@JulienBek (@sequoia): When everyone loves an investment, assign a devil’s advocate and imagine how it could fail before committing. Source: 20VC with Harry Stebbings

@michael_jmoritz (@sequoia): Bill Gates removed his car radio because it distracted him from thinking about Microsoft. Source: Giant Ideas

Few people have what it takes. But startups do need employees.

What sets superforecasters apart (those among us who are consistently better at predicting what will happen) is not just that they’re smarter or more open-minded. It’s their willingness to recognize that judgment can be trained and to commit, for example, to including probabilities and base rates in their thinking. They’re also open to being measured. I wonder how that translates to Power-Law Masters in VC, the rare investors who have generated billion-dollar outcomes more than once.

@chamath (Social Capital): Know your limitations, recognize your strengths, and build around what you do best. Source: Chamath Palihapitiya

Don Valentine (@sequoia): Learning to tell a compelling story is essential to raising money. Source: Stanford Graduate School of Business

Elon Musk (Tesla / SpaceX): Creating OpenAI to counter Google helped accelerate the very technology he was worried about. Source: The Economist

@HowardMarksBook (Oaktree): Let your children make decisions, including wrong ones. They need the experience to learn how to choose for themselves. Source: My First Million

Kenneth Griffin (@Citadel): Study your winning investments too. Understanding what you got right can help you repeat it. Source: Norges Bank Investment Management

@travisk (Atoms): An unfamiliar idea can meet resistance. Build trust with the people who doubt you, and they can become your supporters. Source: a16z

“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” — Herb Simon, 1971 Simon was writing about how organizations could cope with an abundance of information when human attention remained scarce. His observation feels even more relevant in the age of generative AI: he was one of the founding figures of artificial intelligence.

@m2jr (@floodgatefund): A startup pivot doesn’t mean starting from scratch. Keep what you’ve discovered that others have missed, and change the product or who it’s for. Source: Giant Ideas

Martin Eberhard (@Tesla): Building a startup means keeping your team steady through the highs and lows, even when your own confidence is shaken. Source: Kim Java

Daniel Kahneman: Sounding confident can make someone look like an expert. What matters is whether they actually get things right. Source: Intelligence Squared

Why do so many investors escalate commitment to a failing course of action, throwing good money after bad into startups with increasingly poor prospects? The usual explanation is the sunk cost fallacy: they fail to recognize that the old money is gone, and that any new investment needs to be judged on its own merits. But recent academic work suggests another explanation: persisting has its own rewards. People who stick to their commitments, even failing ones, can be viewed as more trustworthy. In my experience, other factors also need to be taken into account: - not wanting to recognize a loss, especially during fundraising; - protecting a partner’s standing within the firm; or - keeping their track record looking good when they’re up for promotion. There’s more going on than just struggling to let go of money already invested.

Steve Jobs: The technology you build will become obsolete. But others will build on your work, even if they never know your name. Source: BarrancoStudio

Had that exact same thought when I saw the use case @OpenAI advertised for its latest model.

@chamath (Social Capital): Self-mastery is earned through experience, scars, resilience, and confidence. Source: Chamath Palihapitiya

In many cases, we are asked a question about probability (“how likely is this to happen?”) but we answer a question about similarity (“how much does this look like a stereotype I have in my mind?”). @paulg’s joke “I can be tricked by anyone who looks like Mark Zuckerberg” is a powerful way to illustrate this bias.

Steve Jobs: a company is the cumulative result of thousands of decisions. Source: Steve Jobs Archive