Max Hodak

Beliefs Korrents

• Korrents What they believe 40 beliefs — each backed by an exact quote.

  Each is a korrent — compiled by korrents.com, not by them: the one-line wordings are korrents', the quotes are theirs.

  Recent

  • The brain is very literally a computer, and so is the universe -- this is not a metaphor.

    Like, the brain very literally, very clearly, plainly is a computer in in my understanding of the world. I also view the universe generally as a computer.

    From Restoring Sight to Reimagining the Brain, with Max Hodak Said 20 Aug 2026

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  • Humanity is not good enough at molecular biology to make drugs that restore vision or hearing or stop Parkinson's.

    People have spent huge amounts of time and money looking for drugs to restore vision or to restore hearing or to stop Parkinson's or to to help paralyzed people move again. Understanding the like the biology and the molecular detail required to make a drug has been very difficult. Humanity just isn't that good at that, to be totally honest.

    From Restoring Sight to Reimagining the Brain, with Max Hodak Said 20 Aug 2026

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  • Putting a device into the brain works in an hour, which makes it far more amenable to biology than drug discovery.

    It's like if I put electrodes in M1, you will probably be using a computer in an hour. Um and so it's just it's easier, it's more amenable to biology in many ways.

    From Restoring Sight to Reimagining the Brain, with Max Hodak Said 20 Aug 2026

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  • Moonshots succeed more often than Silicon Valley's use of the word admits -- we actually got to the moon.

    It's like, you know, when we went to the moon, we did it. And so, historically, the success rate of moonshots is higher than I think people give them credit for.

    From Restoring Sight to Reimagining the Brain, with Max Hodak Said 20 Aug 2026

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  • Treating brain-computer interfaces as one investment category is like having a single "drug bet" -- the field is as varied as pharma.

    Yeah, I mean I think BCI is a category kind of like how pharma is a category. I think sometimes you I I'll talk to VCs and like, "Oh, we have a BCI bet." I'm like, "Do you have a drug bet? You made one bet on a drugs? Like that's that's how you think about the category?"

    From Restoring Sight to Reimagining the Brain, with Max Hodak Said 20 Aug 2026

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  • You want to command a device explicitly, not have it act on a thought you happened to have.

    It'd be pretty annoying if they just start like spontaneously getting notifications during meetings that like, "Oh, it thought that you were thinking about an Uber, therefore it decided to summon summon two for you." And so you'll probably want these to be pretty explicit.

    From Restoring Sight to Reimagining the Brain, with Max Hodak Said 20 Aug 2026

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  • Vision, hearing, balance and a kilobit per second of motor control would get you halfway to the Matrix.

    because if you can if you get vision, hearing, balance, and a kilobit per second of motor control, you're halfway to the Matrix.

    From Restoring Sight to Reimagining the Brain, with Max Hodak Said 20 Aug 2026

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  • What people care about in their own identity is continuity, not similarity -- they accept enormous drift so long as the thread is unbroken.

    so I'm in the camp that like continuity is greatly important. And so people will accept significant drift in their identity over time as long as they have continuity.

    From Restoring Sight to Reimagining the Brain, with Max Hodak Said 20 Aug 2026

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  • Concepts are represented with strikingly similar geometry inside large AI models and inside brains.

    And so when you look inside these big AI models, the mathematical objects that you see look a lot like the things that you see in neuroscience. So if you look at how do how do these AI models represent um just like represent concepts and you look at the parts of the brain that represent concepts, you see these you see very similar geometry.

    From Restoring Sight to Reimagining the Brain, with Max Hodak Said 20 Aug 2026

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  • Intelligence looks like a fact of physics: apply enough compute to matter and you get something that thinks.

    I mean it feels like a lot of physics. Like if you apply enough compute to matter, you get this thing that looks like intelligence.

    From Restoring Sight to Reimagining the Brain, with Max Hodak Said 20 Aug 2026

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  • The most fertile way to study neuroscience today is to work on AI models rather than on brains.

