The penalty good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.
20h ago
It is not the insurrections of ignorance that are dangerous, but the revolts of intelligence.
3d ago
It is not so much that man is a herd animal, but that he is a horde animal, a being of a warrior horde; he is led by a chief and his horde shares a common life. The striking fact about this is the extraordinary ease with which a man identifies himself with a group.
Instead of sitting there and trying to tell someone else, 'No, no, it goes like this. No, no, do it like this,' you just do it yourself and then you know the way the song goes. You know what the drum part's supposed to be, what kind of groove you want. You're just beating yourself up to get it right.
Few – if any – startups in Silicon Valley history have grown as big as Notion, or for as long, without some semblance of a board. But by virtue of a quirk of its own fundraising history and an intellectual internal leadership style, it's the position Notion found itself in even after more than a decade in operation, and as its valuation reached $11 billion.
I've always said this, at Microsoft we are at our best when we do what the world expects us to do, we are at our worst when we do things out of envy, which is just because somebody else had some cool hit, somewhere, doesn't mean we should go do that.
customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great. Even when they don't yet know it, customers want something better, and your desire to delight customers will drive you to invent on their behalf.
I believe that in the 20th century, under the leadership of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the United States devised the single best governing ideology that any country has ever created: liberal nationalism.
Power is more the product of having the authority and trust to get lots of people to collaborate with you, rather than some galaxy brain scheming capability. Trump is not powerful because his brain, considered in isolation, is the most effective optimization engine on Earth. He is powerful because the government which hundreds of millions of people consider legitimate gives him a lot of power.
The key to effective teamwork is having a single enemy. Now here's something even uglier. The same team-building hostility is heating up over in the enemy's camp. That evil team is getting bigger and stronger because it hates you—and precisely because you're bonding with your own team.
There is so much noise in venture today, that actually leading with original thoughts can have a competitive advantage. We want other, larger platforms to view Worldbuild as a tastemaker for where they should be spending time six months, or 12 months from today.
Dad heard about a team at a youth prison in West Virginia that was supposed to be better than us. He loaded us into the van one morning and we drove two hundred miles to play them. This was a maximum-security facility for juveniles, up in Salem. We had to be buzzed in through a thick steel door and then through another one and another, but they wouldn't let us into the gym. We could hear someone in there screaming. Then it was silent, and the door opened. On one end of the court, the other team was about to warm up, and on our end—where we were supposed to warm up—a kid was mopping a puddle of blood.
As AI tools become more widely used and increasingly specialized, many business leaders are trying to think quickly and creatively about how to best utilize this technology at nearly every level of their operations.
He wins access by going deeper than anyone else, mastering the material and speaking the insiders' language. That proximity gives him real influence, shaping how the industry talks about its own future.
It's all too easy to slip into doing a softball puff piece — fawning all over your guests and treating them like gurus dispensing wisdom from a mountain. This is an even easier trap for someone like Dwarkesh, who is very young and who is primarily known for interviewing people instead of for dispensing his own thoughts. So it's extremely impressive that he consistently avoids this trap — he always manages to challenge and provoke his subjects, rather than just letting them spout their usual talking points.
1mo ago
The primary cause of failure in leadership is that men do not think enough. They trust to their memories and their passions, and act from them, when they ought to consult their understandings.
Abrams believed draftees undermined discipline and unit cohesion, so he redesigned the Army around high-quality volunteers, proving the draft was neither necessary nor desirable long-term and establishing a model that the other services ultimately adopted.
We believe in saying no to thousands of projects so that we can really focus on the few that are truly important and meaningful to us. We believe in deep collaboration and cross-pollination of our groups, which allow us to innovate in a way that others cannot.
1mo ago
The best thing a company can do is to be a wonderful place to work and to create products and services that genuinely improve people's lives. Most companies optimize for the wrong thing—they optimize for quarterly earnings instead of for the long-term health of the business and the satisfaction of their customers.
Mario shares how he uses real-time data and second-derivative thinking to make decisions, how he hires and develops A players (and the gut test that tells you who isn't one), how he runs meetings that surface the best thinking from the most junior person in the room, and why ego, complacency, and small goals quietly cap everything.
2mo ago
The task of the excellent teacher is to stimulate 'apparent' ordinary people to unusual effort. The tough problem is not in identifying winners: it is in making winners out of ordinary people.
We are first and foremost a high quality independent news journalism company, that is our mission, it is the most value-creating thing we do for society and economically, and that is by miles.
He tries to hear out every faction: first the AI existential risk people, then the AI optimists and accelerationists like "Beff Jezos," then the "stochastic parrot" / "current harms" people like Emily Bender and Timnit Gebru, and finally the AI company CEOs (Altman, Amodei, and Hassabis were the three who agreed to be interviewed), with Yuval Noah Harari showing up from time to time to insert deepities.
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.
2mo ago
The task of the excellent teacher is to stimulate 'apparently ordinary' people to unusual effort over many years.
2mo ago
The task of the excellent teacher is to stimulate 'apparently ordinary' people to unusual effort. The tough problem is not in identifying winners: it is in making winners out of ordinary people.
2mo 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.
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.
3mo 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.
Andrew was a walking category error, perceiving no difference between business and pleasure, between what was good for the country and what was excellent for him, conducting a campaign of international larceny masquerading as public service.
3mo 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.
After two decades of working inside companies like Google, Facebook, and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and supporting leaders at companies like Stripe, Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft, and Gamma, I've come to believe that blaming people for problems that are actually structural is one of the biggest leadership traps there is.
It had taken Sutskever years to be able to put his finger on Altman's pattern of behavior — how OpenAI's CEO would tell him one thing, then say another and act as if the difference was an accident. "Oh, I must have misspoken," Altman would say.
how OpenAI's CEO would tell him one thing, then say another and act as if the difference was an accident. "Oh, I must have misspoken," Altman would say. Sutskever felt that Altman was dishonest and causing chaos, which would be a problem for any CEO, but especially for one in charge of such potentially civilization-altering technology.
It had taken Sutskever years to be able to put his finger on Altman's pattern of behavior — how OpenAI's CEO would tell him one thing, then say another and act as if the difference was an accident.
3mo ago
The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything.
3mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.