

“And so I would ignore total shipments for VR and AR, and I would wait until it gets to the point where someone builds a device or software that once people get it, they use it a lot of every day.”

“it is harder for existing companies to get good technology people than it is for good technology people to learn about other industries.”

“I do think that working hard early in your career to get the leverage and the compounding effects is underrated and one of the most valuable pieces of advice that I never got.”

“And a framework that I have for when to give up and when to keep working is it should be an internal, not an external decision. Um, if people aren't Using it or if people are saying it's bad, that alone is not a reason to give up. You want to pay some attention to that, they might be right, um, but I think the best…”

“at least in my own experience, what I found is that burnout actually comes from, um, failing and things not working. Momentum is really energizing. The lack of momentum is super draining.”

“I think history belongs to the doers, and I think you should Take a risk. Actually do something. Don't just sit around and talk and organize and bring together groups and go to thought leadership conferences and whatever it is these people spend their time on other than actually building something.”

“You know, really big markets are bad for startups, not good.”

“I think being super generous with early employee equity and getting founder quality people as the first 10 employees, um, I think all the evidence is on the side of doing this, and yet almost no one does, so there's like a huge edge if you're willing to do it.”

“Like, try lots of things, let people follow their intuitions, and then when something starts working, put a lot more resources behind it. That's worked for us really well.”

“we're very good at, um, thinking about Short-term catastrophic risk, and we're very bad about thinking about long-term chronic risk.”

“Basically all people, almost like, 98% of people in the world will try to pull you back and say, it seems a little bit too crazy, a little bit too out there, a little bit too ambitious.”

“one of the many problems with the deferred life plan is everyone can kind of tell that that's what you're on. And you're not that serious about, you're not that committed to either. Uh, and it just never works. I mean, it must work sometimes, but I've seen it fail a lot, lot, lot.”

“for those ideas that sound bad but are good, uh, because of this phenomenon, this one no versus one yes, startups can win. Uh, in fact, startups usually do beat big companies in that category of ideas.”

“And, and, and the framework that I finally figured out is it's, you have to look at the net, the net output that a person has on the organization as a whole. And even if they do a lot themselves, if they make everybody else miserable.”

“if you treat this as something that you're gonna try to get better at, and sort of deliberately practice, uh, you can learn a lot, and you can get better at this really quickly.”

“The power law means that your single best investment, um, will be worth more to you in return than all of the rest of your investments put together. Your second best will be better than three through infinity put together.”

“The companies that could be giant are at this intersection of sounds like a bad idea is a good idea. And because That's a very narrow intersection. Um, and because they sound like a bad idea, the best investments are the ones that are easiest to talk yourself out of if you start off thinking about why they could go…”

“It is way more important to your future success as an investor that founders like you and say, that investor did the right thing by me, than it is that you squeeze out, you know, a few drops of juice from a failing company.”

“If you look at a founder who comes to meet you for a seed round, um, and compare that founder to Brian Chesky, you'll be disappointed a hundred percent of the time. Um, that is the wrong comparison. You will never write a check. Um, however, um, just like startups, you look at the growth rate, um, you should look at…”

“a real trend is one where although not that many people are participating yet, the people who are, um, use the platform a lot every day and tell their friends spontaneously how great it is.”

“if I think about all of the most successful internet and mobile startups, um, I heard about those because, this is like true for enterprise and consumer apps, I heard about those because they were so good that, ah, one of my friends spontaneously told me about it. They were not being incentivized to, that was not, they…”

“Almost all of the value in a startup is the, you know, revenue, the earnings it's gonna generate in years, 1011, and 12 from now.”

“The, the thing that I have seen be most predictive for TAM's total addressable market, the thing that I have seen be most predictable for a large TAM down the road is how much the people that are using it today use it and love it.”

“This is almost universal among, not perfectly, but almost universal among our best companies where initially you have to go get users manually or do things that you could never do with ten million users.”

