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Raymond Plank founded Apache Corporation with just $250,000 in 1954. 50 years later his company was worth $50 billion.

Founders
2h ago

I think we're at the beginning of an era where we're going to be able to just have much more. And I think that the thing that I would most want people to understand is that technological progress is the main driver of that, and that we should think about how to accelerate it rather than slow it down, because the compounding effects of even slightly faster scientific progress are enormous.

1d ago

By summer of 2026, it will be as though the digital world is going through some kind of fast evolution with some parts of it emitting a huge amount of heat and light and moving with counterintuitive speed relative to everything else. Great fortunes will be won and lost here and the powerful engines of our silicon creation will be put to work further accelerating this economy and further changing things.

3w ago

The most counterintuitive thing I've learned is that the more you optimize for growth, the more you actually undermine the conditions that create it. The companies that grow the fastest over long periods of time are usually the ones that were willing to grow more slowly at some earlier point to build something real.

4w ago

The IPO market has in fact become sort of the last stop on the chump train and that is when Google went public I think it was an $80 billion market cap it's up you know 500 fold retail investors have had a chance to garner a tremendous you know 500x return if you to get that from SpaceX after it goes public what would that be two trillion

4w ago

The best businesses we've found are ones where the value of the business actually increases the longer you hold it, not just because of retained earnings, but because the competitive position strengthens over time. That's the opposite of what most people think about when they think about an investment decaying or having a terminal value that you have to discount back.

1mo ago

The best businesses we've ever seen are ones where the incremental return on capital is essentially infinite because you don't need capital to grow. And so you have a business that's generating cash and you need to decide what to do with that cash. And most of the time, the best answer is to give it back to shareholders, but sometimes the best answer is to redeploy it into new investments.

1mo ago

The other thing that's really important in this world is that the flywheels tend to be self-reinforcing in a way that creates winner-take-most dynamics. The best models attract the most users, which generates the most data, which trains the best next models. And so you end up with a situation where the leaders tend to pull away from the pack over time rather than revert to the mean.

1mo ago

The companies that matter most are the ones that can actually translate technological capability into economic value, and that translation is much harder than it looks. Most technology waves produce enormous value for society but relatively little for investors, because competition drives returns to zero faster than most people expect.

1mo ago

The exciting part of being in technology investing is that you have these waves of innovation that create extraordinary opportunities for value creation and also value destruction. And the companies that are able to ride multiple waves are extraordinary compounders over time, but it's actually quite rare.

1mo ago

If you do not want everything to be owned by a tiny elite, you have to aggressively tax extremely high levels of wealth. Because otherwise, if you're Jeff Bezos, what is he worth? $300 billion, right? Even if he makes 5% a year, he's making $15 billion a year, right? And it's just going to grow, right? It's going to grow unbelievably quickly.

2mo ago

If you're Jeff Bezos, what is what's he worth? $300 million, $300 billion, right? Even if he makes 5% a year, right? Which he's going to make way more than that. Even if he makes 5% a year, he's making $15 billion a year, right? And it's just going to grow, right? It's going to grow unbelievably quickly.

2mo ago

The argument in favor of allowing everyday investors to own this stuff is that this stuff has made people really rich over long periods of time and so if you only let rich people own it, they're only going to get richer and the wealth gap explodes.

4mo ago

your 20s sort of dictate your trajectory into your 30s and 40s, and your ability to kind of get to the right positions in your 30s and 40s to really then aggregate influence and economic security are somewhat a function of the trajectory or the scale or the velocity you establish in your 20s.

4mo ago

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