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if you want to be a startup entrepreneur, get used to negotiating from positions of weakness.
Like so much at Adchemy, that technology would be a throwaway, but the knowledge I gained there, from poring over Google’s RTB technical documentation and passing Google’s merciless integration tests with our code, would set me light-years ahead of the clueless product team at Facebook years later. If you had told me at the time I wouldn’t have believed you, but one day I’d be writing the technical docs and running the integration tests for Google’s biggest ad exchange competitor, Facebook Exchange.
a cash-generating business that doesn’t improve the product postpones the inevitable by floating the charade, all the while actually making failure more likely.
Saint Augustine thought the best way to heavenly salvation was to know the route to hell, but avoid it.
technology entrepreneurs are society’s chaos monkeys, pulling the plug on everything from taxi medallions (Uber) to traditional hotels (Airbnb) to dating
Every religion requires its miracles and stories of exalted sainthood for mass veneration; capitalism’s miracles simply culminate in NASDAQ ticker symbols rather than saintly relics.
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.
We spin in an ever-turning circle, and it is our delight to change the bottom for the top and the top for the bottom. You may climb up if you wish, but on this condition: don’t think it an injustice when the rules of the game require you to go back down. —Boethius,
war is never avoided; it’s only postponed to someone’s advantage.
What’s an existential struggle to you is merely one more set of tasks to a tuned-out engineer bored of his own product,
The harsh reality is this: to have influence in the world, you need to be willing and able to reward your friends and punish your enemies.
While love is a beautiful emotion, far more empires have been built, books written, wrongs righted, fights won, and ambitions realized out of vengeful desire to prove some critic wrong, or existential dread of some perceived enemy, than all the love in the world. Love is grand, but hate and fear last longer.
Murthy passed on to the oblivion he deserved. The only chapter in Silicon Valley history he’ll ever have is this one, the one I’ve written for him.
Humans like a sense of order and meaning: what happens in act 2 of a play must have stemmed from act 1.
The bike-riding, date-night-going types will never give everything to a company or an idea, and are nothing more than complacent bourgeois, whatever trappings of the “disruptive innovator” they may sport, often in the form of ponderous blog posts or a bookshelf of bound B-school-level bloviation. The ones who could pass for a homeless person, though, those are the startup kamikazes who will give everything for the entrepreneurial cause, and are stopped only by death or jail.
Sacca, or any VC really, would push you to mimic his own distorted risk profile, which prefers a tenfold return, even if it marginally increases the chance of complete failure.
The risk expectations of founders and investors can often be severely misaligned.
In many ways, the interview process is the face of the company.
in the self-aggrandizing view of most tech companies, their corporate “culture” is unique, and as valuable as that of an uncontacted Amazon tribe, it is hailed as precisely what undergirds their sky-high valuation.
It’s a society in which all men and women live in their own self-contained bubble, unattached to traditional anchors like family or religion, and largely unperturbed by outside social forces
I was not going to blow the biggest career wad of my life on a company that hesitated to work past six p.m. daily.
The human need for immortality projects—those ends that dole out meaning and purpose beyond ourselves—hasn’t changed since the pyramids. The only difference now is the nature of the putative Holy Land, and the means for achieving it.
The Googlers at Facebook were a bit like the Greeks during the rise of the Roman Empire: they brought lots of civilization and tech culture with them, but it was clear who was going to run the world in the near future.
The principal reason for you to be technical is not to help technically design the system under development; if you’re doing that, then you’re PMing wrong. No, you’re technical so you can tell when engineers are bullshitting you, which will be often.
All that matters in the end is what we take away from an experience—even if pried off the wall with a weathered rigging knife.
at the moment of our greatest triumph and of disaster to our enemies to reflect on our own situation and on the possible reversal of circumstances,
is like a great and perfect man,
by hybridizing their corporate DNA with the pluck and daring of the startup entrepreneur, they revitalize their internal cultures and add traits not typically found among their recruitment fodder
the first rule of startups is also true of any fast-paced, competitive workplace like Facebook: act like you belong there, even if you don’t.
“Embracing change” isn’t enough. It has to be so hardwired into who we are that even talking about it seems redundant. The Internet is not a friendly place. Things that don’t stay relevant don’t even get the luxury of leaving ruins. They disappear.
Like me, PMMess would lose herself in bouts of louche, ethanolic self-destruction that typically ended in some disinhibited act of carnality.
the universe had conspired to make something big happen right there in front of you, and you were a part of it by being present.
He represented the best in Facebook engineering: irreverence without disrespect, competence without arrogance, ambition without ego.
what used to be worth $10 in mental decision cost now takes $100 to trigger. It’s like your mental decimal point of concern has moved over a zero
Money talks, but inside Facebook at least, it spoke only if what it said was part of the bigger, accepted narrative.
those who most made a big show of believing in Truth were unusually attached to whatever well-groomed pack of lies they held dear.
inside every cynic lives a heartbroken idealist.
