Hours of interviews, cut down to every distinct point.

8 points · 7 appearances · 2019–2025 · changed view

“Wealth is the thing that you really want. Wealth is assets that earn while you sleep. Wealth is the factory that with the robots as cranking out things. Wealth is the computer program that's running at night that's serving other customers. Wealth is even money in the bank that is being reinvested into other assets and into other businesses. Even a house can be a form of wealth, because you can rent it out — although that's probably a lower use of productivity — but land and actually doing some commercial enterprise. So my definition of wealth is much more businesses and assets that can earn while you sleep.”

5 points · 5 appearances · 2024–2026 · changed view

“The observation is that don't die is the most played game by everyone all over the world every day. You and I breathe every few seconds, we look both ways before we cross the street, we all play don't die. So it's played more than capitalism, it's played more than any religion. It's the most played game in the world.”

6 points · 4 appearances · 2007–2020 · changed view

“Well, you can say everybody knows that. Well, I think I've been in the top 5% of my age cohort all my life in understanding the power of incentives, and all my life I've underestimated it. And never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes my limit a little farther.”

6 points · 4 appearances · 2015–2026 · changed view

“It turns out it's not that important to be smart; it's much, much more important to be determined. If you imagine this hypothetical person who's like a hundred out of a hundred for smart and a hundred out of a hundred for determination, and then you start taking away determination, it doesn't take very long before you have this sort of ineffectual but brilliant person. Whereas if you take someone who's super, super determined and you start taking away smartness bit by bit, eventually you get to some guy who owns a lot of taxi medallions — but he's still rich. Or like a trash hauling business or something like that.”

6 points · 4 appearances · 2015–2017

“I think that, um, all — if you're a founder or entrepreneur, what you want to aim for is monopoly. You want to aim to build a company that is one of a kind, uh, and that it's so far, um, differentiated from the competition that it's not even competing. Um, and, um, and I think this is the — conventional wisdom is always that capitalism and competition are somehow synonyms. I believe they're antonyms. A capitalist is someone who's in the business of accumulating capital. A world of perfect compet— competition is a world where all the profits are competed away. If you want to compete like crazy, um, then you should just open a restaurant in Chicago. Um, and, um, and, uh, and I think the, the great companies, like, uh, Google, sort of the paradigm example I use, has had no serious competition in search since 2002, when it definitively distanced itself from Yahoo and Microsoft, and as a result it's been generating enormous cash flows for the last 12 years.”

6 points · 3 appearances · 2021–2024 · changed view

“If you have a good enough offer, you don't have to sell hard. You don't have to have amazing copy or amazing creative.”

6 points · 3 appearances · 2022–2024 · changed view

“Satoshi's fundamental breakthrough was the way to discover absolute truth in a time when trust was scarce but computation was abundant — to turn the determination of absolute truth, at least on the metadata, okay, of who, like meaning digital signature; what digital signature did what, via hash; when, via time stamp. You can now get pretty good bounds on that, you know, in this box of like the probability that this digital signature was falsified, that this hash, you know, was a collision, that this time stamp, you know, it's within this range. And you can compute how much energy would be required to falsify that, like how many hashes would need to be done to create a new chain. And that's like a totally new thing. It is access to absolute truth for everybody, which is absolutely worth all the computation. It's worth all the energy that goes into it. There's nothing that's more important than, like, humanity's history.”

6 points · 3 appearances · 2014–2025 · changed view

“There's what's called the installation phase and there's what's called the deployment phase. And it turns out in every single case — and this includes railroads and, like, lots, electricity and steam engines and lots of prior new fundamental technologies — there's always this just gigantic bubble and then crash kind of halfway through. And historically that marks the transition from the installation phase to the deployment state.”

6 points · 3 appearances · 2015–2025 · changed view

“I think probably the biggest thing, aside from how we interview folks, that we did differently is just being okay taking a really long time to hire people, in that, kind of the received wisdom is work really hard to hire the best people, and you're like, "Gee, thanks, I was going to do the opposite, but now that you've said that, I'll work really hard to hire the best people." And so I guess the question is sort of to what lengths should you go and kind of what does that actually mean in practice. And in practice it means being okay waiting a really long time to hire people and having to be painfully persistent in doing so. And so it took us, let me think, took us a year — well, it took me six months to hire the first two people, so.”

