Podcast Notes Playlist: Startup

Key Takeaways

• You must have “one reason” to found a start-up; if you have five or six reasons to start it, then you have not yet found the single, very strong reason
• Hire for raw IQ and hard work, then constantly iterate on solving the single problem at hand
• Using your mind to its fullest capacity is the ultimate pleasure
• The most successful people in the world are extremely focused and allow their focused efforts to compound over time
• It is easy to identify conceptual gaps; developing the path toward closing that gap is the challenging part
• You must figure out 1) what you are passionate about and 2) what you are good at
• How you invest your time is more important than how you invest your capital, if wealth creation is your goal

Episode 578: Shaan Puri ( https://twitter.com/ShaanVP ) sits down with Joe Lonsdale ( https://twitter.com/JTLonsdale ) to talk about how he leveraged one internship at PayPal into one billion dollar success after another.

Want to see Sam and Shaan’s smiling faces? Head to the MFM YouTube Channel and subscribe - http://tinyurl.com/5n7ftsy5
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Show Notes:
(0:00) The One Reason strategy
(3:18) Learning Global Macro Finance from Peter Thiel
(5:35) Taking multi-million dollar bets at 4:30am
(8:43) Hire for raw IQ over expertise
(10:33) Nurturing employees into unicorn founders
(12:24) Solving hard problems with Addepar
(13:53) Always “Being on”
(15:32) How to spot opportunities for new businesses
(21:10) How Epirus landed a military defense contract
(27:09) Getting hits in hard domains
(28:24) Business Idea: AI-powered Estate Planning
(29:19) Business Idea: Business Process Outsourcing for local government
(30:58) Big swings vs. base hits
(31:49) Idea vs. execution
(32:38) Focus vs. diversity of thought/attention
(33:33) Insights from Elon’s inner circle
(35:36) Joe Lonsdale’s unfair advantages
(38:48) How to invest your time to make your first $1M
(40:40) Working on an A+ problem as an intern at PayPal
(43:15) Be within 2 standard deviations of top talent
(44:14) Early days at Palantir
(46:56) Building a top engineering culture
(48:31) Borrowing trust as 21-year old defense contractor
(52:22) Peter Thiel’s biggest contrarian bet

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Links:
• Joe's Twitter - https://twitter.com/JTLonsdale
• Joe's blog - https://blog.joelonsdale.com/
• Addepar - https://addepar.com/
• Palantir - https://www.palantir.com/
• Epirus- https://www.epirusinc.com/
• OpenGov - https://opengov.com/
• Prologis - https://www.prologis.com/
• Lessons from Peter Thiel - https://joelonsdale.com/lessons-peter-thiel/

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Check Out Shaan's Stuff:
Need to hire? You should use the same service Shaan uses to hire developers, designers, & Virtual Assistants → it’s called Shepherd (tell ‘em Shaan sent you): https://bit.ly/SupportShepherd

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Check Out Sam's Stuff:
• Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/
• Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/
• Copy That - https://copythat.com
• Hampton Wealth Survey - https://joinhampton.com/wealth

My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by The HubSpot Podcast Network // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano

Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more.
—
Other episodes you might enjoy:
• #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits

• #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future

• #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto

• #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett

• ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates

• Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More

• How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

Key Takeaways

• The question to consider: Does AI help the strong get stronger, or does AI allow for new businesses to emerge and disrupt the incumbents?
• The top five technology companies are spending 2x on capital expenditure than the top five energy companies
• Companies should strive to increase the consumer’s willingness to pay
• “Regulation is the friend of the incumbent.” – Bill Gurley
• Venture capital is one of the few asset classes that has high persistence: the past winners tend to be future winners
• Develop a framework that allows you to benefit from the group dynamics of pattern recognition, but that does not tie you to one specific type of pattern
• Instead of nit-picking how an investment may fail, make the primary focus of the discussion: “How big could this be?”
• Investors must capture the extreme events if they wish to outperform
• The sharpest minds desire to know where they are wrong about something

My guests today are Bill Gurley and Michael Mauboussin. Bill is a General Partner at Benchmark, and Michael is the Head of Consilient Research for Counterpoint Global. While they are longtime friends with one another, I’d never heard them appear somewhere together so it was a real treat to be able to do this with the two of them. They are two of the leading minds in their fields, and we combined their decades of expertise into one wide-ranging conversation. We discuss the different kinds of increasing returns to scale, the issue of regulatory capture, AI, and hardware. Please enjoy this great conversation with Bill Gurley and Michael Mauboussin.

