#2025
We fail before committing to change.
Failure is painful.
Discomfort is opportunity for growth.
Growing is painful.
Criticism’s a gift. A mirror’s your best view. Look for truth.
Truth is painful.
Hope 2025 is filled with many pains. If you have no pain, create pain.
6. $SEKOIA - @sekoia_virtuals
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Peter Thiel: Why will the 20th employee join your company?
When deciding whether or not to invest in a founder, Thiel asks:
“Why will the 20th talented person join your company when they can get paid way more at Google, they will have to work way less hard at Google, and it will look better on their resume to go to Google?”
The 20th employee won’t get the equity or prestige that someone on the founding team will get, so there needs to be another incentive if you’re going to build a truly great company and attract the best people in the world.
Thiel believes the best answer is something along the lines of:
“This is the only place in the world where you can work on this incredibly important problem.”
He continues:
“It has to—on some dimension—be a really important problem that at least some people think is the most important problem in the world. Those are the kind of businesses that are unique, and when they work, they end up being leaders in their respective markets.”
If it’s a problem that a bunch of other teams are working on, it will be hard to attract a truly world-class employee #20.
Source: @PandoDaily
Rick Rubin on the power of creating something truly for yourself
Last month, Elon Musk tweeted that Rick Rubin’s philosophy of creating something truly for yourself is how Tesla creates products.
Rick elaborates on this philosophy in the clip below:
“My only goal is to make something that I like… I know what I like. If I don’t like it, I keep working, and eventually we get to a place where we like it.”
And somewhat counterintuitively, he doesn’t consider the audience at all:
“The audience comes last… I’m not making it for them. I’m making it for me. And it turns out that when you make something truly for yourself, you’re doing the best thing you possibly can for the audience.”
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt argues a similar point:
"If you think about the greatest products, they've almost always been designed for the benefit of the people who are actually building them.”
Uber started out as a private timeshare limousine service for Garrett Camp and his friends. Microsoft started when Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote a Basic interpreter for the Altair so they didn’t have to write machine language to program it. Drew Houston built Dropbox to make his files live online after forgetting his USB stick. Larry Page and Sergey Brin built Google for Stanford—and particularly for themselves—with the first server in Larry’s dorm room.
Video source: @LewisHowes
"What does the rest of the world not get about India?"
I asked this question to @kunalb11.
Kunal founded @CRED_club - a leading Indian fintech valued at $1B+.
This list is a must read if you're interested in Indian startups.
Here were my favorite insights he shared:
Capitalism is brutal.
If you invest, you MUST know how to identify a moat.
Here are 9 financial “rules of thumb” that Warren Buffett uses to tell if a company has one:
Thank you to all the investors who are investing in the YC w23 batch. After working with over 800 YC companies over the past 10 years I also wanted to offer 1 piece of advice.
“Seven drinks in one day is very different than one drink a day for seven days. It’s the frequency and dose that defines the poison.”
— Dr. Peter Attia (@PeterAttiaMD)
Listen to my interview with Dr. Peter Attia: https://t.co/W2COlG8WJT
Goldman Sachs just released their AI report on economic growth.
They predict 300 million jobs will be lost to automation.
Here are the key takeaways everyone must know:
4 Life Lessons My Mistakes Taught Me:
1. You can't get far alone—Get a team.
2. Luck is 10% chance, 90% reacting to opportunity—Pounce on chance.
3. Time heals everything—Don't pick at old wounds.
4. You should cringe at your past—If you don't, it means you haven't grown.