Clearly define your personal ‘utility function’ – what truly drives and fulfills you beyond just money – to ensure long-term happiness and purpose, as solely financial motivation often leads to misery after achieving wealth.
Embrace a career progression that starts with mercenary drive (for survival and success), transitions to a missionary focus (broader purpose), and culminates in an ‘artist’ mindset (doing it for the love of the craft), as this path leads to long-term happiness and significant impact.
To achieve long-term relevance and impact, cultivate a polymathic approach with diverse interests, be driven by a blend of motivations beyond just money (e.g., impact, interestingness), and strive for early success to build a platform for compounding career growth and access to valuable information flow.
When evaluating a startup or building one, first assess if there’s a strong demand and differentiation for the product (product-market fit) before evaluating the team, as even amazing teams can fail in bad markets, while mediocre teams can succeed in good ones.
To maximize your chances of being at the top of your game in a specific industry, relocate to its primary geographic cluster (e.g., Hollywood for movies, Silicon Valley for tech) to leverage the concentrated talent and information flow, rather than making it harder by working remotely from anywhere.
To identify future opportunities and innovations, position yourself to gain early, firsthand access to emerging technologies and their internal usage, as those closest to the tech often see the future before it becomes widely distributed.
To gain an information advantage, focus not just on accessing unique data, but critically on developing superior methods to interpret publicly available information, including having the right tools, filters, and the ability to make intuitive leaps that others miss.
To avoid self-inflicted wounds, remain customer-centric rather than becoming overly focused on competitors, as excessive competitor focus can lead to losing differentiation, neglecting customer needs, and undertaking actions that don’t benefit your company.
View your company as a performance-oriented team with a specific mission, rather than a family, to optimize for collective performance and ensure all members are aligned and contributing effectively towards shared goals.
Resist societal trends that reduce independence, agency, and risk-taking, especially in children, as an overemphasis on safety and fragility can have negative long-term implications for mental health and the ability to function independently.
To accelerate product development and customer acquisition, immerse yourself in environments (like YC batches) that create peer pressure and set strict timelines, fostering a mindset of shipping fast and constantly seeking customer feedback.
For an early tech team, ensure you have at least one person skilled in vision-setting and sales (like Jobs), one person exceptionally good at building (like Wozniak), and plan for someone to scale the company as it grows (like Cook) to cover essential roles.
When planning CEO succession, prioritize finding a leader who possesses a product-founder mentality, capable of innovation and driving new changes, rather than simply promoting a complementary operational lieutenant, to prevent company decay after a founder’s golden age.
Tailor the organizational structure of a large company to specifically complement the CEO’s unique needs, quirks, and obsessions, rather than adopting a generic structure, to optimize for their effectiveness and drive.
As an innovative CEO, recognize areas that are well-established (like sales processes) and avoid the urge to reinvent them; instead, hire experienced professionals to manage these functions, allowing you to focus innovation where it’s truly needed.
When scaling yourself as a leader, focus on hiring individuals who are highly effective in their roles and possess skills that complement your own, rather than trying to do everything yourself.
Focus on bringing your professional self to work, emphasizing effectiveness and collaborative behavior, rather than your ‘whole self’ with all personal morals and values that may not be appropriate for a diverse work environment.
For companies focused on innovation, especially young ones, prioritize in-person work environments over remote work, as remote setups are generally less conducive to spontaneous collaboration and idea sharing unless specifically designed for online collaboration.
If committing to a remote-first company model, implement comprehensive, well-documented processes for every aspect, from salary bands to communication protocols, to ensure efficiency and effective collaboration, as exemplified by GitLab.
CEOs should critically evaluate their remote work policies, recognizing that enforcing in-person attendance can implicitly prioritize employees who are more committed to the company’s mission over other personal priorities, and make a judgment call on its importance.
For big tech companies, consider a drastic re-evaluation of staffing levels and productivity, as many may be overstaffed with employees not working very hard, suggesting potential for significant cuts without compromising output.
