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Peter Thiel's advice to early-stage startups: "One basic frame is that if you're starting a company, you always start small. So how do you get to monopoly when you're small? Answer, you start with a very small market. And the conventional business thing is always you want to go...

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Founder Mode

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39,978 views • 8 months ago •via X (Twitter)

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16 Comments

Deva.me's profile picture
Deva.me8 months ago

Winning early isn’t about size, it’s about clarity. Small, well-defined markets let you learn fast and compound before competition even notices.

Ashish | The Founders' Stack's profile picture
Ashish | The Founders' Stack8 months ago

The 'Big Fish, Small Pond' strategy is undefeated. If you start in a massive market, you are noise. You are fighting for 0.001% market share. If you start in a tiny market, you can be the Signal. You can own 80% and dictate the terms. Monopoly isn't just the goal at the end; it's the mechanism you need at the beginning.

Saish More's profile picture
Saish More8 months ago

This is such an underrated point. “Big market” sounds exciting on slides, but in reality you’re just a tiny slice fighting invisible competitors. Winning something small and concrete first feels way more honest.

Osama Ragab's profile picture
Osama Ragab8 months ago

If your market is 'trillions of dollars,' your chance of a monopoly is zero. The goal isn't to be a small player in a big pond. it's to be the only player in a tiny pond until you’re big enough to bring the water with you.

Jeni Mayorskaya's profile picture
Jeni Mayorskaya8 months ago

There is an opposite path. You start in a very large market, with very ambitious goal and you partner with parties that win with your growth and grand ambition.

Gregor's profile picture
Gregor8 months ago

But starting with a small market isn't always a guarantee of monopoly, as it often leads to a perpetual struggle for market share and limited scalability.

Finnian's profile picture
Finnian8 months ago

Sharp reminder on starting small markets. The framing makes the monopoly path feel practical. What is your favorite recent example of a tiny market that scaled cleanly?

Nguyễn Đức Hạnh Felix's profile picture
Nguyễn Đức Hạnh Felix8 months ago

Yes

AfricaClimateResilience's profile picture
AfricaClimateResilience8 months ago

Reminds of this video I saw recently emphasizing how hard startup life is…they say it’s just suffering on top of suffering…sounds really familiar.

Kevin Brown's profile picture
Kevin Brown8 months ago

This is right about entry, not ambition. Big markets don’t start crowded they become crowded. The winners usually start by owning a tiny wedge, then expand outward once they control how users think and behave.

Aniket Thapa's profile picture
Aniket Thapa8 months ago

This is why consistency without intent burns people out. Direction matters more than frequency.

carefree_wanderer's profile picture
carefree_wanderer8 months ago

@grok source video on YouTube ?

second_order's profile picture
second_order8 months ago

@grok is starting small always better If not then is big market better How much is then down to luck And how much for thiel was it luck and now we listen to him like sheeps - thinking he has any hacks and tricks

Robert's profile picture
Robert8 months ago

Wise

Aparna Bisen Chauhan's profile picture
Aparna Bisen Chauhan8 months ago

For a startup scale is a distraction if you haven't first mastered the niche. Excellence isn't about being everywhere; it’s about being undeniable where you are.

Scott D. Witt's profile picture
Scott D. Witt8 months ago

another example of FounderMode re-discovering (and rebranding) timeless concepts? This is basic #MarketStrategy: You grow into a big business by progressively adding new pairs of customers/products. Avoiding head-to head-competition was described 2500 yrs ago by Sun Tzu. 1/

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Q: Is it better to target a small market or a large one? In the clip below, Peter Thiel (billionaire venture capitalist and co-founder of PayPal and Palantir) describes his framework for evaluating markets: “It’s always a big mistake going after a giant market on day 1. That’s typically evidence that you haven’t defined the categories correctly, and there’s going to be too much competition.” He continues: “Almost all of the successful companies in Silicon Valley had some model of starting with small markets and expanding.” Amazon started with books eBay started with Pez dispensers and Beanie Babies PayPal started with power-sellers on eBay Facebook started with Harvard “What’s very counterintuitive about many of these companies is that they often start with markets so small that most people don’t think they’re valuable at all.” The opposite of this is companies that start out targeting really big markets, and he used clean tech companies in 2005-2008 trying to capture a small percentage of a trillion-dollar market as an example. “Once you’re a minnow in a vast ocean, that’s not a good place to be. It means you have tons of competitors, and you don’t even know who all of the competitors are.” As Thiel puts it: “You want to be a one-of-a-kind company where it’s the only one in a small ecosystem… large existing markets typically mean you have tons of competition and it’s very hard to differentiate.” You can then expand concentrically from there. Follow Startup Archive for more tactical startup advice!

