Summary
Intro:
• My favorite books give me a new type of X-ray vision.
• this book is actually a guide to think for yourself.
• Our future is born anew every day. Use your powers well.
• Create a product. Solve a problem. Build.
Background
• I learned early on that you’ve got to stand up for yourself
• Knowing what I was weak at allowed me to become strong
• In venture capital and content creation, originality is really, really valued. Whether you call it originality, being disobedient, or being contrarian—the combination of being analytical and not fully obedient has been important.
Part 1: Tech
- Putting in a lot of labor doesn’t necessarily generate value.Putting in the right technology often does
- We have to start talking more about our values than our val-
uations. Money is only a tool. What really matters is building
something you can’t buy.
- The reason speed has value is because
time has value; the reason time has value is because human
life spans are finite.
- You can’t invent planes without test pilots. We have to have Early adopters.
Being too conservative on safety actually leads to systemic risk. Systemic risk happens when you stop taking risks and get stuck with a system that no longer improves.
- Everything technology is doing means more upside, more downside. That’s my one-liner for the future: more upside, more downside.
- The last era was big data. The next era is verifiable data
- Our physical future- Knowing the joules required to build something would give us a ratio-scale measure of the cost of production.
Part 2: truth
- Many things that are true are unpopular;many things that are popular are untrue.
- Determining the type of evidence people accept is as important as knowing their incentives.
- The form of science today is a peer-reviewed journal paper. But the substance of science is independent replication.
- Only trust as scientific truth what can
be independently verified.
- Technological history is the history of what works; political history is the history of what works to retain power.
- Everybody has strong opinions about people they’ve never met based on tales told by people they do not know
- How to change the world:
1. Discover true facts.
2. Acquire sufficient distribution.
- You need to learn how to make media clips and movies, write, publish, direct, encapsulate, build relation-ships, and build political coalitions; you need to learn how to fight.
- The media you consume changes the decisions you make. The technology you have changes the decisions
you can make
- For any technology we want to drive forward, we must own the D iscourse. An “important feed” will be very different from the “news feed.” What is important often is not new, and what is new often is not important
Become a citizen journalist
- Own a media corporation or be owned by one.
- Platforms like Substack, Patreon, and Ghost allow writers to optimize for dollowers.
- “Dollowers” (dollar-weighted followers) are an important part of the future.
Part 3 - Building the Future
- To get lucky, you must first take a chance
- The less money you need, the less dependent you are.
- I spend my money on being able
to work harder.
- Don’t argue about anything; just build an alternative. Don’t argue with words. Build products based on truths many people can’t grasp
- Works in practice, not in theory
- This is where historical perspective and market research is Key. A strong new plan for navigating the idea maze usually requires an obsession with the market and a unique insight others have not had.
- Look for the areas technology has not moved into yet. That’s where the opportunities will be
- From a founding and investing standpoint, you have to con-sider strategic questions. What kinds of platforms are there? What new platforms cure such a pain point that people get on it? Then what else can be deployed on that platform?
- The best entrepreneurs are logical enough to think of unpopular truths and then social enough to make those truths popular.
- If the goal is full stack, always talk to executives in the field early on. A few words can save years of work to identify key cost centers and hard parts. You can start all of these as “just” a new clinic/restaurant/ accountant/architect/ law firm. Think big, start small. Prove, then scale.Staging is key for full-stack startups
- A demo is worth a thousand decks
The 6 Ps are a useful checklist.
Product—What are you selling?
Person—To whom?
Purpose—Why are they buying it?
Pricing—At what price?
Priority—Why now?
Prestige—And why from you?
- You can quantify the quality of a user interface by the number, type, and duration of user inputs required to achieve a result.
- Bounded commitment.List your options, choose your best one, and commit for a predetermined period of time—like a week or a month. Then
Revisit. The key is thinking of your
time as a resource to quantitatively allocate, like capital.
- SaaS first, code second, hire last.
- A new product can never be superior to an incumbent in all respects. Launch means criticism.
