Startup Wisdom

Peter Thiel on how you should think about your future:

"What you end up doing when you think of the future as indefinite is you pick a job that you think will look good on your resume, because it will lead to a different job later on. There's even a credentialing version where you go to grad school, you get a consulting job, and you think of it as this branching tree diagram where you never really do something that you want to do.

You can think of the future on three horizons. Very short-term is: are you going to be happy, and will you be learning a lot? Medium-term is: how good is it on your resume? And very long-term is: are you working on something important or meaningful? We're in a skewed world where we overweight the medium-term and underweight some combination of the short-term and the long-term. I would recalibrate to focus on the short-term and the long-term, and forget about the medium-term."

Steve Jobs on how to make something great:

Peter Thiel on why you need to try new things:

Phil Knight (founder of Nike) on why you can't be afraid of offending people:

.@alexandr_wang (Chief AI Officer of Meta) on why vision and ambition will soon become scarce:

"I think a decade looking back, it'll be obvious that intelligence became abundant and that agency became abundant. The current trends we're on are just going to keep continuing, and this will be very strange. For the history of humanity, groups of smart people getting together towards a shared goal was the bottleneck of progress.

The United States of America, in some sense, was an example. The United States of America is formed from a group of very smart people getting together and having a vision for the future that they wanted to enact. And that's the story of nearly every company in America and the story of every YC company.

And that's going to change. All of a sudden, the scarce resource isn't going to be intelligence or agency. I really think it's going to be vision and ambition.

Do you have a clear view of what you want the world to look like in the future? What is the one way in which you want to put your finger on the scale for how the future of the world will develop? And how will the world look in five to ten years in a way that it does not look like today? And you have the ambition and drive to go through all the crap to make that happen. And AI will make that easier. Agents and AI make that maybe 10 times or 100 times easier than it was a decade ago."

Video Credit: @ycombinator