I love reading internal memos because they help me understand how insiders think about strategy. Since internal memos are less filtered than press releases, I learn much more. Special thanks to Sriram K for finding and compiling the Facebook, Disney, and Sequoia memos:
Zuckerberg on the Messenger Ecosystem Zuckerberg wrote these a while ago, and itâs cool to see the changes he discussed in these emails implemented into the FB messenger product 4 years later, with varying degrees of success.
Zuckerberg negogiating with Kevin Systrom over the Instagram acquisition The gist of this article revolved around how Instagram would look if Facebook were to acquire it. Would it be swallowed under the Facebook umbrella or would it operate on a standalone basis? Looking back, it seems like Instagram has thrived as a mostly standalone product combined with Facebookâs ad tech to generate revenue.
Zuckerberg on why Facebook should buy Unity This memo from years ago spurred my decision to purchase shares in $U when they IPOâd. Zuckerbergâs vision of future social networks in the memo revolves around VR/AR interactions. Recently, the popularity of games like Fortnite and Roblox seem to have confirmed that theory: people are spending more time just hanging out with friends in virtual worlds, buying virtual clothing/accessories, and talking. Since $U is primary game dev tool used in mobile and AR, and I believe itâs usage will grow as gaming becomes a larger and more accepted entertainment option (itâs already huge).
Roelof Bothaâs internal investment thesis to Sequoia for YouTube YouTube seems to be endpoint for influencers in the creator economy. Typically the process goes something like this: Go viral on TikTok or Instagram -> create a YouTube channel and develop deeper connections with more personal videos. Right now, itâs the most long-form and entertaining visual medium for creators to interact with their fans. It makes a ton of money for Google too through ads. Itâs interesting to see how Botha saw the space back during the early innings, especially in regards to competitors and revenue generation strategies.
Trammell Crow memos after the savings and loans crisis The TLDR on the S&L crisis was that S&Lâs had low profits because they borrowed at really high interest rates (set by the fed), but were stuck on making money on low interest mortgage loans. Reagan signs an act, which eliminated LTV ratios and interest rate caps for S&Ls. This led to speculative lending and fraud, and eventually when everything unwound, turned into more than 700 S&L failures. Many of these happened in Texas, and thatâs where Trammell Crow was exposed the most. These were some of the lessons they learned. Contains gems like âProduct should dictate land price. Land price should not dictate productâ, âConfusing quality with image; and focusing on high-end projects when the market demand had shifted to middle-income or price-sensitive centers e.g. with discount anchorsâ, âOffice buildings have a long product lifecycle ⊠A lot can change in this time period. This dramatically exacerbates the unpredictability of two of the most volatile components of profitability: The loss to lease up costs and yieldsâ
Essays
Essays that I often reread that I found interesting or have shaped my thinking
Blas Morosâ The Infinite Game Taught me about how self-awareness and close examination of yourself is a requirement to taking control of your own life. Create a priority framework and iterate from there.
Blas Morosâ Learning Process How one of the most well-read people I know creates systems to accomplish things. Chunking time, eliminating deadtime, aiming to build rather than consume, using Evernote and Wunderlist to organize projects, prioritizing health and family, etc. I think heâs able to read 5 books a month despite the fact that he has a family, a full-time job, and in the process of starting a start-up.
Patrick Collison - Advice General advice from the co-founder of Stripe, which is one of the most valuable private companies right now that is democratiazing transactions in the form of frictionless APIs. âIn particular, try to go deep on multiple things. (To varying degrees, I tried to go deep on languages, programming, writing, physics, math. Some of those stuck more than others.) One of the main things you should try to achieve by age 20 is some sense for which kinds of things you enjoy doing. This probably wonât change a lot throughout your life and so you should try to discover the shape of that space as quickly as you can.â
Paul Graham - Life is Short âOk, so life actually is short. Does it make any difference to know that? It has for me. It means arguments of the form âLife is too short for xâ have great force. Itâs not just a figure of speech to say that life is too short for something. Itâs not just a synonym for annoying. If you find yourself thinking that life is too short for something, you should try to eliminate it if you can. When I ask myself what Iâve found life is too short for, the word that pops into my head is âbullshit.â I realize that answer is somewhat tautological. Itâs almost the definition of bullshit that itâs the stuff that life is too short for.â
Paul Graham - Cities and Ambition âGreat cities attract ambitious people. You can sense it when you walk around one. In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a message: you could do more; you should try harder. The surprising thing is how different these messages can be. New York tells you, above all: you should make more money. There are other messages too, of course. You should be hipper. You should be better looking. But the clearest message is that you should be richer.â Environment influences thinking and priorities.