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Naval Ravikant’s checklist for starting a company “The most important thing is there are no formulas. At the end of the day, you have to do what you love, and you have to do it even though people tell you it’ll never work. But that being said, if there was a formula [for starting a company], I would put it something like this.” Naval started seven companies before AngelList and this is the checklist he recommends running through before starting a startup: 1. Pick a great cofounder. This is most important: “You can do a company on your own, but it’s like you can raise a child on your own, but you probably shouldn’t. You need someone who’s going to be there with you.” This has it’s own checklist. Your cofounder should be: a. Very high intelligence (”hopefully they make you feel dumb, or they’re not smart enough”) b. Very high energy (”They should be extremely hardworking. A founder is someone who never has to be motivated. You should not have to be telling them to do their job.”) c. Very high integrity. (”a smart, hardworking crook who’s going to cheat you is the worst kind of person to be paired up with.”) 2. Pick a very large market. “Notice I don’t talk about the idea. I think ideas are almost irrelevant… The more important thing is that you pick a large space that you’re knowledgeable and passionate about. And then you will figure out what the right thing to do within that space is.” You want to be able to say to investors: “This is a space where there’s a huge market. I’m really knowledgeable and passionate about it. Here’s the great person that I have doing it with me. And here’s the minimum viable product that we have built. That will show that we can test in the marketplace… You iterate until you get to product/market fit… And then you go and you raise money from people you trust. And you use that money to scale.”

Startup Archive

36,050 views • 1 year ago

Pavel Durov on why he hasn't had depression in 20 years: "I normally never have depression. I don't remember having depression in the last 20 years, at least maybe when I was a teenager." Pavel's approach to difficult emotions is completely counterintuitive. As he puts it: "I'm a human being like everybody else. I do get to experience emotions and some of them are not very pleasant. But I believe that it's the responsibility of every one of us to cope with these emotions and to learn to work through them." On what creates depression: "Self-discipline is particularly important because without it, how can you overcome this seemingly endless loop of negativity or despair that ultimately leads to depression for some people?" His method: "One of the reasons I don't have depression is I start doing things. I identify the problem, I can see a solution, and I start executing the strategy. If you are stuck in this loop of being worried about something, nothing's ever going to change." The mistake people make: "People often make this mistake thinking 'Oh, I should just have some rest and then regain energy.' This is not how it works. You gain energy by doing something. So you start doing something, then it happens. You feel motivated, you feel inspired, and then ultimately you do something else a little bit more." He continues: "The whole point is to do first and then feel, not feel and then do. Going to the gym is a good example. There are many days when you don't want to start working out. But you have to overcome this initial reluctance and then you get to a point that you enjoy it and you think 'Oh my god, it was such a good idea to come to gym today.'" Action creates energy, not the other way around.
2:23

Pavel Durov on why he hasn't had depression in 20 years: "I normally never have depression. I don't remember having depression in the last 20 years, at least maybe when I was a teenager." Pavel's approach to difficult emotions is completely counterintuitive. As he puts it: "I'm a human being like everybody else. I do get to experience emotions and some of them are not very pleasant. But I believe that it's the responsibility of every one of us to cope with these emotions and to learn to work through them." On what creates depression: "Self-discipline is particularly important because without it, how can you overcome this seemingly endless loop of negativity or despair that ultimately leads to depression for some people?" His method: "One of the reasons I don't have depression is I start doing things. I identify the problem, I can see a solution, and I start executing the strategy. If you are stuck in this loop of being worried about something, nothing's ever going to change." The mistake people make: "People often make this mistake thinking 'Oh, I should just have some rest and then regain energy.' This is not how it works. You gain energy by doing something. So you start doing something, then it happens. You feel motivated, you feel inspired, and then ultimately you do something else a little bit more." He continues: "The whole point is to do first and then feel, not feel and then do. Going to the gym is a good example. There are many days when you don't want to start working out. But you have to overcome this initial reluctance and then you get to a point that you enjoy it and you think 'Oh my god, it was such a good idea to come to gym today.'" Action creates energy, not the other way around.

