I changed the color of a button with CSS for the first time. When I saw the change reflected on a web page, my world changed. I realized, right, this is what I want to do. From that moment on, I took my laptop with me everywhere I traveled. For instance, during a recent trip to Bali, I brought my laptop to a waterfall. My laptop goes everywhere with me, even on a three-hour motorbike ride to a waterfall. It's just so different now; I can hardly recognize myself from my university days. Back then, I was a completely different person, but now, I have to be pried away from my laptop because I love collaborating with the community on open source code and documentation. I am a strong advocate for the principle of automate and delegate. If you can automate a task, such as pushing it to a bash script or running it as a Lambda function, you should do so. However, it can be challenging to delegate tasks that you do not understand yourself. This brings to mind a historical analogy from the Age of Exploration. During this time, a ship's captain had to master every job on the ship before ascending to the rank of captain. They needed to know how to swab the deck, prepare food, tie knots, raise sails, and patch holes in the hull. Only after gaining experience in all these roles could they effectively delegate tasks and ensure quality assurance of the work done by others. it is essential to at least take half up front, if not the full amount. Even if the client is a friend, it is crucial to maintain this practice. Maintaining a reputation for always delivering is crucial. Have you ever walked into a reputable ramen restaurant, handed them your ticket, and not received your ramen? No, because in most cases, you will get what you pay for if you are selective and work with reputable players. There is a degree of determinism in that process. Developer advocacy is crucial; you need to teach people how to use your tools. There’s a saying that first-time founders think about the technology, while second-time founders think about the distribution. This is absolutely true and makes sense. Developer advocacy is essentially distribution; it’s how you get the tools into developers’ hands and how you get them to care about your open-source library when there are ten other libraries There are courses on everything; there are so many people out there creating courses. I don't know what the exact statistic is, but it was reported that there are thousands of hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute. With all that content, it's clear that there is something on pretty much every topic. However, you can teach it in a way that makes sense to you, and if it makes sense to you, it probably makes sense to others who think the same way. Everyone knows that test-driven development is the better way to do things, but most people don’t actually implement it. Even those who claim to have done end-to-end testing with tools like Playwright or Cypress often skip testing their authenticated pages because they don't know how to log in. They might create a fake user in the database or use a spare account, which leads to low testing quality. When using OAuth, for example, it is crucial to mock out the authentication process. You need to test it once to ensure it works, but then you want to focus on other things. Unfortunately, there is little content available on this topic, and if I create content on it, it often doesn’t perform well because it lacks excitement and flashy elements. I believe it is important to avoid just hammering GitHub or similar platforms, especially since I hit the rate limit on GitHub. Some people suggest just putting a private token in, but that feels fundamentally wrong. Instead, I should make those requests once, save the JSON files, and then mock those out. This process has been super interesting for me, and I can't wait to share it with others. You have your routine, and you do it. You can’t not work out for a year, join 10 gyms, and then work out for an entire weekend. It doesn’t work like that. The same principle applies to content creation. I tell people not to worry about it. If you document your journey, you will have more content than you can put out. I only put out about 40% of my content because I just have too much. if you really want to grow, you need to be consistent and feed the algorithm, not the trolls. Ignore those trolls; just get friendly with that block button. If someone is challenging you, I actually think it's important to engage in that conversation if they're doing it professionally. I learn a lot from that and make many new friends that way. However, if someone is clearly being a troll, just block them, done, forget it, and move on. I would say you should post every four to six hours around the clock because you want to cover multiple time zones. Do something that's authentic, whether it's a success you've had that day, a challenge you've faced, or even a picture of your workspace—whether it's tidy or messy. People love workspace photos. Even if your setup is basic, just share that; it shows you're authentic. I think having a picture of yourself at least once a month is really important so people can see you're a real person. Additionally, share a technical tip once a day. This should be something you've learned, just a bite-sized piece, like one or two lines, maybe with a screenshot of code or something similar. I have about six different topics that I try to cycle through every couple of days. For example, if I did a technical tip today at 1 p.m., then tomorrow I'll do another technical tip at 1 a.m., ensuring it's not the same one. This way, across time zones, people get a mixture of content. I'm using a dynamic mic because I'm not in a nice studio; I don't have soundproofing and am working from my office. I have big windows in front of me, providing natural light you focus on specific areas of interest, which allows you to triage your learning effectively. You’re not necessarily following all the comings and goings of the tech world; rather, you're concentrating on things you can directly control, like getting better at JavaScript. Speaking with people like you energizes me so much, as cheesy as that sounds

There’s a really important axiomatic idea that people need to hold on to: it does not matter what you look at; it matters what you see. It’s a fancy way of saying, "Is the glass half empty or half full?" We’re both looking at the same glass. They set the frame: glass half empty, glass half full. Then, they have to control the frame. Going again, I can't state this enough: the heartbreaking reality of politics is that, at its essence, politics is manipulation. I will say it again and again so people know what I mean by that. It's about setting a frame and controlling a frame. What makes for a great entrepreneur is somebody that can solve a novel problem. This is one of the key lessons I try to impart to young entrepreneurs: your job is to solve not only a problem you've never seen before but also to be able to solve a problem that nobody has ever seen before. As a student of history, I recognize the feedback loop that exists within the human mind. If we can borrow from the future, we will do so, even those of us with children. Historically, there comes a point when we face a debt Jubilee. This term is notoriously misnamed because what it often results in is bloodshed, allowing people to overturn the tables and declare, "you're never getting your money back." This is the harsh reality; sometimes, it leads to violent outcomes where one side asserts dominance, or we witness decapitations in the streets—a stark reminder from history, particularly looking at France. Beliefs represent what you perceive to be true about the world, while values reflect what you believe ought to be true. For instance, I believe that people ought to have the opportunity to pursue excellence, whereas some may argue that everyone should have the same outcomes. This distinction is a value judgment rather than an objective assessment of reality.

