Naval

Riding AGI, AI Anxiety, Who Funded COVID, Defending Taiwan, and California Empire

Naval with three founders who are living in the future: Garry Tan (Y Combinator), Daniel Francis (Abel Police), and Farbood Nivi (A-LIST). 00:00 Guest Intros 02:35 Live in the Future 03:58 Will AI Outsmart us? 07:43 In the Anthropic Breadline 09:59 The Tech Genie Is Out 12:33 We Invested in COVID?! 14:25 Good Writing Is Novelty 18:50 Living Like It’s 2028 24:32 Truth dot ai 30:18 Does China have the Weights? 35:38 Everyone has AI Anxiety 39:32 Have Your Agent Talk to My Agent 42:01 What if Open Source takes the Lead? 44:03 The Sun is Setting on Google 48:00 Ride the AGI 50:46 Will There be Startups? 54:05 Defending Taiwan 1:00:05 The California Empire 1:01:26 If the U.S. Falls 1:03:11 Universal Basic Robot 1:06:01 Humans as AI Handlers Permalink: http://nav.al/future

A Return to Code

With agents, you just don’t get stuck anymore. —Max Hodak

Waste Tokens, Save Time

Don’t look at tokens either as inputs or outputs.  Just look at your time and look at the final output. — Naval

AI Software Factories

“Clearly there are 100x or 1,000x engineers now. The world hasn’t adjusted.” — Guillermo Rauch (Vercel) Guillermo: I’ve been really pilled with this idea of software factories. You used to ship the output directly, and everything inside the company was how good is person A at shipping output B? And now what’s happening is the way that I’m judging you as an engineer is, are you producing the factory that will produce multiplicative outputs B through Z, right? We used to believe, and it used to be somewhat controversial, that there’s 10X engineers. Now clearly there’s 100X or 1,000X engineers. And the world hasn’t fully adjusted to this. @naval: I used to get flamed on Twitter for saying there are 10X engineers, because it flies in the face of so much equality philosophy that everyone’s equal. But the reality is, when you’re operating in idea domains—when you’re operating in intellectual domains and virtual digital domains—it’s not even 10X. It’s 100X or 1,000X, and it always has been. Satoshi, Notch, the guy who invented JavaScript, the Brendan Eichs of the world. John Carmack. These are 1,000X programmers. Not to even mention if you choose the right thing to work on versus the wrong thing to work on, that’s an infinity difference. And it could just be not necessarily even a better programmer, just one who had a better judgment of what to work on in the first place. And now obviously it’s less controversial, because of AI leverage.

Full Episode: The AI Industrial Revolution

Full episode with with 20 minutes of new material at the end. With Guillermo Rauch (Vercel), Blake Scholl (Boom Supersonic), and Max Hodak (Science). Software factories, vertical integration, the regulatory frontier, and the autonomous company. Part 1: Waste Tokens, Save Time 00:00 Three Frontier Founders 01:27 AI Software Factories 04:15 Waste Tokens, Save Time 05:47 Models Instructing Humans 09:29 Is Pure Software Dead? 12:03 You Don't Get Stuck Anymore Part 2: Vibe Coding Hardware 14:39 Vibe Coding a Turbine Blade 18:07 Open Source Compounds China's Advantage 20:15 You Always Want the Smartest Model 22:44 Software Still Needs Hands 24:43 Humans Are Becoming Verifiers Part 3: The Regulatory Frontier 27:53 The Regulatory Red Queen Race 32:32 Why There's No Innovation in Healthcare 36:49 We Need a True 50-State Experiment 40:31 China's FDA Is Beating Ours 43:37 Healthcare Is a Communist Society Inside Capitalism 45:57 Sid's Story: N-of-1 Medicine Part 4: The Autonomous Company 47:49 Autonomous Infrastructure 51:25 Your Job Is to Train the Agent 54:54 The Next Lord of the Rings 59:08 What's Your Definition of Art? 1:05:00 Can AI Have New Ideas? 1:07:03 A Very Large Number of Small Teams Transcript: http://nav.al/industrial

