Celeste Durve

Founder of VIPER: Premium Staff, Talent & Experiential Advisory
Smart Is Sexy on Substack

[Celeste Durve @CelesteDurve]

Most people are overvaluing ideas and undervaluing the willingness to do the boring, repetitive, often uncomfortable work that brings them to life.

[Celeste Durve @CelesteDurve]

Ideas are so seductive. & now w/ AI, you can take an idea further in 30 sec than you could in 30 days a year ago. You get validation, momentum, & a bit of dopamine before you’ve actually done anything. But the outcome doesn’t live in the idea. It ONLY lives in the execution

[Vikram Pai @vikpai]

Running a business is just realizing how dumb you were 6 months ago every 6 months

[Celeste Durve @CelesteDurve]

Your environment is either reinforcing your future identity or your past identity.

[Barstool Sports @barstoolsports]

Become ungovernable

[Spencer Pratt @spencerpratt]

Funny how they never attack my policy ideas. They can only try to assassinate your character. They don’t wanna talk about my debate masterclass a week ago, they wanna talk about a reality show from a lifetime ago. That’s because they want the continued decline of the city. They are locked in an ideological death spiral and can’t shake it. Come at my policies or go sit back down on the back bench. I’m in the arena, son.

[Celeste Durve @CelesteDurve]

Remember when Bass landed from Ghana during the LA fires & reporters interviewed her & she literally said NOTHING. She stood there & did not reply. This is the same. She disappears anytime something is required of her. It's pathetic in any role but its unnaceptable in leadership

[New York Post @nypost]

LA mayoral debate in tatters as Nithya Raman joins Karen Bass in suddenly pulling out at last minute https://t.co/UZnnVOC2p1

[Jay Yang @Jayyanginspires]

A wise mentor once told me: “Before you play the game, study the winners. If you don’t want their life, don’t play their game.”

[signüll @signulll]

building a company is largely the act of managing your own emotional state so the field around you remains coherent enough for other ppl to do their best work inside it.

basically founders set the emotional physics of the org. panic compounds. but clarity compounds too.

[kache @yacineMTB]

you can outsource your thinking
but you cannot outsource your understanding

[Spencer Pratt @spencerpratt]

They not like us

[Spencer Pratt @spencerpratt]

“These people just need more housing”

Yeah. In prison.

[JoeyTuccio @joey_tuccio]

I have been rescuing animals on Skid Row years. Here’s a scorecard of how many times the people running have personally reached out to see how they can help the animals on Skid Row:

Karen Bass - 0
Nithya Raman - 0
Rae Huang - 0
Adam Miller - 0
Spencer Pratt - 123901230

[ilove @imsopopu1ar]

Putting on lip liner to walk 10,000 steps

[Jonas @jonaasw1]

IRL is going to crush AI over the next 5 years.

In the last 3 months, $750M+ in capital was deployed on "anti-AI" bets.

Big players are doubling down on their investments in events, experiences and in-person connection.

Here's what I'm seeing:

@cornerapp, a social map app for Gen Z, has grown to 60K+ users helping people curate and share places to meet IRL—"Google Maps but social." Everyone ik in NYC loves them.

@partiful, @poshvip_, and @LumaHQ have raised a combined $60M and are exploding. Partiful hit 500K+ MAU, Posh hit 6 million registered users, and Luma has over 2 million users signing up for events.

Harvard alum @aidaxbaradari just launched @be_inaudible, the first smart device to stop unwanted audio recordings and keep IRL conversations private.

@mcuban made a massive bet, investing in Burwoodland, a NYC-based live-events company behind IRL experiences in the US, Canada, and Europe.

Former COO and CPO of Hinge officially launched Rodeo to help people spend more time IRL with friends.

@a16z keeps doubling down on IRL via investments and a16z Build — a dinner series and community for founders / operators figuring out their next move. @nazzari, @katiekirsch, @eriktorenberg.

Billion-dollar companies are paying $$$ for community and events leads:

- @AnthropicAI: Events Lead - $320k
- @Substack: Events Lead - $190k
- @VaynerMedia: Head of Experiential - $250k
- @Spotify: Global Experiential & Content - $175k
- @BiltRewards: Director of Events & Experiences - $150k

Investors are pouring billions of dollars into AI.

But smart money is quietly deploying millions into IRL at the same time.

a16z backs both OpenAI and Partiful. ElevenLabs and Substack.

The nuance is - it's not AI vs. IRL.

It's that the more we live online, the more premium real-life connection becomes.

They're not competing investments.

They're a hedge on each other.

[Farzad 🇺🇸 🇮🇷 @farzyness]

I wish more people in the US realized just how much optimism the United States creates for people all over the world.

The country is far from perfect, but it's so unbelievably amazing.

[Chamath Palihapitiya @chamath]

With Zuck’s move to Florida, California’s total taxable wealth from billionaires has plummeted to well under $1T from over $2T just a few weeks ago.

The loss of this tax revenue was totally avoidable but is now forever. All because Gavin Newsom stood motionless as this stupidly written bill, from a fringe union and a handful of socialist academics with an axe to grind, meandered its way into the public conversation without any action from him and freaked everyone out.

These were all people that were paying 13%+ in state income tax every year WITH NO COMPLAINTS UNTIL A FEW WEEKS AGO.

And now, for the rest of time, the lost tax revenues from these folks will have to be paid for by the middle class because they are the only group left in California large enough that you can tax to fill the hole.

He’s forsaken the middle class instead of managing the budget, managing the deficit, eliminating even a portion of California’s gargantuan waste and abuse. He could have done any of these things at any point over the past 7+ years.

But he was silent.

And now California’s budget will implode and he wants to run for President.

Insane.

[Bryan Johnson @bryan_johnson]

Kindness is peak human performance and high status.

Kindness requires metabolic abundance: the capacity to override primal impulses, regulate emotions, and extend empathy.

Meanness is dirty energy: high cortisol, inflammation and an exhausted executive function.

[SMB Attorney @SMB_Attorney]

You have to wake up with unshakable confidence that it’s all going to work out, probably in different and better ways than you can even imagine. But in order to get the most out of it, you have to get up and get the fuck after it.

[Celeste Durve @CelesteDurve]

@avipat_ GO TEAM!! fire!