I’m like, I like this world. What you mean is free meaning you could do whatever you want. You could always do whatever you wanted; you have the ability to do that. You just have to gather your resources. You already show it on a regular basis. Nobody could see your butt if you're making love to them. Your ass is the Wizard of Oz, and your dick is what they all see. You're smart, but more importantly, you're clever. Clever goes a lot further than smart in this world. I don’t mean to just say you sound smart; you represent a level of understanding that I admire. When you said, "I don't know nothing," I thought, that's not true. I couldn't have done what you did. This isn't me kissing ass or licking knob; I didn’t watch the whole interview, but for the few minutes I did, I thought, this guy's really smart. I learned that good enough can take you very far. In fact, good enough has taken me 30 years. On the set of Clerks, when we were shooting, I would often say, "Cut, um, all right, that's good enough, let's move on, let's do something else." Good enough has gotten me here, to this chair, and I believe it will get you as far as you need to go. Good enough gets me to the set. If I've rehearsed enough before we shoot, I can usually get it in one or two takes, and then I say, "Good enough, moving on." All that time adds up, and that's money saved. I suppose at some point in your career, you might strive for perfection, but honestly, I never have, and I've been doing this for 30 years. Some people, especially in the Letterboxd crowd, might be disgusted by that thought, thinking, "Oh, he doesn't even try." But I do try; I've been doing this for 30 years. I show up, I deliver, and I just don't make everyone's life miserable in the process. I have a vision and an idea of where we're going, and I want everyone to have a good time doing it. Otherwise, what’s the point? If people on set are miserable while making pretend for a living, then everyone has failed, and this job shouldn't be like that. It should be fun; after all, we are making pretend for a living. I understand that some people believe "art is pain," but I don't subscribe to that notion. While filmmaking is indeed an art form, it doesn't have to be painful. It can be very cathartic, and many folks can't pivot from that mindset. I am the guy who says, "That's good enough, let's move on." Every one of my movies is good enough; they don't have to be great. I saw someone on Twitter recently say that a film has "one or two really brilliant ideas" and the rest is just some "horeshit." I thought, "Yeah, that's it." You don't have to keep watching if you don't like that kind of thing. But I'm lucky; I manage to have one or two good ideas amidst the "horeshit," especially after 30 years in the industry. if you're always aiming for perfection, you might find that many people don't even go that far. The fear of not being prepared for perfection often prevents them from taking that first step. If we can't live in the past—or shouldn't live in the past because it's unhealthy—and we shouldn't live in the future due to past depression and future anxiety, there's only one place to be. We have no choice but to be here in the present. However, so often we're not in the present. Nobody wants to be in this moment; they want to be there. Everyone's headed to a place, and then everyone's obsessing about where we've been. Kids, this is what they taught me in the nut house. I'm going to save you a lot of money and time: be here and now, be mindful, breathe. The easiest way to do that, if your head's going crazy and you're in the future worrying about some bad outcomes, or if you're in the past worrying about some old traumas, is just to breathe. You go, just breathe in and out five times, taking deep breaths. You know what it does? It grounds you. Do you know why? Because you cannot breathe in the past, and you cannot breathe in the future. You can only breathe in the here and now. By breathing, you bring yourself back to the moment. You pull yourself out of that fake future that you're fretting about, and you pull yourself out of that horrendous past that you're still traumatized by. You could sit there and think, "Well, wait, is anything wrong?" No, my body is reacting to some thoughts I was thinking about because the body stores trauma. I just did this to myself; I created this condition. You could pull yourself out of that. I'm not saying this is a cure for everything; some people go through real struggles. But when you're in your head, oh yeah, that ain't real life. You may have gone through real trauma in your life, but when you're in your head fretting about it, you are making up a fiction. You have to put that thought away, flip the script, and be like, "I'm in the here and now." If you can't do that and you have to be in the future, just make up a better future. It has just as much a likelihood of coming true as the fake scenarios that you're fretting about, ruining your life. At least be an author for the best for yourself. Make it up; make up good things.