浪费代币，节省时间

播客新形式来袭！ 与三位前沿创始人对话：Guillermo Rauch（Vercel）、Blake Scholl（Boom Sonic）和Max Hodak（Science）。 00:00 三位前沿创始人 01:27 AI软件工厂 04:15 消耗代币，节省时间 05:47 模型指导人类 09:30 纯软件已死？ 12:04 你不再被困住 文字记录：nav.al/tokens

The Only Way Out

Doom is easy. Optimism takes imagination. The Only Way Out A Podcast Film

The Age of Nonlinear Returns

“We live in the age of nonlinear returns. So there’s no point in fighting over the small pie before it’s fully baked, especially in the tech business.” — Naval “We live in the age of nonlinear returns. The upside is always bigger in the future, and the upside can be 100x, 1,000x, 10,000x bigger. So there’s no point in fighting over the small pie before it’s fully baked, especially in the tech business. Anyone who’s been in for a while will tell you that it’s power law distribution of returns: their number one winner is worth more than numbers two through N put together. Number two is bigger than three through N put together and so on. In investing, that means that you’re looking for that one grand slam outcome. You’re not looking for the company that gets sold early. Even if it was a successful sale, it’s still not going to be that number one or number two in the power law. The same way when you’re doing deals, the most important thing is your time. You have to keep your time and your optionality available. So if you’re going to give that up, it only makes sense to do that for something that has that opportunity to be 100x or 1,000x on your time or on your capital. So there’s no point in fighting to divide up small spoils. It just doesn’t make sense. Now, sometimes the big spoils come out and then the knives hit the table, and then you see people get greedy. In those cases, you do have to defend yourself. Unfortunately, business is war by other means, and so that does happen. I’m not going to say it’s all hunky dory and everybody gets along. A lot of times you will get ripped off and you do have to stand up for yourself — sometimes just on principle so that you don’t get taken advantage of in the future. But generally speaking, I think you want to focus on the upside and you want to preserve your time and your reputation and your mental health — your peace. So if you are in a situation where you are being taken advantage of, and you know that if you don’t solve this you won’t sleep at night for the next year, you do have to fight. But if you feel like, ‘I can walk away from this and I can recover my time and I know not to work with these people again,’ or ‘I know that these stakes are too small to bother fighting over,’ then you just don’t do it. Generally, I think people spend too much time splitting hairs on small stakes and not enough time focusing on the big upside. And the big upside is entirely where it’s at.”

Business Books Are a Waste of Time

“All frameworks in life—your workout framework, your sales framework, even your building-an-app framework—are all a distant second to your motivation.” — @naval “If you’re not excited about the thing, what are you doing selling it? It’s a miserable life if you’re selling things that you don’t care about. So I think for me, sales is a byproduct of credibility, and obviously it helps to be articulate and it helps to be empathic. In terms of the actual sales skills, I know the whole Cialdini checklist. I might use it once in a blue moon. But I’m not going to artificially fill an email or a pitch with random comments, just trying to close in on people. All frameworks in life — whether it’s like your working out framework or your sales framework, or even your building an app framework — they’re all secondary, and distant secondary, to your motivation. If you are truly motivated to build an app, you will figure it out. If you’re truly motivated to create a business, you will figure it out. The business school, the business books, the app development stuff, all of that is secondary. You can use that later ex post facto to analyze the thing in hindsight and say, ‘Oh, that’s how I did it.’ But the reality is, you’ll do it because you’re motivated. There’s also a tricky line there. If you’re the kind of person who needs to read motivational tweets and listen to motivational podcasts all the time, then you’re probably not going to make it either, because you have to be self-motivated at some level. It’s like Schopenhauer used to say, the point of reading is a kindling — to light a fire in your own brain. And I would say the same way, the point of being motivated is kindling — to light a fire in your own heart. And if that fire can’t be lit, then you’re just going to be listening to motivational podcasts until the end of time. There’s no value in reading business books. Even business podcasts to me are a form of entertainment, while I’m brushing my teeth or I’m on the treadmill. They’re not a way to actually learn anything useful. If you want to learn something useful, the only way to learn it is to go and do it. And to do it with fervor and obsession and authenticity.”

