Eric-Jorgenson_The-Anthology-of-Balaji.indd - readwise.io  ## Metadata - Author: **readwise.io** - Full Title: Eric-Jorgenson_The-Anthology-of-Balaji.indd - Category: #articles - URL: https://readwise.io/reader/document_raw_content/102949905 ## Highlights - But conflict is attention, and it’s very easy to just default into responding to negativity. This is partly because negativity is louder than positivity on the internet. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfa9fk63v6zw2kx2b5cykrc8)) - The first thirteen years of my conscious life, school was a prison-like environment. You must go there every day; you cannot leave. You have no control over your environment. You cannot avoid other kids in school, and I was simply not part of the social network. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfaa8jd6ypmp9r0vcsawgmet)) - I have a long-term horizon; I have my eyes set on the long-term goal of transhumanism. But I’m willing to be pragmatic and execute in the short run. I go down the to-do list toward that North Star. I’m always conscious of the long term. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfaaxt136kny0j795zyjj1r0)) - Every few years, I feel like my life starts anew. I’m in my forties now, but I feel like I’ve just started because I built up various resources like distribution, network, and capital. Now I can broadcast ideas, invest money, and see big things happen. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfaaykghc0xtvbtvwqhmcnpv)) - We have to start talking more about our values than our valuations ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfab58asysvss54h3qhk8b29)) - Technology theory of value is better than labor theory of value. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfbtdpnhfq4agzfb826mftga)) - A philosopher named Frederic Bastiat has a parable about this, about what is seen and what is unseen. It requires more empathy and more imagination to think about value that isn’t seen. You can see a skyscraper. You can’t see what could have been built but wasn’t. You can’t see the cities we could build if we had regulations allowing skyscrapers to be built in two weeks rather than two years. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfbtvrb76pvdb6k1fkn6d2a8)) - Today, we don’t have the same level of risk tolerance. People want an extremely high level of safety, but they don’t realize we can be too conservative. Being too conservative on safety actually leads to systemic risk. Systemic risk happens when you stop taking risks and get stuck with a system that no longer improves. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfc2ymag4wc9993gjph3e4gd)) - If you haven’t studied something in depth, your mental model of it often implicitly reduces to a few scenes from a Hollywood movie. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfc368mgeaep9s7etqwzrmnr)) - Through history, regimes rise and fall, but technology is (so far!) up and to the right. What distinguishes man from ape is technological progress. The more things that can get done without you thinking about them, the more civilizational progress there has been. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfc3c5snada1a5454g2t48eb)) - Progress is abstraction ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfc3db25an23aqg2hbxawahy)) - The assumption behind sci-fi like Black Mirror is that the present is okay, but technology could make the future dystopian. But perhaps the present is dystopian and technology is our only hope for a positive future. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfc3ke120p412warrtsa691h)) - Every area the government touches sees prices inflate. That’s due to regulations or subsidies, which impairs the increases of labor productivity from technology. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfc3ng4jnfgzbaxmd8w07bn3)) - A subsidy is similar to a regulation because it casts a particular way of doing things into stone. That’s why we still have yellow school buses and number two pencils. These decisions are set in budget appropriations, locked in, and then they become lagging aspects of the system. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfc5a0zzsbkezbrkx13t646x)) - There is obviously value to tradition. People say something is “Lindy” to mean it’s been proven by the test of time, or existed for a long time. But, of course, there’s a tension between tradition and innovation. Going to the moon wasn’t Lindy; it was just awesome. This is a tension within humanity itself. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfc5bdgz5rxr58rp5dfpgy71)) - In theory, the state was meant to be an innovation in violence reduction. You stay in your territory; I stay in mine. Clear sovereigns would keep domestic order, and the principle of national sovereignty would deter aggression from abroad. It didn’t entirely work out like that, of course. Both intrastate and interstate conflict still occurred. But it may have been preferable to the preceding era of fuzzy-bordered empires and sovereign conflicts. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfc5mpe14n4gsc9pt0cvdznm)) - Technology determines which fringe ideas have become newly feasible and what elements of current consensus have become suddenly obsolete. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfc8yjqj7ewrvs5g12pd7ahk)) - What is politically feasible is a function of what is technologically feasible. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfc93g58cqmr9dkc7021g1j8)) - At the end of the day, you sometimes need to work with governments. But you should always put your trust in technology over politicians because technology is what works no matter what politician is in office. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfc9cp0gjhx05g50jkp86ygk)) - Society, driven by technology, goes through cycles of centralization and decentralization. The decentralization phase approaches. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfc9e3c5j556bpkf89f6xt29)) - Blockchains provide the technical foundation for a new digital theory of property rights. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfcaqq9bgej0zv0vjzck7tdy)) - Crypto is a spinal transplant for the tech industry. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfcawe9mvgj3fskgfbhmb6g6)) - Every human-to-human interface replaced with a human-to-machine interface reduces the relative importance of social status versus technical competence. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfcb197krvdnk7hygbzz25bw)) - The goal of transhumanism is simply to become the absolute best version of yourself. I think all of tech will be focused on it in five to ten years. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfcbbdjjmfrs068ynh46kza3)) - We’ve been coevolving with technology for a very, very long time, throughout evolutionary timescales. Technology is actually what makes us human. It’s what distinguishes man from animal. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfcbfpmzeh5t3fpdjqdh92fg)) - If you distill how I think about the world, it’s how to level up as an individual, then as a group, and then for humanity as a whole. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfcbgyy4nwvtdkh8q3zj19qz)) - Many things that are true are unpopular; many things that are popular are untrue. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfcbjthsp0q2dnkacj20cpxz)) - Only trust as scientific truth what can be independently verified. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfcczb10ysdtmd40mtnbz87f)) - I see a strong correlation between lack of technical ability and naive trust in social authority. The only true authority is raw data. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfcdft0s64pf3q79rv4nmhvt)) - We select people who win popularity contests, then wonder why they’re bad at allocating scarce resources. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfcdtak9zgdm7ee2prtcm7xb)) - Costly speech means only the wealthy speak freely. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfcdvm9gasahjama72y54emw)) - The monopoly on truth is upstream of the monopoly on violence. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfcdwcbk79277g0qt102j9n9)) - Popular opinion: platitude Popular fact: triviality Unpopular opinion: heresy Unpopular fact: innovation ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfcebkbxt393twgh0gx4yp3v)) - Whether you have the scientific or historical evidence to prove a truth does not matter if people do not have an economic incentive for evaluating and then spreading that truth. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfdw8r83jz7rw01kzza9aptv)) - Unpopular truth is a reliable source of profit. Behind every great fortune is a great thoughtcrime. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfezctz8wwpvg0369p326m1n)) - How to change the world: 1. Discover true facts. 2. Acquire sufficient distribution. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfezxefevpkm7h2vb3nyv33d)) - Media is like a shimmery mirror. Reality is on the far side, what you read is on the near side, and the media is controlling the middle. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hff01t933643stfx9ydc5h3y)) - If you are what you eat, then you think what you see. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hff048xbxawyf2xdbac5pabt)) - Giving free content to media corporations in the form of quotes and interviews no longer makes sense. You must build your own distribution to avoid distortion. This is already happening. Elon, Zuckerberg, and all the smartest founders are building their own media arms, going direct and routing around legacy media corporations. Doing so is now a core competency. A CEO or a founder who does not build direct distribution is not doing it right. It’s like a company not building a website. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hff172z09x8xfpcpa1gcyppg)) - People are running on scripts. They don’t even realize they’re running on scripts. Media scripts humans, just as computer code scripts machines. When kids come out of a movie theater, they immediately start quoting lines and re-enacting what they just saw on the screen. Sometimes you can get people to do something by telling them to do it, but often just showing it being done is better. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hff1jjdn5pp7ezjx557n8vjy)) - Popularity can be measured by likes. Truth can’t be. Status is a zero-sum game. Wealth creation isn’t. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hff1p5358mmxhvympp96b5wm)) - As a guiding philosophy, “win and help win” will always outcompete “live and let live.” ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hff1tegs6ehnhg6g66r131x2)) - Many people don’t understand that wealth can be created. My first counterexample for them: who did Steve Jobs steal all the iPhones from? If wealth is a zero-sum game, where one person’s gain is someone else’s loss, where did the phones come from? This simple example shows wealth can be created. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hff1zq6jg8nr8b14nhx2jg9p)) - Money seems to be locally zero-sum (after a trade happens, Person A has –$1, Person B has +$1), but actually money is globally positive-sum. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hff3ct2xyn54a4pvzn0j24e5)) - The less money you need, the less dependent you are. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hff3t9yazqktas5h5t47bk9z)) - When you’re in any institution, you cannot speak freely, especially when you’re the CEO. I’ve only really been able to speak freely to a greater extent over the last year and a half. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hff3v4a30h8z93as51qpxxce)) - Once you get that first win under your belt, you build the confidence you’re able to do it again and again. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hff5090yrddxveffcewzcnd4)) - Financial independence is also personal and ideological independence. If you have financial independence, the crowd can’t economically cancel you. If you have a financial cushion, which anybody can build by cutting consumption, you can ride out challenges. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hff54hrytxt6458wnaw4f46y)) - Here is my ranking of types of leaders: socialist < nationalist < capitalist < technologist. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hff5s2xtwkh9keyk8chckqjk)) - Why does socialism keep arising over and over again? One way of answering that question: it is the easiest way to become a leader. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hff5p7344qg5fp65kedg9yh0)) - The hard way to gain status is to build something, to accomplish something, to add value. The easy way to gain status is to accuse someone else of being a bad person. It’s a statusacquisition hack, a quick way to gain relative status. Your critique of the existing system may be correct. But you need a product, not just a critique. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hff5yg9mp5808m6gf7n7nswa)) - Billionaires exist because they can code apps. Bill Gates coded Microsoft’s first BASIC interpreter. Larry Page and Sergey Brin built version one of Google. Mark Zuckerberg built version one of Facebook. Jack Dorsey built version one of Twitter. Drew Houston built version one of Dropbox. Garrett Camp built version one of Uber. Bobby Murphy built version one of Snapchat. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hff65j9hqznr3086h3e1e4eg)) - Every startup and every project starts as a hallucination ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hff6betptrqxqwv5ad3d9qsb)) - The state has far more money than anyone else. But NASA is behind SpaceX because tech isn’t capitallimited; it’s competence-limited. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hff6hxb4kk94y9dpv06nvgx9)) - Don’t do a startup unless you’re ideologically driven to make it succeed. You need something beyond economic motivation, because startups are very hard. There are much lower-risk ways to earn money than a startup. Building a startup is an extremely stressful journey toward infinity. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hff6sfbtdqp5vwx8jb8c33xe)) - For something like Uber, if you had looked at only the market size of taxis, you would have never believed they could build such a large company. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hff6thvs8v8grbjrfs9q34wy)) - You’re building the bridge between the qualitative and the quantitative. The qualitative is like the compass heading. The quantitative is measuring your progress along the compass heading. But you can’t use metrics to choose which direction to go. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hff6wt4nsbnd38vsq2wa40a6)) - A bad founder runs to the entrance of a maze without any sense for the history of the industry, the players in the maze, the casualties of the past, or the technologies likely to move walls and change assumptions. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfgepcyymkzrvjvvzdcy8sph)) - If you can write and diagram a complex decision tree with many alternatives, explaining why your particular plan to navigate the maze is superior to the ten past companies who died in the maze and twenty current competitors lost in the maze, you have gone a long way toward proving you have a good idea others did not and do not have. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfgev4wqtn5n1cyf31q5kw42)) - History is the closest thing we have to a physics of humanity. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfgezpt973eemjqgwn5n2avv)) - The technologies to look for haven’t gotten a lot of press yet, the ones still near inception in labs of places like Stanford ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfgf4gpt4teab8pfrvgg8ys0)) - We transitioned from paper to a scanner that scans paper into a digital version, and then to a native digital text file that begins life on the computer. We transitioned from face-toface meetings to Zoom video meetings (a scanner of faces), and then (soon?) to native digital VR meetings. We transitioned from physical cash to credit cards and PayPal (a scan of the pre-existing banking system), and then to the native digital version of money: cryptocurrency. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfgfd9svwcb4xn93yb2mfq1k)) - A good question for a software company is: what’s your billiondollar function? For Facebook, it’s arguably the function that allows advertisers to put ads in front of users. The defensibility comes from its database. It’s likely not a single function today, but it probably was or could be. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfhk90r1kgq4885bqcv2rezm)) - From a founding and investing standpoint, you have to consider strategic questions. What kinds of platforms are there? What new platforms cure such a pain point that people get on it? Then what else can be deployed on that platform? ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfhkd5jfn1rpqtmv9wwet5ya)) - The best entrepreneurs are logical enough to think of unpopular truths and then social enough to make those truths popular. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfhkfkc5y3bc3yv3hm5t93qx)) - You cannot automate something until you’ve done it manually many times. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfhkm0p9n75ba88wkqf98mcs)) - Anything founded before the internet may not be able to survive the internet. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfhkwxcnmecydn7r210n1ksj)) - Everyone’s boss is the CEO other than the CEO. The CEO’s boss is the market. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfjbp1k0961g9c75nvxh3dsg)) - → $1 to 1 billion: Coca Cola (cans of soda) → $10 to 100 million: Johnson & Johnson (household products) → $100 to 10 million: Blizzard (World of Warcraft games) → $1,000 to 1 million: Lenovo (laptops) → $10,000 to 100,000: Toyota (cars) → $100,000 to 10,000: Oracle (enterprise software) → $1,000,000 to 1,000: Countrywide (high-end mortgages) ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfjc3ff75891dgcd1p2a75eh)) - The best market size estimates are both surprising and convincing. To be surprising is the art of the presentation. To be convincing, you want to estimate your market size in at least two different ways. First, use Fermi estimates to determine the number of people who will buy your product (top-down market sizing). This requires general stats like 300 million Americans, 8 billion world population, 30 million US businesses, and domainspecific stats like 6 million annual pregnancies. Second, use SEC filings of comparable companies in the industry to get empirical revenue figures and sum these up (bottom-up market sizing). Bottom-up is generally more reliable. Be sure you are not drawing boundaries too big or optimistic. “If we get only 1% of China…” is a bad start. One of the most convincing things you can do with a bottoms-up estimate is to link or screenshot an invoice with a high price point. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfjcfqgg23z1dje1g40nq6nw)) - In theory, the ultimate market research is a table with 7 billion rows (one for each human), columns for their attributes (e.g., location, profession), and columns for each possible version of your product, with each entry showing the amount people will pay for those features. Of course, you can’t survey 7 billion people, but you can sample a few hundred. This gives you a framework for how to set up your product tiers and roadmap. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfjch9rbz37qa036tgf6bww1)) - If you are seriously considering starting a business, consider paying for a demographically targeted survey with 500 responses. It will save you money, time, and energy in the long run. Even spending $1,000 to seriously evaluate four ideas will be well worth it in time/energy savings. If you genuinely can’t afford this, ask ten to twenty potential customers how much they’d pay for different versions of your product or run a poll on social media. You will find early feedback on pricing and features (even biased feedback) superior to none at all. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfjcnhwjvr9aw0yd29xb4qsg)) - The 6 Ps are a useful checklist. Product—What are you selling? Person—To whom? Purpose—Why are they buying it? Pricing—At what price? Priority—Why now? Prestige—And why from you? ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfjcq41kknjtfneyp7c36rn1)) - A startup is a business built to grow extremely fast. Rapid growth requires using a new technology to invalidate the assumptions of incumbent politicians and businesses. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfjcswf6nyajybaebkctc6qc)) - An idea is not a mockup. A mockup is not a prototype. A prototype is not a program. A program is not a product. A product is not a business. And a business is not profits. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfjctwx8jbrbd3zj04khf26r)) - Startup engineering means getting something to work well enough for people to buy it. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfjczzy72hms60farad9v2ys)) - You can quantify the quality of a user interface by the number, type, and duration of user inputs required to achieve a result. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfjd28ysrcxqcb87d8qt1k8w)) - The Paladin model takes something that is extremely popular and tries to make it profitable. Elon Musk is taking popular, supported ideas like solar power and electric cars and trying to actually make them feasible. (One proof point of “popularity”: both these ideas were supported by tax credits.) Elon’s danger is not getting banned. His danger is going bankrupt. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfjdpes9x1pesgq0d0xvh9ab)) - But the companies annoy enough people that their ideas are not immediately popular in the same way. The Dark Knights are not going to go bankrupt because demand is so high, but they might get banned. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfjdp69m5097wcdazz1m72qj)) - Finding up-and-coming people is a very important component of hiring. Technology executive and investor Keith Rabois has a good saying: “Hire geniuses no one knows yet.” My version is: “Hire people who are hungry and can teach us something.” ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfjdsbhnaxhefphjx69apab4)) - This is the most challenging thing to do as an entrepreneur, but it’s also absolutely necessary: hire people who are better than you. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfje0335dxyndtztxw968mrd)) - Speaking of the course of the relationship, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman’s concept of the initial employer-employee compact as a “tour of duty” is useful because a company is not a family. A family is about unconditional love. That’s not how a company is. A good company works on conditional love—you have to deliver. On the other hand, a company shouldn’t be completely mercenary. Everybody has bad days. Everybody has a bad week at times, or sometimes even a bad month or more. These are our fellow co-workers, and we have mercy for their challenges, even if the customer doesn’t. The customer doesn’t care whether someone had a bad day at Coca-Cola’s bottling plant. They just think, Why is this bottle all crushed? I’m going to buy Pepsi. The customer isn’t acting out of malice. It’s just that the interface they’re seeing is not human. They see a crushed bottle. There’s a failure somewhere in the supply chain. So they just shrug and pick the other thing, right? The customer is genuinely merciless. You have to somehow buffer that for employees inside the company. I think the intermediate is this concept of the tour of duty: a pre-arranged, clear set of expectations about deliverables, timeline, and departure. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfje5qa1sd8jabryrk2tj80z)) - A founder’s role changes a lot as a company grows. An analogy from the sports world: 1–10 employees: player 10–100 employees: coach 100–1,000 employees: general manager 1,000+ employees: commissioner ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfjefxx2y8ks42pm8xzsbzq7)) - Politics arises when one person’s biggest win involves (or requires!) another person’s loss. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfjezx80qspke2m11f0f6pdv)) - More people, more differing incentive structures ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfjf0fqsn2pmqkepkxr0q9n2)) - Network defects are what I call the case when increasing size beyond a certain point decreases the value of the network. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfjf28nhh3tyrkva89vyykgd)) - Leaders should focus on creating, quantifying, and communicating alignment as much as possible. Doing so is complementary to daily management. Alignment is why people do things even without assigned to-dos. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfjf3tfwm74y6gbc27c6f3g4)) - Both the best and worst CEOs have this in common: the company could run without them. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfjf84k4ndbkyaf5scfa13ev)) - Before candidates join your company, have them write out what they would consider success, mediocrity, and failure: bull, base, and bear. Where do they want to be in a year or four years? ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfjf9nm7nvxqat780b0zafjs)) - Use the same technique for dividing up labor between a manager and an employee. Do a two-by-two table with four quadrants: What does the manager expect from themself? What does the manager expect from the employee? What does the employee expect from themself? What does the employee expect from the manager? ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfjyvnxes68gqp5apmvrhmdz)) - This type of table is so simple, but you should create one at every one-on-one, and you should do a one-on-one every week. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfjywzaeks0qvhrcve8hse2s)) - If you focus on growing users, pay close attention to churn. Pairing a second measure of quality with a metric of growth is very, very important. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfjz9v1xqwsf3s9e54qc3ryk)) - In terms of execution heuristics, perhaps the best is Peter Thiel’s “one thing.” Everyone in the company is responsible for one thing. Each person should at all times know what their one thing is, and everyone should know everyone else’s too. Marc Andreessen’s anti to-do list is also good: write down what you just did, and then cross it off. Even if you get off track, this gives you a sense of what you were working on and your progress. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfjzcxn98kf9cegnfgwghmrq)) - Doing things as fast as you can often means doing them one at a time. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfjzdqb7rjxc6m49crx84m3b)) - What I learned from Ramji is a skill or mode called “list, rank, iterate.” It’s a meta-algorithm, a simple but useful way to attack unstructured problems. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfjzpfqkc0gkkpah2a49a7zb)) - When starting a business, conventional wisdom says the idea is everything. People believe that with the right idea, bringing it to market and making a billion dollars is just a matter of details. This is how the general public thinks technological innovation happens. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfjzr2gyf2tdzgmhta9m9ers)) - The founder has to invest in a bureaucracy that impersonalizes the company and turns every employee into an interchangeable part. Otherwise, one person could quit and crash the company. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfjzwnkqkrkjabf8pw80cq1g)) - All the mental energy you use to elaborate your misery would be far better used trying to find the one seemingly impossible way out of your current mess. It’s best to spend zero time on what you could have done and all of your time on what you might do. Because in the end, nobody cares, just run your company. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfk04da7ycyqqra55xfm4aqr)) - Technology is multi-dimensional enough that there is usually a move available. If you’re smart enough and dedicated enough, you can find it. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfk056sb99m1vcvgc2fce00a)) - Economist and philosopher John Maynard Keynes said, “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” Meaning, if you don’t know what intellectual software you’re running, you’re running something subconsciously. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfk0cpfja0gqt68jncet34y2)) - Hard work is a competitive advantage. Even the belief that hard work is a competitive advantage is itself now a competitive advantage. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfk0yjem6yzet8jp33nx24b3)) - You can understand any mathematical concept in six ways: verbal, visual, algebraic, numerical, computational, and historical. 1. Verbal—explain in words 2. Visual—make a graph 3. Algebraic—write the equation 4. Numerical—do a numerical example 5. Computational—code a solver or algorithm 6. Historical—tell where it came from ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfk18k4w494yjwmcstnph2a0)) - A founder’s diligence is harder to determine than intelligence. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01hfk1ddencrd0wnkh39d90m91))