Sometimes, I find that when I go on vacation and stay in a place without air conditioning, it can be a cool experience. At first, I think, "this sucks," but then I feel a lot more connected to nature. It's hard to explain, but you feel way more connected to the environment when you don't have air conditioning and all these little comforts. Sleeping on your side is actually the best position." I was curious if it mattered which side, and she explained, "I like to connect everything back to evolution. When we slept in the cave, we co-slept for warmth and probably slept on our left side to protect our heart and have our dominant hand ready for an attack." In today's fast-paced world, it is easy to just use people as pieces of garbage that you can get through quickly, instead of forming actual deep meaningful relationships that could nurture both parties well. This mindset makes sense when you consider how we often treat people similarly to how we shop online. For example, when browsing on Amazon, you might think, "I don't want this one, not this one, maybe this one; let me read up on it." This approach can unconsciously extend to our interactions with people, especially with the constant access we have through our phones. My list included simple actions like talking to a friend, having a square of dark chocolate, taking a nap, or going for a walk. There are two modes our nervous system can be in: fight or flight and rest and digest. The fight or flight mode is characterized by hyper-vigilance, where we are constantly looking out for threats. In contrast, the rest and digest mode is the calm state we experience after a satisfying meal. Ideally, we want to spend more time in the rest and digest mode. Engaging in activities like going for a long walk in nature can help reset your nervous system. To understand this better, one can refer to Erikson's stages of psychosocial development. The first stage, trust versus mistrust, is foundational. Many of my CEO clients find themselves grappling with the stage of industry versus inferiority, which occurs between ages 5 to 12. This stage often leads to feelings of inadequacy, commonly referred to as imposter syndrome. Consider a newborn baby: it starts with almost no abilities, and within just 18 months, the transformation is astonishing. The progress is remarkable, and it is incredible to witness how much development occurs in such a short time. By that time, they are walking, can control their own bladder and bowels, and can speak up to five languages if they have been exposed to different languages in their early years. This is the biggest example of neuroplasticity; the change is incredible. So, I was going to say that we can also get access to ancestral or ancient wisdom. If we put that together with the idea of what our ancestors did when they didn't really have resources to spare for fun, right? They danced, they drummed, they chanted, they hummed, they sang, they painted. These physical activities are actually really good for us and can help us to release some of that stored trauma. So, I'd love for people to go away with that message: yes, you might have stored trauma that talking therapy hasn't completely gotten rid of, but there are things that you can do at home. You don’t have to pay for a massage; you can do self-massage, you can take a bath, you can dance around your living room, and all of these things could also help you to release that kind of trauma. Trauma is a significant issue, and I'd love for people to walk away with the message that yes, you might have stored trauma that talking therapy hasn't completely got rid of I sometimes wonder about the nature of stress in our current society. Everyone feels so stressed out, and it seems to be a prevalent issue. It used to be that we had to be wary of physical threats, like a lion attacking us. Now, however, the biggest threats to our safety are psychological threats—things like your partner leaving you, losing your job, or your friends not liking you anymore. The fear has shifted from external to internal, and it feels like we are in a phase of evolution where the lions now are the fears inside of us. These fears include concerns about losing our ability to feed our families or achieving our goals. If it's an interdependent, trusting relationship where both parties are committed for the long term, then that inevitably will reduce your stress levels. For women, particularly if they are being intimate, they will experience a lot of oxytocin—a hormone released through cuddling and physical intimacy, which peaks during orgasm. As a result, they become more bonded to the guy. If the guy has no intentions of pursuing a committed relationship, he will experience a lot of dopamine, the reward chemical, and testosterone. Additionally, there is a hormone called vasopressin, which relates to social bonding and aggression in men. If men don't have sex immediately, this hormone builds up, leading them to become bonded to the woman. Consequently, there is better value in creating a relationship if sex is not involved right away, as it increases the chances of the man bonding with the woman. I feel like the more I keep it in my body, the more masculine I feel, and the more of myself I feel, as opposed to just having a leak of it constantly. You know, it's kind of like I almost had a leak of my masculinity, and I would cause the leak, but the leak would happen, and it was just like a dripping pipe. You look at a dripping pipe, and you're like, "Ah," but you look at a pipe that's not dripping, and you're like, "Hey, this is some pretty good construction over here." co-sleeping, which is associated with oxytocin release, and question whether couples or families that sleep together are generally healthier individuals can improve each other's health, suggesting that if we ate together and co-slept, one might actually donate healthy cells to the other as part of a relationship. having a moderate amount of faith or some sort of spiritual belief is beneficial for the brain. However, having none or too much—like fundamentalism—is actually not good for your brain. It's important to note that even though the brain represents a small percentage of body weight, it uses 20 to 30% of everything that you eat. This means that when you are asleep, your brain is still consuming about 20% of your daily intake. When you are focused on a task, it can use up to 25%, and under stress, it may consume as much as 30% of what you eat. There is a significant debate surrounding ultra-processed foods, but from a brain health perspective, I advise against them. These foods can have detrimental effects on your brain. The primary issue is inflammation. When your body breaks down ultra-processed foods, it generates a lot of cellular activity and waste products, which can lead to inflammation. When the body is under stress and receiving inadequate nutrition, cortisol levels rise, crossing the blood-brain barrier and causing inflammation in both the gut and the brain. I would like to share my personal approach, which has taken years to develop. I eat 30 different plant products per week. This variety can include coffee, dark chocolate, and spices. For instance, if you enjoy Mexican cuisine, it’s not as challenging as it seems to incorporate diverse vegetables. In South America, they refer to squash, beans, and corn as the three sisters, attributing their consumption to the blue zones of longevity in certain regions. In addition to plant-based foods, it’s essential to consume good quality protein. Lean proteins such as eggs, yogurt, tofu, and fish are excellent options. Speaking of fish, I personally enjoy it a lot. There’s something fascinating about seeing fish in the water, although I do have a peculiar perspective on animals. For example, when I look at cows, I often think, "this thing is dumb," which influences my feelings about eating them. In contrast, fish seem more dynamic, and I sometimes think about wanting to embody traits of the animals I consume. Moreover, we must not forget the importance of good fats for the brain. Foods like oily fish, avocados, eggs, nuts, and olive oil are all beneficial. Additionally, dark-skinned foods are generally better for brain health than their lighter counterparts. For instance, purple sprouting broccoli is preferable to green broccoli, and blueberries are a better choice than raspberries. The purple color in these foods contains antioxidants known as anthocyanins, which are beneficial for neuroplasticity—the brain's ability to change and adapt. we actually have a second nose that is not connected to the brain? It’s called the vomeronasal organ, and it detects smells from food that give off vapors, like spicy foods. Interestingly, this organ connects to the heart and can influence heart rate, but it does not connect directly to the brain. Dogs have a similar organ, which allows them to detect pheromones. Interestingly, cats and dogs in old people's homes tend to sit outside the door of individuals who are dying. This behavior occurs because cell death starts to happen before you actually die, and it happens in a specific order that these animals can smell. That’s crazy Andreas Meran also mentioned that things like extra-sensory perception are not just “woo woo.” He compared it to the fact that most people are unaware we have this second nose. There’s science behind it; we just haven’t discovered it all yet. What we need to live our normal life is called our working memory, which is stored in the outer cortex of the brain. Our beliefs and thought patterns, which we were discussing earlier, are located in systems in the limbic part of the brain, which is the shape and size of your clenched fist. Obviously, yours is bigger than mine. The cortex surrounds it, and through a process called Hebbian learning, named after the neuroscientist Donald Hebb, we understand that you can't remember everything you've experienced in your life, but you have experienced it. That information, like neurons that fire together, wire together, gets stored deeper in your spinal cord and gut neurons. This is why intuition is sometimes called gut instinct. Now, how do we change our perspective? This leads us to the hard problem of neuroscience, which is the question of whether our brain is our mind or our mind is our brain. If we're being very scientific, then our consciousness, which encompasses everything we think and feel, arises from neurons and chemicals that are physically part of our brain. Recently, there has been a significant move towards understanding that in ancient times, we believed in seers, shamans, and mystics, and things like clairvoyance and claircognizance. We've moved away from that in modern times, leaning more towards astrology and the moon, for instance. However, science is now starting to look at some of this ancient wisdom in a way that suggests we may have forgotten things that are crucial to our mental health in the modern world. I mentioned some of those things already, like drumming and chanting. What we believe now is that our brain might actually be filtering our consciousness down so that we can survive in this material world, but our minds are capable of much more than what we currently think. In terms of perspective, it's essential to recognize that all the filters from your childhood and upbringing shape how you see the world. You can absolutely challenge your perspective; it’s not just your brain—it’s a version of reality that your brain is creating. I have some favorite exercises that people can do at home to help with this. One exercise involves sitting down and describing yourself—what you're wearing, your age—and then asking a question like, "What should I do?" or "What's going to happen to me?" This is especially useful when you're feeling desperate. After that, you get up, walk seven steps, turn around, and say, "I'm Tara, seven years older than you, and I've seen what happens in your life in the next seven years." Then, you answer the question and give advice. This exercise is quite powerful because you’re putting yourself in a different place and using both your current self and your intuition. It often feels like there are many hidden abilities that we have yet to discover. For instance, while we often think of our senses as limited to five, I believe there could be up to 33 senses that we don’t even know about yet. We have senses like chronception, which is the understanding of the passing of time. I think we all take turns being what someone else needs to hear. For example, someone might approach me at the airport and share something profound that I needed to hear at that moment. It’s remarkable how we can act as each other’s champions throughout the day and over the years; this connection is a gift. Sometimes, we forget that we're the captain of the ship; sometimes we just feel like the stream owns everything. I think some versions of manifestation can still make people feel like that because it's about the universe and vibrations. I wanted to explain manifestation through Psychology and Neuroscience in a way to say, "Look, it's your brain that's doing it; it's not some outside force." I think that's way more empowering, and that's what people really liked about it. I write a lot about vision boards, but I call them action boards because I say you can't just create a fantasy and then sit at home and wait for it to come true. Look at how hard you've worked to get to where you are If you know, manifestation is basically setting goals and desires, knowing what you want, and finding images of them to put on a board that you can see at least twice a day. If it's only once a day, then see it just before you go to sleep because it imprints on your subconscious. It can be very literal or metaphorical; for example, you could have a horse on there, and it could mean one thing to you and something else to me. Basically, I ask people to make this board, look at it daily, and visualize these things being true because your brain doesn't actually know the difference between something happening in real life and a strong visualization. Wow! And you won't be afraid of it if you've already visualized it. You won't meet that dream girl and say, "Oh, maybe I'm not ready." You'll have told your brain that you're ready to take a healthy risk. So, your brain doesn't really know the difference between something that happened in real life or something that you strongly visualize. Wow! It's the same reason why, when we watch a movie, we're able to get lost in it; we're able to believe in it. You could create enough of a visualization for yourself that if you really were to powerfully start to focus on it, your brain would eventually think it's so true that the world would meet you and put it into your life. Women have had financial independence, been able to use contraception, and changed how older women can survive and be valued in society. However, men haven’t really changed that much since the 1950s. For many guys, it’s not about whether a woman can do something; it’s about wanting to be of service and showing off a bit. We want to be able to help out. I used to joke about how women want to be men now, especially when I see women deadlifting weights. I’d say, If you put down the barbells and look lost for a minute, a guy will show right up. making small, manageable changes—what I call "micro tweaks"—in fundamental areas such as sleep, diet, hydration, exercise, and stress management. For instance, if someone went to bed half an hour earlier, drank an extra glass of water, ate more vegetables, walked a thousand steps more than usual, and spent time in nature, they would create a better environment for their brain. I assured that if they did a few things like that every day, they would feel significantly better within weeks, prompting them to think, "okay, what else can I do?" This could lead to a point where they are in excellent physical condition and could even create a vision board to outline their goals.

