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.

I think the reality is that it's never been a better time to be an entrepreneur, it's never been a better time to work at a startup. You work at a really intellectually free environment, you get to work with people who are like-minded, it's very energetic. It's wonderful.

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.

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.

If you're trying to get to profitability by lowering costs as a startup then you are in a very precarious and difficult position. You need to grow through profitability.

The entrepreneurial struggle is the same at basically every stage in the sense that there's maybe slightly less risk but strategic issues are generally always the same. Now there's so much existential risk from another company either being able to compete or to disrupt you in the same way you're disrupting somebody else, an entrepreneur needs a real steady partner who has the ability to start working with them in the Seed or the A and be credible and value-add with strategic advice, and just be backstopped by so much capital that you can do any growth round or even a public round.