Listen to Founders Podcast
For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here.
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Invest Like the Best is a property of Colossus, LLC. For more episodes of Invest Like the Best, visit joincolossus.com/episodes.
Past guests include Tobi Lutke, Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger, John Collison, Kat Cole, Marc Andreessen, Matthew Ball, Bill Gurley, Anu Hariharan, Ben Thompson, and many more.
Stay up to date on all our podcasts by signing up to Colossus Weekly, our quick dive every Sunday highlighting the top business and investing concepts from our podcasts and the best of what we read that week. Sign up here.
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Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (https://thepodcastconsultant.com).

Show Notes:
(00:00:00) Welcome to Invest Like the Best
(00:03:38) Dissecting the Dynamics of AI, LLMs, and Market Disruption
(00:05:06) The World of AI Investments and Market Trends
(00:08:13) Integration of New Technologies in Business
(00:15:27) The Power of Increasing Returns and Strategic Investments
(00:22:26) Unpacking the Role of Intangibles in Scaling and Innovation
(00:28:54) Transformative Potential of Open Source and Idea Recombination
(00:34:42) The Complex Landscape of Regulation and Innovation
(00:43:17) Today’s Venture Capital Ecosystem
(00:47:08) Impact of Fewer IPOs and Private Market Dynamics
(00:50:38) Capital Allocation in Zero Interest Rate Environments
(00:54:44) The Evolution of Venture Capital and High-Stakes Investment Games
(00:57:21) Exploring New Frontiers: AI, Energy, and Physical World Innovations
(01:01:14) The Power of Learning by Doing
(01:17:49) Working with Genius
(01:26:47) The Value of Teaching, Writing, and Sharing Knowledge

Key Takeaways

• Check out theepisode page

What I learned from reading The Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant.

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Get access to the World’s Most Valuable Notebook for Founders at Founders Notes

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Follow Founders Podcast on YouTube

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(1:00) This is a 100 page biography of the human species

(1:00) The Story of Civilization by Will and Ariel Durant (Full Set)

(2:30) Generations of men establish a growing mastery over the earth, but they are destined to become fossils in its soil.

(4:00) Ruthlessly prioritize how you spend your time.

(4:00) The influence of geographic factors diminishes as technology grows.

(4:30) ALL OF THE NAPOLEON EPISODES:

Napoleon: A Concise Biography by David Bell. (Founders #294)

The Mind of Napoleon: A Selection of His Written and Spoken Wordsedited by J. Christopher Herold. (Founders #302)

Napoleon and Modern War by Napoleon and Col. Lanza. (Founders #337)

(8:00) Our job is to make our companies and ourselves better equipped to meet the test of survival.

(11:30) Economic development specializes functions, differentiates abilities, and makes men unequally valuable to their group.

(12:30) The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happinessby Naval Ravikant and Eric Jorgenson. (Founders #191)

(14:30) In the end, superior ability has its way.

(16:30) Nothing is clearer in history than the adoption by successful rebels of the methods they were accustomed to condemn in the forces they deposed.

(19:00) The imitative majority follows the innovating minority and this follows the originative individual, in adapting new responses to the demands of environment or survival.

(20:00) If you can identify an enduring human need you can build a business around that.

(21:00) In every age men have been dishonest and governments have been corrupt.

(25:00) Survival at all costs: Nature and history do not agree with our conceptions of good and bad; they define good as that which survives, and bad as that which goes under.

