Mark Zuckerberg: “Developing superintelligence is now in sight.”

Great quote from Jensen on resilience here: "It’s pretty hard to discourage me, and if I believe in something, I’m just going to keep doing it until it’s done and we’re great at it. It’s hard to deter me. It’s hard to distract me. It’s hard to discourage me."

Just started using @perchdotapp the first reading app for the Internet—loving the streamlined content and fresh topics! Excited to see how it changes the way I consume and organize information. #Productivity #AI #ReadingApps

Just downloaded @perchdotapp. An app that turns your newsletters into an audible experience. I’ve been sucked into so many podcasts, so this will be a nice switch up.

Peter Thiel on working with people who have different political views Eric Weinstein was a Managing Director at Thiel Capital. Thiel is asked why he would hire someone so vocal about political ideas he doesn’t agree with (e.g. supporting Bernie Sanders). Thiel responds: “Well, I’m interested in ideas always… I think we need to find new ideas and new ways of approaching the world, and Eric is an absolutely first-rate heterodox thinker.” Thiel continues: “I think all of our politics are somewhat eclectic and complex. Eric is more on the left; I’m more on the right. But we’re both interested in ideas and figuring out how to make sense of our world. And that unites us.” Thiel is surprised at how unusual this is: “Most of my peers in Silicon Valley think the ideas are more set — we know all the right answers, and it’s inefficient or a waste of time to be exploring outside of that. But the substantive question you have to ask is, ‘Are the ideas right or should we have more explorations?’” He gives climate change as an example: “There’s the view that we know it’s happening and it’s a runaway problem. We can’t even pause to think about it because we know all these things, and we just have to focus all of our energy on solving it. If those things are true, then that might be reasonable. If they’re not entirely true — maybe it’s more methane than carbon dioxide, in which case eating steak is worse than driving a car — then we need to have much more of a debate.” Theil concludes: “The kind of question that’s very hard and that you have to make a judgement on is: ‘Do we more or less have the truth about everything?’ My view is that we’re really far off. But a lot of my peers think that we’re kind of at the end of history and have figured everything out. They think that weird and interesting ideas are just wrong and a waste of time. That’s their bias. Mine’s the opposite.” Video source: @RubinReport (2018)

Paul Graham on why starting with a “small, intense fire" is the key to startup growth “You’ve got to find people who want what you’re making A LOT. And that's necessarily going to be a small number at first. But that's ok. That’s how these giant things get started… You don’t have to do any better than Apple and Facebook.” Apple started by selling just 500 Apple I computers. Today it’s the largest company in the world. "You have to know who those first users are and how you're going to get them. Then you're going to sit down and just have a party with those first few users and focus entirely on them and making them super super happy." He gives another example of a startup in a Y Combinator batch with a beta group of just one user: Sam Altman. This startup was building a new mobile email client and their goal was to just make Sam happy. Sam uses email a lot on the go and knows all of the other email client options, so he is sufficiently demanding. If they can build a product that makes Sam happy, odds are it will make lots of other people happy too. "One of the things we tell startups in these extreme cases where they can make just one user happy is to act like a consultant. Act like Sam has hired you to make an email app just for him. All you have to do is make Sam happy--it can say 'Sam Altman' at the top of the screen. That's ok! Just so long as Sam would feel bummed if you stopped working on it. That's the test." Video source: @twistartups @Jason (2014)

Peter Thiel tells the founding story of PayPal “When you start one of these companies, it’s typically not the case that you get the whole idea fully formed instantaneously,” Thiel begins. “There was this incredible internet boom going on in Silicon Valley in the late 1990s. It felt like there was this open frontier or gold rush, and one of the natural things to look at was finance.” At the time, Thiel was very interested in the idea of creating new forms of money. “There’s always something super mysterious, powerful, and important about money,” He explains. “And we had this general idea to do something with security, money, and payments very early on in the founding of the company. Then you iterate a lot on how to get the idea out.” Thiel continues: “The critical question for any consumer internet product is not what the idea is, but ‘how do you get distribution?’ There had been a lot of internet payments companies that had already started and failed by 1998… They would’ve worked if everybody used them, but you could never get the first person to start. So the challenge was how to make it go viral and how to get something to work where it’s good for the first person, the 10th person, and the 100th person. Once you have millions of people, you have a network and network effects. That was sort of the chicken and egg problem we wanted to solve.” Eventually the team stumbled on the idea of linking money with email: “There were already 300 million people in 1999 that had email accounts. So if you could send money to an email address… you didn’t need both counterparts to a transaction to be part of the PayPal network. Only the sender could be part of it, and then the recipient would sign up as they took money out. We started with the 24 people in our office, and they sent money to friends and other people. Then we gave these referral bonuses of $10 if you got someone to sign up, and it just grew exponentially. It grew about 7-10% compounding daily… We had 1,000 people in mid-November of 1999. By the end of December it was 12,000. By February 3, 2000, it was 100,000. By mid-April 2000, it was up to a million.” The other critical component of PayPal’s success was starting with customers who had an intense need and minimal downside risk: “One of the natural places that it started was on the eBay auction site where you had small dollar transactions of maybe $40 as the typical amount. If you send a check across the country, that’s a 10 day delay. It’s slow, and most people aren’t set up to process credit cards.” Thiel reflects on what it felt like to go from 1,000 users to 1 million in just a few months: “[It felt like] you were at the forefront of some sort of revolutionary thing. It’s incredibly exciting and incredibly scary. It was like ‘we’re going to take over the world’ or ‘we’re all going to die’ and you move between those two several times a day.” Fraud was a major challenge the company had to solve — especially because making a product hard to defraud is usually at odds with making it easy to use. Thiel had an interesting perspective of operating in strange regulatory zone with this new form of moving money: “I often thought of it at the time that we were in a race between technology and politics. The politicians didn’t like us, but if we got the PayPal network to be big enough, it would sort of overwhelm the regulators and they’d have to accept it as a fait accompli… One of the execs at PayPal said we needed to hire a whole bunch of lawyers to tell us what we can or can’t do, and we said no we’re not going to hire them. They’ll just tell us what we can’t do. We have to just go ahead and not hire the lawyers and just do it.” Video source: @RubinReport (2018)

Patrick Collison on thinking for yourself: "Nobody is going to teach you to think for yourself. A large fraction of what people around you believe is mistaken. Internalize this and practice coming up with your own worldview. The correlation between it and those around you shouldn't be too strong unless you think you were especially lucky in your initial conditions."

"Advice I'd Give Past Me" by Patrick Collison

Citadel founder Ken Griffin: “Every CEO is a salesperson” When Citadel founder Ken Griffin was getting started, his mentor offered Ken anything he wanted from his office. Ken took a $10 plaque off the wall that said, “If we’re all going to eat, someone’s got to sell.” Ken explains why: “That’s the story of being an entrepreneur… Every CEO is a salesperson. They have to sell a venture capital firm. They have to sell a customer. They have to sell an employee… You are always selling. And if you don’t like to sell, here’s my advice: get over it! I had no interest in selling when I was 20 years old.” Ken recalls traveling to Switzerland to raise capital for Citadel in the early day and how demoralizing his two scheduled meetings were. The first person thought he was meeting with a different person who also had the last name Griffin and promptly walked out. The second person said to Ken, “It’s so sad that such a bright young man picked the wrong career.” Ken reflects, “You just have to play through these moments.” Today Citadel is considered one of the most successful hedge funds in history, having generated ~$74 billion in net gains since inception. Video source: @YaleSOM (2023)