Don’t Manage, Lead

“A taste of freedom can make you unemployable.” — Naval “Management is telling people what to do, and leadership is making them want to do it. And I think leadership is one of the core, core things that you have to drive in an organization. You just have to inspire people to want to do the work. But it can’t be fake. It has to be a true motivator rolled into their capabilities and their own objectives — what they want out of life. So you do have to take the time to listen to what those people want, and then figure out where there’s an overlap in what you want done, and then inspire them to go do it. There’s a famous Antoine de Saint-Exupéry line. So he has a great line, which goes something like, ‘If you want to build a ship, don’t just gather the men, and issue orders, and cut the wood, and start the fires. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.’ So if I’m recruiting someone, I’m always pitching them on what I think is correct — it’s honest; it’s authentic — which is that startups are just a much better way to build businesses, to live your life, and much more fun to work in than large companies. You’re not a cog in a machine. You have a lot more autonomy. You have a lot more fun. You can make a lot more money. And yes, in the short term it’s grueling, but in the long term, once you’ve done startups, it’s very difficult to go work for a big company. Once you have worked with a lot of autonomy or worked for yourself, it’s very hard to be employable in a traditional sense. I think one of my most popular tweets was, ‘A taste of freedom can make you unemployable.’ And that’s kind of what I mean, especially for talented and skilled people who are self-motivated. And not everyone is that way, but if you are one of those self-motivated, high-agency people, when you’ve been free, you become unemployable. It’s like a kid who’s been homeschooled becomes unschoolable. They’ve just tasted freedom. And you’re not going to do your best work when you’re not free.”

Feed Your (Good) Obsessions

“Don’t look for balance. Feed your (good) obsessions.” — @NavalR “Vibe coding is just my latest obsession. I have an obsessive personality. Every six months I get obsessed with something new, and I’ve learned over time, there are bad obsessions — like, if you are overeating, or if you’re doing drugs, or you’re playing too many video games — that’s a bad obsession. But there are good obsessions. The intellectual obsessions are good obsessions. So I’ve learned to feed my intellectual obsessions. I go out of my way to indulge in it. I don’t look for balance. I look to feed my obsessions. And then once the obsession phase passes, like it inevitably does — you get a little tired of the thing — some large piece of it stays with you for the rest of your life. And so I would say indulge your obsessions. Don’t worry about business books. Like if you want to be good at sales, then find something that you really care about that you want to sell and go sell that thing. And it won’t be hard. It won’t feel like sales. If it feels to you like you’re selling, then you’re probably selling the wrong thing. But if you’re just being enthusiastic about it, if you’re just conveying your enthusiasm, and you can’t control yourself, then you found the right thing to sell.”

I Don’t Sell

“I don’t sell. Humans are hardwired to resist being sold to.” — @NavalR “I actually don’t believe in sales. If you feel like someone is selling to you, and if you feel like you’re being sold, it’s a turnoff. Humans are hardwired to resist being sold to. So I think what matters much more is credibility. Credibility is way more important than sales. If you want to be good at “sales,” then really what you want is you want to be credible. You want people to trust you. You want to be the real estate agent that steers people away from bad deals and bad neighborhoods and bad houses, so that when the right one comes along for them, they trust you. You really have to take your ego out of it, put yourself in the other person’s shoes and figure out what they want. And then once you’ve figured out what they want, then you can “make the sale.” But I’m not the guy you would talk to for making the sales quota, where you have to sell like 50 pieces of software this week or this month. But what I can tell you is that the people you most want to impress in life are the ones who can see right through you. And they will see right through your sales tactics; they will see right through your pitching them. And these people are the top of the top. So if you want to work with the people who are at the top of the top, if you want to successfully sell the biggest things that are out there, then you have to be very credible. And to be credible, you have to be authentic. You have to tell the truth. You have to be knowledgeable. They have to be able to trust you, and that you’re not just doing what’s expedient for you—you’re thinking about the long term. You’re being honest. You understand what you’re talking about, and you can explain it simply. Because nobody’s an expert in everything. They’re not going to come up to speed quickly enough, so you do have to figure out how to analogize it and convey it to them, and it doesn’t always work. You can’t be attached to the outcome. You can’t sell everyone on everything. I know there is a model out there that does work, where some people are incredibly aggressive. They’re like, “Never give up. Just keep hammering. Just keep going on it. Just keep beating on it, and eventually you’ll break through.” I’m not one of those people—I’m just lazy. I like to go where it’s easy, so if my “sale,” or if my pitch does not resonate with somebody, I move on. I move on instantly, and I just keep looking for the person whom it will resonate with.”

