When you are starting a new business you don’t want to go after giant markets. You want to go after small markets and take over those markets quickly.
The developing world can just do things that are extensive or horizontal, that basically copy. The developed world needs to do things that are intensive or vertical, where we take our civilization to the next level.
No company has a culture, every company is a culture.
Secrets are hard but solvable problems and we should talk about them. It’s hard to work toward a radically better future if you don’t believe in secrets.
There are many more secrets in the world that are waiting to be found. The question of how many secrets exist in our world is roughly equivalent to how many startups people should start.
I’m in favor of free trade, but I think if you had to make a choice between having technological progress versus free trade, you had one or the other, you should always pick technological progress. I think it’s an incredibly important variable for creating more prosperity.
Higher education holds itself out as a kind of universal church, outside of which there is no salvation.
Society is secretly driven by sales.
It is sort of a bit of a caricature of capitalism, that it’s always this zero-sum game where you have winners and losers. Silicon Valley, the technology industry at its best, creates a situation where everybody can be a winner.
The most fundamental reason that even businesspeople underestimate the importance of sales is the systematic effort to hide it at every level of every field in a world secretly driven by it.
There are still many large white spaces on the map of human knowledge. You can go discover them. So do it. Get out there and fill in the blank spaces. Every single moment is a possibility to go to these new places and explore them.
In the developed world, technological progress means that you can have a situation where there’s growth, where there’s a way in which everybody can be better off over time.
First, only invest in companies that have the potential to return the value of the entire fund.
Everybody has a product to sell – no matter whether you’re an employee, a founder, or an investor. It’s true even if your company consists of just you and your computer. Look around. If you don’t see any salespeople, you’re the salesperson.
American government is not dominated by engineers, it is dominated by lawyers. Engineers are interested in substance and building things; lawyers are interested in process and rights and getting the ideology correctly blended. And so there is sort of no really concrete plan for the future.
The business model piece is we’re always talking about competing more effectively. If you’re starting a company or career you don’t want to compete. You want to create a monopoly. We want to invest in a company that has a good plan to create a monopoly.
There are quite a lot of people who think my aspirations are not possible. That’s a good thing. We don’t need to really worry about these people very much, because since they don’t think it’s possible they won’t take us very seriously- and they will not actually try to stop us until it’s too late.
Long-term planning is often undervalued by our indefinite short-term world.
A startup is the largest endeavor over which you can have definite mastery. You can have agency not just over your own life, but over a small and important part of the world. It begins by rejecting the unjust tyranny of Chance. You are not a lottery ticket.
A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed.