Peter Thiel: "Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius."

Sam Altman (Sam Altman): "The most underrated quality is being really determined. This is more important than being smart, having a network or a great idea. So much about being a successful entrepreneur is just not giving up."

.Elon Musk's Engineering Design Process 1. Make requirements less dumb 2. Delete the part or process 3. Simplify or optimize 4. Accelerate cycle-time 5. Automate "The most common error of a smart engineer is to optimise a thing that should not exist...”

Jensen Huang: Do irreplaceable work. Work on things which without you, wouldn't / couldn't get done by anyone else.

Mark Zuckerberg: Pick something you care about and work on it, but don’t commit to turning it into a company until it’s working. A tremendous percentage of the very best companies didn't come from people who decided upfront that they wanted to start a company.

Sam Altman on what stood out to him about Elon Musk: "I remember when Elon took me on a tour of the SpaceX factory many years ago. The thing that sticks in memory was the look of absolute certainty on his face when he talked about sending large rockets to Mars. I left thinking

Jensen Huang: "Greatness does not come from intelligence. Greatness comes from character, and character isn't isn't formed out of smart people: it's formed out of people who have suffered."

Peter Thiel's advice for young people: (i) think very hard / concretely about the future (ii) do not substitute education for thought (iii) avoid hyper-competition; do not do what everyone else is doing (iv) identify areas of innovation at the frontier; do new things there

Sam Altman on hard work.

Paul Graham on why ambitious people need each other.

Peter Thiel: "What I think people like Zuckerburg or Musk or Jeff Bezos at Amazon have in common is that they’re relentless. They don’t stop. Every day, they start over, do more, get better at it. People often ask whether Facebook was just a fluke, in the right place at the right

Peter Thiel: Meaning is found in doing things that are important, that otherwise wouldn't get done. Do the work that only you can do.

Steve Jobs on hard work.

Sam Altman: Don’t be afraid to work on what you really want to work on.

Peter Thiel: “Almost all of the successful companies in Silicon Valley had some model of starting with small markets and expanding.” Amazon started with books. PayPal started with eBay power-sellers. Facebook started with Harvard. Airbnb started with renting air mattresses.

Sam Altman on what he looks for in founders.

Sam Altman's advice for young people: "Surround yourself with people who will make you more ambitious."

Sam Altman: Almost everyone I’ve ever met would be well-served by spending more time thinking about what to focus on. It is much more important to work on the right thing than it is to work many hours.

Andrej Karpathy on the most important thing he’s learned from Elon Musk:

Peter Thiel: "Many of the great companies that have been built over the last two decades were founded by people whose identities were somehow deeply connected to their company. It was their life's project. They had some kind of idiosyncratic, different vision of what they were