Jaynit

547,702 views • 8 months ago

Naval Ravikant on why it's 10,000 iterations, not 10,000 hours: "The only true test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life. And there are two parts to that: one is getting what you want, so you know how to get it. And the second is wanting the right things, knowing what to want in the first place." Naval believes most people are proceeding unconsciously through life. As he puts it: "If you're not careful you can end up in a place in life not only that you don't want to be, but one that you didn't even mean to get to. Usually, people end up there because they are going on autopilot with societal expectations or people's expectations. Out of guilt or mimetic desire, our desires are picked up from other people." On how little time we spend deciding: "We run on these four-year cycles. You go join a startup, you vest your stock over four years. College you go for four years, high school you go for four years. These are very long cycles, the amount of time we spend deciding what to do and who to do it with? Very short. Very, very short." He continues: "We spend three months deciding, one month deciding on a job where we're going to be for 10 years or 5 years. People decide frivolously which city to live in and that's going to decide who their friends are, what their jobs are, their opportunity, their weather, their food supply, their air supply, quality of life. It's such an important decision but people spend so little time thinking it through." His rule: "I would argue that if you're making a four-year decision, spend a year thinking it through. Like really thinking it. 25% of the time." On the secretary theorem: "The optimal time to search is somewhere around a third of the way through. You take the best person you've worked with and try to find someone that good or better. By the time you've got about a third of the way through, you have seen enough that you now have a sense of what the bar is. Then anybody who meets or exceeds that bar is good enough." But here's the catch: "It's actually not time-based; it's not based on one-third of the time, it's iteration-based. The number of candidates, the number of shots you took on goal. So you want to have lots and lots of iterations. You need to bail out quickly, and you need to be decisive quickly." On failed relationships: "If you go back and you look through failed relationships, probably the biggest regret will be staying in the relationship after you knew it was over. The moment you knew it wasn't going to work out, you should have moved on." His reframe of Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours: "I would say it's actually 10,000 iterations to Mastery. It's not actually 10,000; it's some unknown number, but it's about the number of iterations that drives a learning curve. Iteration is not repetition—repetition is doing the same thing over and over. Iteration is modifying it with a learning and then doing another version of it. That's error correction." On modern society: "Modern society is far more forgiving of failure. Once you find the one business you're meant to plow into and compound returns, it's okay if you had 50 small failed ventures or 50 small failed job interviews. The number of failures doesn't matter." His approach: "You want to be skeptical about specific things—every specific opportunity is probably a fail. But you want to be optimistic in the general. Something in here is going to work out. You want to investigate and explore very, very quickly until you find the match. And then you have to be willing to go all in." On labels: "Labels like pessimist, optimist, cynic, introvert, extrovert, these are very self-limiting. Don't define yourself by trauma or PTSD because then you lock it into your identity and you're just going to loop on it. It's better to stay flexible because reality is always changing and you have to be able to adapt to it." Spend a year deciding. Take 10,000 iterations. Then go all in.
10:05

