Viante Fruit

The World is Yours

[Jay Alto @theJayAlto]

if your parents worked hard to give you a safety net, don't insult them by playing it safe

[Dear Men. @Dea_rMen]

Half of male depression is solved by getting in shape. The other half is solved by having a mission.

[quinn @quinnslcm]

Desire. I love this topic.

I went through this phase at around 18 y/o where I thought wanting things and making money was ‘bad’. I deprived myself of luxuries that I wanted because I was trying to maintain a certain image. I was going to sell all my things, live in a van, say fuck all/be a smelly mountain dude with long hair.

This all started to become virtue signaling in itself.

The more I deprived myself of things that I desired the more it would turn into judgement and resentment for those that got them! How funny that works. I couldn’t pay rent some months while living in Wyoming, so I blamed the world around me for it. The list goes on.

When I moved to California it forced me to snap out of it a bit. Suddenly, I wanted to work harder. I recently got out of a breakup and wanted to dress nicer. I wanted to smell better. These things costed money. It’s nice to be able to walk into a grocery store and grab what I want without worrying if I can pay my credit card off. It’s nice to buy clothes that last long vs cheaply made fast fashion. It’s nice to walk into the vet and know you can take care of your dog without selling your car.

I began to realize that the more I made, the people who had the largest opinion about money were those that felt victim to it.

Like @naval said, be careful how many desires you have, because you’ll be unhappy until you get that thing. And then once you get that thing, you’ll revert to the same state that you were in before you had it.

So, where does that leave you? I see desire as a great motivator. Desire more not for more things. But a desire to want more from yourself, creatively, in how you hold yourself. How the reflection of the world you’ve created for yourself is from how many times it took to drain the tank and fill it up again. That $100,000 watch serves better as a symbol that you gave everything you had, and did what you said you were going to do vs trying to look impressive to the girl at the bar. Do it for you.

[Lucius @LuciusTheSaint]

never stress. things have a way of working themselves out

[ry @rywalker]

Anthropic is hunting enterprise workflows to productize. The contrarian bet: a probabilistic system will never match an agent built by someone who deeply understands how their specific company works.

[Sam Stoof @samstooff]

Tech branding doesn't have to be boring.

[Ryan Cohen @ryancohen]

Proposal to acquire eBay.
https://t.co/FwjcxbDmyt

[Viante Fruit @viantef]

@ihartmike @RexhaRexhaRexha Alexander the Great conquered half the known world at 29. Results only matter.

[Martin Tobias (Pre-Seed VC) @MartinGTobias]

Poker is about reading people, not cards.

Startups are about understanding markets, not just products.

[MD Umair Khan @MDUmairKh]

@MensHumor I have no tattoos, and I don't like tattoos on women either.

[Ronit Pereira @CAronitpereira]

“Be nice to people on the way up; you'll pass the same ones on the way down.”

- Michael Bloomberg

[Mindset Machine  @mindsetmachine]

Naval Ravikant: You should live your life like a lion

[Boring_Business @BoringBiz_]

life is won by people who overpromise and then figure out how to keep that promise

[Alex Socoloff @socoloffalex]

Brand identity for “And Other Ideas” YouTube channel.

[mary morgan @maryarchived]

having zero tattoos is going to become a coveted status signal sooner than we realize

[𓁹‿𓁹 @kitvolta]

the trick to surviving is having a european approach to life with somehow an american work output

[brian @bdguan]

just spent 2 weeks in china. went into it thinking we're cooked. came back more bullish on america than ever. here's why:

1. chinese citizens are way more chronically online. on the subway, train, anywhere, literally everyone is glued to their phone. gaming, short form, wechat. "don't walk and look at your phone, it's dangerous!" announcements flood crowded areas. their tiktok isn't any better, its still garbage, soft-core porn, etc.

2. everyone's using AI — deepseek, kimi, doubao. but nobody's afraid of losing their job to it. here it feels like there's an existential crisis every week. in china, nothing. i think the CCP won't let companies mass-layoff workers. great for short-term stability. terrible for long-term competitiveness on a global scale.

3. china doesn't produce weirdos. i sat in on a class at tsinghua (china's MIT). not one student spoke unless the professor read their name out loud. no questions. no debate. chinese education produces world-class executors, not contrarians. it does make it a safer place to live though.

4. china doesn't have christianity but it has something america doesn't have: a shared story everyone believes in. every person age 25-70 watched their country go from abject poverty to skyscrapers in one lifetime. that kind of collective proof has a deep unifying effect. compare that to how divided we are right now. america has a huge meaning vacuum that needs to be filled.

nevertheless, i return back to my home in america reinvigorated. because everything i saw confirms one thing: china optimizes. america innovates. and the innovators always win.

[Karri Saarinen @karrisaarinen]

I keep thinking I miss having someone like Steve Jobs in the industry.

He had some standards. He cared about quality, coherence, and making great products. He could be ruthless and he had plenty of flaws, but it still felt like he and Apple were trying to make something genuinely great above all else. They had their opinions and you could respect that. They didn't try to force you, but make their case why they think it's good.

Now tech feels driven by trend chasing, fear, scale, revenue comparisons, endless games and everyone talks their book. Investors come first, business goals next, and users last if not at all.

I wish there would still someone like Steve still around

[Andrew Ziperski @andrewziperski]

Venture capital evolved from featuring savvy research analysts like Mary Meeker and Bill Gurley to people who can’t define FCF because technology companies (for better or worse) generally rewarded the latter over the last few decades.

Consider the two big waves where VCs made most of their money in the last 15-20 years: mobile-first consumer social/internet and SaaS.

Mobile/social companies operated in largely permissionless markets that inherently favored young founders, who naturally are not particularly financially sophisticated. SaaS markets, while they generally favored slightly older and more mature founders, similarly didn’t reward financial sophistication; product and GTM chops were far more important.

Both internet and SaaS businesses ran relatively capital-light business models with high gross margins, which gave companies a lot of wiggle room. Financial optimization was just not a key driver of success. And these companies were all built against the backdrop of an enormous bull run and low interest rates post-GFC. Companies could generally raise cheap equity, and most felt like they just didn’t need to think too deeply about how to properly capitalize their businesses.

Silicon Valley became a place where engineering/design/product/sales skills were rewarded and finance was not. “Wall Street” was looked down upon, and people who cared about finance were derided as being slow, bureaucratic, extractive, negative-sum, etc.

These dynamics have obviously changed.

The frontier AI labs are extraordinarily capital-intensive. Some of the hottest applied AI companies have negative gross margins, where optimization on that front over time will make or break their businesses. The asset-heavy aerospace/defense/industrial companies in El Segundo naturally require capital structure sophistication. Technology as a broad industry has matured, and many winning founders are no longer whimsical Stanford types who spent their summers writing code, but Wharton grads who cut their teeth at banks and buyout firms. And, whether companies will admit it or not, the equity capital markets are essentially shut for all but a very small handful of companies, whose success will now depend on their ability to think even slightly outside the box on capitalization.

Finance is now a first-class citizen in Silicon Valley.