Paul Graham - How To Do What You Love âAnother test you can use is: always produce. For example, if you have a day job you donât take seriously because you plan to be a novelist, are you producing? Are you writing pages of fiction, however bad? As long as youâre producing, youâll know youâre not merely using the hazy vision of the grand novel you plan to write one day as an opiate. The view of it will be obstructed by the all too palpably flawed one youâre actually writing. âAlways produceâ is also a heuristic for finding the work you love. If you subject yourself to that constraint, it will automatically push you away from things you think youâre supposed to work on, toward things you actually like. âAlways produceâ will discover your lifeâs work the way water, with the aid of gravity, finds the hole in your roof.â
Simon Sarris - Stoicism is Not Enough Ironically I loved âThis is Waterâ by David Foster Wallace, but Sarris brings up valid points against Stoicism. I never thought about the context of when Meditations was written - but with a crumbling empire infected by plague, the Stoic mindset was probably a good mindset to have in such a dire situation. I think Sarris views certain things as objective (objectively good or objectively bad), whereas through Stoicism, people can bend their perception of the external based on inner willpower. Sarris argues that if there is too much Stoicism, objectivity loses meaning and certain emotions are shut off. These emotions are important for us to feel wonder and induce feelings of sacredness. Rather than pure Stoicism, which only allows life to be âsurvivableâ, aim to live a good life. Instead of fully turning inward, realize that the ultimate goals transcend the individuals and are ultimately passed on to others. You need to see external events for what they are, because this perspective is important if you want to cultivate change.
Sam Altman - Researchers and Founders What are the successful traits of researchers and founders? Self-belief, willing to work hard, bias towards action, honest about what isnât working, creative idea-generators, value autonomy, frequently driven by genuine curiosity.
Sam Altman - How To Be Successful TLDR: Compound yourself, have an irrational amount of self-belief, learn to think independently, get good at sales, make it easy to take risks, focus, work hard, be bold, be willful, be hard to compete with, build a network, get rich by owning things, be internally driven.
Ava Huang - On continually renegotiating your identity âItâs impossible to completely escape the pull of instinct and self-optimization, but my experience has been that I am happiest when I take my identity less seriously and give myself permission to continually renegotiate itâŠIf we reject the illusion of a fixed identity and keep ourselves open (always staying partially in crisis) we make discovering whom we are and what weâre able to do a lifelong project. I love Rachel Cusk paraphrasing D.H. Lawrence: âSome people have a lot farther to go from where they begin to get where they want to beâa long way up the mountain, and that is how it has been for me. I donât feel I am getting older; I feel I am getting closer.ââ
Ava Huang - On maintaining attention âLife is a fight against entropy, I think as I gather up Waterloo sparkling water cans, half-empty mugs of coffee and three pairs of sweatpants strewn over the sofa, grudgingly restoring the apartment to order. Thanks to lockdown Iâve very belatedly entered some approximation of adult domesticity, and mostly I find it⊠hilarious. Like: you have to keep cleaning the apartment on an infinite weekly cycle in order to stop it from collapsing into disarray. You have to keep buying groceries, and keep looking up recipes, and keeping baking cookies at the same rate you consume them.â
Ava Huang - On not losing my nerve âWhen talking to a friend the other day about creative work I realized that a constant resolution that helps me continue is the thought that I canât lose my nerve. Itâs like walking on a tightrope: there are infinite ways to fuck up and fall, but itâs important to not think about it too much, or else youâll psych yourself out and actually fall when you otherwise mightâve been okay.â
John Gardner - The Road to Self-Renewal Speech delivered by John Gardner in 1990 to McKinsey & Company. He talks about the velocity of careers, why some die, and how some renew themselves. How do you maintain velocity, avoid complacency, and get better? ââMeaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. The ingredients are there. You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life. Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you. If it does, then the particular balance of success or failure is of less account.â
Andy Dunn - The Risk Not Taken Beautiful essay by the founder of Bonobos, his journey across the world, and why he decided to not take a lucrative job after graduation. âThe risk not taken is more dangerous than the risk taken. I realized that I had defined risk the wrong way twice. The first time was thinking it was risky to travel abroad in the developing world, and yet what a risk it would have been not to have done so. The second time I had been thinking risk was not taking a steady job. No â I realized â risk is not having access to food, healthcare, and education. Risk is what is facing Stanleyâs children, it is not what is facing me. It turns out there is risk in taking the steady job. The risk is generally not financial. It is spiritual.â
Wait But Why - How to Beat Procrastination âNo one âbuilds a house.â They lay one brick again and again and again and the end result is a house. Procrastinators are great visionariesâthey love to fantasize about the beautiful mansion they will one day have builtâbut what they need to be are gritty construction workers, who methodically lay one brick after the other, day after day, without giving up, until a house is built.â
Wait But Why - The Procrastination Matrix âThe distinction between an ordinary person and an extraordinary person might simply come down to the differences in how they allot their time points.â
Wait But Why - The Tail End A visual representation of the time you have left. I think it was this essay that made me think more about the importance of visualizations - a good visualization can carry life-altering messages if done in the correct way. This is what happened here. Takeaways:
1) Living in the same place as the people you love matters.** I probably have 10X the time left with the people who live in my city as I do with the people who live somewhere else.