Naval Ravikant on why it's 10,000 iterations, not 10,000 hours: "The only true test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life. And there are two parts to that: one is getting what you want, so you know how to get it. And the second is wanting the right things, knowing what to want in the first place." Naval believes most people are proceeding unconsciously through life. As he puts it: "If you're not careful you can end up in a place in life not only that you don't want to be, but one that you didn't even mean to get to. Usually, people end up there because they are going on autopilot with societal expectations or people's expectations. Out of guilt or mimetic desire, our desires are picked up from other people." On how little time we spend deciding: "We run on these four-year cycles. You go join a startup, you vest your stock over four years. College you go for four years, high school you go for four years. These are very long cycles, the amount of time we spend deciding what to do and who to do it with? Very short. Very, very short." He continues: "We spend three months deciding, one month deciding on a job where we're going to be for 10 years or 5 years. People decide frivolously which city to live in and that's going to decide who their friends are, what their jobs are, their opportunity, their weather, their food supply, their air supply, quality of life. It's such an important decision but people spend so little time thinking it through." His rule: "I would argue that if you're making a four-year decision, spend a year thinking it through. Like really thinking it. 25% of the time." On the secretary theorem: "The optimal time to search is somewhere around a third of the way through. You take the best person you've worked with and try to find someone that good or better. By the time you've got about a third of the way through, you have seen enough that you now have a sense of what the bar is. Then anybody who meets or exceeds that bar is good enough." But here's the catch: "It's actually not time-based; it's not based on one-third of the time, it's iteration-based. The number of candidates, the number of shots you took on goal. So you want to have lots and lots of iterations. You need to bail out quickly, and you need to be decisive quickly." On failed relationships: "If you go back and you look through failed relationships, probably the biggest regret will be staying in the relationship after you knew it was over. The moment you knew it wasn't going to work out, you should have moved on." His reframe of Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours: "I would say it's actually 10,000 iterations to Mastery. It's not actually 10,000; it's some unknown number, but it's about the number of iterations that drives a learning curve. Iteration is not repetition—repetition is doing the same thing over and over. Iteration is modifying it with a learning and then doing another version of it. That's error correction." On modern society: "Modern society is far more forgiving of failure. Once you find the one business you're meant to plow into and compound returns, it's okay if you had 50 small failed ventures or 50 small failed job interviews. The number of failures doesn't matter." His approach: "You want to be skeptical about specific things—every specific opportunity is probably a fail. But you want to be optimistic in the general. Something in here is going to work out. You want to investigate and explore very, very quickly until you find the match. And then you have to be willing to go all in." On labels: "Labels like pessimist, optimist, cynic, introvert, extrovert, these are very self-limiting. Don't define yourself by trauma or PTSD because then you lock it into your identity and you're just going to loop on it. It's better to stay flexible because reality is always changing and you have to be able to adapt to it." Spend a year deciding. Take 10,000 iterations. Then go all in.

Jaynit

69,475 views • 8 months ago

Sam Altman: “One of the few arbitrage opportunities left in the market is time” “I don’t think you can beat the market in a lot of ways, but the one way I do is by making a long-term commitment to something. My new belief on how long I should hold stock in the best companies I invest in is forever. And I think in a world where people are increasingly focused on the tick and the quarterly earnings cycle, you should try to go in the other direction. This is a great way to generate value and wealth.” Sam continues: “And so I think that when you’re thinking about a startup, it’s really worthwhile to think about something you’re willing to make a very long-term commitment to because that is where the current void in the market is. You get paid as a founder for the wealth you create for other people… The best companies just create massive amounts of value for the world, and then they capture some of that for themselves. But they capture far less than they create, and they do it over a very long period of time. So if you’re going to be one of those companies, I think you want to make a super long-term commitment to yourself and others that are going to work on it with you… It is worth waiting because you will make far more money over the long term by doing this company really well than a bunch of short term things along the way.” Video source: Y Combinator (2016)
1:44

Sam Altman: “One of the few arbitrage opportunities left in the market is time” “I don’t think you can beat the market in a lot of ways, but the one way I do is by making a long-term commitment to something. My new belief on how long I should hold stock in the best companies I invest in is forever. And I think in a world where people are increasingly focused on the tick and the quarterly earnings cycle, you should try to go in the other direction. This is a great way to generate value and wealth.” Sam continues: “And so I think that when you’re thinking about a startup, it’s really worthwhile to think about something you’re willing to make a very long-term commitment to because that is where the current void in the market is. You get paid as a founder for the wealth you create for other people… The best companies just create massive amounts of value for the world, and then they capture some of that for themselves. But they capture far less than they create, and they do it over a very long period of time. So if you’re going to be one of those companies, I think you want to make a super long-term commitment to yourself and others that are going to work on it with you… It is worth waiting because you will make far more money over the long term by doing this company really well than a bunch of short term things along the way.” Video source: Y Combinator (2016)

Startup Archive

49,283 views • 1 year ago

Jeff Bezos on what founders need to understand about brands “I think our most important piece of intellectual property is our brand name,” Jeff Bezos says of Amazon. “And I think this is very important for anybody who is going to start a company or market an invention to understand — brands for companies are like reputations for people. Reputations are hard earned and easily lost.” Jeff continues: “We’ve worked very hard to earn trust. You can’t ask for trust. You have to do it the hard way, one step at a time. You make a promise, and then you fulfill that promise. You say ‘We’ll deliver this to you tomorrow,’ and then you actually deliver it tomorrow. And if you do that over and over again, then ultimately you can instill your company’s name with a reputation. Sometimes people talk about brands in this very amorphous way, but for me, I like to think of it as a person — what is the reputation that that person has and how have they earned that reputation?”
1:09