- The rapid growth phase is where startups are most unpopular—and most at risk
- “Hire people who are hungry and can teach us something.” When you give
somebody the biggest opportunity they’ve ever had, they’re hungry.
Then there’s the other bit, ”and can teach us something.” I look for people who can communicate their knowledge effectively.
- To be effective, pull key information to the beginning and communicate it in the head-line. Then you should communicate it again in the subtitle, communicate it again in a slightly different way in the opening sentence, and expand on it in the opening paragraph.That’s how you should write internal memos.
- hire people who are better Than you
- A good company works on conditional love—you have to deliver.
- Before candidates join your company, have them write out what they would consider success, mediocrity, and failure: bull, base, and bear. Where do they want to be in a year or Four years?
Use the same technique for dividing up labor between a manager and an employee. Do a two-by-two table with four quadrants: What does the manager expect from themself? What does the manager expect from the employee? What does the employee expect from themself? What does the employee expect from the manager?
- Distribution is about connections.
- If you focus on growing users, pay close attention to churn. Pairing a second measure of quality with a metric of growth is very, very important.
- Executing - The execution mindset means doing the next thing on the to-do list at all times. Rewrite the list every day or every week in Response to progress.
- Doing things as fast as you can often means doing them one at a time
- list, rank, iterate: page 234
- It’s not the idea; it’s the execution
Nobody cares - by Ben Horowitz
“Nobody cares, just coach your team” might be the best CEO advice ever. Because, you see, nobody cares. When things go wrong in your company, nobody cares. The press doesn’t care, your investors don’t care, your board doesn’t care, your employees don’t care, even your mama doesn’t care. Nobody cares.
And they are right not to care. A great reason for failing won’t preserve one dollar for your investors, won’t save one employee’s job, or get you one new customer. It especially won’t make you feel one bit better when you shut down your company and declare bankruptcy.
All the mental energy you use to elaborate your misery would be far better used trying to find the one seemingly impossible way out of your current mess. It’s best to spend zero time on what you could have done and all of your time on what you might do. Because in the end, nobody cares, just run your company.
Evolving
- The productivity handbook:
- write out your Goals.
- I lie awake at night and think, Okay, here’s what I’ve learned today. How does that fit into my broad collection of ideas? Where are the contradictions, overlaps, and so on?
- Economist and philosopher John Maynard Keynes said, “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” Meaning, if you don’t know what intellectual soft-
ware you’re running, you’re running something subconsciously.
- Your email inbox is a to-do list other people write For you. Task length and importance are not related to recently received.
- Don’t just focus on economics alone, because you can overoptimize and distort financial metrics at the expense of health
- What you choose to load into your brain first thing in the morning is the most precious, precious space.
- Hard work is a competitive advantage.
- The newest technical papers and the oldest books are the best sources of arbitrage.
- You are What you read
- Learn to learn fast. To learn technical content fast, I just start doing problems. Start, then learn
You can understand any mathematical concept in six ways:
verbal, visual, algebraic, numerical, computational, and
historical.
1. Verbal—explain in words
2. Visual—make a graph
3. Algebraic—write the equation
4. Numerical—do a numerical example
5. Computational—code a solver or algorithm
6. Historical—tell where it came from
- At each stage of life, I used my current skill and applied it in a new domain to learn another skill. I never started completely at zero; I was always building from a previous skill.
- The ideal is you are a full-stack engineer and full-stack creator
- Establish your broad skill and knowledge foundation, then find
an area you want to work in. To choose your specific domain, pick an area you really care about for some reason
- Invest in the Future you want to see - Build your wealth, then help others build theirs.
- A startup should be exceptional in at least one dimension. It can’t be “pretty good” at all different things. At least one dimension needs to be 10 times better and amazing to bet on.
- Found it, fund it, or join it. We’ll have to work to create the future we want.
Book recommendations:
- The Princeton Companion to Mathematics by Timothy Gowers
- Schaum’s Outlines by Joel Lerner and James Cashin
- The Great CEO Within by Matt Mochary
- Where Is My Flying Car? by Josh Storrs Hall
VisualizeValue.com.