2) Priorities matter. Your remaining face time with any person depends largely on where that person falls on your list of life priorities. Make sure this list is set by youânot by unconscious inertia.
3) Quality time matters. If youâre in your last 10% of time with someone you love, keep that fact in the front of your mind when youâre with them and treat that time as what it actually is: precious.
John Salvatier - Reality has a surprising amount of detail âBefore youâve noticed important details they are, of course, basically invisible. Itâs hard to put your attention on them because you donât even know what youâre looking for. But after you see them they quickly become so integrated into your intuitive models of the world that they become essentially transparent. Do you remember the insights that were crucial in learning to ride a bike or drive? How about the details and insights you have that led you to be good at the things youâre good at?⊠The direction for improvement is clear: seek detail you would not normally notice about the world. When you go for a walk, notice the unexpected detail in a flower or what the seams in the road imply about how the road was built⊠If you wish to not get stuck, seek to perceive what you have not yet perceived.â
Patrick McKenzie - Doing Business In Japan As someone who thinks about going to Japan at least once a day, this article provided a fascinating perspective on corporate culture in Japan. Pretty long, but couldnât put it down.
Nate Soares - Conviction without self-deception âI think itâs important to tease apart feelings from beliefs. If youâre standing on that diving platform, I think itâs important to simultaneously know you have a 17% chance of victory, and fill yourself with the excitement, focus, and confidence of the second swimmer. Become able to tap into conviction, without any need for the self-deception.â
Nate Soares - Dive In In my experience, the way you end up doing good in the world has very little to do with how good your initial plan was. Most of your outcome will depend on luck, timing, and your ability to actually get out of your own way and start somewhere. The way to end up with a good plan is not to start with a good plan, itâs to start with some plan, and then slam that plan against reality until reality hands you a better plan.
Autotranslucence - Becoming a Magician âSo, in short, a helpful strategy for becoming a magician: Surround yourself with people who look like magicians to you. Then imagine yourself as one, older and wiser, in great detail. Imagine yourself as the person you would be afraid to say you want to be out loud to others (because it seems so ridiculously impossible right now).â
Eugene Wei - Chinese Robber Fallacy Great introduction into base rates using a simple example. âThere are over a billion Chinese people. If even one in a thousand is a robber, you can provide one million examples of Chinese robbers to appease the doubters. Most people think of stereotyping as âHereâs one example I heard of where the out-group does something bad,â and then you correct it with âBut we canât generalize about an entire group just from one example!â Itâs less obvious that you may be able to provide literally one million examples of your false stereotype and still have it be a false stereotype. If you spend twelve hours a day on the task and can describe one crime every ten seconds, you can spend four months doing nothing but providing examples of burglarous Chinese â and still have absolutely no point.â
Richard Hamming - You and Your Research âIt was pretty clear to me that this man didnât know much mathematics and he wasnât really articulate. His problem seemed interesting so I took it home and did a little work. I finally showed him how to run computers so he could compute his own answers. I gave him the power to compute. He went ahead, with negligible recognition from his own department, but ultimately he has collected all the prizes in the field. Once he got well started, his shyness, his awkwardness, his inarticulateness, fell away and he became much more productive in many other ways. Certainly he became much more articulate.â
Kevin Simler - Ads donât work that way âCultural imprinting is the mechanism whereby an ad, rather than trying to change our minds individually, instead changes the landscape of cultural meanings â which in turn changes how we are perceived by others when we use a product. Whether you drink Corona or Heineken or Budweiser âsaysâ something about you. But you arenât in control of that message; it just sits there, out in the world, having been imprinted on the broader culture by an ad campaign. Itâs then up to you to decide whether you want to align yourself with itâŠIn this way, cultural imprinting relies on the principle of common knowledge. For a fact to be common knowledge among a group, itâs not enough for everyone to know it. Everyone must also know that everyone else knows it.â
Ideopunk - 100 Tips for a Better Life A few gems: âThe best advice is personal/comes from somebody who knows you well ⊠Discipline > motivation - the former can be trained, the latter is fleeting ⊠Things you use for a significant fraction of your life (bed: 1/3rd, office-chair: 1/4th) are worth investing in ⊠Often in the process of laying out a problem, a solution will present itself ⊠There are 2 red flags to avoid almost all dangerous people: 1. The perpetually aggrieved ; 2. The angry. ⊠Look for somebody you enjoy just hanging with. Long-term relationships are mostly spent just chilling ⊠De-emphasizing your quirks lead to 90% of people thinking youâre alright. Emphasizing them lead to 10% of ppl thinking youâre amazing. Aim for them. ⊠Call your parents when you think of them, tell your friends when you love them.
