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As I observed more than once at Facebook, and as I imagine is the case in all organizations from business to government, high-level decisions that affected thousands of people and billions in revenue would be made on gut feel, the residue of whatever historical politics were in play, and the ability to cater persuasive messages to people either busy, impatient, or uninterested (or all three).
Marc Andreessen, in the future there will be two types of jobs: people who tell computers what to do, and people who are told by computers what to do. Wall
company’s debt is complex and multifarious,
Vonnegut wrote in Bluebeard, never trust the survivor of a massacre until you know what he did to survive.
company’s employee retention strategy is cultivating Stockholm syndrome, you’re in the wrong company.
than time. Employees are people with more time than money. Entrepreneurs are simply the seductive go-betweens. Startups are business experiments performed with other people’s money. Marketing is like sex: only losers pay for it. Company culture is what goes without saying. There are no real rules, only laws. Success forgives all sins. People who leak to you, leak about you. Meritocracy is the propaganda we use to bless the charade. Greed and vanity are the twin engines of bourgeois society. Most managers are incompetent and maintain their jobs via inertia and politics. Lawsuits are merely
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Startups are experiments in group psychology. As CEO, you’re both the therapist leader, and the patient most in need of therapy.
people don’t really change, they just become better actors.
The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell. —Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman
In VC, as often in life, it’s the incompetent and insecure who are generally the assholes; the masterful and successful—not to mention those universally perceived as the best in their field—are playing the long game. You never know where the next Airbnb is coming from.
gated by birth or balance sheet,
Balzac, “The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a forgotten crime, as the crime was properly done.”
to have influence in the world, you need to be willing and able to reward your friends and punish your enemies.
I’m high-strung, fast-talking, and wired on a combination of caffeine, fear, and greed at all times.
First, the ability to monomaniacally and obsessively focus on one thing and one thing only, at the expense of everything else in life.
Second, the ability to take and endure endless amounts of shit.
as in sports or war, the overpowering desire to not let down your fellows is often all that keeps you going.
far more empires have been built, books written, wrongs righted, fights won, and ambitions realized out of vengeful desire to prove some critic wrong,
Whether swindler or dupe, we’re all either subjects or objects of one or another conspiracy in this world. Our only hope is that the profits from authoring schemes outweigh the costs of being extras in those of others; I’d need a startup per child at this rate.
marketing was like sex; only the losers paid for it.
almost always involves some impediment to paying users being scalably acquired or serviced.
get close enough to that perfect product-market fit, in which users pay more money for the product than it costs to operate (and than it cost to acquire those users to begin with), we’ve escaped the financial free fall.
men are judged by the company they keep.
Know what they want—whether money, power, social approval of various flavors, or merely a comfortable life—and you can predict 90 percent of what they eventually do.
makeshift favela of promotional booths.
Trust, but verify—and
le Carré–esque
A no-shop is either a separate contract or a clause in the term sheet stipulating that the company cannot solicit other acquirers during the period of negotiation and due diligence.
Sacca, who ignored my inquiries; as we were to learn, this was a man who only ever talked his book.
legendary Enrico Fermi brainteaser about piano tuners in Chicago.
Friend of Zuck (FoZ)
The shambolic hipsters with the expensively decorated offices, thousand-dollar fixies in their bike stand, and the Fail Whale?fn2 Or the hoodie-wearing frat boys with an imperial mandate who coded while they shat? Which was it going to be? Could it possibly be both?
chimerical worklife balance?
Remember: if you’re having phone calls, the deal is still on. Phone calls are yesses, emails are nos.
Twitter was being what poker pros term a call station,
And so even founders in a well-established company are on a vesting schedule, and get only a quarter of their fat equity slice after a year, just as a big-company employee does.
weirdly pointless versions of them would be held in the regional offices where no engineers even worked, as a sort of pagan celebration of the values of do-it-yourself creation,
Chamath Palihapitiya, one of the men most responsible for Facebook’s success.
MAKE AN IMPACT, GET IN OVER YOUR HEAD, DONE IS BETTER THAN PERFECT,
the vulgar masses are always seduced by the appearances of things and by the outcome of events;
paramerde
antediluvian
depredations
craven
itself, genius can produce original thoughts just as little as a woman by herself can bear children.
samizdat.
Like hermit crabs, successful companies outgrow a series of larger and larger shells.
nomenklatura
Elysium
The quick shall inherit the earth”; “We don’t build services to make money, we make money to build services”).
