Rajesh Jain

Shane Parrish: “If someone admits they made a mistake, have the grace to let it go. Holding it over them ensures they won’t be quick to admit they were wrong in the future. Outcome over ego.”

Entrepreneur First: “We believe that building technology startups will become the ‘default’ career path for the world’s most ambitious people. I argue three things below. First, that digital technology is the most recent in a series of ‘technologies of ambition’ that have enabled ambitious people to maximise their impact over the last millennium or so. Second, that technology entrepreneurship is likely to become the dominant ‘technology of ambition’. Third, that new institutions will be needed to channel, focus and amplify this new ambition.”

Robert Caro: “Explore a single individual deeply enough and truths about all individuals emerge.” Dwarkesh Patel: “Robert Caro’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson are not only the best biographies I have ever read – and not only the best histories I have ever read. They’re perhaps the best books I’ve ever read.”

Sapient Capital: “As you become more fitted into your niche, your area of expertise, it discloses more information back to you. An elite martial artist squaring off in a bar fight will instantly notice the balance of his opponent, striking distance and potential weapons nearby. This gives him more options for action. He literally inhabits a richer world, and this makes him more powerful than an average person. He quite literally “sees through the matrix.” When it comes to understanding the connection between “openness” and wisdom, the expert is more open to the world, and the world is more open to him. So when Charlie Munger “reasons by analogy” he’s reaching back into his case studies to find a relevant comparison to the current situation. By extracting and recombining multiple pertinent details (what Cedric calls “fragments”), he might literally be seeing a pattern nobody else can see, which is why he can invest in a totally differentiated way. Like the cardiac nurse, he’s observing the entire whole, rather than applying a single concept to the situation. The apex of wisdom is a sage. His disciplined usage of his attention has helped him become flexible, because he can literally see more and act decisively with less effort. But his domain isn’t limited to stock markets, a tennis court or a chessboard. He sees the whole world that way, and he is more powerful within it. It’s why sages are associated with miracles of congruence like snapping one’s fingers to make a thunderstorm appear. They have harmonized with deep reality and act from within it, rather than the modern man who too often tries to rigidly impose his rules from without.”

Morgan Housel: “Venture capital is a tail-driven business. You’ve likely heard that. Make 100 investments, and almost all of your return will come from five of them; most of your return from one or two. Correlation Ventures crunched the numbers. Out of 21,000 venture financings from 2004 to 2014, 65% lost money. Two and a half percent of investments made 10x-20x. One percent made more than 20x return. Half a percent – about 100 companies – earned 50x or more. That’s where the majority of the industry’s returns come from. It skews even more as you drill down. There’s been $482 billion of VC funding in the last ten years. The combined value of the ten largest venture-backed companies is $213 billion. So ten venture-backed companies are valued at half the industry’s deployed capital…A takeaway from that is that no matter what you’re doing, you should be comfortable with a lot of stuff not working. It’s normal. This is true for companies, which need to learn how to fail well. It’s true for investors, who need to understand both the normal tail mechanics of diversification and the importance of time horizon, since long-term returns accrue in bunches. And it’s important to realize that jobs and even entire careers might take a few attempts before you find a winning groove That’s how these things work.”

Marc Levinson in 2020: “The [cargo-shipping] container era began in April 1956, when the Ideal-X, a converted tanker left over from the war, carried fifty-eight aluminum containers on its deck from Newark, New Jersey, to Houston, Texas. No one imagined this concept would turn the world economy upside down. It was conceived with an entirely different purpose in mind: to shave a few dollars off the cost of moving trucks between North Carolina and New York.” [via CafeHayek] Donald Boudreaux: “It cannot be said too often: Entrepreneurial innovation is inseparable from capitalism. It is indispensable not only for economic growth but even for the maintenance (if such were our goal) of our current standard of living. (When objective facts on the ground change, innovation is necessary to deal with these changes. If, say, a source of raw materials dries up, innovation is necessary to find new sources or sufficient quantities of acceptable substitutes.) Yet industrial policy necessarily is hostile to innovation because innovation necessarily is not part of the industrial-policy plan. The fact that industrial policyists continue to ignore this reality should embarrass them. Alas, it seems not to do so.”

Julia Angwin: “Nearly all of the tech platforms developed extensive and detailed rules banning hate speech after finding that the first thing that happens on a new social network is that users start tossing slurs at one another…But fear is weaponized even more than hate by leaders who seek to spark violence. Hate is often part of the equation, of course, but fear is almost always the key ingredient when people feel they must lash out to defend themselves.”

WSJ: “Many countries are competing to be the “plus one,” with Vietnam, Mexico, Thailand and Malaysia in particular contention. India must still overcome entrenched problems that have kept it a bit player in global supply chains. Its labor force remains mostly poor and unskilled, infrastructure is underdeveloped and the business climate, including regulations, can be burdensome. Manufacturing remains small relative to the size of India’s economy. Nonetheless, after decades of disappointment, it is making progress. Its manufactured exports were barely a tenth of China’s in 2021, but they exceeded all other emerging markets except Mexico’s and Vietnam’s, according to World Bank data. The biggest gains have been in electronics, where exports have tripled since 2018 to $23 billion in the year through March. India has gone from making 9% of the world’s smartphone handsets in 2016 to a projected 19% this year, according to Counterpoint Technology Market Research. Foreign direct investment into India averaged $42 billion annually from 2020 to 2022, a doubling in under a decade, according to central bank figures.”

Vint Cerf: “I think we’re still in a very peculiar period of time, where we’re trying to characterize what these things can and can’t do, and how they go off the rails, and how do you take advantage of them to do useful work? How do we get them to distinguish fact from fiction? All of that is in my view open territory, but then that’s always an exciting place to be — a place where nobody’s ever been before. The thrill of discovery and the risk of hazard create a fairly exciting mix — an exhilarating mix.”

Token Dispatch: “Dynamic NFTs function by storing data in a format that can be edited. While static NFTs are usually created using the ERC-721 token standard, dynamic NFTs use the ERC-1155 standard. That type of token standard is sometimes referred to as “semi-fungible” because it can be changed if required. Changes to a dynamic NFT can be triggered by a smart contract. Typically, an oracle will send external data to the smart contract, which triggers a change in the NFT’s metadata. The characteristics of that NFT, like its appearance, will then be updated…Dynamic NFTs are the gateway to a world where your digital possessions come to life.”

Rob Toth: “When it came time to choose a career, I didn’t start a business of my own—instead I got a job at this newspaper, and have worked here for three decades as an editor. Even as other friends founded their own companies, and some became impressive successes, I’ve followed other bosses and gotten my checks from a payroll department. Now I’m starting to wonder why. Don’t misunderstand: I love my job, and I’ve been fortunate to have had the opportunity to do it for so long. And there is nothing wrong with sticking with a good thing. My father and mother stayed with their employers for decades, doing demanding work so the family could have everything it needed. But lately I’ve been thinking about why I never did launch a business of my own—and if I should have. Was it fear? Was it common sense? And most of all: Was it a mistake? Would I have been happier had I built something from nothing and answered just to myself?”

WSJ: “‘Robber barons’ of the 19th and 21st centuries enrich, not exploit, the poor and middle class…As American capitalism blossomed, some got rich. In 1892 there were 4,050 millionaires, with less than 20% having inherited their wealth. The rest created it and in the process reduced poverty, expanded general societal prosperity, and made it possible for millions of immigrants looking for opportunity and freedom to find both. That mattered little to progressives, who were so obsessed by the 4,050 millionaires that they turned a blind eye to the 66 million Americans whose economic well-being improved faster than any people who had ever lived on earth…At its root, progressivism is based on a myth and fueled by envy—the same caustic force that has destroyed prosperity and endangered freedom from the time of the ancient Greeks.”

Christopher Penn on open-source AI models: “Fine-tuning a model isn’t nearly as costly as building the model in the first place. If entrepreneurs and engineers wanted a custom model for a specific task, it’s far easier to fine tune an existing model, as long as the source model is high enough quality. And that’s what LLaMa is – a very high quality starting point for a lot of innovation that Facebook released to the world. Think of LLaMa like this: let’s pretend that generative AI is like pizza. Up until now, you had to order pizza delivery from OpenAI, right? Through ChatGPT and their APIs, they were the only game in town. You might have thought about making your own pizza from scratch, but for a variety of reasons – time, money, talent – you just didn’t. Along comes Facebook and LLaMa, which is like one of those pre-baked pizza kits. Now all you have to do is customize the very nice pre-made pizza with the toppings you want, but you don’t have to go through all the work of making the pizza from scratch.”

Shane Parrish: “When we know a lot about a topic, it can be difficult to write about it in a way that makes sense to the layperson. To improve writing, Cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker suggests several strategies: 1) Use concrete nouns and refer to tangible things instead of abstractions. 2) Assume that readers know less about the topic than you do, but are still intelligent and sophisticated. 3) Have someone from the intended audience read your work and provide feedback. 4) Allow time between writing and editing, so you can approach your own work with fresh eyes.”

RMI: “The energy transition is a technology revolution. At the heart of the energy transition lies the fact that renewable technologies are far superior to fossil fuels. The energy transition is a shift from a concentrated, expensive, polluting commodity-based system with no learning curve, to an efficient, manufactured, technology-driven system that offers continuously falling costs and is available everywhere. It is moving from heavy, fiery molecules to light, obedient electrons; from hunting fossil fuels to farming the sun. Like past technology shifts, it is a transformation, not merely a substitution. As RethinkX notes, this is not a brown caterpillar to a green caterpillar, but rather a caterpillar to a butterfly, which means different economics, geographies, winners, and energy carriers. Just like past technology shifts, the falling costs of the new render the old obsolete…When it comes to the renewables revolution, linear is the default perception, but exponential is the default reality. The growth of the key new energy technologies is exponential.”

Emergence Capital: “Founders building in generative AI today can take many paths, but I see two ways forward to build a lasting, defensible business. First understand your and your team’s core strength, then, choose one of these options: 1. Major in generative AI’s emerging technical capabilities and hunt for a function or vertical problem that benefits from your insights. Or… 2. Major in deep domain expertise and market relationships, and form a team to add in the technical knowledge. Given the broad accessibility of AI capabilities, both of these strategies can lead to large opportunities for startups…In the age of generative AI, one lesson remains true: the tighter your context and industry, the wiser your model and product.”

Warren Buffett: “What gives you opportunities is other people doing dumb things. In the 58 years we’ve been running Berkshire, I’d say there has been a great increase in the number of people doing dumb things.” More: “You should write your obituary and then try to figure out how to live up to it.”

Technology Review: “A growing group of experts and educators are trying to figure out what the relationship should be between digital technology and reading instruction. Both reading and digital tech are world-expanding human inventions, and laptops and smartphones have arguably given humans unending opportunities to read more; you can access pretty much anything in print within a few seconds. In terms of “raw words,” the cognitive scientist Daniel T. Willingham has said, kids read more now than they did a decade ago. But many reading experts suspect that the technology may also be changing how they read—that reading on a screen is fundamentally different from reading on the page.”

WSJ: “The tools of our lives, from car dashboard screens to buzzing phones, fracture our attention while promising that we can do it all, all the time. Except we can’t. “You can’t multitask,” says Earl K. Miller, a neuroscience professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory. Our brains are wired to do just one cognitively demanding thing at a time, he says. We tell ourselves we’re multitasking, when what we’re actually doing is task-switching, rapidly shifting from one thing to the next.  As we toggle, our minds stumble as we try to recall where we were and what we were doing, he says. Juggling tasks makes us less creative and more prone to errors; the quality of our work suffers…Our brains aren’t wired to juggle tasks.”

WaPo profiles Dean Koontz: “Author of more than 110 books…he’s sold more than 500 million books, writes two novels every year, lives like a prince and keeps his manuscripts in the fridge in case of fire.” More: “Koontz is billed as the “international best-selling master of suspense,” though he eschews labels and writes in multiple genres — supernatural, science fiction, young adult, manga, dog. Frequently, his books fuse several and are dusted with humor. “You can’t tie him down,” his friend and fellow best-selling author Jonathan Kellerman says. “He just works all the time. He has a lot of anxiety but manages to channel it into fiction.” Ten hours a day, six days a week — more nearing the end of each book, “when momentum carries me like a leaf on a flood.” He revises constantly, an average of 20 times before he proceeds to the next page. “When the writing is working, nothing stops me,” he says.”