    Well, I mean ironically it's probably working on AI.

    From Restoring Sight to Reimagining the Brain, with Max Hodak Said 20 Aug 2026

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  • Restoring vision to the blind is a good business, and a company doing it should aim to be profitable rather than permanently funded.

    Yeah, well I mean becoming profitable or at least have like having the ability to do this forever is a super high priority. Restoring vision to the blind is pretty good business if you can actually do that.

    From Restoring Sight to Reimagining the Brain, with Max Hodak Said 20 Aug 2026

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  • The brain is the only organ that cannot even in principle be transplanted; the heart, liver and lungs are support characters.

    the only organ that you can't even in principle transplant is the brain. The like the heart, pancreas, the liver, the lungs, as far as I'm concerned, they're really support characters. They're there to keep the brain activity interesting and and going.

    From Restoring Sight to Reimagining the Brain, with Max Hodak Said 20 Aug 2026

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  • Getting vision, hearing, balance and motor signals in and out of the brain is an end in itself, because the world you experience is generated in there.

    That world is is generated by the brain. And so, if you can get visuals the visual signal, auditory signal, balance, motor, like somatic sensory motor in and out of the brain, that is that is an end in itself. That is the central object.

    From Restoring Sight to Reimagining the Brain, with Max Hodak Said 20 Aug 2026

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  • If this work succeeds, the sense of jeopardy that comes with having a body will simply fade.

    And I think that if we're successful, what will happen is that sense of jeopardy will fade. Like we will be we will just become much less fragile.

    From Restoring Sight to Reimagining the Brain, with Max Hodak Said 20 Aug 2026

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  • If we are serious about going to the stars we will have to adapt our bodies, because we are not going to export Earth everywhere we go.

    the other extreme is if we're serious about exploring the universe and going to the stars, we are going to have to adapt ourselves to that environment. We're not going to export Earth with us everywhere we go.

    From Restoring Sight to Reimagining the Brain, with Max Hodak Said 20 Aug 2026

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  • Talking and writing are not read-outs of a finished thought -- they are the thinking, so a faster brain-to-text channel would not make you think faster.

    Well, I mean first of all, I think that talking or writing is thinking.

    From Restoring Sight to Reimagining the Brain, with Max Hodak Said 20 Aug 2026

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  • A brain keyboard may go the way of AR glasses: attention was already fully occupied, so moving the interface closer changes nothing.

    It might turn out to be like AR AR glasses where it's just we were our attention was already fully 100% occupied and putting it on the face didn't really change that. We were already consuming all of the available time.

    From Restoring Sight to Reimagining the Brain, with Max Hodak Said 20 Aug 2026

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  • Making a highly paid team wait a week to buy a tool at half price destroys far more value than it saves.

    then you also remember that you've hired some very highly paid and talented employees. And are you saying they can't get the tools that they need? That you're spending $100,000 a week. If you wait a week to get a power supply half off, you have certainly dwarfed any possible benefit from getting it.

    Max Hodak: Average Is Not Good Enough Said 7 Aug 2026

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  • Approving purchases one at a time is the wrong place to control burn; spending review belongs earlier, in a budget people can make their own trade-offs inside.

    And so what you realize is not only is this very hard to keep burn under control, but also it's just this is the inappropriate place to exercise spending review. Spending review has to come earlier. You have to have some concept of budgeting.

    Max Hodak: Average Is Not Good Enough Said 7 Aug 2026

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  • If nobody can say what an experiment costs, everyone behaves as though experiments are free — it does not cost dollars, it costs media, and media comes from the fridge.

    And so if nobody knows how much an experiment costs, like every time you like grow up a new cell line or every time we make a new a new probe in in the fab, how much does that loop cost? Nobody knows. Therefore, experiments are free. Um, it doesn't cost dollars. It costs media. And media comes from the fridge.

    Max Hodak: Average Is Not Good Enough Said 7 Aug 2026

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  • The best companies come out of scenes: a moment and a community that nucleate the founding team, and once that moment passes it is hard to get back.

