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

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

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

"Subcultures are dead."

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

"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."

"An entrepreneur endorses the invisible hand."

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

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

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

"Smart Companies Try To Commoditize Their Products’ Complements"

"In fact some nerds are quite fierce."

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

"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.'"

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

"Explain what you've learned from users."

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

"Isn't that really, really weird?"

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

"Every tweet is a free lottery ticket."

"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."

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

"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."

"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.'"

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

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!

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

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

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

"Startups are very counterintuitive."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Compounding is magic. Look for it everywhere."

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

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

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

"Seize the memes of production."

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

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

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

"Grocery delivery, an ideology?"

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

"Blockchains are all the rage."

"Well, another day shot to hell!"

"The Authoritarian High-Modernist Recipe for Failure"

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

"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."

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

"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"

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

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

"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."