Good investors have to choose how to allocate their mind share with the precious capital they have.
— Chamath Palihapitiya
There's a handful of exceptionally good companies, but there's always one company that's the best.
We curate our lives around this perceived sense of perfection, because we get rewarded in these short term signals: Hearts, likes, thumbs up. We conflate that with value, and we conflate it with truth, and instead, what it really is is fake, brittle popularity that's short term and leaves you even more vacant and empty before you did it.
I think when you think about immigration, what we need to do is realize that that human capital, if put in a place to succeed, will literally sacrifice everything.
I wish I had invested in the series A of Snapchat and Uber.
It's important to understand the compensation equation that a CEO and a founder has with his or her employees.
Half the population of the entire world is women, and people are somehow shocked that this entire half is as capable as the other half.
All these social media sites allow us to confuse truth and popularity. That has to be fixed. Because every normal citizen has a right to know what is factual versus what is amplified by good actors or bad actors.
Here's the thing - if you want to do good things in the world, there's just only so much time that one can spend being glass half empty.
I feel like a lot of entrepreneurs hear all this talk about profitability and realize they need to lower their burn. So, they just start chopping off perks and people.
If the government shuts down, nothing happens, and we all move on, because it just doesn't matter. Stasis in the government is actually good for all of us.
My mom was a nurse, and my dad worked in the Health Ministry as a civil servant. When I was 6 years old, my dad got a job at the Sri Lankan High Commission in Canada, so we moved there.
Something like bitcoin is really important because it is not correlated to the rest of the market.
Valuable companies take decades to build.
Betting against entrepreneurs who are changing the world has never been a profitable endeavor.
One of the things I have known my entire life is that I have an innate capability for making money.
Today we live in a world now where it is easy to confuse truth and popularity. And you can use money to amplify whatever you believe and get people to believe what is popular is now truthful. And what is not popular may not be truthful.
Much like Warren Buffett has said very famously - he doesn't buy technology stocks because he doesn't understand them- I will not buy consumer goods companies because I do not understand them.
All of the business of selling apps and selling subscriptions is extremely cruelly misunderstood, including by me.
The government - they're completely useless.
Being a tech company has to be about a pattern of repetitive innovation.
I think Apple is a productive cash machine.
The goal of a private company is, first, zero to one: Get past the product-market fit; figure out whether people actually care about what you're trying to build and someone will pay you money for that. That's the zero to one problem.
You need to use data science and machine learning to get the ground truth of what's happening inside of a company.
I want children who can make eye contact. I want children who know how to resolve conflicts with their peers. I want children who understand the dynamics of interpersonal relationships that are physical and tactile. I do not want children that only know how to interface with the world through a screen.
If you're trying to get to profitability by lowering costs as a startup, then you are in a very precarious and difficult position.
Zuck is unemotional. He doesn't get influenced by ego.
I've found that a lot of successful poker players grew up poor. And I'm convinced that poor people have a risk tolerance that rich people don't have because poor people fundamentally don't value money that much because they're used to not having it.
I was born in Sri Lanka.
I'm a living testament to the value of immigration. I escaped a civil war, and I came to Canada as a refugee, and they gave my family protection. I did my best to pay that country back, and I think I did that.
We need to divorce ourselves from venture capital as an occupation and focus on using capital as a way to take really big bets on things that just seem totally audacious.
Your job as a smart investor is to separate the facts and the news from the fiction and the noise.
I wasn't blessed with the natural ability to rein myself in.
At some point, Apple will become much more aggressive and much more daring in taking their brand and capital to really reshaping markets.
Early traction of Tesla is tracking very closely to Apple.
We need to go after cancer, diabetes, climate change, the substantive problems of the world that, if were solved, would create immense wealth and opportunity that would cascade across countries.
When Facebook went public, they didn't have a particularly strong model of governance.
The point of Silicon Valley, at least when I moved here, was we're all trying to do stuff, and none of us quite felt like we fit in anywhere else. But we were all trying to do good things. And the money was just the byproduct of good things.
I was raised in a house where my mom was the primary breadwinner. It was a dysfunctional house, but she showed tremendous resilience.
You have to respect people for who they are on a basic level.
VC has always been this high-touch, in-your-face-type business.
Startups should be - if you graph their financial performance, it should be what's called a J curve. You start out at zero. you're not making any money; you're not losing any money.
Companies are transcending power now. We are becoming the eminent vehicles for change and influence, and capital structures that matter. If companies shut down, the stock market would collapse.
My first job was at a Burger King.
Not everybody is right all the time.
Facebook could have gone public whenever it wanted. We decided the right time was 2012. It could have easily been 2010 or 2014.
I think what IBM is excellent at is using their sales and marketing infrastructure to convince people who have asymmetrically less knowledge to pay for something.
When I left Facebook, I left an enormous amount of equity on the table. I thought, 'I don't want to be a slave to money. I want to be a slave to something bigger: an ambition, a goal.'
None of us are going to fix governance; it may just be beyond repair. But you can fix capitalism. And the reason you can fix capitalism - It is inherently numerical, and as a result, it is inherently objective. It can be done objectively.
