"There are plenty of people as smart as Bill Gates who achieve nothing."

"Your thesis is like your first love," Eco muses. "It will be difficult to forget.”

"Before there were cattle prods, governments tortured their prisoners with clubs and rubber hoses."

"Most successful consumer social products walk through a boneyard of failures before achieving victory."

"When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor."

"No, seriously, it was awful. I deleted my blog of 1,557 posts."

"Escaping High School - A guide for fourteen-year-olds and fourteen-year-olds at heart."

"The tyranny of ideas can imprison us, but reading something wonderful liberates the mind like nothing else."

"The idea of 'structurelessness,' however, has moved from a healthy counter to those tendencies to becoming a goddess in its own right."

"It's difficult to overstate what a momentous sea change it was for hundreds of millions, and eventually billions, of humans who had grown up competing for status in small tribes, to suddenly be dropped into a talent show competing against EVERY PERSON THEY HAD EVER MET."

"A few months ago, while dining at Veggie Grill (one of the new breed of Chipotle-class fast-casual restaurants), a phrase popped unbidden into my head: premium mediocre."

"If you collected lists of techniques for doing great work in a lot of different fields, what would the intersection look like?"

Yes, you may be special, chosen people putting big dents in the universe, but believe it or not, the rest of us actually have some interesting lessons to share from our less ambitious lives!

"The idea is to initially attract users with a single-player tool and then, over time, get them to participate in a network."

"What Would Bezos Build If He Were Starting Out Today?"

"Isn't that really, really weird?"

"Upward, not Northward" - was the clue to the whole proof.

"Despite stagnant wages, declining employment rates, and an increased propensity to live with their parents, younger men report increased happiness during the 2000s."

"It was a group of consultants at McKinsey & Company who coined the 'war for talent' in their 1998 report and subsequent book of the same name, propelling the term 'top talent' into the corporate executive hive-mind for the next two decades."

"Suppose you were to reach into the mirror universe, where everything is inverted, and pull out a book that is the exact opposite of Robert Gordon’s The Rise and Fall of American Growth."

"There are two kinds of problems in the world: strong-link problems and weak-link problems."

"The more we understand about the world around us, the less it seems we understand about people and the way they are."

"If you don’t have a leadership philosophy as a Tech Founder, you should probably figure one out…because you just admitted you’re leading people without a deliberate framework."

"The average internet user spent about 30 minutes a day online, compared to about 7 hours today."

"It's that you're overwhelmed by things you do want to read."

America is today in the midst of a great technological revolution.

"If you’ve ever watched an extremely high performer go from killing it one year to struggling the next, you know what I’m talking about."

"Blockchains are all the rage."

Have you presented to company executives about a key engineering initiative, walking into the room excited and leaving defeated?

"Seize the memes of production."

"Earlier this week, I was trying to think of ways to talk about the gap between notions about the future we’ve all absorbed from the last three hundred years of fossil-fueled progress, on the one hand, and the ways of thinking about what’s ahead that might actually help us make sense of our predicament and the postpetroleum, post-progress world ahead, on the other."

"In fact some nerds are quite fierce."

"The biggest lesson that can be read from 70 years of AI research is that general methods that leverage computation are ultimately the most effective, and by a large margin."

"Successful open-source development can be understood by Richard Gabriel's claim that 'the right thing' design approach, tends to lose to 'worse is better.'"

"Subcultures are dead."

"As Russia invaded Ukraine, three women from the same family became pregnant at the same time."

"Oozification is a process that makes the technological future visibly illegible, especially to those closest to it and working hardest to make it happen, and this fear is the temporal analog of high-modernist fear of illegibility."

"It's better to make a few people really happy than to make a lot of people semi-happy."

"How can smart, ambitious people stay working in an area where they have no long term ambitions?"

"Cap your existential downside risk, pursue max volatility, repeat."

"The philosopher Kwame Appiah writes that 'in life, the challenge is not so much to figure out how best to play the game; the challenge is to figure out what game you’re playing.'"

"Language is the most important piece of the Idea Stack because language is the terrain on which the battle of ideas is fought."

"In the 1950s and 1960s, Warren Buffett ran a hugely successful investment partnership."

"Earlier this week, I was trying to think of ways to talk about the gap between notions about the future we’ve all absorbed from the last three hundred years of fossil-fueled progress"

"Warren Buffett is almost certainly the most studied investor in history."

Because ‘to know about something’ isn’t the same as ‘knowing something’.

"Everything is Held Together with Duct Tape: All of it. Every last thing. Seriously."

"Smart Companies Try To Commoditize Their Products’ Complements"

"A good founder is capable of anticipating which turns lead to treasure and which lead to certain death."

"Compounding is magic. Look for it everywhere."

"The Authoritarian High-Modernist Recipe for Failure"

"One thread I connected pretty late at Cash App was that speeding up time-to-money for a given transaction creates more value than is obvious."

"One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies -- an impression that has been reinforced almost daily -- is that Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right."

"It's a frequent occurrence that the weird stuff lands on my desk after it goes through another skilled engineer or two."

"The world is constructed entirely by people who are mostly winging it… and a lot of them don't realize that about themselves."

"Why do so few scientists make significant contributions and so many are forgotten in the long run?"

"Everyone’s job is world-building, even if they don’t realize it."

"I often get introduced to people looking to make the jump into startups and Silicon Valley."

"Of all the attempts to put Sir Alex Ferguson’s 27-year tenure managing Manchester United in perspective, perhaps none were as articulate as the team he selected yesterday for his final match at Old Trafford."

"An entrepreneur endorses the invisible hand."

"Well, another day shot to hell!"

"Designing a New Old Home: Part 2 - The Elements and Materials"

"Social networks tend to elevate content that it expects will get attention, incentivizing a particular type of behavior that lends status to the users performing said behavior."

Nintendo uses a product-development philosophy called “Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology.”

"What the smartest people do on the weekend is what everyone else will do during the week in ten years."

"I know the politicians are mistaken because it was my job to predict which people will become billionaires."

"America is becoming increasingly obsessed with racism and sexism."

"The scene that made me cry was about paper."

"In this post, I want to discuss exactly how the design of TikTok helps its algorithm work as well as it does."

"An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes, which can be made, in a very narrow field." (Niels Bohr)

"One of the most common types of advice we give at Y Combinator is to do things that don't scale."

"This has turned out to be the most important quality in startup founders."

"Was the MBA worth it? Am I better for it? Am I now the person I want to be?"

"Every tweet is a free lottery ticket."

"Our vision is that we’re going to power the Internet."

"Grocery delivery, an ideology?"

"It hit me pretty quickly that what’s happening in the world of AI is not just an important topic, but by far THE most important topic for our future."

"When a great team meets a lousy market, market wins; when a lousy team meets a great market, market wins."

"Explain what you've learned from users."

"Once I picked my jaw up off the floor, though, what struck me about Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s presentation was how he opened the segment: Our vision for our assistant is to help you get things done."

"Startups are very counterintuitive."

"If you aren’t getting rejected on a daily basis, your goals aren’t ambitious enough."

"Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!"

"Tar Tasks are the dead weight To Do List items dragging down your soul."

Sinatra with a cold is Picasso without paint, Ferrari without fuel — only worse.

"Unfortunately, we’re all bad information compressors—it’s part of being human."

"If you want to find your people on Farcaster… Be Earnest."

One of the most valuable writing skills is the ability to generate novel ideas.

"Well, you know this is a bull market!"