“people are always tempted to do this halfway, and I think, like, you should, that the entire company should be aligned, like, are we, are we in the mode where we are testing, are we in the mode where we're trying to make things work, are, and testing growth channels, in which case we can do some things, ah, but we're…”

“I, one of the reasons, I think, why trying to hyperscale a company that is not, that that is not winning fails, is because without that, then all of these problems of people having their turf stepped on, and, you know, the occasional bad hire you have to get out, people have a lot of time to, like, think about how…”

“Before 20 or 25 employees, most companies are structured with everyone reporting to the founder. It's totally flat. And that's really good, and that's what you want. Um, and at that stage, that is the optimal way, um, for product, that's the optimal structure for productivity. But the thing that tricks people is that…”

“Um, what you want to do is innovate on your product and on your business model. Um, management structure is not where I would recommend trying to innovate.”

“Before product market fit, your only job that matters is to build a great product, or your number one job is to build a great product. As the company grows, and at about this, you know, 25 or so employee size, your main job shifts from building a great product to building a great company. And it stays there for the…”

“I personally like six year Big grants, but six years of vesting, because I think these companies just take a while to build.”

“I think most companies, even until they get up to say three or 400 employees, should announce every offer on some internal mailing list or something before they make it. Because like half the time you do that, someone in the company will know something good or bad about that employee.”

“I, I really believe that the single hardest thing in business is building a company That does repeatable innovation and just has this ongoing culture of excellence as it grows. If you look at the examples of this, um, most companies fail here. Most companies do one great thing where the founder just pushes to get it…”

“as the company grows, you continue to oscillate. The highs are better, but the lows keep getting worse.”

“never outsource this to your head of marketing or PR firm. You, founders have to figure out what the message of the company is going to be. And once you set that, it kind of sticks. Very hard to change this once the press decides how they're going to talk about you.”

“The, the difference, what you want is you want diversity of backgrounds, but you don't want diversity of vision. Like where companies get in trouble is when they have people that think very differently about what the company should be doing or don't work well together.”

“Uh, the canonical advice is like go on vacation or whatever. That never works for founders. It's sort of all-consuming in this way. It's very difficult to understand. So, what you do is you just keep going.”

“At the beginning, you should only hire when you have a desperate need to. Later, you need to learn how to hire fast and scale up the company. But in the early days, uh, the goal should be not to hire.”

“Um, if you're not willing to give someone, your co-founder, you know, like an equal share of the equity, uh, I think that should make you think hard about whether or not you want them as a co-founder.”

“And you should be extremely suspicious if you're ever talking about, we're not focused on growth right now. We're not growing that well right now, but we're doing this other thing, you know. We don't have, we don't have a timeline for when we're gonna ship this, because we're focused on this other thing. We're doing a…”

“In fact, this is the one thing that we've learned, best predictive success of Founders NYC. If every time we talk to a team, they've gotten new things done, um, that's the best predictor we have that the company will go on to be successful.”

“The, the best founders usually respond to email the most quickly. Um, they make decisions the most quickly. They're generally quick in all these different ways.”

“Companies tend to, the really transformational companies get formed in clusters on the rise of a new platform.”

“For whatever you're doing, there tend to be pockets of it around the world where there are similar people that are doing great work in whatever field you care about, and it's really worth trying to go be, be near them.”

“I think that one of the few arbitrage opportunities left in the market is time. I think we have gotten really good at high frequency trading. Um, we've gotten really good at the price of things, and we've gotten worse at the long-term value.”

“one of the things that I have noticed among the most interesting, the most successful people that I spend time with is that they have strong opinions, strongly held about the future. They are willing to be convinced with new data that they are wrong, but the bar for that is fairly high.”

“It's not only ok, it's good to have strong ideas about the future, and it is ok To not be super diversified in your investment portfolio or your career or your life.”

“I think startups are really like the main thing that keeps the economy from becoming stagnant. Um, I think companies do just like drift towards suckiness, and startups will continue to be important forever.”

“The world does not understand how to intuit exponentials, and so they missed this one.”

“if you are doing the same thing as everyone else, it is very hard to concentrate talent, and it's very hard to get people to, like, really believe in a mission, and if you're doing, like, a one-of-one thing, Uh, you, you have a really nice tailwind there.”

“Big companies have the edge when things are like moving slowly and not that dynamic. And then when something like this or mobile or the internet or semiconductor revolution happens, or probably like back in the days of the industrial revolution, that was when upstarts had their, have their edge.”

“Conviction is great until the moment you have data one way or the other. And there are a lot of people who hold on it past the moment of data.”

“It is easy when there's a new technology platform to say, well, because I'm doing some of the AI, the, the rule, the laws of business don't apply to me. I have this magic technology, and so I don't have to build a, a moat or a, um, you know, competitive edge or a better product. It's because, you know, I'm doing AI and…”

“The only recipe I've ever seen work for making really impactful companies is both a giant vision and a good step one, two, and three.”

“I've at least found for myself, I have like a, a like fixed budget of cognitive output per day, and I can spend that on whatever, but if I let it go on unimportant stuff, then I never have time to get to the The really important stuff.”

“the fundamental pattern that has always worked for me is, um, take time, explore a lot of things, try a lot of things, try to have like a beginner's mind about what will work and what won't work. Um, but trust your intuitions, pursue a lot of things as cheaply and quickly as possible, and then be very honest with…”

“It's an incredibly privileged thing to be able to do this, but if you are in the position between jobs where you can take a year off, I highly recommend it. I think it was like one of the two or three best career things that I ever did.”

“The things that I think have taught me a lot about, like, Business are poker and angel investing. So I recommend both of those.”

“if you're trying to like win on really big creative ideas, um, much better off, like cut something, have less of them, whatever. But like for me skimping on sleep, which I have tried at other points in my life is a terrible trade.”

“One is you take a lot of random meetings, and you accept that 90% of the time you will waste your time and be frustrated with yourself for wasting your time for that one meeting that makes it all worth it net.”

“Um, I think if you cut it off entirely, it's disastrous. Like, if you don't have any, like, flow of, like, People outside your network with new ideas or just a lot of talent that is under appreciated. It's really bad.”

“If you can build a product that is so good, people spontaneously tell their friends about it, you have done 80% of the work that you need to be a really successful startup.”

“If you can't explain in a few words what you do, and if people don't, if at least some people don't say, oh, that's pretty interesting, that's usually a mistake. It's usually a sign of unclear thinking or a need that is not big enough.”

“if you think about the most important startups, They are the ones that I start in small markets that are growing very, very quickly.”

“Real trends are ones where a new technology platform comes along, and the early adopters use it obsessively and tell their friends how much they love it. Um, a fake trend is one where people may buy the product, um, but don't use it, or at least not enough.”

“Another thing that startups need, at least one evangelical founder, usually the CEO. Someone at the startup has got to be the person that is going to recruit, sell the product, talk to the press, um, raise money, and this requires someone who can infect with enthusiasm, uh, the whole world about what the company is…”

“Another thing that we've noticed among our best founders, again and again and again, is that they are, have a confident and definite view of the future. They may be wrong, um, and so we say it's good to be confident and flexible, but this idea that you are confident and definite, this is what I think is going to…”

“the entire startup ecosystem is best set up to support companies that have a low chance of success, but are huge if they work.”

“I've still Met only a handful of founders, I think, that spend enough time on recruiting, like Mark Zuckerberg is famously one of them.”

“You need at least some idea generators. There are a handful of people in any company that has gone on to be really successful that I, that I've been able to work with who are just really good at coming up with lots of ideas. Um, you don't want too many of these people because that's more ideas than a company can follow…”

“startups, especially in their early days, um, often win by moving very quickly. You, you never get as much data as you'd like. You never have as much time to deliberate as you'd like. And you want people who, uh, will, are willing to act with much less data than they'd like to have, with much less certainty.”

“we have seen many of our startups do incredible things because no one told them it was hard, or no one told them they can't do it.”

“Paul Buhite once, uh, spent a bunch of time looking, one of the YC partners, uh, spent a bunch of time looking at the traits of our best founders and tried to distill down what they were. And he came up with frugality, focus, obsession, and love. I actually, I think that is really good. I don't have much to add. Um,…”

“And you want to optimize the number of those decisions that someone has to make to compete with you because a big company will make them on average worse and certainly much slower than you do. So the speed of market evolution, um, gives you a lot more chances to compound your advantage over a big company.”

“And then finally, startups usually win on big platform shifts. Many people have observed that startups come in these clusters. Those clusters usually come after a big platform shift.”

“I've noticed that many of the most transformative companies come because the founder sees some, like an intersection of two pretty different, but really important trends a few years before everybody else does.”

“many of these companies that are sort of a generation defining companies are started by people who are out of network, who are not well known, who are not sort of the people that, you know, can start a company and get a bunch of press right away.”

