I would tell startups to just keep your head down, keep building. Your contingency plan, if you have one, should be because you are still spending more than you make and you still don't have a line of sight for that J curve. That is the most important contingency. Because otherwise you are betraying that equation to your cofounders, to your investors, to your employees and to your customers.

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. The idea that there's an obligation to have that thing happen in four years or five years or six years, I think we need to disavow that.

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.

As you start the company, you start spending spending spending ahead of revenue but then you come out of it and very quickly you should become a company that spends less than it makes. And what I mean by very quickly, is that window of time should be in that 6 to 8 year time frame. And the reason is because if you build your business model correctly it's almost unavoidable.

People should absolutely have a point of view about the political process themselves individually, but we're also at a point in the evolution of capitalism where any one individual's impacts are over estimated because there is enough regulation and guard rails. They may be odious and grotesque in what they say, but the practical day-to-day impacts from a policy perspective tend to be limited because the system made it so. That's why you see a lot of political apathy because people have internalized the inability for anyone either really really good or really really bad to do anything.

If you look at the ecosystem, entrepreneurs as a class have gotten younger, younger, and younger. They also as a class have become less and less and less experienced. The good part about that is that you're unlocking this ability to start a company to so many more people. That's an amazing positive. The negative is they're coming to that job with dramatically less experience than they've ever had. So there needs to be someone around the table that can then help them.

The half-life of companies is shrinking. So in the same ease in which you can start a company today to disrupt an incumbent, you have to also realize that somebody will do that to you as well just as easily. So if you're not just going to get on top but stay on top, that will require a real prepared mind across many companies.