    I think the best companies in my experience come from what might be characterized as scenes. There's like a moment that enables a new company to be born and there's a bunch that comes together that really creates this like unique nucleation for the new company.

    Max Hodak: Average Is Not Good Enough Said 7 Aug 2026

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  • There is no right hiring process, but there is a wrong one: not having something you do religiously as a company.

    there's no one right answer, but this is a thing where you need a really defined process. There is no right answer, but a wrong answer for sure is not having something that you do very religiously as a company.

    Max Hodak: Average Is Not Good Enough Said 7 Aug 2026

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  • Any one person or small group placed at the top of the hiring funnel will bottleneck the whole organisation, so first-round review should be distributed across the company as a vote.

    And so we can distribute the voting across a lot of the company for this initial review, which is essential because if you're doing anything cool, by the time you get a couple years into it, that top of funnel is overwhelming. And if you place any in any small group of employees or any one person in the way as a bottle bottleneck on this, they will absolutely bottleneck the whole rest of the organization.

    Max Hodak: Average Is Not Good Enough Said 7 Aug 2026

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  • The annual performance review is disruptive and surfaces nothing you did not already know but had avoided acting on.

    Um which based on my experience is like this is a a very disruptive process that doesn't tend to surface issues that you don't already know about but haven't acted on because you knew that thing was there.

    Max Hodak: Average Is Not Good Enough Said 7 Aug 2026

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  • Performance review is best done as a PageRank-style computation over continuous company-wide votes, not as an annual HR cycle.

    This is a little bit different than actually literally I vector centrality but it's very similar and so we call this technique IGEN reviews and I've become convinced that this is more or less the right way to do performance reviews.

    Max Hodak: Average Is Not Good Enough Said 7 Aug 2026

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  • Rate of iteration separates success from failure: a competitor learning one thing a month will never matter to a company learning one thing a week.

    But the the real theme of the talk is that rate of iteration separates success from failure. And if you can get a fast iteration loop, that really overcomes many other things you're going to run into. And this effect is so severe. I mean, if you can learn one thing every week and there's a competitor that's learning a thing every month, they will they will never matter.

    Max Hodak: Average Is Not Good Enough Said 7 Aug 2026

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  • A startup's speed is set by boring internal infrastructure — purchasing, recruiting, spending — and that matters as much as understanding the technology itself.

    And so speed determines success and failure and speed is determined by infrastructure. This is driven by really boring sounding things like how well do your purchasing and recruiting and spending processes work. This is as important as how well do you understand understand the object level technical content of the thing that you're building.

    Max Hodak: Average Is Not Good Enough Said 7 Aug 2026

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    startups

  • Deep tech companies rarely fail because the technology does not work; they fail because nobody built the systems to run the organisation around it.

    It's like it's it's uncommon that these deep tech companies that fail because the technology doesn't work. They fail because once you end up with this organization of hundreds of people and thousand hundreds of thousands of square feet of physical infrastructure, you haven't built the systems to manage that.

    Max Hodak: Average Is Not Good Enough Said 7 Aug 2026

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  • A founder cannot delegate judgment: the chief executive has to make the decision that makes sense to them, however much momentum the alternative has.

    And one of the harder lessons as a startup founder, one of the harder things I think to to really deal with is the fact that you cannot delegate your judgment. As as the CEO, you must always make decisions that make sense to you, no matter how much momentum or inertia alternatives seem to have.

    Max Hodak: Average Is Not Good Enough Said 7 Aug 2026

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    startups

  • Copying the consensus drags you towards the average, and average is not good enough — so you have to make the decisions that make sense to you even when you are completely alone in them.

    And so um in order to succeed your judgment has to be differentiatedly good. Now the reality might be that you don't know if your judgment is good yet. And so um one way or another you will have to find out and that means making decisions that make sense to you even when you are totally alone in that realization.