“I think what I have seen the most successful angel investors do is just start helping founders for free. Realizing they may not get to invest in those companies, but that they'll get the referrals down the road.”

“is this a company that I believe will be able to recruit hundreds of really talented people who could otherwise start their own companies? Is a super important filter that I don't think people think about enough.”

“Paul Buhite, one of our partners, made a list of the four traits that he thought founders that go on to create giant companies have, and they are obsession, focus, frugality, and love.”

“If you don't have really strong communication skills, or if you don't develop them quickly, you're at a big disadvantage. Think about, there, there are obviously famous exceptions to this, but if you think about it on the whole, the founders of the really super successful companies tend to be great communicators.”

“There are increasing number of people who just, like, want to be around startups and go to startup parties and talk about being a founder. Um, treat that as a red flag.”

“even in our 10 minute interview, if you give like a founder a chance to sort of tell you about the unethical things they do, they will often do it. Um, and Yeah, surprisingly often.”

“You know, you're like a poor college student with no money and no reputation, and if you do a startup and fail, you're like two years older with no money and no reputation, and it's fine. It's actually much harder to wait and, you know, let your life ramp up and then do it.”

“if you're the founder of the company, and you want to work a hundred hours a week, and be super focused and productive, that's cool, but like, most other people you hire, especially as you get bigger, have other lives, and, ah, you need to understand that.”

“And then the other thing that I think I got wrong, and 19 year old starting companies often get wrong, is because they evolve fairly organically from projects, you never take the time to realize, like, wow, this has become, you know, all of a sudden I'm running this company with 10 people, and we're doing this, and…”

“there is something culturally important to us about frugality, because we want that reflected in our startups, and our startups have the kind of bond with us where they reflect what we do.”

“The thing that I think you need most to scale well and quickly is two or three senior team members that you trust and that are really good at scaling an organization, especially if you're a first time CEO.”

“You only have to do really well at a few things, um, to do well, and you can do badly at a lot of things, but if you don't do well at those few things, it doesn't matter how well you do everything else, and so what you don't want to be is the founder that gets everything but building a great product perfect, um, and,…”

“The very best founders that we've worked with, ah, one of the things that they always evaluate their people on is how good have they been at training their replacements? How good are they at, you know, on a moment's notice being able to move to a next role? Because most founders are very bad at this. And most people…”

“Ah, and so I think this is a worthwhile exercise, and it's good to do, but only to the extent that what you say is different from what other people would say. And trying to figure that out is really important, and what, honestly, what most companies find when they do this, or what many companies find, is that they have…”

“all of these things are things that are not writing code or talking to users. Which means, with a few exceptions that I'll try to note, you can ignore them until after you have product market fit.”

“Most of these things for most companies become important between months 12 and 24. But it's really more about stage than anything else. These are things that usually hit around 25 people, ah, and definitely post product market fit.”

“In the early days of a startup, hiring senior people is usually a mistake. You just want people that get stuff done, um, and, and the willingness to work hard and aptitude matters more than experience. As the company starts to scale, and at about this time when you have to put in place a basic management structure, it…”

“That's how most founders delegate. And that does not make people feel good, and it certainly doesn't scale. A subtle difference, but really important, is to say, hey, you're really smart. That's why I hired you. You go off. Here are the things to think about. Here's what I think. But you make this decision. I totally…”

“if you write it down and put it up on a wiki or whatever that every employee reads, um, you as the founder get to basically write the law. And, and if you write this down, it will become law in the company. And if you make everyone read this, as the company hires a hundred and then a thousand employees, people will…”

“So I tell founders, like, you should think about, you know, for the next 10 years, you're going to be giving out three to five percent of the company every year, because you just get bigger and bigger.”

“The most common place this comes up, honestly, is people that hire, you know, all guys on their engineering team for the first 15 or 20 people. Um, and at that point, you get a culture in place that sort of takes on a life of its own, and most founders that I've spoken to that have made this mistake regret it, and they…”

“the productivity, I think, goes down with the square of the number of employees, if you don't make an effort, because it's sort of one of these, like, connections between nodes. Every pair of people adds communication overhead. And so if you don't start thinking about the systems that you're going to put in place when…”

“Because so few people make an actual long term commitment to what they're building, uh, the ones that do have a huge advantage.”

“The way you get deals done and the way you get good terms is to have a competitive situation. You know, if you don't do this deal with party A, you're gonna do it with party B. It's not always an option, but it usually is. And this is like the single thing that makes deals happen and makes deals move.”

“Um, older people have to basically guess about the technologies that are sort of, that young people are using, right? Because young people get older and they become the dominant market. But you can just watch what you're doing and what your friends are doing. And, um, you will almost certainly have better instincts on…”

“One question that people asked online this morning is how much time you should be spending hiring. Um, the answer is either like zero or 25%. You're either not hiring at all or it's probably your single biggest block of time.”

“most, uh, first time founders are very bad interviewers, but very good at evaluating someone after they've worked together.”

“I think that as a rough guideline, you should aim to give 10% of the company to the first 10 employees.”

“Um, the way to have a company that executes well is to execute well yourself. Everything in a startup gets modeled after the founders. Whatever the founders do becomes the culture. So if you want a culture where people work hard and pay attention to detail and focus on the customer and are frugal, um, you have to do it…”

“Unfortunately, the trick to great execution is to say no a lot. You know, you're saying no 97 times out of a hundred. Um, and most founders find that they have to make a very conscious effort to do this.”

“when people say get on planes in marginal situations, they usually mean it, uh, well they don't usually mean it literally, but I think it's actually good literal advice.”

“You have to save the vision speeches for when the company's winning. When you're not winning, you just have to get momentum back in small wins.”

“Competitors making noise in the press I think probably crushes a company's momentum more often than any other external factor.”

“Don't worry about a competitor at all, um, until they're actually beating you with a real shipped product.”

“The biggest advantage of all, I think is that, um, Younger people tend not to have the scars of experience. They don't know what they don't know. They are willing to take on these things again and again.”

“The most important thing that I have seen is an agreement before the acquisition is finalized about autonomy of the target company.”

“I would give it like a good six to nine months before making a decision that it's not going to work.”

“I, it's always so tempting to try to tell this sort of grandiose and exciting story, but if you can't, if the person you're pitching can't understand what you actually do today in the first, like, 30 seconds, the pitch is unlikely to get better from there.”

“whenever I've helped people for, for no immediate benefit, uh, and with no intention of ever getting a benefit at all, uh, time and again in my career, it has really Later, benefited me a lot.”

“I think most people give up on things way too early. So the mistake that most people make is they try something. It does not immediately work. You see this particularly in young entrepreneurs. It does not immediately work. After seven weeks, they say, you know what, I tried this thing. It's just not meant to be, and I…”

“Being young and unknown and poor, um, that is actually a great gift in terms of the amount of risk you can take.”

“I think the wrong kind of risk to take is where people don't actually do things or don't commit to something because they don't want to fail, and they overrate the risk of failure and the reputation damage or embarrassment or whatever.”

“Being willing to ask what you want and, and be somewhat aggressive are really important characteristics of being an entrepreneur.”

“So the thing I don't think works that often are the startups on their 11th pivot that are totally unrelated.”

“And this is where I think it takes brutal honesty with yourself about which projects are actually working and which you would like to convince yourself are working.”

“Startups survive on their own momentum. Um, if you have momentum, people keep Delivering results beyond what they think they're capable of. If you lose momentum, it's very difficult to get it back.”

“human intuitions about exponential growth are terrible. Um, we clearly had no evolutionary need for this. We can, like, visualize linear growth very well. We can, like, you know, visualize the trajectory of an arrow very well. Um, we, very few people that I have met, actually maybe none, can sort of tell me what, you…”

“The other thing on communication that people get wrong as you scale, and we're supposed to go to questions, so I'll make this a short point, is how much of the time, or how much time you have to spend repeating the same message. Um, so a lot of people, like, want to say at one all hands once, here's the company's…”

“People forget is if you build something impressive, uh, your network will kind of come to you.”

“One thing at the end, uh, don't leave a meeting without some plan for a follow-up. Um, it's like really good to just say, like, can I email you? Should we meet again? What are your thoughts?”

“I, I think you want to look for the intersection of what you're good at, what you enjoy, and, and what, where you can create value for the world. And in my experience, if you don't find some of the intersection of those three, it's hard to really have an impact.”