The Logic of Violence // A podcast film

"If you really hate somebody, in the future, a drone will be able to get them." – @NavalR “I think drones are still underleveraged, even though they’ve come to prominence on the battlefield recently. We still haven’t seen anywhere near the end game of drones. There’s nothing in particular I’m trying to figure out there. I mean, I think drone defense is going to be very difficult, because a drone that’s attacking has the advantage of both kinetic energy—because it’s coming down on you—and it’s got the advantage of surprise, where the attacker can mass all the attack drones in one area, whereas the defender is always spread thin. The defender has one advantage, which is short range. The defender has to traverse a much smaller range going up than the attacking drone probably had to cover coming in. But I think that drone warfare changes the structure of violence in society. So it’s going to actually fundamentally change how militaries and entire states are architected. You could argue that the modern state rose up as a consequence of the rifle, because a rifle allowed a former peasant to take down a feudal knight on the battlefield. Then you need a factory to make rifles, and you had to drill musket men and arm them and train them. And so nation states sprung up and became dominant instead of feudal states as the right structure to do that within. And then post-nuclear, there’s only seven to nine really independent sovereign nations, and everybody else lives underneath someone else’s nuclear umbrella. So those seven to nine call the shots, whether in the Security Council or elsewhere. And so nuclear weapons were the new logic of violence after 1945. Now the newest logic of violence is drones. And that’s going to fundamentally shift the game again, because drones bring the logic of mutually assured destruction down to the individual level. If you really hate somebody, in the future, a drone will be able to get them. That’s a weird form of violence coming up that’s going to basically restructure society as we know it. I don’t know which way it goes. Is it going to be the case that you have a few very large, very powerful countries that control all the drones? Or is it that drones get so democratized that any individual can be deadly?”

Sell the Truth

00:00 Be Credible 03:18 “Yes, And” 04:31 Selfish Honesty 05:37 Charisma Is Confidence + Love 07:56 Don’t Manage, Lead 11:16 Hunt Together 14:51 Feed Your (Good) Obsessions 18:57 Sell the Truth 21:07 Good Deal or No Deal 23:39 The Age of Nonlinear Returns -- Transcript: http://nav.al/sell USVC is a product of AngelList, where we are founders and hold equity.

The Beginning of the End of Apple’s Dominance

“If I want an app, I literally open up Claude on my phone. I can operate a remote terminal, which is running on my desktop, or I can just use Claude in the cloud. It can connect to Xcode. I give it a two-line description. It builds me an app. It ships it to my app store. I open my app store app. The app is sitting there. I click install. 30 seconds later, I have a working app on my phone. That’s magical. You can literally be at dinner with someone having a conversation, they describe some app they want, you can describe it to Claude, and five minutes later you’re showing them that app on your phone. That’s why I say it’s kind of the beginning of the end for Apple, because Apple relies on their OS and their apps being better than everybody else’s. The hardware, yes, it’s better, but it doesn’t support their margins and their monopoly, or pseudo-monopoly. So when all your communication starts going through Claude, or through Codex, or through some other agent, when all you’re doing all day long is instead of opening an Uber app, you’re saying, “Call me an Uber,” or instead of opening a workout app, you’re saying, “Where’s my workout app? Track my workout. Make no mistakes,” right? Then you are just communicating with the agent, and when that happens, then the need for a phone becomes much smaller and smaller. Maybe there’s a few banking apps and government apps that haven’t ported and don’t have the proper APIs. But these agents don’t even need APIs. They can figure out and create their own APIs on the fly. The use case stops being your interfacing with your iPhone or your Android phone. Instead, you’re just interfacing with the AI model. And now Apple is using Gemini, which is Google’s AI model. So what’s the difference? I might as well just use an Android phone, because all I need at that point is I need a screen, I need battery, and I need connectivity. And Android’s got that just fine. And then the apps and user interfaces are being created on the fly for what I need. And yes, for certain things, there will always be best-of-breed user interfaces and you’ll want some familiarity. But even the era of tap, tap, tap, upgrade your system software, drag this over here, hunt for that button, type into that field, all that is going away. It should all be conversational. It should all be agentic. And in that world, Apple loses a lot of its advantages, and then it’s competing purely on, “Oh yeah, we have the best chips and we have the best integrated hardware.” But that’s not the same margins as Apple of today. That’s more like the margins that Samsung or Lenovo makes, which is not the margins that Apple wants to have. As a consequence, I think its market cap will compress. I think Apple giving up on AI will go down as the biggest strategic mistake in the tech industry of this decade, and it’s the beginning of the end of Apple’s dominance. ” -- Full Episode: https://youtu.be/lIUEJqIDPcA

