very few people have ever eaten the glass of going from nothing to something. idea → design → build → launch. that full arc.
with or without ai, it’s brutal. it breaks your back & your brain. it’s one of the most honest pains there is.
The hallmark of expertise is no longer how much you know. It's how well you synthesize.
Information scarcity rewarded knowledge acquisition. Information abundance requires pattern recognition.
It's not enough to collect facts. The future belongs to those who connect dots.
Hardware is hard.
That’s why Elon is by far the greatest founder of all time.
Remember — countless startups die just while trying to put stationary beige boxes on desktops. Very smart people get crushed by supply chain disruptions, or China tariffs, or lockdowns, or shipping interruptions, or regulatory delays.
Not Elon. He didn’t just survive financial crisis and coronavirus. He managed to build physical things in America while fighting the state and the laws of nature at the same time.
Somehow he managed to simultaneously build not just a car company but a rocket company. Those don’t just have “moving parts”, they are a moving whole.
The difficulty level here is insane. Hardware is completely different from software. One recall, just one serious bug, can destroy your company. If you are charging $50 for something that costs $40, and you need to recall and replace a million units, you’re usually dead.
So just one of these companies — just Tesla, or just SpaceX — would be an incredible accomplishment for anyone. Even a very intelligent and hardworking person would have to live an incredibly boring, disciplined, focused life to possibly maintain the extremely low error rate needed to profitably ship such complex products.
Not Elon. He did SpaceX and Tesla while having N children by K women. While also cofounding OpenAI and Neuralink and Boring Company. While fighting and defeating countless journalists, politicians, haters, and short sellers. And of course while buying Twitter, posting all the time, and building a following larger than almost any politician.
The better you are, the better you understand how much better Elon is. If you’re good at math you appreciate Ramanujan’s greatness. If you’re good at basketball you respect how amazing Michael Jordan was. Elon is like that, for tech. Everyone in tech understands the sport we’re playing, and he really is the greatest of all time.
Billionaire investor Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) on why people should read more books:
"There are thousands of years of history in which lots and lots of very smart people worked very hard and ran all types of experiments on how to create new businesses, invent new technology, new ways to manage etc.
They ran these experiments throughout their entire lives. At some point, somebody put these lessons down in a book.
For very little money and a few hours of time, you can learn from someone’s accumulated experience. There is so much more to learn from the past than we often realize.
You could productively spend your time reading experiences of great people who have come before and you learn every time."
"The great liability of the engineer compared to men of other professions is that his works are out in the open where all can see them. His acts, step by step, are in hard substance. He cannot bury his mistakes in the grave like the doctors. He cannot argue them into thin air or blame the judge like the lawyers. He cannot, like the architects, cover his failures with trees and vines. He cannot, like the politicians, screen his shortcomings by blaming his opponents and hope the people will forget. The engineer simply cannot deny he did it. If his works do not work, he is damned." - Herbert Hoover, American engineer and politician