(25:00) Victory in our industry is spelled survival. — Steve Jobs

(25:00) All that matters is to survive. The rest is just words. — Charles de Gaulle by Julian Jackson. (Founders #224)

(26:00) By being so cautious in respect to leverage and having loads of liquidity, we will be equipped both financially and emotionally to play offense while others scramble for survival. — The Essays of Warren Buffett by Warren Buffett and Lawrence Cunningham (Founders #227)

(27:00) History reports that the men who can manage men manage the men who can manage only things, and the men who can manage money manage all.

(31:00) The Iron Law of Oligarchy

(32:00) Every advance in the complexity of the economy puts an added premium upon superior ability.

(33:00) The General and the Genius: Groves and Oppenheimer—The Unlikely Partnership that Built the Atom Bomb by James Kunetka.(Founders #215)

(34:00) Freedom's Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II by Arthur Herman

(37:00) All technological advances will have to be written off as merely new means of achieving old ends

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Get access to the World’s Most Valuable Notebook for Founders at Founders Notes

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“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth

Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

Key Takeaways

• The trick of entrepreneurship is convincing yourself that it is not that hard, even when it is
• “Your organization should be the architecture of the machinery of building the product.” – Jensen Huang
• Pave the way to future opportunities; you cannot wait until the opportunity is in front of you to reach out for it
• Many of the great all-time tech companies began by building products and services for developers
• You don’t have to be that perfect if you can position yourself near opportunities
• Every person should learn how to use an AI to augment their productivity
• Nvidia tries to position itself in a way that serves a need that is yet to emerge
• Push your chips in when you know it is going to work
• Don’t do everything; prioritize your time, and make sacrifices, but realize that there is plenty of time in life

We finally sit down with the man himself: Nvidia Cofounder & CEO Jensen Huang. After three parts and seven+ hours of covering the company, we thought we knew everything but — unsurprisingly — Jensen knows more. A couple teasers: we learned that the company’s initial motivation to enter the datacenter business came from perhaps not where you’d think, and the roots of Nvidia’s platform strategy stretch back beyond CUDA all the way to the origin of the company.

We also got a peek into Jensen’s mindset and calculus behind “betting the company” multiple times, and his surprising feelings about whether he’d go on the founder journey again if he could rewind time. We can’t think of any better way to tie a bow on our Nvidia series (for now). Tune in!

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One of the most commonstrategiesfor achievinga powerful ideal lifestyle vision is to leverage entrepreneurial activities to find a stable source of income that allows autonomy and flexibility. To help understand how to succeed in such ventures, Cal interviews the entrepreneurand author Noah Kagan about his new book, "The Million Dollar Weekend." Recording on the road as part of his book tour for "Slow Productivity," Cal also shares some lessons about what he's been observing.

Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here’s the link: bit.ly/3U3sTvo

Video from today’s episode: youtube.com/calnewportmedia

INTERVIEW: Marketing guru Noah Kagan [11:06]

Links:
Use this link to preorder a signed copy of “Slow Productivity”:
peoplesbooktakoma.com/preorder-slow-productivity/
FREE download excerpt and 2 Bonuses for “Slow Productivity”:
calnewport.com/slow

Thanks to our Sponsors:

This show is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at
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Thanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, Kieron Rees for slow productivity music, and Mark Miles for mastering.

Delian Asparouhov is the co-founder, President and Chairman of Varda Space Industries, a company building spacecraft to manufacture materials in microgravity that are difficult or impossible to produce on Earth— starting with pharmaceuticals. He’s also a Partner at Founders Fund.

Previously, he was a principal at Khosla Ventures, head of growth at Teespring, and founder of a healthcare company called Nightingale. Delian is Bulgarian, attended MIT, and likes to ski and play soccer.