I zoomed in a bunch because if you know anything about Paul Graham, it is his obsession with keeping things simple and never changing them. This is what his blog looks like by default—not great for mobile—so we're going to zoom in a bit to make it more readable It’s funny because everyone associates YC and the whole venture capitalist world with super artificial “faking it till you make it” type stuff. But YC is as real as it comes, almost to a fault, where they are so blunt and straightforward. This includes things like these talks that are not recorded, and you’ll never get to see. I wasn’t at this event, so I didn’t get to see this, and I never will. He explicitly told us to throw away our pitch deck and just show the product as our pitch, which went great and is a huge part of why we were able to raise funds Why was everyone telling these founders the wrong thing? That was the big mystery to me. After mulling it over for a bit, I figured out that what they were being told was how to run a company that you hadn't founded—how to run a company if you're merely a professional manager. You find success by building the right thing and obsessing over it. It is the obsession over individual customers' needs that makes you successful. As crazy as it sounds, I still take all of the sales calls for all of the services we've built. It's important to be on that ground level, doing support and being involved in these ways. people screw up by hiring for the work they don't want to do When I hired an editor, it meant I could focus on the things I loved, but there were some problems. Since I didn't love editing, I couldn't be a great workplace for an editor because I couldn't relate to them. They'd feel alone, and it meant that my bar for a good editor to hire was a lot lower because I wanted to just get this work off my plate. . I was hiring people not because they were great or the right fit for my team, but because I didn't want to be editing. Now, let's apply this to startups. Many founders think, "Oh, I'm wasting all my time on support; I need to hire someone to do support for me so I can focus on the important things." No, support is important! You have to do it enough to like it, and then when you like it and understand it deeply, that's the point you hire. Stop hiring for the things you don't want to do; hire for the things you love to do so you're forced to deal with the things you don't want to do. I think this is my best advice. I've been giving it more and more, and I've watched people's brains just crumble—be it a creator or a big business—when they realize that their hiring process has been about avoiding the things they don't want to do because their goal is to stop thinking about it. The journey of being a Founder can often be challenging, and many of us learn that the hard way. However, even during this learning process, I still felt kind of lonely. My social circle consisted of just two to three people, both of whom were busy running their own companies. This loneliness is a killer. It's hard to articulate, but you simply aren’t getting the reception you need. If a VC or investor can come in and fill that gap, they can negotiate a much better deal on your company. This is a strategy that many VCs love to employ: providing you with a sense of safety and a comfortable place to talk, discuss, and be part of the community. The catch is that they will use this leverage to secure a better deal and isolate you from other sources of advice that might be more beneficial. One of Y Combinator's specific goals is to set up their Founders for success, even if it means compromising their margins and accepting worse deals. The most popular method, invented by Y Combinator, is called the SAFE, which stands for Secured Against Future Equity. This means that all investors in a company like Ping currently own 0% of it. All of Ping's shares are owned by employees. When new equity is added to the pool—whether through selling the company, doing a Series A, or going public—that's when the investments convert. This approach effectively acts as an IOU, making it significantly easier to manage my cap table and investments. Michael Cyel from Why Competitor articulated this well: there are three states when you pitch your company. After you describe what you are building and why I should invest, 95% of the time, I am thinking, "No, I’m out; it’s not my thing." 1% of the time, I think, "Yeah, this person knows what they’re doing; I’m in." The remaining 4% of the time, I feel that I would hate to say no to this person. I may not go out of my way to offer to invest, but I won’t immediately turn them down like I would in the other cases. If they ask me how much I am in for or present their valuation, it becomes much harder for me to say no. That aside, the 95% of the time I’m not interested isn’t due to specific facts or a checklist of things that need changing. Instead, it’s more of a gut feeling; I might not be vibing with the idea, the team, or perhaps the presentation is lacking. If they cannot convince me as both a user and an investor, I don’t see much likelihood of their success. However, it’s difficult to articulate that feeling and provide specific reasons. Most investors, when they say no, try to justify their decision to themselves because it feels uncomfortable to simply decline. They often make up reasons on the spot, which usually results in bad advice. I conducted five to seven calls a day for two weeks straight, but when we finally met with the right VCs, the deal was closed in 15 minutes from the start of the call. Ultimately, don’t listen to investors when they say anything other than "I’m in." The biggest mistake I see many founders make is allowing investors to influence their decision-making process too early. The best advice a VC ever gave me was to not listen to VCs There’s a reason why those who can, do; those who can’t, teach. The same applies here: those who can build, build; those who can't build, invest. It may sound silly, but it is painfully true. Founders should stop trying to make their company appeal to people who don’t even know what appeals to them. If you are starting a company in the tech space and think it might be interesting to me, I encourage you to write me a cohesive two-sentence message in my Twitter DMs explaining why I might be interested. If you do a good job at that, I will respond; if not, I probably won’t respond. Please don’t take it personally; it’s just hard to sneak into my brain. Remember how many billions of dollars Paul Graham is worth? The simplicity of his language is striking; the most complex word he uses is "effective," and most of his words are five letters or fewer. It’s remarkable how much knowledge he can convey in such simple language, and he has been doing this for a decade now. In effect, there are two different ways to run a company: founder mode and manager mode. Until now, most people, even in Silicon Valley, have implicitly assumed that scaling a startup meant switching to