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Creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37signals, and creator of Omarchy.

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  Nous has some of the best visuals and brand talent in the industry.

  Their words

  Nous has some of the best damn visuals and brand wizards in the game.

  @dhh on Xx.com

Political scientist writing Drezner's World on international relations, American politics and the marketplace of ideas; author of The Ideas Industry.

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  Marco Rubio is struggling to hire talented staff and is settling for loyalists who follow his instructions instead.

  America

  Their words

  This suggests that Rubio is having some difficulties hiring anyone with talent and is settling for a putz who will do what Rubio tells him to do on Latin America.

  The Devolution of the Policy Planning Staffdanieldrezner.substack.com

Professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS and co-author, with Abraham Newman, of Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy.

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  Elon Musk was flagrantly incompetent when he took on a government role, contradicting predictions that his business talent would translate there.

  government

  Their words

  What we do know is that the actual Elon Musk that we have to live with on this here timeline was flagrantly incompetent in government, contrary to Noah's previous predictions.

  The Acemoglu Wars Are All About AIprogrammablemutter.com

Programmer and teacher; writes on software, learning and the web, and makes the Coding Blocks video course.

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  So Good They Can't Ignore You

  Their words

  A nicely written case against the ‘follow your passion’ advice with a well-defined career-building strategy. As many non-fiction sel-help books, could be at least 10 times shorter, but hey, it’s pretty good.

  rakhim.org

From one piece No-One Makes You Shop at Amazon 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  People tend to overestimate their own talent and underestimate the structural advantages that amplify their success.

  Their words

  we are systematically likely to overestimate our own individual awesomeness, and to underestimate the external power asymmetries that magnify our voices.

  No-One Makes You Shop at Amazonprogrammablemutter.com

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  Success in cultural and professional fields is driven more by chance and path dependence than by talent.

  Their words

  much cultural success is stochastic (the experimental evidence suggests that talent only moderately predicts success in culture markets), and that path dependence shapes chances of success

  No-One Makes You Shop at Amazonprogrammablemutter.com

Economist at George Mason University, co-author of Marginal Revolution, host of Conversations with Tyler. Writes in short, dense claims about economics, culture and AI, and has moved position on AI in public more than once.

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  Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season

  Their words

  I usually do not enjoy poetry in translation, but this is so fiery and full of passion that I am happy to recommend it.

  marginalrevolution.com

Founder of Scale AI and, since 2025, Chief AI Officer at Meta, where he leads the company’s superintelligence lab.

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  Talent density is the one thing to bet on when building a lab, because it compounds by itself: the more talented people you have, the more the best want to join you.

  Their words

  the first is talent density was incredibly important. That was the the core thing to bet on and um, like talent density is something that compounds naturally. Like the more talented people you have the more of the most most talented people want to join you.

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Founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic, the Denver company building the Overture supersonic airliner and its Symphony engine.

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  “Work on what you know” is the worst advice there is: knowledge can be acquired, but what you love cannot be changed.

  Their words

  So I think the worst advice is like work on what you know. Uh what you know can be changed. Particularly in a world where you everyone has personalized AI tutors. Anybody with passion and dedication can learn new knowledge and learn new skills. But what you can't change easily is what you love.

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Chief Product and Technology Officer at Netflix, previously VP of Science at Lyft and an economist at Analysis Group.

From one piece Why Netflix is betting on systems thinkers—not specialists—in the AI era | Elizabeth Stone (CPTO) 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Netflix is not losing the talent war to the frontier AI labs; it competes for a different person — one excited by applying technology to entertainment at scale.

  Their words

  It does feel like we have to be more more explicit about the types of people and talent that tend to thrive at Netflix versus other companies like some of the frontier labs.

  youtube.com

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  Talent density is the non-negotiable first ingredient — without it you cannot trust decisions made at every level or let people take risks.

  Their words

  Well, the talent density is the non-negotiable. Like you have to start with that. If you don't have that, you can't get to a place where you have confidence in decision-making at all levels of the organization, allowing people to take risks and innovate quickly.

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Short-story writer and novelist; won the Booker Prize for Lincoln in the Bardo, and teaches craft weekly in Story Club.

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  Insisting on knowing whether you have talent, or started too late, closes doors that staying uncertain would have left open.

  Their words

  The more we know – the more we insist on being sure – the more doors we close.

  The Natural-Born Artist.georgesaunders.substack.com

General partner at Benchmark Capital for over two decades; was the lead analyst on Amazon's IPO before moving into venture capital. Writes Above the Crowd on tech and marketplace economics.

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  Knowing both the deep history of a field and its bleeding edge is what makes someone genuinely differentiated in it.

