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Studying the world's best founders and sharing what I learn.

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Anya Rossi

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.Sam Altman on why the best founders never run out of ideas: "You can give a founder an idea and they can start a company. The problem is they need to come up with new ideas for a company basically every week. Crazy new ideas, big changes, all the time. We tried an experiment once at YC where we funded 20 teams of strong founders who didn't have ideas but were otherwise really good. They all failed. And what we learned is that the good founders are the people who have ideas all the time. There's an intelligence component to this, a creativity component, an ability to think independent thoughts. But whatever you want to call it, this particular kind of intelligence that leads to seeing problems in different ways and thinking of ideas that don't yet exist but should, you've got to have that in a founder."

.Sam Altman on why the best founders never run out of ideas: "You can give a founder an idea and they can start a company. The problem is they need to come up with new ideas for a company basically every week. Crazy new ideas, big changes, all the time. We tried an experiment once at YC where we funded 20 teams of strong founders who didn't have ideas but were otherwise really good. They all failed. And what we learned is that the good founders are the people who have ideas all the time. There's an intelligence component to this, a creativity component, an ability to think independent thoughts. But whatever you want to call it, this particular kind of intelligence that leads to seeing problems in different ways and thinking of ideas that don't yet exist but should, you've got to have that in a founder."

83,219 views • 7 days ago

.Palmer Luckey on how to build a following as a founder: "If you say something where you caveat it and you hedge it and you basically end up saying something that most people would agree with, you might as well have said nothing at all. You're not going to build a following of people who say, 'Man, I just love Palmer's right-down-the-middle, very hedged takes that everyone agrees with.' If you're just restating common sentiment, it's not going to get you anywhere. So make sure that when you're saying something, you're saying something. Make sure you're trying to affect change — maybe not in everybody, but in some people. If you make some people love what you're saying and some people hate what you're saying, that's a lot better than having everybody lukewarm agree with you about things everyone already agrees with. Don't waste your time communicating about the things everyone already agrees with you on."

.Palmer Luckey on how to build a following as a founder: "If you say something where you caveat it and you hedge it and you basically end up saying something that most people would agree with, you might as well have said nothing at all. You're not going to build a following of people who say, 'Man, I just love Palmer's right-down-the-middle, very hedged takes that everyone agrees with.' If you're just restating common sentiment, it's not going to get you anywhere. So make sure that when you're saying something, you're saying something. Make sure you're trying to affect change — maybe not in everybody, but in some people. If you make some people love what you're saying and some people hate what you're saying, that's a lot better than having everybody lukewarm agree with you about things everyone already agrees with. Don't waste your time communicating about the things everyone already agrees with you on."

47,711 views • 29 days ago

Peter Thiel on the advice all young people need to hear: "My bias was that education was a substitute for thinking about your future. What are you going to do with your future? I don't know. I'll get an undergraduate degree. What are you going to do once you have that? I don't know. I'll get a graduate degree ... And so when we think of our lives as just adding these line items on a resume, I think that's actually not the best way to go about it."

Peter Thiel on the advice all young people need to hear: "My bias was that education was a substitute for thinking about your future. What are you going to do with your future? I don't know. I'll get an undergraduate degree. What are you going to do once you have that? I don't know. I'll get a graduate degree ... And so when we think of our lives as just adding these line items on a resume, I think that's actually not the best way to go about it."

48,115 views • 2 months ago

7 minutes of Steve Jobs’ most timeless advice:

7 minutes of Steve Jobs’ most timeless advice:

11,665 views • 24 days ago

Peter Thiel on why the best startups sound boring at first: "Healthcare IT, education software — somewhat overrated. SaaS software, pretty badly overrated. If you hear the words 'big data,' 'cloud computing,' you need to run away as fast as you possibly can. You need to just think fraud and run away. These buzzwords, they're a tell — like in poker — that the company's bluffing, and that it's undifferentiated, because we've heard the buzzwords before. Conversely, the things that are underrated are the ones where there are no buzzwords, which don't actually fit into any pre-existing categories. Google would have been described as a search engine in 1998 — people would have said, why do we need another search engine, we already have 20. If you described Facebook as a social network circa 2004, that's a misleading categorization. People aren't interested in networking in the abstract; they're interested in real identity. Real identity was the key innovation Facebook had."

Peter Thiel on why the best startups sound boring at first: "Healthcare IT, education software — somewhat overrated. SaaS software, pretty badly overrated. If you hear the words 'big data,' 'cloud computing,' you need to run away as fast as you possibly can. You need to just think fraud and run away. These buzzwords, they're a tell — like in poker — that the company's bluffing, and that it's undifferentiated, because we've heard the buzzwords before. Conversely, the things that are underrated are the ones where there are no buzzwords, which don't actually fit into any pre-existing categories. Google would have been described as a search engine in 1998 — people would have said, why do we need another search engine, we already have 20. If you described Facebook as a social network circa 2004, that's a misleading categorization. People aren't interested in networking in the abstract; they're interested in real identity. Real identity was the key innovation Facebook had."

16,082 views • 1 month ago

Naval Ravikant on why hard work isn't linear: "We like to view the world as linear: I'm gonna put in eight hours of work, I'm gonna get back eight hours of output. It doesn't work that way. A guy running the corner grocery store is working just as hard or harder than you and me — how much output is he getting? What you do, who you do it with, and how you do it is way more important than how hard you work. Output is nonlinear, based on the quality of the work that you put in."

Naval Ravikant on why hard work isn't linear: "We like to view the world as linear: I'm gonna put in eight hours of work, I'm gonna get back eight hours of output. It doesn't work that way. A guy running the corner grocery store is working just as hard or harder than you and me — how much output is he getting? What you do, who you do it with, and how you do it is way more important than how hard you work. Output is nonlinear, based on the quality of the work that you put in."

19,189 views • 3 months ago

Jeff Bezos on the difference between your gifts and your choices — and the one that actually defines you: "It's the choices that define us, not our gifts ... You can never be proud of your gifts because they're gifts. They were given to you ... you can only be proud, really, of your choices, because those are the things that you are acting on ... you can choose a life of ease and comfort, or you can choose a life of service and adventure. And when you're eighty, which one of those things do you think you're gonna be more proud of?"

Jeff Bezos on the difference between your gifts and your choices — and the one that actually defines you: "It's the choices that define us, not our gifts ... You can never be proud of your gifts because they're gifts. They were given to you ... you can only be proud, really, of your choices, because those are the things that you are acting on ... you can choose a life of ease and comfort, or you can choose a life of service and adventure. And when you're eighty, which one of those things do you think you're gonna be more proud of?"

10,728 views • 2 months ago

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