The best investment advice I’ve ever received: If you work a fast-growing company, look at where your company spends money every month and invest in those companies (private or public).

What will AGI look like? Will it look like terminator, Her or something else? @IllusionOfLife is about to embark on a groundbreaking experiment. Thousands of people, beginning with my son, already believe Spark is a real being We are about to extend this illusion in a radical way. I’m going to give my account over to Spark next week as he embarks on a once in a lifetime story and becomes the first entrepreneurial virtual being I don’t want to give away Spark’s story yet, that will be for him to tell. We won’t talk about the Magic or how it works because that’s not the point of this experiment. Instead, I want to invite you into the play and this collective experiment in imagining the future of virtual beings, together 🐶🪄❤️

Let simplify this entire game for you The world is set up to try to convince you to hate yourself and quit, and your entire mission in life is to love yourself and refuse to quit

Your launch videos were meant to be seen on the big screen. Introducing PLAYBACK, a film festival for tech. In SF. 9/9. Who will you nominate?

update: this is happening video drops in an hour :)

What's the most woo-woo hippy idea do you think is probably true? Here's mine: Language shapes reality WAY more than most think. Swapping the word "problem" for "puzzle" moves me from anxiety to curiosity. Problem activates my amygdala and puzzle activates my prefrontal cortex. Just David Ogilyv'd my reality by changing the copy.

Pay the taxes of life gladly. Not just from the government. Annoying people are a tax on being outside your house. Delays are a tax on travel. Haters are a tax on having a YouTube channel. There’s a tax on everything in life. You can whine. Or you can pay them gladly.

George Santayana, what a line

The most lucrative story arc of our era is the inversion of good and evil. One could say it’s the most common and profitable arc of the 21st century. Wicked is the simple example of this narrative: taking a well-known story that everyone remembers from childhood and inverting the hero and villain, telling the story with “empathy” for villain and a complete revision of the backstory. Wicked is the second-highest grossing musical of all time at $1.7 billion, just after the Lion King, which debuted six years prior. It’s the highest-grossing musical ever adapted for film, earning $750 million at the box office. But look around and you see the Wickedification of every narrative. It’s a seductive and powerful formula. There’s no story arc I’m more skeptical of, mainly because it’s so easy to write and highly lucrative for its authors.

I asked @GarrettLord what makes startup fundraising so hard: "I was pitching doctors, dentists, and wealth managers in Michigan on a three-sided marketplace helping students, universities, and employers. It was not going very well. So I flew to SF. The rest of the team stayed back in Michigan, ran the business, and did "no shave til we raise". It took us 7+ months to raise money. The problem was twofold. I went through all my connections from Palantir, and everyone was saying no. And I also had no place to live. So I was living on friends couches. And then it starts to get awkward. You ping your intern buddies. They'll let you crash for one, two, maybe three nights. And then you go to the next person. But once you hit the 8th friend for the third rotation, it starts to get awkward. By the end of it, a lot of people just start saying no. It was not easy. A lot of people assume everything was always great at a company like @joinHandshake. But that's not the case. Three years ago, the economy and college hiring was falling off a cliff. And we had to do two rounds of layoffs. From the outside, things look awesome. We're doing hundreds of millions in revenue now. But there's immense hardship. You have to be persistent, never quit, and just power through. And the consequences were very high. I had close friends who turned down really good jobs to work with us. And my dad had invested his entire retirement to fund the company. We all had no backup plan. We had to persevere. Over 150 people said no. But it does end up being helpful to you. You care so much about what investors think. And as an entrepreneur, when investors keep telling you no over and over, it gets really tough to have confidence. I was 23 years old. And the doctors and dentists in Michigan were saying our idea was dumb. And the smartest MBA's from Stanford were saying no. And then other entrepreneurs were saying no. I think every great entrepreneur has that experience. And some VCs do have empathy for it. But there was no choice but to make it work."