manager mode. However, we can infer the existence of another mode from the dismay of founders who have tried it and the success of their attempts to escape from it. The most loyal users were the ones who had a bug, reported it, and then we fixed it really fast and thanked them. You have more confidence in something that failed and the owner fixed quickly than in something that never failed in the first place This is why I love safety nets versus guard rails. It makes it so much easier to fix things when they break, and they always will break. It doesn’t matter how big or small or how many unit tests you have; things will break. Being able to fix it quickly will always be the better thing for user loyalty, to the point where it's actually better to have bugs than not, as long as you can fix them quickly. Ownership is the biggest thing, without question. Every team has somebody who's more driven than the rest. Even if they don't meet your expectations for drive, at the very least, they feel a bit lonely. If you can reach out to them and be their safe space to complain about these things not moving, you can build a really strong relationship there. Then the faker hires more fakers, and now you have a company run by people who don’t actually want to do any work. Then you accidentally end up with a situation like Google. It’s so easy to fall into this trap. . I'm now at the point where I won't even use a new service or company if I can't talk to the CEO. If I'm not confident that I can reach out to an executive at the company and get something fixed, I'll use the smaller alternative, even if your service is better. If I can't talk to the founder, I'm out. It is what it is. Your org chart cannot and should not represent the amount of impact people are having, and those impactful people should feel like they have every tool they need to unblock and have more impact. They should be able to meet with you, chat with you, work with you, and ship with you. More companies need to operate like this; imagine how useful such a thing could be. It could make a big company feel like a startup. Founder mode will be more complicated than manager mode, but it will also work better. We already know that from examples of individual founders groping their way towards it. if the practice of having such retreats became so widespread that even mature companies dominated by politics started to do it, we could quantify the sentencing of companies by the average depth of the org chart of those invited as soon as the concept of founder mode becomes established, people will start misusing it. Founders who are unable to delegate even things that they should will use founder mode as the excuse, or managers who aren't founders will decide they should try to act like founders The founder arc is starting; I am feeling more inspired than I have in a while. I feel validated. This is the way I like to build, and I think it's so nice having an article that's really breaking down this way of thinking. I hope that going forward, more people will see the benefits of going founder mode. So until next time, summer's over; founder mode fall has begun.

I think the first thing is just that it's surreal. I was in Afghanistan first when the Taliban were in their last reign, which lasted from the late 1990s through to September the 11th. It was a time when it was one of the most shocking governments on Earth. There were public executions in the main stadiums, and Kabul, the capital city, was a ghost town. There were very few people living there, very few vehicles, and half the buildings were still in ruins from the Civil War. They were even hanging televisions from trees as part of their campaign against any kind of image. Many Afghans will say, "Okay, we don't like the way the Taliban are behaving; we don't like the way they're treating women; we feel a real absence of freedom." But my goodness, we're grateful that we're not liable to be killed at any moment. If you're looking for a symbol of how the West got overconfident and how it went wrong, Iraq and Afghanistan are prime examples where we spent over $3 trillion—$3,000 billion—and achieved close to nothing. These were failures beyond imagining. You can't think of a bigger failure than to invade a country, get rid of the Taliban, spend 20 years there, and then hand it back to the Taliban again. It's just definitional failure. There’s a striking statistic that one of my friends, George, found: the head of UK cyber security had a job posted online with an annual salary of £65,000 to combat threats from the CCP, Russia, Iran, hackers, and the dark web. It’s astonishing that such a critical position is offered such a low salary. In some ways, their situation seems even worse, as they spend four and a half hours every day making fundraising calls, leaving them with no time to think about politics. They are just focused on bringing in money all the time. There is a beautiful phrase from the English poet William Blake, who speaks of mind-forged manacles. As humans, we often surround ourselves with constraints; we are incredibly tribal, conventional, and conformist. We attempt to read and follow rules that ultimately make no sense, shaped by cultures that lead us to engage in bizarre behaviors. For instance, if I post something trivial, like a joke about Elon Musk, I might receive 17,000 to 20,000 likes, but if I share a serious message about addressing extreme poverty in Africa, I might only get about 100 likes. This stark contrast illustrates how the online landscape prioritizes sensationalism over substantive discussion. It can be quite disheartening to see that a serious article, which I care about deeply, garners a mere 10,000 to 15,000 views, while a trivial joke can reach four to five million people. By getting out of the way and allowing people to manage their own resources, we see remarkable transformations. It’s not a charity worker coming in to do it for them; it’s simply giving them the cash and returning three months later. The results are striking: the percentage of households with electricity increased from about a third to nearly 80%, and three-quarters of the families ended up with a cow. Roofs were repaired, everyone had a latrine, school enrollment increased, and people began eating twice a day instead of once every two days. This brings us to the perspective of the saying, “Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day; teach a man to fish, and he’ll be able to feed himself for a lifetime.” It’s a lovely phrase that suggests an instant solution: just teach someone to fish, and their problems are solved. This idea flatters us, as it implies that we possess the knowledge that others lack. However, what I have realized through cash transfers is that this notion does not hold true. Why doesn’t it work? Firstly, in many cases, people already know how to fish; they just don’t have the money for a fishing hook. Many communities have business ideas ready to go; they simply need a bit of cash to buy a