6 points · 3 appearances · 2014–2018 · changed view

“Before we jump in on the how, I want to talk about why you should start a startup. I'm somewhat hesitant to be doing this class at all, because you should never start a startup just for the sake of doing so. There are much easier ways to get rich, and everyone who starts a startup always says — always — that they couldn't have imagined how hard and painful it was going to be. You should only start a startup if you feel compelled by a particular problem, and that you think starting a company is the best way to solve it. The specific passion should come first and the startup second. In fact, all of the big successes we have at YC followed this.”

5 points · 3 appearances · 2013–2020 · changed view

“The third point is skin in the game. When you're a banker, all right, and you have the upside, no downside, what are you going to do? Create the maximum number of loans that don't blow up often, right, and collect your bonuses. It's like selling out of the money options, and then of course you blow up. Now how do I link this to fragility? It's very simple: fragility is short volatility, you see, and selling an out of the money option is short a certain class of volatility. And what you have is, a banker has the option, he has the upside, and if you pay taxes every April 15 you're paying for his downside. That's it. They may make money, it still covers his downside. So this to me is not capitalism, it's misunderstanding of basic rules.”

6 points · 2 appearances · 2025

“how much dopamine is in our system at any one time compared to how much dopamine was in our system a few minutes ago, that dictates your so-called quality of life and your desire to pursue things. This is important. Your experience of life and your level of motivation and drive depends on how much dopamine you have relative to your recent experience. This is why when you repeatedly engage in something that you enjoy, your threshold for enjoyment goes up and up and up.”

8 points · 4 appearances · 2019–2025 · changed view

“The world just reflects your own feelings back at you. Reality is neutral. Reality has no judgments. To a tree, there's no concept of right or wrong or good or bad. You're born, you have a whole set of sensory experiences and stimulations and lights and colors and sounds, and then you die. And how you choose to interpret that is up to you — you do have that choice. So this is what I meant that happiness is a choice. If you believe it's the choice, then you can start working on it.”

5 points · 3 appearances · 2024–2025

“So one is you have to reframe your identity that you are a professional sleeper. So just like you take your professional job seriously, you show up on time, right? You learn, you grow, like you have a lot of self-respect on what you do. The same is true for sleep. Right now, like, we sleep when it's convenient, or when we're done watching our show, or when we're finished having friends over. But sleep is actually a profession. Like, you need to become really good at it and respect it.”

6 points · 4 appearances · 2007–2020 · changed view

“I tried to do something about this terrible ignorance I left the Harvard Law School with when I saw this patterned irrationality which was so extreme. And I had no theory or anything to deal with it. But I could see that it was extreme and I could see that it was patterned. I just started to create my own system of psychology, partly by casual reading but largely from personal experience, and I used that pattern to help me get through life.”

6 points · 3 appearances · 2009–2019 · changed view

“About a month after we started Y Combinator, we sort of stumbled upon the phrase that became our motto: make something people want. And we've changed our minds about a lot of things since then, but if I were choosing again today, this is still the one I would choose. I don't think you can get it down to three words — of course, if you could, I would be the first to try. Another thing we tell startups, probably the second most common thing we tell startups, is not to worry too much about the business model at the beginning. Don't worry too much about money — not because it's not important, but because it's so much easier than making something great.”

6 points · 3 appearances · 2015

“One sort of question is always like, what great business is nobody building? There's a more intellectual version of it, which I always like to ask as an interview question. It's: tell me something that's true that almost nobody agrees with you on. And this turns out to be a shockingly hard question for people to answer, and it's hard because, for one thing, it's hard because we've just been taught that truth is conventional. The truth is whatever everybody agrees on, and so coming up with something new that people don't already agree on puts us in a very uncomfortable sort of a place. It sounds like it's really hard to do this, and so you have to be really, really brilliant, so we think. But the other reason it's a very tough question to answer is because you sort of think about the literal dynamic of an interview, where I'm asking the question to somebody, and then give me an answer, and it's like, oh yeah, I already thought that, or I agree with that — that's the wrong answer. And so that the right answer is one that, in some sense, people might not agree with, and so it, I think, often requires quite a bit of courage to come up with an answer that people haven't thought of.”