0:00 - Intro 3:14 - How Does Innovation Happen? 6:23 - Varda and the No Science Allowed Rule 7:52 - A Primer on Solid State Microgravity Manufacturing 18:25 - Space Industrialization, Trading Posts, and the Chinese and Portuguese Navies 21:13 - Economic Incentives and Future Business Models in Space 24:24 - SpaceX and The Costs of Mass to Orbit 27:45 - Demand for Space Manufacturing and Varda at Scale 33:44 - Manufacturing, Servicing, Machining, and Future Markets for Space 36:42 - Incubating Companies 40:33 - When Would Varda Have Been Started Otherwise? 42:19 - The Hollywood Model of Startups 45:20 - Future of Incubations 47:47 - Media’s Role in Technology 50:39 - What Media Inspired Varda’s Founding? 52:38 - Talent, Culture, and Cementing Company Trajectory 53:57 - Narratives and Talent Recruitment 55:28 - Traits Delian Looks for in Founders 57:38 - The ‘Why Now’ When Investing 1:00:08 - Bring Non-Consensus and Right 1:02:53 - Is Varda Consensus Yet? 1:03:24 - Identifying Non-Consensus Opportunities 1:05:12 - Lessons from Founding and Investing 1:07:40 - What Skill Do You Wish You’d Developed Earlier? 1:10:11 - Immigrant Mentality 1:11:24 - Less Obvious Reasons for Success 1:12:55 - On Speed 1:14:23 - What Should More People Be Thinking About?

🎙️More Episodes🎙️ YouTube: https://bit.ly/3QDLQFt Apple: https://apple.co/478Be6M Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3sfiFiE

📲Socials📲

Twitter: https://twitter.com/adlabossiere

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexlabossiere/

Key Takeaways

• The United States of America is the greatest startup in world history
• As an entrepreneur, your social role is to make profits, but you also need to ensure that socialists do not take over your country
• “Every founder starts as lead engineer and ends up as Chief Psychologist.” – Balaji
• There is light in the world and there is darkness; accelerationism want light and the decels want darkness
• A world of degrowth is a world that is full of war; when the pie is forced to be shrunk, the people are forced to fight because there are less resources available
• Academics do not understand that what matters is how systems and incentives work
• We must take the frameworks that work in the entrepreneurial world and apply them to other things
• Make America States Again
• The darkest of times reveal who is on the side of darkness and who is on the side of the light

Joe Lonsdale is one of the most prominent investors in technology. He's the co-founder of Palantir, 8VC, Addepar, and the Cicero Institute —and one of Balaji's longtime friends. We have fun talking about education, longevity, space, and the little matter of completely reforming all governments with the internet. OUTLINE: 00:00 - How Silicon Valley got expensive 09:18 - Tech founders as philosophers 17:39 - 100% Democracy and .01% Democracy 28:51 - Internet Values vs Western Values 36:05 - How Academics Become Capitalists 46:40 - Red States, Purple States, Foreign States for AI 58:11 - Thoughts on Space, Robotics, Longevity

VIDEO

YouTube: https://youtu.be/Ny93ZjlR93g SOCIAL https://ciceroinstitute.org https://www.8vc.com https://thenetworkstate.com/podcast https://twitter.com/JTLonsdale https://twitter.com/balajis

Key Takeaways

• Blockchains provide the societal benefits of protocol networks but with the competitive advantages of corporate networks
• “Come for the tool, stay for the network.” – Chris Dixon
• If every command line tool becomes an app, does every protocol become a blockchain?
• Distribution was so scarce in the early days of the internet that Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber) killed for it
• The Web3 version of a given Web2 app adds balances and the ability to cryptographically sign messages and transactions
• Many tech companies suffer from Stockholm Syndrome; they have become accustomed to the App Store taking a significant portion of their revenue
• Web3 combines the best of both worlds of Web1 and Web2
• Web3 is as structured as the Web2-style databases but as open as a Web1-style web
• Crypto is a counter-force to many of the things that AI is doing
• Blockchains enable property rights in the digital space
• “Technology changes microeconomic leverage.” – Balaji

Read Write Own (readwriteown.com) is a new book by Chris Dixon, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and founder of the largest crypto fund in the world. It's an important work that is simultaneously the best crypto tutorial for newcomers and an accessible reference for experts. Balaji and Chris are long-time friends and worked together at a16z for years. Here they discuss Read Write Own and the state of crypto in 2024. OUTLINE 00:20 - Chris Introduces Read Write Own 05:04 - Why Books Are Harder than Essays 11:40 - Overview of Read Write Own 18:01 - The 2000s: Open RSS vs Proprietary Social 25:32 - Every Protocol Now Gets Global State 31:42 - Web3 Versions of Web2 Apps 35:27 - Proprietary Networks Are Locking Down 38:47 - Crypto Subsidizes Creatives 42:53 - Virtual Goods and Online Status 44:13 - Own Usernames Like Domain Names 47:55 - What Digital Ownership Means 48:52 - Tech Giants' Power and User Leverage. 58:28 - Collaborative Storytelling 01:02:06 - Digital Identity with Web3 01:09:36 - Conclusion