Harj Tagger - Conversations and Ideas ââŠThere are a few such motives [in conversations] Iâve repeatedly come acrossâŠThe motive I fear most is someone checking which tribe I belong to. Some people care only about figuring out if you believe the same things they do. The earnest reason for this is comfort. Itâs easier to be around people who think like you do. The more insidious reason is punishing you for not being in the right tribe. This is where you encounter the nastiest personalities, like the agents of Mao tricking teachers into revealing their beliefs so they could be fed to students.â
Nabeel Qureshi - How to Understand Things âThe smartest person Iâve ever known had a habit that, as a teenager, I found striking. After heâd prove a theorem, or solve a problem, heâd go back and continue thinking about the problem and try to figure out different proofs of the same thing. Sometimes heâd spend hours on a problem heâd already solved âŠThe photographer Robert Capa advised beginning photographers: âIf your pictures arenât good enough, youâre not close enoughâ. (This is good fiction writing advice, by the way.) It is also good advice for understanding things. When in doubt, go closer.â
Cedric Chin - Why Tacit Knowledge is More Important Than Deliberate Practice âThis is actually generalisable. People with expertise in any sufficiently complicated domain will always explain their expertise with things like: âWell, do X. Except when you see Y, then do Z, because A. And if you see B, then do P. But if you see A and C but not B, then do Q, because reason D. And then there are weird situations where you do Z but then see thing C emerge, then you should switch to Q.â And if you push further, eventually they might say âAhh, it just feels right. Do it long enough and itâll feel right to you too.â Eventually I realised that the way to learn Hieuâs techniques was to copy him.â
Dan Luu - How I Learned to Program âPerhaps the most important meta-skill I picked up was learning how to solve large problemsâŠI canât cite any particular a-ha moment. It was just eight years of work. When I went looking for problems to solve, Glenn would often hand me a problem that was slightly harder than I thought possible for me. Iâd tell him that I didnât think I could solve the problem, heâd tell me to try anyway, and maybe 80% of the time Iâd solve the problem. We repeated that for maybe five or six years before I stopped telling Glenn that I didnât think I could solve the problem. Even though I donât know when it happened, I know that I eventually started thinking of myself as someone who could solve any open problem that we had.â
Dan Wang - Definite Optimism as Human Capital After reading this essay + Thielâs Zero to One, Iâm becoming more convinced that cultural capital is an incredibly powerful force multiplier when it comes to domestic development. E.g. how much does inspiration matter to the growth of a nationâs science and technology? âI wonder if economists overrate the easier-to-observe policy factors and under-theorize the idea that positive visions of the future drive long-term growth. To put it in a different way, I wish that they would consider definite optimism as human capital. In addition to education levels, human capital models should consider factors like optimism, imagination, and hope for the future.â
Mihir Desai - The Trouble with Optionality Applying financial concepts like âoptionalityâ to your life can lead to dangerous diversions from your dreams. Meaning is created by investing time and energy in a small number of things you deem important, not by spreading out your bets. âThe shortest distance between two points is reliably a straight line. If your dreams are apparent to you, pursue them. Creating optionality and buying lottery tickets are not way stations on the road to pursuing your dreamy outcomes. They are dangerous diversions that will change you.â
Clayton Christensen - How Will You Measure Your Life? âThe powerful motivator in our lives isnât money; itâs the opportunity to learn, grow in responsibilities, contribute to others, and be recognized for achievements. I tell the students about a vision of sorts I had while I was running the company I founded before becoming an academic. In my mindâs eye I saw one of my managers leave for work one morning with a relatively strong level of self-esteem. Then I pictured her driving home to her family 10 hours later, feeling unappreciated, frustrated, underutilized, and demeaned. I imagined how profoundly her lowered self-esteem affected the way she interacted with her children. The vision in my mind then fast-forwarded to another day, when she drove home with greater self-esteemâfeeling that she had learned a lot, been recognized for achieving valuable things, and played a significant role in the success of some important initiatives. I then imagined how positively that affected her as a spouse and a parent. My conclusion: Management is the most noble of professions if itâs practiced well. No other occupation offers as many ways to help others learn and grow, take responsibility and be recognized for achievement, and contribute to the success of a team. More and more MBA students come to school thinking that a career in business means buying, selling, and investing in companies. Thatâs unfortunate. Doing deals doesnât yield the deep rewards that come from building up people.â