Jeff Bezos on what founders need to understand about brands “I think our most important piece of intellectual property is our brand name,” Jeff Bezos says of Amazon. “And I think this is very important for anybody who is going to start a company or market an invention to understand — brands for companies are like reputations for people. Reputations are hard earned and easily lost.” Jeff continues: “We’ve worked very hard to earn trust. You can’t ask for trust. You have to do it the hard way, one step at a time. You make a promise, and then you fulfill that promise. You say ‘We’ll deliver this to you tomorrow,’ and then you actually deliver it tomorrow. And if you do that over and over again, then ultimately you can instill your company’s name with a reputation. Sometimes people talk about brands in this very amorphous way, but for me, I like to think of it as a person — what is the reputation that that person has and how have they earned that reputation?”

Startup Archive

12,545 views • 8 months ago

Sam Altman explains why “how big is your market?” is a terrible question for investors to ask “The question that investors usually ask is: ‘How big is your market?’ I think this is a terrible question. You would never ask a startup, ‘How big is your current revenue?’ and make your investment decision based off of that. You’d want to know how it was going to grow. It’s the same thing for markets.” Sam continues: “The markets that are best for startups are markets that are small today and going to grow explosively over the next 10 years.” The other factor Sam has found to be predictive of startup success is whether or not the startup has already captured a significant part of some small market: “Airbnb by the end of YC had captured a significant amount of pre-existing apartment renters in New York City. Stripe had captured nearly 100% of YC companies in their current batch that wanted to process payments. We look for something like that, but you don’t always see it.” Video source: Khosla Ventures (2021)
0:52

Sam Altman explains why “how big is your market?” is a terrible question for investors to ask “The question that investors usually ask is: ‘How big is your market?’ I think this is a terrible question. You would never ask a startup, ‘How big is your current revenue?’ and make your investment decision based off of that. You’d want to know how it was going to grow. It’s the same thing for markets.” Sam continues: “The markets that are best for startups are markets that are small today and going to grow explosively over the next 10 years.” The other factor Sam has found to be predictive of startup success is whether or not the startup has already captured a significant part of some small market: “Airbnb by the end of YC had captured a significant amount of pre-existing apartment renters in New York City. Stripe had captured nearly 100% of YC companies in their current batch that wanted to process payments. We look for something like that, but you don’t always see it.” Video source: Khosla Ventures (2021)

Startup Archive

154,517 views • 10 months ago

Can companies responsibly build a business model around Starship? .Eric Romo, President & COO of Impulse Space doesn't think so. "Why would you (SpaceX) sell a thing you don’t have enough of for yourself, at a bargain-basement price, to your competitors? The logic just doesn’t hold anywhere there. And it’s just sort of the wishful thinking of, “Well, because I want it,” that these companies say they’re going to get this at a low price. And the reality is, in the market, this is the same thing that happened with Falcon 9."
3:31

Can companies responsibly build a business model around Starship? .Eric Romo, President & COO of Impulse Space doesn't think so. "Why would you (SpaceX) sell a thing you don’t have enough of for yourself, at a bargain-basement price, to your competitors? The logic just doesn’t hold anywhere there. And it’s just sort of the wishful thinking of, “Well, because I want it,” that these companies say they’re going to get this at a low price. And the reality is, in the market, this is the same thing that happened with Falcon 9."

Mo Islam

57,699 views • 2 months ago

Qullamaggie on Feeling Like a Genius, It's The Market Not You “A melt-up market is when everything is going straight up. And it becomes too easy to make money. You start feeling like a genius — that’s a melt-up market. Trust me, you are not a genius. None of you. It’s the market, not you. No, it’s true. It’s true. Most of my money has come from periods when the market is really good. You just have to line your trading with a period where the market is really good. You know, you gotta be aggressive when the market is really good. Your job is to identify good setups in a good market — and then let the market take care of the rest. Too many people think they are the shit just because they’re making a lot of money. But that’s not really true. It’s the market, not you.”
0:56

Qullamaggie on Feeling Like a Genius, It's The Market Not You “A melt-up market is when everything is going straight up. And it becomes too easy to make money. You start feeling like a genius — that’s a melt-up market. Trust me, you are not a genius. None of you. It’s the market, not you. No, it’s true. It’s true. Most of my money has come from periods when the market is really good. You just have to line your trading with a period where the market is really good. You know, you gotta be aggressive when the market is really good. Your job is to identify good setups in a good market — and then let the market take care of the rest. Too many people think they are the shit just because they’re making a lot of money. But that’s not really true. It’s the market, not you.”