  Their words

  I'm suggesting you should understand the really old stuff, the history, because it's differentiating and shows a passion and it gives you a great frame of mind, but you also want to really understand the new edge. If you do both of those things, like you're I think you're a power player in your field, you know.

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Statistician at Carnegie Mellon; writes on complex systems, machine learning and inference, and has kept a books-read notebook since 2000 that is now thousands of entries long.

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  Eisenhorn

  Their words

  It's pretty decently adequate, as mind candy. There are places where Abnett shows flashes of real talent. (To avoid spoilers, I'll just say: The first alien planet; the opening scenes with the cranky biologist.) There are other aspects of the novels which are pretty unsatisfying.

  bactra.org

Polyglot who speaks twenty languages and co-founded LingQ; argues that comprehensible input, not study, is what does the work.

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  A person who studies a language for years and cannot speak it was taught the wrong method; it is not a failure of talent or of effort.

  Their words

  Most people hear that story and think: he must have lacked talent, or commitment. I don’t think that’s the right conclusion. I think he was never taught how second language acquisition actually works, and so he spent hundreds of hours doing the wrong things.

  What Is Second Language Acquisition?blog.thelinguist.com

Uber's first Chief Technology Officer, from 2013 to 2020; later CTO of Coupang and of Faire.

From one piece Scaling Uber with Thuan Pham (Uber's first CTO) 4 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  A company should manufacture fresh internal challenges for its best people, because the alternative is that they go and find those challenges at another company.

  Their words

  I look at um the talent base and I think it is best for us to create opportunity for people to keep on growing with fresh new challenges within the company because if we don't do that they would leave the company

  Scaling Uber with Thuan Pham (Uber's first CTO)youtube.com

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  Talent density is self-protecting: once a team is made of A players it will only hire more of them and will not tolerate anyone who is not performing.

  Their words

  when you have team A, team A will just want to hire more A level players and yeah, they just intolerant of anybody who's not performing,

  Scaling Uber with Thuan Pham (Uber's first CTO)youtube.com

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  A company that stops hiring new graduates because AI makes juniors look unnecessary will have no senior engineers in a few years' time.

  Their words

  the best of the best still get offer from us because if we don't hire those folks today, what senior engineer will we have for yeah years from now, right? You have to feed the talent pipeline

  Scaling Uber with Thuan Pham (Uber's first CTO)youtube.com

+ 1 more

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  Engineering offices abroad should be opened where world-class talent already lives, not where labour is cheap — you bring the work to the talent rather than moving the talent.

  Their words

  We didn't go to other places because of cost savings like that. We go there because we have need and we have world class talent

  Scaling Uber with Thuan Pham (Uber's first CTO)youtube.com

Co-founder of NVIDIA and, as of 2026, its chief executive; the company designs the GPUs most large AI models are trained on.

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  China is the fastest-innovating country in the world today, on the strength of its talent, its open-source habit and its ferocious internal competition.

  open sourceChina

  Their words

  So you get this rapid, incredible great talent, rapid innovation because of open source and just, you know, the nature of friends, and, and insane competition. Among the company, what emerges is incredible stuff. And so this is the fastest innovating country in the world today

  youtube.com

Writer and illustrator, author of Am I There Yet? and Out of the Blue; writes the newsletter Out of the Blue on grief, joy and everyday attention.

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  How much the economy pays for a given talent at a given time is arbitrary and shouldn't determine which of your gifts you value.

  Their words

  Our dumb economy might prize a certain talent more during a certain period of time or place, but that doesn't mean you should.

  How to find your passion in lifemariandrew.substack.com

American game designer and director, for nineteen years at Blizzard as a World of Warcraft quest designer and then game director of Overwatch; now runs the independent studio Kintsugiyama.

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  Crunch is wrong when it is imposed — an executive on a forty-hour week has no business telling anyone to stay late — but a person choosing long hours on their own life's work is not the same thing.

  Their words

  I don’t think executives who take off and work 40-hour weeks should be telling anybody to stay late. I think that’s wrong and immoral. But to me as an individual, as long as I’m not telling other people to do it, my life’s work is my passion and I want to do it as much as possible.

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Engineer writing about the physical economy — oil and gas, manufacturing, batteries, drones and what it costs to build things.

From one piece Speed Can Reindustrialize America 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  The scarce input in American manufacturing is high-end technical talent, and industrial policy consumes it rather than creating it.

  America

  Their words

  Industrial policy almost inevitably consumes more skilled labor and reduces what we can produce.

  Speed Can Reindustrialize Americaaustinvernon.site

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  The real cost of the CHIPS Act is the technical talent it ties up, not its fifty-billion-dollar price tag.

  Their words

  The CHIPS Act might still be a positive, but the cost is almost certainly many times the $50 billion price tag.