James Somers - Speed Matters âThe prescription must be that if thereâs something you want to do a lot of and get good atâlike write, or fix bugsâyou should try to do it faster. That doesnât mean be sloppy. But it does mean, push yourself to go faster than you think is healthy. Thatâs because the task will come to cost less in your mind; itâll have a lower activation energy. So youâll do it more. And as you do it more (as long as youâre doing it deliberately), youâll get better. Eventually youâll be both fast and good.â
James Somers - Deliberate Practice âAnyway, the overall picture that emerges from this (quite long) paper is that innate talent counts for very littleâeven things like lung capacity, heart size, capillary density, dexterity, etc., that we might take to be genetically endowed, turn out to change considerably with years of deliberate practice. Or to take another example, excellent pianists donât have faster reaction times than amateurs; they only outperform the amateurs on tests specifically related to training on the piano. Nor is there a clean relationship between chess ability and IQ. And so on.â
James Somers - How to be a loser âNow the problem with that is that there is nothing more kryptonitic to a personâs Fighting Spirit, and to winning, than comfort. Nobody ever got anything done by being comfortable. If you are not working hard, you are not learning; if you never get past that point when a new project becomes actually difficult, where the marginal returns flatten out, then you will never be a master. Everything worthwhile is going to hurt, and if you avoid pain, you will fail. Etc.â
Andy Matuschak - Why books donÊŒt workâPicture some serious non-fiction tomes. The Selfish Gene; Thinking, Fast and Slow; Guns, Germs, and Steel; etc. Have you ever had a book like thisâone youâd readâcome up in conversation, only to discover that youâd absorbed what amounts to a few sentences? Iâll be honest: it happens to me regularly. Often things go well at first. Iâll feel I can sketch the basic claims, paint the surface; but when someone asks a basic probing question, the edifice instantly collapses.â
Jamie Brandon - Things UnlearnedâItâs so easy to think that simple solutions exist. But if you look at the history of ideas that actually worked, they tend to only be simple from a distance. The closer you get, the more you notice that the working idea is surrounding by a huge number of almost identical ideas that donât work.
Take bicycles, for example. They seem simple and obvious, but it took two centuries to figure out all the details and most people today canât actually locate the working idea amongst its neighbours.â
Tom Socca - Your Real Biological Clock Is Youâre Going to Die âThe clock is running, only itâs not a clock: Itâs a sandglass. According to the Social Security Administrationâs online calculator, an average man born the day I was born can expect to live 34.9 more years, for a total of 82.0 years. When I first checked it, when drafting this piece, it was 35.4. I thought it would be a lighthearted exercise, but I felt real dread as I was entering the birthdate, and, despite myself, shock when I saw how small the number was.â
June Huh Profile - Fields Medal in Mathematics âI have this math competition experience, that as a mathematician you have to be clever, you have to be fast,â he said. âBut June is the opposite. ⊠If you talk to him for five minutes about some calculus problem, youâd think this guy wouldnât pass a qualifying exam. Heâs very slow.â
Crypto
Nic Carter - A Most Peaceful Revolution âYou may deride Bitcoin, no matter. Bitcoin will be there for you when you need it. You may not need it now; you may not need it ever. But as we plunge into a more despotic, authoritarian, and chaotic world, you may one day feel comfort knowing that the worldâs highest assurance wealth protection system in history is waiting patiently for you.â
Videos
Peter Thiel - Zero to One Competition is for losers because competition kills profits. You want to aim to create a differentiated company = monopoly. Doesnât apply to companies, but also careers. Great primer on his book Zero to One.
AlphaGo - The Movie Modern day version of Deep Blue vs. Kasparov, but with an immensely more complex game.
Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle âThere are many ways to live your life. Thatâs maybe the most important thing you can realize in your life, is that every aspect of your life is a choice. But there are default choices. You can choose to sleepwalk through your life and accept the path thatâs been laid out for you. You can choose to accept the world as it is. But you donât have to. If there is something in the world you feel is a wrong and you have a vision for what a better world could be, you can find your guiding principle. And you can fight for a cause. So after this talk, Iâd like you to take a little time and think about what matters to you. What you believe in. And what you might fight for.â