6 points · 2 appearances · 2025

“If you're under 30, you have no reason not to go 100% all-in on your goals. The downside is nothing and the upside is everything.”

6 points · 2 appearances · 2025 · changed view

“Are new countries even possible? We know that we can found new companies like Google out of a garage, and new communities — the three billion person community that is Facebook started out of a dorm room. We know we can start new currencies like Bitcoin from a white paper. But can we start new countries similarly? That's the next step. That's what taking the internet seriously means.”

6 points · 3 appearances · 2023–2025 · changed view

“It turns out that there were another set of people who very badly wanted to outlaw alcohol in those days, and those were the Bootleggers, which was organized crime; this stood to make a huge amount of money if legal alcohol sales were banned.”

6 points · 2 appearances · 2019–2020

“The kind of the story of total factor productivity growth in the US over the course of the last, call it, you know, 150 years, is one of a sort of lowish growth, and then sort of, you know, a real growth spurt over the course is the kind of the middle of 20th century. It's been a sort of much lower level since, you know, perhaps 1970 or so, a slight kind of peak around, you know, 2000, hypothesized to be because the sort of corn quote ICT revolution, and now back to, again, quite historically low levels, at least, again, if we take our, you know, window as being the last hundred fifty years. And so, I mean, that is, you know, that charge, that picture, is very consistent with one we're sort of mid-century science, you know, worked really well, we discovered a lot of amazing things, but somehow the the rate of discovery seems to be lower since then.”

6 points · 2 appearances · 2025

“First of all, you can't ask it anything. That's very nice of you to say, but there's a lot of things that it's still embarrassingly bad at. But even if we fixed those, which hopefully we will, it doesn't continuously learn and improve. It can't go get better at something that it's currently weak at. It can't go discover new science and update its understanding and do that. And it also kind of can't — even if we lower the bar — it can't just sort of do any knowledge work you could do in front of a computer. Even without the sort of ability to get better at something it doesn't know yet, I might accept that as a definition of AGI. But the current systems — you can't say, like, hey, go do this task for my job, and it goes off and clicks around the internet and calls someone and looks at your files and does it. And without that, it feels definitely short of it.”

6 points · 2 appearances · 2013

“Please mishandle. So something that is fragile, if you map it properly mathematically, you'd realize that the fragile is what does not like disorder. It doesn't want mishandling, it doesn't want volatility, it wants peace and predictability. So the opposite of that would be something that love volatility.”

6 points · 2 appearances · 2021–2026 · changed view

“One way that you can ensure that that cortisol peak occurs early in the day, right about the time that you wake up, is to view bright light, ideally from sunlight, within the first 30 to 60 minutes after waking. The reason for that is very simple. You want to trigger that cortisol increase to occur very early in your day, and you don't want that cortisol peak to happen later, which is what will happen if you wait to get outside and see sunlight.”

8 points · 4 appearances · 2019–2025 · changed view

“We have this idea that everything can be taught — everything can be taught in school — and it's not true that everything can be taught. In fact, the most interesting things cannot be taught, but everything can be learned. And very often that learning either comes from some innate characteristics in your DNA, or it could be through your childhood where you learn soft skills which are very, very hard to teach later on in life, or it's something that is brand-new, so nobody else knows how to do it either.”

6 points · 4 appearances · 2019–2025 · changed view

“If you want to make money, you have to get paid at scale. And why you? That's accountability. At scale? That's leverage. And just you getting paid, as opposed to somebody else getting paid — that's specific knowledge.”

6 points · 2 appearances · 2026 · changed view

“What does that mean? Just like now anybody can make a video, anyone can make a podcast, anyone can now make an application. So we should expect to see a tsunami of applications. Not that we don't have one already in the app store, but it doesn't even begin to compare to what we're going to see. However, when you start drowning in these applications, does that necessarily mean that these are all going to get used? No. I think it's going to break into two kinds of things. First, the best application for a given use case still tends to win the entire category. When you have such a multiplicity of content, whether in videos or audio or music or applications, there's no demand for average. Nobody wants the average thing. People want the best thing that does the job.”