What public figures publish and believe, in their own words.
About this feed
Highlights: posts that did unusually well for the person who wrote them, everything
they published at length, each release and new project, and every belief — at most
two a day from anyone. Day by day, newest
day first; within a day, the people with the most beliefs on this site come first. Nothing
else orders it. Show everything instead.
The quoted blocks are what people actually said; a beneath one is
the belief those words support, in korrents' wording. Nobody here wrote their own page.
Top people are the people in this feed with the most beliefs on this site, then the
most here. Choose an area and the row leads with the people whose beliefs are about it;
tap a face for their feed.
When you care only about shareholder value, the only job you have is to promote further exploitation and dominance — not to have happy customers, not to make your company "a good place to work," not to make a good product, not to make a difference or contribute to anything other than further growth.
the definition of a “good business” has changed from one that makes good products at a fair price to a sustainable and loyal market, to one that can display the most stock price growth from quarter to quarter.
So the idea is when you start a business, you get to make all the rules now. You can, like in this little part of the world, you get to decide how things should work. You don't have to follow norms.
The all-in cost of operating the Google Play Store, stocking it, maintaining it, the software, the entire ecosystem is around 6% of revenue. So in a competitive market, would a company whose cost is 6% be able to charge 30%? Absolutely not.
I have written forewords for Amir in the past on two of his prior books, Ecosystem Arabia: The Making of a New Economy and Venture Adventure: Startup Fundraising Advice from Top Global Investors, both of which I recommend.
When I have conversations with breached companies, my messaging is crystal clear: be transparent and expeditious in your reporting of the incident and prioritise communicating with your customers.
Well, I strongly believe that we should make business software like we make games because when we make products like we make games, people find them fun. They tell their friends. They fall in love with them.
And that's why when you have a missionritical product like email where you are interfacing with customers with candidates with investors it turns out to really matter. Email is mission critical. So it's not something where you can simply launch with a halfbaked product.
I knew that our competition was not going to be startups. It was incumbents. And I also knew that incumbents generally struggle with speed because by definition they have massive scale and usually entrenched architecture.
But the price point that supports our best-in-class best-in- position is actually the third one. it starts to feel expensive, but then you sit down and you think about the time that you spend in email, the ROI, and you still buy it anyway.
A more how-to pragmatic version of carving your own path. Includes some personal story of reinvention but more on experimentation that challenges our default scripts of success and ambition.
For most of my investing life, Vanguard was THE one-stop shop for index funds of all types. They have the lowest expense ratio and the utmost respect for their customers.
But Google has never had that DNA of like, "This is a product we should sell." The Google Cloud, which is a separate organization from the TPU team, which is a separate organization from the DeepMind team, which is a separate organization from the Search team. There's a lot of bureaucracy here.
OpenAI has a fantastic margin. When they're doing inference, their gross margins are north of 75%. So that's a four to five X factor right there of the cost difference, is that OpenAI is just making crazy amounts of money because they're the only one with the capability.
But the funniest thing I think that comes out of this is Jevons paradox is true. AWS pricing for H100s has gone up over the last couple of weeks, since a little bit after Christmas, since V3 was launched, AWS H100 pricing has gone up.
But what happens when every company can just invent their own business logic really cheaply and quickly? You stop using platform SaaS, you start building custom tailored solutions, you change them really quickly.
I think that they're trying to shift the narrative. They're trying to protect themselves. We saw this years ago when ByteDance was actually banned from some OpenAI APIs for training on outputs. There's other AI startups that most people, if you're in the AI culture, were like they just told us they trained on OpenAI outputs and they never got banned.
The short-term that company that could make the most money is the one that figures out what advertising targeting method works for language model generations.
Where housing costs are moderate, friends and family have bigger homes. When they are higher, friends and family don’t have space to share, and this is often what puts a vulnerable person onto the streets.
Focusing on these earned channels that you own becomes the utmost priority. And if you don't have them on your growth road map, you're going to be in some really big trouble over the next year to two years because your cost of acquisition is only going to go up.
I really believe that the founder led growth is not being popularized enough that you do not need growth teams until you actually can start running experiments on your user base
But to ever promise a homepage redesign or marketing site redesign in order to drive more acquisition is a failed promise that is going to be led by lots of agency money spending, uh often a million dollars plus
If you have the overall business slowing down, your head of growth is destined to fail because the reason business is slowing down is much deeper than not having a growth team.