bicycle to transport their goods or invest in equipment to turn milk into yogurt. They already know how to fish; they just lack the necessary tools. Secondly, every household is different. One person may want to open a yogurt business, while their neighbor may wish to send their child to school, and another may need funds for healthcare or home repairs. Cash allows individuals to address their unique needs and aspirations, enabling them to improve their circumstances in ways that are most meaningful to them. In that case, they don’t want to fish; they want to open a bakery. And then, I think the final thing is, of course, somebody in that community will put the money to use so much more efficiently. If it's their own money and they're fixing up their house, they do it for a fraction of the costs that a foreign charity would incur because they’d bring in their brother and their cousins and they’d use local materials. It’s a completely different world. They concluded that the most sustainable way to provide water was for the girls to carry the buckets 300 yards to the well, fill them with water, and then use them for washing. I was baffled, thinking, "What are you doing?" This was a $440,000 project. I suggested that they could have simply given $2,000 to the head teacher, which would have allowed them to support 20 times as many schools. Their response was that the head teacher might have stolen the money. I retorted, "We stole the money; we literally stole $38,000 out of $40,000 here." The issue lies partly in our risk aversion. We are often unwilling to trust people, leading to excessive spending on follow-ups, financial checks, controls, and monitoring. A significant portion of the funding is wasted on visits to ensure that the buckets are still present. Rory Sutherland from Ogilvy once said, "Nobody gets fired for hiring Deloitte." His point was that people prefer to be wrong in a reliable manner than to take risks and potentially face consequences. In a way, I'm less worried about proportions; what I'm worried about is that there are 300 million more people who can't put food on the table, and we can fix it. I mean, I think the point about direct cash transfers is that the most useful thing you can do is send cash. It's not about being a world genius who really knows about whatever; for example, I could be like, "I'm a real expert on podcasting, so I need to go and teach the people in this village how to podcast or how to sell sandwiches at Heathrow Airport." No, they know much better than we do. It's also about trust—it's about saying, "I trust you; I believe that you know much more about your own environment than I do." When discussing the impact of the Sam Bankman-Fried effective altruism fallout on forward-thinking charity initiatives, it is important to note the contrasting approaches. Initiatives like Give Directly present a cool name and a sexy idea, focusing on a bottom-up approach. They provide the most robust resources to individuals, allowing them to choose how to spend it, in contrast to effective altruism (EA), which typically involves top-down analyses to determine the most efficient charities

I think it's obvious there's basically one deep state party, and that is the party of Cheney, Harris, Biden, and Victoria Nuland, my colleague at Columbia University now. Nuland is kind of the face of all of this because she has been in every administration for the last 30 years. She was in the Clinton Administration, wrecking our policies towards Russia in the 1990s. She was in the Bush Administration with Cheney, wrecking our policies towards NATO enlargement. She was then in the Obama Administration as Hillary's spokesperson first and then making a coup in Ukraine in February 2014—not a great move, started a war. She was Biden's Under Secretary of State. Now that's both parties. It's a colossal mess, and she's been Cheney's advisor, she's been Biden's advisor. It makes perfect sense. This is the reality. We're trying to find out if there's another party—that's the big question. It's very important to understand that starting in the late 19th, early 20th century, given developments in the American economy, it was imperative that we develop—and this was true of all Western countries—a very powerful central state that could run the country In a very interesting interview of Putin in 2017, published in Figaro, he mentioned that he had dealt with three U.S. presidents. He observed that they come into office with certain ideas, but then the men in dark suits and blue ties come in and explain the way the world really is, causing those ideas to vanish. Trump hired John Bolton, who represented the Deep State, and Bolton explained in his memoirs how they would trick Trump when he didn't agree with them. American foreign policy aims to maximize power and to be a global hegemon. With no rival great power left post-Cold War, the U.S. decided to utilize its power to remake the world in its own image. U.S. is more interested in strategic advantages like military bases and NATO enlargement rather than state-building. game on the board is power-seeking. there are smart and dumb ways to pursue power, suggesting that containing China is smart while what the U.S. is doing in Ukraine is dumb. We have a mindset that everything is a challenge for survival and that escalation is always the right approach. A little bit of prudence could save the whole planet. Understanding perspectives from both sides can lead to deconfliction. While I admire India's policies, the notion that India will ally with the United States against China is a delusion. Washington needs to understand the global dynamics better. This approach is power-seeking. Even if you're safe as a regional hegemon, you're never safe if another regional hegemon does what you do. In the nuclear age, you don't get a second chance. We are now in a direct war with Russia, which has 6,000 nuclear warheads. I can't think of anything more imbecilic than that. We got into this mess because we thought we had to meddle, including putting NATO into Georgia and Ukraine. If we do the same with China, there will be a war. The agreement is two states, maybe with a big wall between them, on the 4th of June 1967 borders, with a state of Palestine being the 194th UN member state, and its capital in East Jerusalem and control over the Islamic holy sites. Israel faces three big problems aside from problems with centrifugal forces inside the society. One is the Palestinian problem, which is both in Gaza and in the West Bank. Two is Hezbollah, and three is Iran. Iran is the really dangerous flashpoint because, as you know, the Russians are now closely allied with the Iranians, the Chinese are moving in that direction as well. If Israel gets involved in a war with Iran, we’re going to come in in all likelihood. The Israelis are the ones who want us to get involved in a big war with Iran. That’s the escalation flashpoint. If you believe that it matters who leads the next administration, that’s true.