  Speed Can Reindustrialize Americaaustinvernon.site

Software entrepreneur who bootstrapped and sold FeedbackPanda and now builds Podscan; writes The Bootstrapped Founder.

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  Solving your community's problems, not just doing your passion for pay, is the path to a profitable business.

  Their words

  Just doing your thing for money rarely works. My personal take on "follow your passion" is this: find the place where other people have the same passion, then solve their problems.

  Follow Your Passion (But Not Like That)thebootstrappedfounder.com

Executive coach for product leaders. Previously a partner at GV (Google Ventures) and a product manager at Google. Writes at Bring the Donuts, including a standing essential-reading list for product managers.

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  Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products

  Their words

  The sequel to Inspired, this book explores what the best product companies have in common. “Most people think it’s because these companies are somehow able to find and attract a level of talent that makes this innovation possible. But the real advantage these companies have is not so much who they hire, but rather how they enable their people to work together to solve hard problems and create extraordinary products.”

  bringthedonuts.com

Writer and academic, author of The Cult of Smart and How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement; writes a daily newsletter on politics, education and culture.

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  Academic talent is normally distributed, so some students failing is inevitable rather than anybody's fault.

  Their words

  Academic talent is normally distributed throughout the population, and so some degree of failure is literally inevitable.

  There Are No Miracles in Educationfreddiedeboer.substack.com

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  We accept without difficulty that people differ in athletic or musical talent, and refuse to accept that they differ in academic talent.

  Their words

  But with education and intelligence, we’re unwilling to countenance the simple reality that some people are better equipped to succeed and some worse.

  Education Doesn't Work 3.0freddiedeboer.substack.com

Co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind, and a 2024 Nobel laureate in Chemistry for the protein-structure work behind AlphaFold.

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  Meta is not at the AI frontier, and buying talent with enormous salaries is the rational move for a company that is behind.

  Their words

  And Meta right now are not at the frontier. Maybe they'll manage to get back on there and it's probably rational what they're doing from their perspective because they're behind and they need to do something. But I think there's more important things than just money.

  youtube.com

Chief executive of Alphabet and Google; joined Google in 2004 and led Chrome and Android before taking over in 2015.

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  He would still tell a young person with a passion for it to study computer science, because AI will reach every field and first-principles thinking is what transfers.

  Their words

  I do. If you have a passion for computer science, I would. Computer science is obviously a lot more than programming alone, so I would. I still don't think I would change what you pursue. I think AI will horizontally allow impact every field.

  youtube.com

President of the United States, the 45th from 2017 to 2021 and, as of 2026, the 47th; before politics a New York property developer who ran the Trump Organization, and the host of The Apprentice from 2004 to 2015.

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  Tariffs are what made the United States rich under President McKinley.

  America

  Their words

  President McKinley made our country very rich through tariffs and through talent — he was a natural businessman

  The Inaugural Addresswhitehouse.gov

Social scientist at King's College London; writes The Great Gender Divergence on why societies differ in how they treat women.

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  As every population ages, countries will have to compete for migrants rather than choose freely among them.

  immigration

  Their words

  One more word of caution: the world is a closed and shrinking box. As all populations age, competition for talent will only intensify.

  Why is Fertility Collapsing, Globally?ggd.world

Language mentor and polyglot; teaches people to design their own learning method rather than follow a course.

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  Anyone can learn a language, and what separates those who do is method rather than talent.

  Their words

  Everybody can learn a language if they know how.

  About Melanguagementoring.com

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  It is the party's censorship, not any lack of talent, that has made China a cultural underperformer beside Japan and South Korea.

  China

  Their words

  As I’ve written in each of my previous letters, the party’s strangling of free expression has rendered China into a pitiful underperformer relative to Japan and South Korea in the creation of cultural products.

  2023 letterdanwang.co

Bulgarian-born writer and founder of The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings), a reader-funded blog on books, science, art and philosophy running since 2006.

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  The Asking

  Their words

  For half a century, Jane Hirshfield has been slaking the world's soul on poems of perspective and consolation, fusing her Buddhist training, her passion for science, and her tenderness for all things living.

  themarginalian.org

Co-founder and chief executive of Meta Platforms, the company he started as Facebook in 2004.

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  Computers, TVs and phones are badly designed for people because they keep us sitting still, and the human experience is a physical one.

  Their words

  But they're fundamentally like you're sitting, you're still. I mean, people are just not meant to be that way. I mean, I think you and I have this shared passion for sports and martial arts and doing stuff like that. We're just moving around. It's so much of what makes us people is like, you move around. You're not just like a brain and a tank. It's where the human experience is a physical one.

  youtube.com