Microsoft was "just an OS" McDonals was "just fast food" Starbucks was "just coffee" Tesla was "just a car" Google was "just an algorithm" Facebook was "just a website" Apple was "just a computer" Nvidia was "just a chip" Cynicism can end up being pretty expensive.

"Pessimists sound smart. Optimists make money." (Nat Friedman)

People think having a stable job is the safest way to make money. It is, in fact, the hardest way to make money.

"Research is often used as a drunk uses a lightpost; not for illumination but for support." (Ogilvy)

Bezos, Musk, Arnault, Gates, Ellison, Brin. All divorced. The same characteristics that make you incredibly successful in building a business can also make you a terrible partner. You may need two versions of yourself if your marriage is gonna survive. Live life accordingly.

Out of 300+ VP alumni, more than 25% are now founders. Another ~40% work in engineering/product/ops at exceptional companies like Ramp, SpaceX, Warp, and others. 15% are investors at top-tier venture firms like Bessemer and BCV. Almost 100% in tech, in some capacity.

A paradox of expertise: The broader and deeper your knowledge, the more readily you will say, "I don't know," thereby convincing the typical person that your knowledge is narrow and shallow.

Changing your mind publicly can be a noble thing. Rapidly changing your mind from one hot trend to the next hot trend is... not.

When you're building your career, default to yes. Let natural selection determine what opportunities survive in life. When you've had some success, default to no. Radical prioritization in how you spend your time will allow compounding to work. H/t Patrick OShaughnessy Dr. Julie Gurner

Just got off the phone with my Mom to tell her the good news. I've finally made it on the bird app. I have an imposter. Do me a solid and report / block our friend here.

"Normalize thinking as working." (Bryce Roberts)

"I grew up implicitly thinking that intelligence was this special human thing. Now I think it's a fundamental property of matter." Sam Altman "Man was also in the beginning with God. Intelligence, or the light of truth, was not created or made, neither indeed can be" (D&C 93:29)

Business books are written by people figuring it out. Biographies are written about people who figured it out. Read accordingly.

"Most human creativity is spent suppressing human creativity. Deviance is punished by social regulation. That's why we don't have 1000x the greatness that we could have every year." (Visakan Veerasamy)

“I think all the heretics I have known have been virtuous men. They have the virtue of fortitude, or they would not venture to own their heresy; and they cannot afford to be deficient in any of the other virtues, as they would give advantage to their many enemies” (Ben Franklin)

"It is not enough to be so plain that you can be understood, you must speak so that you cannot be misunderstood." h/t David Senra

a16z is in the cloud, but the cloud is not in Miami.

Philosophy at early PayPal was focused on avoiding hierarchy in favor of battling over ideas instead. "We as human beings have the tendency to slouch in the direction of hierarchy absent other things."

Every visionary has a helpful pragmatist as their right hand. Elon Musk has Gwynne Shotwell. Walt Disney had his brother, Roy.