Lone

14,021 views • 4 months ago

Avichal Garg on his $5-10M $BTC thesis "The way we've always thought about it is, this is digital gold. It's a fixed supply asset, it's easy to transport, it's easy to subdivide, it's a global liquid market." "People in the United States sometimes, or people in the west sometimes, forget how easy it is for us to acquire gold. You can go to the store and buy some, or you can get some gold futures. In a lot of the world, you can't get gold that easily. And people want it, people want dollars and gold." "So I tend to think as many people will have BTC as hold gold. If you just look at it from a market cap perspective, if BTC and gold get to a similar market cap, you're talking well in excess of a million dollars per BTC." "One of the lessons of the internet is, when you put things on a phone, you get addressable market expansion. Back in the day people used to talk about, how could Uber possibly be worth more than $10 billion, because the entire taxi industry is only worth $10 billion. Without realizing that when you put Uber on one of these things, all of a sudden 10x as many people can do it." "If you went back 15 years and told your friends there are gonna be 10 companies worth more than a trillion dollars, nobody would have believed you. So I don't think it's crazy that BTC ends up being bigger than gold in the fullness of time."
2:54

Avichal Garg on his $5-10M $BTC thesis "The way we've always thought about it is, this is digital gold. It's a fixed supply asset, it's easy to transport, it's easy to subdivide, it's a global liquid market." "People in the United States sometimes, or people in the west sometimes, forget how easy it is for us to acquire gold. You can go to the store and buy some, or you can get some gold futures. In a lot of the world, you can't get gold that easily. And people want it, people want dollars and gold." "So I tend to think as many people will have BTC as hold gold. If you just look at it from a market cap perspective, if BTC and gold get to a similar market cap, you're talking well in excess of a million dollars per BTC." "One of the lessons of the internet is, when you put things on a phone, you get addressable market expansion. Back in the day people used to talk about, how could Uber possibly be worth more than $10 billion, because the entire taxi industry is only worth $10 billion. Without realizing that when you put Uber on one of these things, all of a sudden 10x as many people can do it." "If you went back 15 years and told your friends there are gonna be 10 companies worth more than a trillion dollars, nobody would have believed you. So I don't think it's crazy that BTC ends up being bigger than gold in the fullness of time."

The Wolf Of All Streets

31,248 views • 7 days ago

"Courage is far shorter in supply than genius." - Peter Thiel "One of the challenges in writing a book about entrepreneurship or teaching a class on this is that there is sort of no formula. And I think science always starts with a number two. It starts with experiments you can repeat, things you can do over and over again. But there's sort of a sense in which every moment in the history of business, every moment in the history of technology happens only once. The next Mark Zuckerberg will not be starting a social networking company. The next Larry Page will not start a search engine. The next Bill Gates will not be starting an operating system. And so if you are trying to copy these people, you're in some sense not learning from them. And so I think one of the really big challenges in teaching or writing about entrepreneurship is what can you say about being an entrepreneur at all when the key thing is always to do something new, different, that's not precisely been done before. And so the point of departure I start with in Zero to One is a somewhat indirect approach by asking a series of contrarian questions. The business question is, what great company is nobody starting? The more intellectual version of this question is, tell me something true that very few people agree with you on. And this is a fantastic interview question. It turns out to be quite a hard question, even when people can read on the internet that you ask of everybody who comes in the door, it still is a hard question. It's one of those unusual questions where if you know it's on the test, it's still hard. And it's hard not just because we sort of think that new things require brilliance or something like that, but because it's socially difficult. If I ask you that question, if you tell me something like the education system is screwed up or our political system doesn't work very well, those are true answers, but they're not actually good answers because all of us already know them to be true. The good answers are ones that are somehow uncomfortable that the person interviewing you does not actually want to hear. And I think we live in this world where courage is in far shorter supply than genius. And so it is sort of this, it is in a sense this problem of political correctness properly understood, is this very deep, very, very broad sort of a problem."
2:28

