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Working closely alongside fellow hires over a sustained period of time can give you a better understanding of who might make for ideal co-founders than searching through Y Combinator's Co-Founder Matching Platform, or even joining a residency like HF0 or South Park Commons.

Spencer Lang
1d ago

The best way to think about the future is not by extrapolating the past, but by understanding what must be true about the future and then figuring out how we get there.

6d ago

The best ideas have some magical quality where one day they seem impossible, and the next day they seem inevitable. The hard part is being in the room when the transition happens.

1w ago

A trap a lot of these kinds of research labs or hard tech labs fall into is they start with the technology first, build that in a vacuum, and then they try to figure out what use cases to try to fit it into later. Whenever that happens, it always feels like the product isn't quite the right fit.

2w ago

What Arc and the OpenAI Foundation are doing is what private capital and motivated foundations can do that institutional science usually can't: pick a hard problem, fund a full-stack experimental-and-AI engine, and run the loop fast enough that we might actually get somewhere by the time it matters to my family.

2w ago

Why it's necessary to create work that might feel embarrassing The simple mindset shift that stops stalling and gets you to just start How to reframe scorn as a positive signal The thought process that can help you move out of a state of rumination How to treat failed ideas as seeds for future breakthroughs

3w ago

The difference between a business that's working and one that isn't is that the working one has solved the hard problem, and the non-working one hasn't. Most people spend all their time on easy problems.

3w ago

Nobody remembers the project that didn't get any traction, the one that may have seemed a bit embarrassing at the time. People remember the successes and forget all the attempts.

3w ago

The best business decision is often the one you don't make. Inaction has a cost that most entrepreneurs systematically underestimate because they can't see the counterfactual.

3w ago

This Generative AI momentum is creating a lot of optimism around the potential of one person companies or solopreneurs using agentic AI. If Agentic AI works out, small businesses might have a new array of powerful tools as well.

4w ago

He moved to the block promising a new bookstore. He brought a whole lot more than that. Now no one is quite sure how to describe what happened outside Quirky Books.

4w ago

The best time to think about the exit is before you start the company. If you don't know what success looks like, you'll never achieve it.

4w ago

Robin Saxby put out a goal to make the ARM ISA the global standard for CPUs. And if you go back to early 1990s, there were a lot of CPUs out there and also there was not an IP business, there really wasn't a very good fabless semiconductor model, and there was not a very good set of tools to develop SoCs. So in some ways, and this is what I love about the company, it was a bit of a crazy idea because you didn't really have all the things in place necessary to go off and do that.

4w ago

I'll be honest that building a new media brand, and continuing to work on high-quality journalism while growing a business, has been the most challenging, stressful and rewarding experience of my career so far.

1mo ago

The best time to think about the exit is before you start the company. Where do you want this business to go? Do you want to build something that lasts forever, or do you want to build something to sell?

1mo ago

Kalanick spent nearly eight years in what might be the most extreme version of stealth mode any modern founder has pulled off: he's hired thousands of employees, in 30 countries, bought and developed hard real estate assets, built a full-stack food infrastructure business, and did it all like lasagna.

1mo ago

"We have the aspiration to enable the global flow of compute, and we think that's going to be a multi-trillion-dollar market," Moushey says. "And to do that, we have to be a little bit more clear that we're not this weird compute provider anymore. We're actually building the market infrastructure to solve this dislocation of supply and demand."

1mo ago

The difference between a business and a cult is that a business creates value for the outside world; a cult extracts value from insiders and gives it to the leader. Most startups fail not because the idea is bad, but because the founder confused the two.

1mo ago

There is an argument that without the organizational skills and production strategy Forrest brought to the table, Fender may have not been able to make the jump from a comparatively small builder to the mammoth industry leader it became.

1mo ago

If you really think about it, "intensity," "consistency" and "authenticity" apply to almost everything that matters. Raising children requires intensity — that ferocious love and superhuman strength that shows up at 3 a.m. when you're exhausted but still rocking a baby back to sleep. Building something meaningful requires consistency — the unglamorous act of showing up again and again, long after the initial excitement fades.

1mo ago

A start-up company wants to light up the night with 50,000 big mirrors orbiting Earth, bouncing sunlight to the night side of the planet to power solar farms after sunset, provide lighting for rescue workers and illuminate city streets, among other things.

1mo ago

The best ideas have a lifespan. At first, they're attacked viciously. Then they're accepted as obvious. The violence of the attacks is proportional to how good the idea is.

1mo ago

The difference between a business and a cult is that a business creates value for people who are not going to work there. A cult is just a business where you worship the CEO.

1mo ago

If the technology you're building with is so much better, why in the world are you just selling it to someone else as a component? Why not just make a better end product?

1mo ago

It's never been easier to launch products, which means the biggest challenge product teams are facing is quickly becoming distribution.

1mo ago

The one thing we ask is that the man who is not thinking should get out of the way of the man who is. The world wants to move forward, and if you're not moving with it, you're holding it back.

1mo ago

Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.

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