"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 Authoritarian High-Modernist Recipe for Failure"

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

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

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

"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."

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

"In fact some nerds are quite fierce."

"Startups are very counterintuitive."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Well, another day shot to hell!"

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

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

"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.'"

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

"Blockchains are all the rage."

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

"Subcultures are dead."

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

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

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

"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."

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

"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.'"

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

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

"Smart Companies Try To Commoditize Their Products’ Complements"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

"Seize the memes of production."

"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."

"Every tweet is a free lottery ticket."

"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."

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