"Courage is far shorter in supply than genius." - Peter Thiel "One of the challenges in writing a book about entrepreneurship or teaching a class on this is that there is sort of no formula. And I think science always starts with a number two. It starts with experiments you can repeat, things you can do over and over again. But there's sort of a sense in which every moment in the history of business, every moment in the history of technology happens only once. The next Mark Zuckerberg will not be starting a social networking company. The next Larry Page will not start a search engine. The next Bill Gates will not be starting an operating system. And so if you are trying to copy these people, you're in some sense not learning from them. And so I think one of the really big challenges in teaching or writing about entrepreneurship is what can you say about being an entrepreneur at all when the key thing is always to do something new, different, that's not precisely been done before. And so the point of departure I start with in Zero to One is a somewhat indirect approach by asking a series of contrarian questions. The business question is, what great company is nobody starting? The more intellectual version of this question is, tell me something true that very few people agree with you on. And this is a fantastic interview question. It turns out to be quite a hard question, even when people can read on the internet that you ask of everybody who comes in the door, it still is a hard question. It's one of those unusual questions where if you know it's on the test, it's still hard. And it's hard not just because we sort of think that new things require brilliance or something like that, but because it's socially difficult. If I ask you that question, if you tell me something like the education system is screwed up or our political system doesn't work very well, those are true answers, but they're not actually good answers because all of us already know them to be true. The good answers are ones that are somehow uncomfortable that the person interviewing you does not actually want to hear. And I think we live in this world where courage is in far shorter supply than genius. And so it is sort of this, it is in a sense this problem of political correctness properly understood, is this very deep, very, very broad sort of a problem."

Founder Mode

12,339 views • 8 months ago

Avichal Garg on the three crypto categories he's investing in "One is, I think the store of value chains are still very interesting. So for us that's primarily BTC and ETH. I think those have ascended into sort of prospective store of value territory. Effectively fixed supply, easy to subdivide, easy to transfer, all the check marks that you would want. And they appeal to different communities." "The second category is anything that has some sort of fee mechanism built into it and deals with financial assets and transactions. You could put SOL into this, put HYPE into this. Our take on those has always been that you have to be very mindful of the fees, you have to think about what the fee take rate is, and then you treat it like an equity." "These are assets that take fees in dollars and make them available to people all over the world who don't have access to dollar instruments. So if you're in Vietnam, if you're in Nigeria, if you're in Turkey, you can buy into these things, and you may not be able to get actual US equities." "To own a piece of a thing that produces US dollar cash flows and can effectively give you a distribution of US dollars in the form of buybacks is a really valuable thing. And the way that the market will express that is a much higher PE ratio, in my opinion, than you get on the US equity markets, because the buyers have fewer alternatives." "Then there's this emerging category of applications that use these primitives that could not otherwise exist. Applications that essentially use distributed compute, confidential compute, zero knowledge proofs and proof generation. Some of those things will look like companies, some of those things won't even look like token networks."
2:51

Avichal Garg on the three crypto categories he's investing in "One is, I think the store of value chains are still very interesting. So for us that's primarily BTC and ETH. I think those have ascended into sort of prospective store of value territory. Effectively fixed supply, easy to subdivide, easy to transfer, all the check marks that you would want. And they appeal to different communities." "The second category is anything that has some sort of fee mechanism built into it and deals with financial assets and transactions. You could put SOL into this, put HYPE into this. Our take on those has always been that you have to be very mindful of the fees, you have to think about what the fee take rate is, and then you treat it like an equity." "These are assets that take fees in dollars and make them available to people all over the world who don't have access to dollar instruments. So if you're in Vietnam, if you're in Nigeria, if you're in Turkey, you can buy into these things, and you may not be able to get actual US equities." "To own a piece of a thing that produces US dollar cash flows and can effectively give you a distribution of US dollars in the form of buybacks is a really valuable thing. And the way that the market will express that is a much higher PE ratio, in my opinion, than you get on the US equity markets, because the buyers have fewer alternatives." "Then there's this emerging category of applications that use these primitives that could not otherwise exist. Applications that essentially use distributed compute, confidential compute, zero knowledge proofs and proof generation. Some of those things will look like companies, some of those things won't even look like token networks."

