the difficult truth is that your entire life is defined by 2-3 important decisions and everything else is a rounding error

don't try to be viral don't fall in love with short-term growth try to become a legend instead thank you for your attention

Something to the idea that AI came after the jobs of its creators first, that it poisons the feeds with slop and drives people away and forces every call to be recorded & transcribed such that they'll all be moved offline. There's an immanent undoing to the entire project

2 types of founders are emerging in the social-media-first era: 1/ Fakes → obsessed with status, bs stories, never ship, give up after 6 months. 2/ Killers → hardcore builders, iterating like mad AND running insane day-one marketing machines. 2/ will be very successful

Great taste can make up for having no money but the opposite is not true

Stats like life expectancy or are an info hazard because they cause you to internalize, on some level, when you’re supposed to die. Applies to many things

My favourite quote from Hagakure "A man does not think of victory or defeat. He plunges recklessly towards an irrational death. By doing this, you will awaken from your dreams." You're going to die anyway. Stop playing it safe.

Growing up in Silicon Valley, I believed tech was meant to democratize opportunity and accelerate human progress. The early ethos of the Valley wasn’t just about building profitable products, but about shifting the trajectory of lives and societies. There was idealism, for sure,

What we do for money, what we choose to build These say a lot about who we are I work hard every day because this is not the future I would like to live in

I have no idea what happened here and don’t know either founder, but I hate how much of SF startup culture lately is grandiose personal announcements and soap opera stuff at such early stages

A pretty much constant paradox is that we expect outlier outcomes from people that we demand act in normal, average ways. We love geniuses after they do the great thing, but we basically loath and harass them if they act in uncouth ways before hand.

some things I currently hate about startup culture

one of the greatest tricks the devil ever played on humanity is convincing us that there is any such thing as absolute certainty. the only time things are 100% clear are carefully constructed fictions. anything true, beautiful, eternal requires a leap of faith and pure belief

preseed investing is about picking every other stage is about winning

there's a lot more capital in the world than there are people with good ideas and strong enough conviction to use it up. a big lesson from private markets is that having large AUM ready to rip doesn't get you much, the best deal guys are capital light and conviction heavy

sf monoculture is dead

The Romans had the right idea that there ought to be distinct stages for distinct ages. Young men go to Gaul to prove themselves and get rich, then serve their people in public life, and finally serve the youth via writing, oration and elder statesmanship broadly. Accumulating

The irony of posting is that the better you are at it the more unfavorable its risk profile becomes over time. It starts as highly convex then starts to look linear and slowly turns concave as your audience grows

ironically the smartest person and best poster I follow on this site