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.

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. So scaling, one through N, is figuring out can you do that at scale and how big is the scale. And when people pay you more than what it costs for you to make it, does that equation end up leaving you with money left over, i.e. profits.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.