The Wolf Of All Streets

31,478 views • 7 days ago

Former acting U.S. Trade Representative and General Counsel (USTR) Stephen Vaughn "Well, I think it's very important to understand, to begin with, no one has given Canada a better trade deal than the US this year so far." "In the first six months of this year, the United States imported $200 billion worth American dollars worth of goods from Canada. We're your best market." "Well, I think it is important to understand that the Trump, the people who voted for Donald Trump, wanted a different deal than the one that they had. And that's what the President is trying to get." "But at the end of the day, this has been a great deal for Canada, and whatever comes out of this, I continue to think the U.S. will give Canada a better deal than she can get from any other country." "If you want to have a closed dairy market, if you want to have closed markets and keep the Americans out of those markets, then you're not going to get as much access to the US market. That's just basic trade negotiation 101." Vaughn is a partner at King & Spadina Law King & Spalding
3:57

Former acting U.S. Trade Representative and General Counsel (USTR) Stephen Vaughn "Well, I think it's very important to understand, to begin with, no one has given Canada a better trade deal than the US this year so far." "In the first six months of this year, the United States imported $200 billion worth American dollars worth of goods from Canada. We're your best market." "Well, I think it is important to understand that the Trump, the people who voted for Donald Trump, wanted a different deal than the one that they had. And that's what the President is trying to get." "But at the end of the day, this has been a great deal for Canada, and whatever comes out of this, I continue to think the U.S. will give Canada a better deal than she can get from any other country." "If you want to have a closed dairy market, if you want to have closed markets and keep the Americans out of those markets, then you're not going to get as much access to the US market. That's just basic trade negotiation 101." Vaughn is a partner at King & Spadina Law King & Spalding

cbcwatcher

23,018 views • 1 month ago

Jensen Huang: "People with really high expectations have very low resilience." "I think one of my great advantages is that I have very low expectations. And I mean that. Most of the Stanford graduates have very high expectations. And you deserve to have high expectations because you came from a great school. You were very successful. You're top of your class. Obviously, you were able to pay for tuition. And then you're graduating from one of the finest institutions on the planet. You're surrounded by other kids that are just incredible. You naturally have very high expectations. People with very high expectations have very low resilience. And unfortunately, resilience matters in success. I don't know how to teach it to you except for I hope suffering happens to you. And I was fortunate that I grew up with my parents providing a condition for us to be successful on the one hand, but there were plenty of opportunities for setbacks and suffering. And to this day, I use the phrase pain and suffering inside our company with great glee. And I mean that. Boy, this is going to cause a lot of pain and suffering. And I mean that in a happy way, because you want to train, you want to refine the character of your company. You want greatness out of them. And greatness is not intelligence. Greatness comes from character, and character isn't formed out of smart people. It's formed out of people who suffered. And so if I could wish upon you, I don't know how to do it. For all of you Stanford students, I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering."
1:39

Jensen Huang: "People with really high expectations have very low resilience." "I think one of my great advantages is that I have very low expectations. And I mean that. Most of the Stanford graduates have very high expectations. And you deserve to have high expectations because you came from a great school. You were very successful. You're top of your class. Obviously, you were able to pay for tuition. And then you're graduating from one of the finest institutions on the planet. You're surrounded by other kids that are just incredible. You naturally have very high expectations. People with very high expectations have very low resilience. And unfortunately, resilience matters in success. I don't know how to teach it to you except for I hope suffering happens to you. And I was fortunate that I grew up with my parents providing a condition for us to be successful on the one hand, but there were plenty of opportunities for setbacks and suffering. And to this day, I use the phrase pain and suffering inside our company with great glee. And I mean that. Boy, this is going to cause a lot of pain and suffering. And I mean that in a happy way, because you want to train, you want to refine the character of your company. You want greatness out of them. And greatness is not intelligence. Greatness comes from character, and character isn't formed out of smart people. It's formed out of people who suffered. And so if I could wish upon you, I don't know how to do it. For all of you Stanford students, I wish upon you ample doses of pain and suffering."

Founder Mode

1,089,477 views • 8 months ago