    Max Hodak: Average Is Not Good Enough Said 7 Aug 2026

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  • It is very hard to actually get stuck, because the action space is always larger than it appears.

    Now, the good news is that in my experience, it's very difficult to actually get stuck. Um, you can get yourself into trouble and the action space is always larger than it appears.

    Max Hodak: Average Is Not Good Enough Said 7 Aug 2026

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  • Once a field really starts to work, the best people leave the universities, because industry can marshal far larger resources and move much faster.

    So when a field really starts to work, industry can just marshall such larger levels of resources and can just move so much faster.

    Max Hodak: Average Is Not Good Enough Said 7 Aug 2026

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  • The best evidence of exceptional ability is winning at a legible competitive game, and without one it is hard to know whether you are exceptional at all.

    I think you have to have that type of competitive feedback. It is tough to know if you're exceptional um without having some legible competitive game.

    Max Hodak: Average Is Not Good Enough Said 7 Aug 2026

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  • Consciousness is a practical problem rather than a philosophical one: given a brain-computer interface that could read and drive every neuron, we would work it out quickly.

    Now, if we had a tech if we had a magical BCI that allowed me to see the instant state of every neuron in the brain and and drive them, I think we'd figure out consciousness pretty fast. I don't think I think this is a practical problem, not a philosophical problem.

    Max Hodak: Average Is Not Good Enough Said 7 Aug 2026

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  • Treating the brain directly as a computer produces effect sizes medicine does not otherwise see — a deep brain stimulator takes a patient from unable to hold a cup of water to writing cursive in ten seconds.

    It gives you these effect sizes that you just don't really see in medicine. Like if you have a patient on on a dopamineergic drug for Parkinson's that works for some period of time, but it's a it's a relatively small effect after a little while. You turn on a deep brain stimulator and a patient goes from not being able to hold a cup of water to being able to write cursive in like 10 seconds.

    Max Hodak: Average Is Not Good Enough Said 7 Aug 2026

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  • Some ideas are worth funding with fifty million dollars or with nothing, and never with five million, because underfunding buys you an ambiguous outcome instead of an answer.

    there are definitely some ideas that are worth funding with $50 million or zero dollars, but not $5 million. Um you won't run the experiment. It'll be really frustrating experience. You'll get an ambiguous outcome.

    Max Hodak: Average Is Not Good Enough Said 7 Aug 2026

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  • Even a long-horizon deep tech company should chase revenue sooner than it thinks, so that it is valued on its roadmap rather than on its probability of dying.

    you do need to think about how do you get to revenue so that not just you can do it forever, but then you'll be valued on your long-term road map, not not valued on your probability of dying.

    Max Hodak: Average Is Not Good Enough Said 7 Aug 2026

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  • A company doing something at the edge of the Overton window has to hold two cultures at once — the true believers and the serious professionals who think they are crazy — and integrating them is what makes it work.

    I think one of the things that makes science the company very special is that it has both of those cultures and is able to integrate them and we're able to simultaneously do some really cool research that I think is really at the edge of the Overton window while simultaneously running clinical trials in six countries now with an approved medical device in Europe and clinical trial results in the New England Journal of Medicine.

    Max Hodak: Average Is Not Good Enough Said 7 Aug 2026

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    Europe

  • Telling your investors after a Series A that you are going to vibe-code your own purchasing system is contrarian enough that any reasonable board would question it.

    Well, I mean, okay, even the whole basis of building Helix is contrarian. Like, I think that if you raise a series A and then you tell your investors that you're going to vibe code a purchasing system, I think that any reasonable board is going to like ask you what you're thinking.

    Max Hodak: Average Is Not Good Enough Said 7 Aug 2026

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  Beliefs others hold too

  • The most fertile way to study neuroscience today is to work on AI models rather than on brains. 2 hold this

    Well, I mean ironically it's probably working on AI.

    From Restoring Sight to Reimagining the Brain, with Max Hodak Said 20 Aug 2026

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  All 40 beliefs →