Monopoly is the condition of every successful business.
Never invest in a tech CEO that wears a suit.
What valuable company is nobody building?
EVERY MOMENT IN business happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.
Had the people who started Facebook decided to stay at Harvard, they would not have been able to build the company, and by the time they graduated in 2006, that window probably would have come and gone.
Technology is probably the single biggest driver of productivity gains for the developed countries. For example, I think it’s much more important than free trade.
A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed. Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It’s like telling the world there’s no Santa Claus.
Of the six people who started PayPal, four had built bombs in high school.
I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.
If you have technological progress, that will encourage more capitalist system. On the other hand, if you don’t, if things are stalled, you end up with much more of a zero sum type thing, where there’s no progress and basically everybody’s gain is somebody else’s loss.
Your mind is software. Program it. Your body is a shell. Change it. Death is a disease. Cure it. Extinction is approaching. Fight it.
Under perfect competition, in the long run no company makes an economic profit.
Technology and capitalism are very much linked. I think that capitalism probably works best in a technologically progressing society.
All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.
In the ’30s, the Keynesian stuff worked at least in the sense that you could print money without inflation because there was all this productivity growth happening. That’s not going to work today.
I think somehow people should be encouraged to think about a very long time horizon and I think this is true for businesses, it’s true for governments and it’s true for people doing things in the non-profit sector.
The most successful businesses have an idea for the future that’s very different from the present.
If you can identify a delusional popular belief, you can find what lies hidden behind it: the contrarian truth.
What important truth do very few people agree with you on?