I’ve been a Knicks fan since 2011.
Many of you know this seeing the variation of Knicks hats I wear on stream.
I was born in NJ so our local cable package at the time only came with MSG Sports.
The only basketball games they showed were the Knicks, the New Jersey Nets weren’t really good enough to get their own station, so I ended up deciding I’d be a Knicks fan at the same time that I began playing basketball in Middle School. I grew up with Carmelo, Jeremy Lin, Steve Novak, etc. I quickly realized being a Knicks fan was not going to be fun.
I don’t talk much about sports anymore because over the past 10 years, I shifted my focus from sports to markets when I realized I wasn’t going to ever make the NBA. I just couldn’t dedicate the type of energy to caring about sports when I realized my core focus was going to shift on becoming a better investor. Jerome Powell became more relevant to me than LeBron James.
But last night was special.
I started crying on the couch when seeing Jalen Brunson win (which my sister made fun of me for) but it’s because Brunson is the epitome of never giving up and continuing to fight in the face of everyone doubting you.
“My confidence comes from my work ethic,” was the part that hit me the hardest that he said last night. It is a reminder that anything in life can be achieved if you are willing to do the work that most people cannot fathom doing.
And when you put in that work, the confidence in the big moments is just a reflection of all the time you put in.
Really happy for the City of New York and for a team for inspiring all of us to dream as big as possible.
Dinner with the Huangs.
Jensen joined his parents for a family meal and took a moment to share fried mantou with local media gathered at the restaurant.
Jensen Huang joined his parents for a family meal in a simple local spot.
The CEO of the world’s most valuable company still makes time for dinner with the people who made the whole thing possible.
Hard not to root for the guy.
Congratulations to my good friend Jensen Huang on being awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Science and Technology from @CarnegieMellon University for his outstanding contributions to accelerated computing and Artificial Intelligence. It was my honor to place upon him his doctoral hood this morning. @intel and @nvidia are collaborating to develop exciting new products!
Math appealed to me early because it rewarded clear thinking.
Code did too. You could sit with a hard problem, strip away the noise, and work toward something real. That habit carried into business.
Building a company is messier than math, obviously.
People are more complicated than equations. Markets are stranger than they look. Still, the instinct is similar: start from first principles. Test your assumptions. Keep going when the first answer falls apart.
Looking back, a lot of my path has been an attempt to bring that kind of rigor into parts of life that are usually dominated by tradition, gatekeeping, or inertia.
Dario is wrong.
He knows absolutely nothing about the effects of technological revolutions on the labor market.
Don't listen to him, Sam, Yoshua, Geoff, or me on this topic.
Listen to economists who have spent their career studying this, like @Ph_Aghion , @erikbryn , @DAcemogluMIT , @amcafee , @davidautor
Bill Ackman says diversification protects you when you don’t fully understand what you own but concentration becomes an edge when you do.
Once your best ideas get diluted, outperforming gets a lot harder which is why his top 3 to 4 positions make up ~50% of the portfolio.
This isn’t just a $META issue. It’s increasingly an issue for all of Tech. Because even within Tech, there is an emerging divide between AI-superpowered engineer/PM/sales folks and everyone else.
And we know how that will end: Smaller orgs, bigger payoffs but then the riches distributed across even fewer players that it is today. And everyone sees it coming. Hence the rot from the outside and, now, the inside.
To my peers and to the super entrepreneurs who are far more successful than me:
This is why elites in tech that “have made it” are increasingly the ones that EVERYONE hates. We’ve not distinguished the difference between luck and skill that got us here. We don’t act as stewards in the broadest sense of the term. We aren’t bringing society along like other generations of super successful business people have. We don’t pay it forward in any meaningful way - although we have clever ways to make it look like we do. Mostly, people see us hording all the gains.
Modern technology companies have essentially created a new form of indentured servitude for the educated masses where SBC was used to pay you an incredible living wage so you don’t go work “for the other guy”. But what does it mean to make $500k/yr if you still leak 55% to taxes then your landlord takes the next 25% for rent?? You still can’t buy a house in SV. These folks are on an eternal hamster wheel. It turns out it’s not much different than being in middle America making $55k.