You should ALWAYS have as few employees as possible. Always. Hiring more people should never be the first lever you reach for, it’s what you do after exhausting your other options.
I think it’s fantastic when businesses are built on open source, the WordPress ecosystem is at least 10B+ a year; Automattic and WP Engine are less than 5% of that.
Many software investors eschew hard tech startups because of their capital intensity, but it’s hard to deny that huge returns are possible in hard tech: just consider SpaceX.
Fascinating subject. Countries are made of stories. Kings didn’t need their subjects to agree, but nations do. So to build a nation, they need to make a story that helps people feel a shared identity, nationalism, and what distinguishes them from their neighbors. Back-creating a history. Founders of Israel did this brilliantly.
The Social Network is substantially made up, more a source for vibes rather than a source for facts. Even the vibes fail to cohere with reality. And yet it convinced many proto-founders to put in YC applications.
This isn’t a money grab: it’s an expectation that any business making hundreds of millions of dollars off of an open source project ought to give back, and if they don’t, then they can’t use its trademarks.
I believe Meta should have the right to set their terms—they’re smart business, and an amazing deal for users of Llama—but don’t pretend Llama is Open Source when it doesn’t actually increase humanity’s freedom.
I argue that over the past 30+ years markets have become less informationally efficient in the relative pricing of common stocks, particularly over medium horizons.
In effect there are two different ways to run a company: founder mode and manager mode. Till now most people even in Silicon Valley have implicitly assumed that scaling a startup meant switching to manager mode.
I also have another less optimistic prediction: as soon as the concept of founder mode becomes established, people will start misusing it. Founders who are unable to delegate even things they should will use founder mode as the excuse. Or managers who aren't founders will decide they should try to act like founders.
Except in practice, judging from the report of founder after founder, what this often turns out to mean is: hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground.
Right now, they can make simple social media posts for small companies and individual influencers. Two years from now, they can make simple campaigns and tradeshow collateral for mid-sized businesses. And in 10 years, I bet that even the richest brand will rely heavily on these tools.
I think the thing that most people get wrong after they’ve decided to start a company is work on things they think the market wants. Not being passionate about any idea but thinking, okay, look, this is what will get me venture funding. This is what will get me revenue or customers. That’s what will get me venture funding. If you work from that perspective, I think you’ll give up beyond the point because it’s very hard to work towards something that was not truly important to you.
You can set out to build a good business and it’s still fine. Maybe the long-term business model of Perplexity can make us profitable in a good company, but never as profitable in a cash cow as Google was. You have to remember that it’s still okay.
What is the weakness of Google is that any ad unit that’s less profitable than a link, or any ad unit that kind of disincentivizes the link click is not in their interest to go aggressive on, because it takes money away from something that’s higher margins.
It should be hard — exceedingly hard — to obtain the synthetic DNA needed to recreate the virus that caused the deadly 1918 influenza pandemic without authorization. But my lab found that it’s surprisingly easy, even when ordering gene fragments from companies that check customers’ orders to detect hazardous sequences.
nobody has everyone as their customer. Nobody. Maybe the water company, but that's about it. Our goal cannot be to be for everyone. That we have to be for someone. The smallest viable audience, not the biggest possible audience.
Employees don't want what you want. Customers don't want what you want. Uh you know, that that one of the challenges of the whole stock option thing is entrepreneurs and founders think that other people will be as motivated by owning part of the company as they are. They are not. Not even close.
I would heavily discourage any startup that was thinking about starting as a nonprofit and adding a for-profit arm later. I’d heavily discourage them from doing that. I don’t think we’ll set a precedent here.
I even recommend for individual investors to invest in a dozen companies, you don't get that much more benefit of diversification going from a dozen to 25 or even 50.
So as I like to say, incentives drive all human behavior and that certainly applies in the business world. So understanding the people and what drives them, and what the actual financial and other incentives of a business, are very important part of the analysis for investing in a company.
And very few businesses that you can have a really high degree of certainty about. And as a result, many investments are speculations because it's really very difficult to predict the future.
And oftentimes it's more important to them to have the public perception that they're good directors so they get the next best deal. If they have a reputation for taking on management too aggressively, word will get out in the small community of founders and they'll miss the next Google.
To that end, I read a few different books from the field of second language acquisition (SLA) over the summer, and even wrote a review of How Languages are Learned.
The only interesting problem is dramatically reducing the cost of access to orbit, which is, if you can do that, you open up a bunch of new endeavors that lots of start-up companies everybody else can do. One of our missions is to be part of this industry and lower the cost to orbit, so that there can be a renaissance, a golden age of people doing all kinds of interesting things in space.
And I would encourage anybody, if anybody listening to this is an entrepreneur, has a small business, whatever, think about the things that are not going to change over 10 years. And those are probably the big things.
That's an inventor's greatest dream, is that their inventions are so successful that they are one day taken for granted. Nobody thinks of Amazon as an invention anymore. Nobody thinks of customer reviews as an invention.
I don't think we necessarily want there to be one big super intelligence. We want to empower everyone to both have more fun, accomplish their business goals, just everything that they're trying to do. We don't tend to have one person that we work with on everything, and I don't think in the future we're going to have one AI that we work with.
I came into the business world with Comma, and I found the exact opposite. I found 5% of people good and 95% of people bad. I found a world that promotes psychopathy.
The two companies that have endured through technology are Apple and Microsoft. And what do they make? Computers and business services, right. All the meme, social ads, they all come and go. But you want to endure, build hardware.
this is the most personal of personal decisions and no one should ever try to pressure anyone else to have kids-it's way too big a thing to be anyone else's business.
Therefore, we have the perverse situation that the richest people are hiring some of the most talented and technologically sophisticated people on the planet to engage in innovation aimed at driving down the demand for labor—the major and often only asset of the world’s poor.
A platform operator can effortlessly change the distribution of surpluses in an instant, while suppliers and customers have to engage in minute, time-consuming and unreliable Platform Kremlinology just to detect these changes, much less understand them.
This is how I frame it: if the effort required to replace or fork a dependency should it go unmaintained is measured in engineer-months, that’s a critical dependency and retaining its maintainers probably makes good business sense.
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.
We are not suppliers. All the people writing and maintaining these projects, we are not suppliers. We do not have a business relationship with all these organisations.
If you had given the Romans the designs for a Newcomen steam engine, they couldn’t have built it without developing whole new technologies for the purpose (or casting every part in bronze, which introduces its own problems) and then wouldn’t have had any profitable use to put it to.
This is precisely the role the central bank can play. By announcing that it stands ready to buy the bonds that investors want to sell at the price associated with the low interest rate, and credibly indicating that it has deep enough pockets to buy whatever is needed, it can eliminate the bad equilibrium.
Sovereign debt markets (and many other markets as well) are subject to sudden stops in which investors either drop out or ask for large spreads even in the absence of large changes in fundamentals.
The proposition is that the cancellation of the bonds held by the central bank would decrease the amount of interest payments and thus the debt service of governments. And indeed, it would. But it would have another effect—namely, to decrease the revenues of the central bank and thus the profits that the central bank turns in to the government. This second effect would be exactly of the same size as the first, and the net effect on the government budget constraint would be equal to zero.
When you take venture funding, you sign up for a rocket ship ride that will either take you to the moon or to crash-land painfully back on earth. Those are the only two choices. And both rides tend to require heavy extraction of value from the customer.
One of the reasons I've never cared for crypto currencies is that the associated utopia of trustless society had zero appeal to me. I don't think the world is better off by erasing the need to trust in our transactional counterparts, so turning these transactions into pure computing always struck me as a regression.
Their words now
But wherever this leads us next, it's clear to me now that I was too hasty to completely dismiss crypto on the basis of all the things wrong with it at the moment. Instead of appreciating the fundamental freedom to transact that it's currently our best shot at protecting.
a lot of industries over time end up not like that. They end up not being actually a fair and free market with market discipline. They end up as something else. In the business world, what they end up with is either just, you know, one company with a full up monopoly or more commonly they end up with what's called an oligopoly
A successful startup has about five years until they become a new incumbent. Um and and they actually start to behave like an incumbent. That's rational. Like of course that's rational. Like they've now built something worth defending.
in quote-unquote real life, right? Which is starting businesses or you know, writing books, right? Or composing music or playing basketball or playing poker, right? Or basically doing anything interesting we're in a probabilistic domain, right?
the reality is the kids that make new things work from scratch. It actually turns out that they actually have been deep in the domain for a long time. Almost every case, they've been thinking hard about the problem that they're trying to solve actually for in in a lot of cases for many years.
My key takeaway from the book: Spielberg, for reasons that McBride can never quite nail down, was capital-D driven. His story provides a master class in the potential of mixing relentless ambition, talent, and perfect timing.
This one might come as a surprise to some, but the reality is that at Fitbit’s more reasonable pricing as of late, the Fitbit Sense is a pretty good option. And it’s a super well-rounded option
Gillian Tett, Anthro-Vision – my colleague Gillian Tett makes the case for thinking like an anthropologist in business and in life. The description of how KitKats took Japan by storm is a particular delight.
Sedgewick was more successful in developing his characters, and I also appreciated that he took regular tangents into other related and interesting matters like the Leadville mining boom, the growth of Los Angeles, and the business maneuvers of other railroad barons like Jay Gould and Collis Huntington.
It is the kind of book you will keep by your desk and pull out from time to time to figure out how to approach an issue or to help one of your senior leaders figure out how to do that.
One of those business books (and there are many) that you can get the main idea within the first 20 pages and can stop reading there. I skimmed through most of it.
A must-read for anyone who wants to start a business, has started a business, wishes they started a business or has ever thought about starting a business.
Rather than being defined as one side of this artificial dichotomy, value investing should instead consist of buying whatever represents a better value proposition, taking all factors into account.
My extensive discussions with Andrew led me to conclude that the focus on value versus growth doesn’t serve investors well in the fast-changing world in which we live.
Not only are the traditional staples of classic value investing (readily discernable quantitative measures of cheapness in the here-and-now) no longer likely to produce a sustainable edge on their own, but the world has gotten more complex, with many more dynamics that can drive a decoupling of near-term metrics from valuation, both to the positive and negative.
Adopting the traditional semiconductor manufacturing business model to compete head to head against the likes of Intel would guarantee automatic failure.
The fast route — venture capital funded — is going to impose constraints on your business that will ultimately make it difficult to remain true to your open-source mission.
Want to know the story behind how Salesforce was built? This is that story in founder Marc Benioff's own words. At times I found him overly prescriptive without an appreciation for his unfair advantages he had (getting to start it while having a big salary at Oracle, having $6Mn in "bootstrapped funding", etc). However, he also helped pioneer the cloud and SaaS as a business model, so there are many great lessons to glean if you're building a high-growth SaaS business.
This book was written before the Lean Startup movement, but espouses many of the same concepts. If you feel like you're starting at zero in understanding what to do to become customer driven, this is a good place to start.
If you actually want to learn how to actually BE a lean startup or how to actually do it, this book will not help you. If you want to learn the high level concepts only then this is a great book. The other books I have above I encourage you to read before this one if you want to truly learn and implement lean practices. 7. On the Shortness of Life by Seneca (3.13.18)
This is a really short book that just gets to the point. It's a great checklist to think about what you need to pull together if you're going to raise money from investors. It helps you avoid some common pitfalls and gives you a good start on what you need to do to nail your elevator, recruiting, and funding pitches.
If you need a 101 outline of the basics of how to build a community on the web regardless of your business type, this is a good, although now slightly dated, book to check out.
These small subsistence farmers generally seek to minimize risk, rather than maximize profits. After all, improving yields by 5% doesn’t mean much if everyone starves to death in the third year because of a tail-risk that wasn’t mitigated.
One of the craziest, most impressive stories of business smarts I’ve come across and from someone otherwise unknown. Like a real-life Francisco d’Anconia from Atlas Shrugged.
If intelligence lies in the process of acquiring skills, then there is no task X such that skill at X demonstrates intelligence, unless X is actually a meta-task involving skill-acquisition across a broad range of tasks.
A must-read for every entrepreneur. A holistic, generous, human, emotional, long-term, story-driven approach to your business. The world would be a much better place if businesses were led this way. You'll have a competitive advantage if you do this, since so few do.
Scott Galloway, The Algebra of Happiness: Notes on the Pursuit of Success, Love, and Meaning: Galloway should be familiar to readers as both the brand strategy professor at NYU Stern School of Business, a regular guest on Masters in Business, and as the author of The Four. He usually writes about technology and business, but concern with his students’ life issues led to this 10 minute YouTube video that garnered nearly 2 million views. That became this lovely short book which is likely to be a graduation and holiday gift for years to come.
His book Principles for Navigating Big Debt Crises is an important read for investors that want to protect themselves from or benefit from recessions and other financial crises.
Regular Rotation Investing Focused Interviews The Meb Faber Show Master in Business with Barry Ritholz Capital Allocators with Ted Seides Bloomberg’s Odd Lots with Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal
Regular Rotation Investing Focused Interviews The Meb Faber Show Master in Business with Barry Ritholz Capital Allocators with Ted Seides Bloomberg’s Odd Lots with Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal
Economics or Business Interviews Conversations with Tyler with Tyler Cowen EconTalk with Russ Roberts General Interviews North Star Podcast with Dave Perell The Tim Ferriss Show
Economics or Business Interviews Conversations with Tyler with Tyler Cowen EconTalk with Russ Roberts General Interviews North Star Podcast with Dave Perell The Tim Ferriss Show
Economics or Business Interviews Conversations with Tyler with Tyler Cowen EconTalk with Russ Roberts General Interviews North Star Podcast with Dave Perell The Tim Ferriss Show
A $250/mo recurring donation to would be a drop in the bucket of most businesses, but a major boon to any open source project, with which the business will almost certainly see tangible value-add as a result.
This a journalistic book, a very sound bit of journalism by Suzanne Mustacich. She is based in Bordeaux, but she clearly travelled to China an awful lot and unravelled a most amusing commercial battle that went on in the early years of this decade between the Bordeaux chateau owners and merchants on the one side and Chinese business people on the other.
Adding new folks to a team disrupts that team’s gelling process, so I’ve found it much easier to have rapid growth periods for any given team followed by consolidation/gelling periods where the team gels.
Many folks try to move all teams at the same time, peanut buttering their limited resources, but resist that indecision-framed-as-fairness: no one getting anything is not a fair outcome.
Podcast. Another classic manifesto from Jason Fried and DHH, challenging the status quo of business today. Properly sparkled with both “fuck”s and wisdom. Fuck 50 or 80-hour work weeks, the always stressed, always anxious way of working, constant crunch. Let’s all calm down. It doesn’t have to be crazy at work.
The bottom line: When trillions of dollars are managed by Wall Streeters charging high fees, it will usually be the managers who reap outsized profits, not the clients. Both large and small investors should stick with low-cost index funds.
ScreenFlow - I believe the future of my business is in video + video courses. I'm in ScreenFlow almost every day. Sometimes I use it to "hijack audio" during interviews. Sometimes I use it to edit video. It's getting a lot of use.
this is where the oft raised concern that hiring is
slowing us down comes from: at high enough rates, the marginal added value of hiring gets
very slow, especially if your training process is weak.
Every business wants to get you addicted to their infinite updates, pings, chats, messages, and news. But if what you want out of life is to create, then those are your obstacles.
My advice to the trustee could not be more simple: Put 10% of the cash in short-term government bonds and 90% in a very low-cost S&P 500 index fund. (I suggest Vanguard’s.) I believe the trust’s long-term results from this policy will be superior to those attained by most investors – whether pension funds, institutions or individuals – who employ high-fee managers.
Real product decisions aren’t easy. They require you to look at a proposal and say “This is a really great idea, I can see why our customers would like it. Well done. But we’re not going to build it. Instead, here’s what we’re doing.”.
I was correct in my original article: what we call design thinking is practiced in some form or other by all great thinkers, whether in literature or art, music or science, engineering or business. But the difference is that in design, there is an attempt to teach it as a systematic, practice-defining method of creative innovation.
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one
sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at
korrents.com.
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said.
The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in
korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who
else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public
statements, and a person can change their mind, which is recorded too.
About the English under a post
Some people here publish in a language other than English. Where they
do, this site shows a machine translation beneath the post, in
this typeface — the site's own, not theirs.
The post itself is never changed, moved or hidden: what is set in the
serif above is exactly what the person published, and it is what to
quote them on. A translation can be wrong in ways that matter,
especially about tone.
Only the post's own words are translated. A quoted post, a linked
article and a belief on korrents.com
are left in their original language.