Shift your mindset to view AI as ‘units of cognition’ or ‘person-equivalent time’ that can be rented or hired to perform white-collar work, enabling you to effectively scale capabilities by leveraging AI for tasks like programming or accounting.
Support and advocate for the unconstrained development of AI, as its potential for global advancements in health, education, and other fundamental areas is immense and should not be stifled by short-sighted regulation.
When prompting AI, be highly specific in your requests and incorporate explicit checks or ’test cases’ within the prompt (e.g., ‘double check that these two things are true’) to reduce errors and improve the reliability of the output.
Use AI for practical tasks like synthesizing information (e.g., identifying key people at a conference and pulling their backgrounds), coding, and generating regular expressions to extract specific data, enhancing productivity in various domains.
When prompting AI for complex tasks, break the task down into a series of smaller, sequential steps and chain the model by feeding the output of each step as input for the next, similar to how an agent would process information.
Prioritize applying AI to domains that offer clear, testable outputs and rapid feedback loops, such as coding, as this allows for quick iteration and continuous training of the system.
When developing AI, especially in domains with clear rules and a defined utility function (like winning a game), implement self-play training where the AI generates its own data and receives rapid feedback for continuous improvement.
When applying AI to complex fields like biology, focus on creating high-fidelity, clean datasets for training models, as this foundational work is crucial for enabling AI to make accurate breakthroughs and clean up existing data.
Consider developing AI-powered fraud or plagiarism detectors for both liberal arts and sciences, as there’s a significant opportunity to uncover widespread issues and improve academic and scientific integrity.
Advocate for and utilize open-source AI models because they level the playing field, make technology globally accessible, and allow users to customize or retrain models to reflect specific cultural norms or values, avoiding imposed biases.
When discussing ‘safety’ (e.g., AI safety, societal safety), clearly define what specific type of safety is being addressed (digital, physical, existential) and articulate why it constitutes a real concern, to avoid conflation and unproductive arguments.
For early-stage companies, actively manage founder relationships to prevent internal conflict and ensure rapid progress towards achieving product-market fit, as these are the primary causes of early company failure.
For consumer businesses, track organic growth rate and retention to see if people are using the product frequently; for B2B products, monitor growth rate, adoption, and metrics like Net Dollar Retention (NDR) to gauge demand.
If you are a talented individual outside of core industry networks, seek out programs or accelerators (like Y Combinator) that can plug you into established networks to help you succeed.
To maximize your potential for breakthroughs and success in any field, strive to join or establish a lineage with the handful of top labs, groups, or institutions that consistently drive most of the progress and produce successful individuals.
Challenge the conventional wisdom that you must have an equal co-founder; instead, consider solo founding or an unequal founder structure, as many of the biggest startup successes have originated from these models.
When conducting reference checks on founders, contextualize negative feedback; unless it points to ethical issues, it might be neutral, as product-market fit can trump individual founder traits, and performance can drastically improve when an individual is fully responsible for their own venture.
Look for startup opportunities in sectors that large, incumbent companies are neglecting or deeming unpopular (e.g., defense when Google exited Maven), as this creates a significant opening for new ventures.
When entering an established industry, identify a ‘why now’ technological shift that incumbents cannot easily adopt or tack on, creating a unique competitive advantage for a new company.
To succeed in industries dominated by large players (like defense), build a sufficiently broad product portfolio from day one to position your company to become a ‘prime’ contractor or major player.
For ventures with inherently long development or sales cycles (e.g., defense contracts), ensure you raise enough capital to sustain operations and endure extended timelines required to achieve major milestones.
Challenge and innovate traditional, inefficient business models (like cost-plus in defense) by proposing alternatives that align incentives for both the provider and the customer, leading to better value and efficiency for all parties.
For military and defense strategists, recognize and embrace the inevitable shift towards highly distributed, drone-based systems, as they offer advantages in speed, cost, and operational capabilities beyond human limitations.
When developing or deploying AI in defense, ensure that a human operator always maintains control over decisions involving lethal force, rather than ceding full autonomy to the system, to prevent unintended harm and maintain ethical boundaries.