At a high level, my sweet spot is digitizing the physical world, treating atoms like bits. In the bits world, a computer's CPU manipulates bits, storage stores bits, and the network moves bits from point A to point B. When treating atoms like bits, manufacturing manipulates atoms, real estate stores atoms, and transport logistics move atoms. These are the core computing resources in an atoms-based computer. My last gig focused on the network for the physical world, but there's a huge amount of innovation left in compute and storage for the physical world, also known as digitized manufacturing and digitized real estate. Our company is building atoms-based computers, and our first computer is a food computer. In our lab, we do everything in-house. Once the dispensers are full of food, nobody touches it, and what comes out on a conveyor belt are bags of food that get delivered. The process is amazing: LED bag sealed, and you get the general idea. Now, you have a restaurant that can asynchronously produce for consumers from what labor is doing, with the labor primarily on the prep side of things. There are vessels with ingredients in them; the bowl goes by, stuff gets dropped in, organized, covered, put in a bag, and labeled. The human has no part in that except for preparing and filling prep. This machine can run for hours without anybody there, making it a more efficient system. To revolutionize the kitchen like Uber did to the car, two things need to happen. First, the logistics and movement of food need to go to zero cost, akin to autonomous vehicles. Second, the production of food must be roboticized and mechanized. When these two things happen, cooking can become a choice rather than a necessity. This allows for higher quality food at a lower cost and gives people back the most precious commodity: time. The key was ensuring that the problems being solved were greater than the problems being created. When the latter began to outweigh the former, it was time to pull back, regroup, and then push forward again. Despite the hardships, I want to emphasize that I loved every minute of it. When you fall in love again, you don't think about the ex very much. Cloud Kitchen is the ex, and you've moved on. You inspired a generation to operate in the real world, build impactful things, and fight with an entrepreneurial spirit.

They built social media on the back of attention-seeking and egotism. That's the currency—ego—and the stuff that's transmitted is high emotional content, high anger, sometimes humor. Now we have a three-way storm: the narcissists and the sadists rule, optimized by the social media algorithms. Even more importantly, the only thing that matters is capturing someone's attention now. What that seems to mean is that we've created an environment where the mindset of an immature narcissist is reinforced constantly, algorithmically, with the AI systems. It's kind of like if you're in a classroom and you have to listen to the noisiest and most obnoxious person in the room all the time. It is remarkably addictive. I've also found there's been a shift in my reading habits. Partly because it's more effortful to read a classic, especially if I'm tired, it's easy to default to the fire hose of at least pseudo-information that X provides. One of the problems with social media pathology might merely be that it's free. People's attention is so valuable that if it's distributed for free, the psychopaths are going to take glorious advantage of that in a major way. That's another problem with the way these games are set up now.

This is the theoretical goal right here: We want to feel like a dynamic language while being a static language. We want to be as fast as Python when it, for example, parses a simple argument and prints out the help message. We want to have that experience where it's essentially instant and nice, but in a compiled language. First, we collect the necessary information and save it to some metadata. Then, we delete the notion that it was dynamically linking to Rock, making it think it's static now. Next, we compile our app to machine code using the dev backend to make it fast. We literally append the bytes to the end of the binary and load everything up in a map to ensure things are fast. Since we just created a lot of these bytes, everything remains hot in cache. Rock's tracing aims to compete with Python and offer a fluid experience. Zig, on the other hand, has different goals but emphasizes simplicity and fast compilation. This focus on user experience is often overlooked by big companies with infinite servers, remote builds, and complex caching systems. However, for the average user, this aspect is crucial for building software that is enjoyable to use. The fundamental message here is to cheat more—meaning, pay attention to details. The solution might be simple, but it requires a deep understanding of systems to take advantage of them. This isn't really cheating; it's about leveraging constraints effectively. A significant problem today is the tendency to build higher abstractions without understanding the underlying details. Without this knowledge, it's challenging to create something truly remarkable. In the Q&A session, a question was raised about targeting a shared object and emitting dynamic relocations. The process involves building everything as Position-Independent Code (PIC) or Position-Independent Executable (PIE), skipping Thread-Local Storage (TLS). This approach can lead to emitting a general dynamic model, which is not efficient at runtime. The response highlighted that in Rock's case, many things are skipped, and they patch up calls directly.