VIDEO

YouTube: https://youtu.be/_nIQztk5KWY SOCIAL https://readwriteown.com https://thenetworkstate.com/podcast https://twitter.com/cdixon https://twitter.com/balajis

Key Takeaways

• Universities still matter, especially the really good ones; the decisions made at elite universities end up influencing the future of the country
• The bundling of the university is evidence that it has evolved; however, it is important for university leaders to continually evaluate that bundle to ensure that it makes sense
• The main credentialing of the college degree is in two parts: the fact that you were admitted and the fact that you graduated
• The admissions process is an IQ test and the graduation process is a conscientiousness test
• For many degrees, the degree is worth less than the wage that it will command in the free market
• University tuition rates have increased 2-3x more than the general inflation rate; if current trends continue, the cost of a four-year education at an elite university will cost $1M
• Increasingly, the policy recommendations that come out of the think tank component of universities are sharply partisan and extreme
• Stanford and Yale have more administrative staff than they have students!
• Universities are highly dependent on their current model continuing indefinitely; they are not as fiscally stable as they may seem from the outside perspective
• In 2015, 57% of American voters had a positive view of American universities; in 2023, that number fell to 36%
• Entrepreneurial opportunities tend to emerge when an industry experiences systemic shifts

In this one-on-one conversation, Marc and Ben tackle the university system – what has certainly been a hot topic that’s been dominating the news over the past few months. As Marc states at the top of the episode, universities matter tremendously to our world, but they’re currently in a state of crisis.

Together, Ben and Marc take a “structural” look at higher education, delving deep into the twelve functions of the modern university. They also unpack the numerous challenges that universities face today – student debt and the replication crisis, among them.

They also discuss topics including DEI, student athlete admissions, accreditation, inflation, and much more.

As colleges face an existential threat that could have long lasting repercussions, how can we find ways to improve these institutions, while being open to new entrepreneurial opportunities in education?

Check out the Ben and Marc show: https://link.chtbl.com/benandmarc

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Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

Key Takeaways

• The more technology and capitalism we get, the better things are going to get
• Fundamentally, whether or not a startup succeeds depends on whether it is building a product that people want
• Great people want to be around other great people; most companies are too tolerant of mediocrity
• In the long run, even the most innovative companies eventually become boring
• Tall Poppy Syndrome: Due to humanity’s tribal inclinations, the Tall Poppy – the person trying to do something new – tends to get cut
• When something in tech is successful, it tends to change the status structures and hierarchies of society
• The Law of Crappy People: The quality of any level in the company will degrade to the worst person at that level
• “More companies die of indigestion than of starvation.” – Marc Andreessen
• The best companies can think in the long term despite the pressures to prioritize the short-term
• New things in the world are not going to show up predictably
• By 2030 or 2035, you will be able to have the equivalent of 1,000 AI programmers writing code for you
• Most people who are opposed to technological change are not opposed to the given technology but are opposed to how that technology may diminish their status and power

Marc Andreessen is a prominent entrepreneur, investor, and software engineer best known for his key role in the development of the early internet. In the early 90s, Marc co-created Mosaic, a pioneering web browser, while a student at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. In 1994, he founded Netscape, launching the popular Netscape Navigator browser.After selling Netscape to AOL in 1999 for $4.3 billion, Marc founded Opsware, selling it later for $1.6 billion. In 2009, he co-founded Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm that has backed, among others, Airbnb, Facebook, Instagram, and SpaceX. Known for his insights into technology, Marc's early work with Mosaic and Netscape significantly shaped the internet's growth, and his ongoing contributions continue to influence the tech industry.

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