Coding Agents As Customer Service Reps

“The other thing is within the app that I’m building, I have a bug reporting infrastructure, where if someone sees a bug, they tap on a button, the bug sends the logs up and the bug files into a server. And then I have Claude go every 24 hours through all the bug reports and it just fixes them all, by itself, without my having to intervene. And it puts all the fixes into side branches for me to review. And then all I have to do is just review the fixes and say, “Ah, that wasn’t really a bug. That wasn’t a good fix. Don’t ship that.” “Oh, that looks good. Makes sense. Ship it.” I’m just the final gate that decides on what goes out there. Eventually you can see apps being built that way by features, where the users will ask for features, they’ll vote on features, and then there’ll be some tastemaker or maintainer in the cloud who’ll look at that and say, “No, the users don’t know what they want.” Or, “Oh, that makes a lot of sense. We should fix that or change that.” So I think even software development will become a collaborative process with the users and the agents will be handling all of it. Because in a sense, the agents can do perfect customer service. If your customer service was perfect, your customer service person would also be an incredible coder and would be indefatigable. They would be up 24/7. They would be writing code, fixing bugs, responding to people, and they would have no ego if they wrote a lot of code to fix a bug, and then you just threw it all away. So I just find that kind of a feature very compelling. You truly can have one-person, two-person software companies now that can scale to millions upon millions of users and make billions upon billions of dollars. That has happened already in the past with people like Notch and Satoshi Nakamoto, and very small teams like the original Instagram team that just made a huge dent with very few people, or the original WhatsApp team. But I think you’re going to see it more and more now.” Full episode: https://youtu.be/lIUEJqIDPcA

A Place for Each Model

“AI is jagged intelligence, as they say, where it’s incredibly smart at some things and incredibly dumb at others. And it’s structured very differently than humans in that when you’re using Claude, you’re using the same AI model—even if you have 10 instances of it running. So 10 of them talking to each other doesn’t really improve its thinking in the same way that 10 humans talking to each other do, because those humans are trained on 10 different datasets. Humans are just inherently very creative and think out of bounds. Whereas the AI agents are trained on the same data distribution. They’re literally running the same model. It’s like 10 people with the same brain and the same dataset talking to each other. Sure, just through thermodynamics they might have some different ideas and come up with something slightly different, but they’re generally going to think the same. So all you’re doing when your 10 agents are talking to each other is you’re just throwing 10 times as many tokens at the problem. It’s like saying take 10 times as long if you need to. Now there are different models like Codex, and Gemini, and Grok Code, which are trained slightly differently. Not that different, but they’re slightly different. And so they might have some different insights. Claude has really good visual presentation through a system called Artifacts and Claude is very good at talking to me at the level that I’m at. So it’s very tuned to figure out from your question and your conversation what you’re capable of understanding and what level you’re asking the question at. It’s very good at meeting you at that level. ChatGPT is still the OG. It’s very good all around. Gemini is very good at search because it has the Google crawl underneath. It’s a frustrating product—it’s constantly timing out on the app and losing the connection and forgetting the plot. But it’s very fast and it’s got a great search index. So if the question I’m asking is really a search question underneath, then I use Gemini. Gemini also has access to YouTube. So if you think your answer is lying in a YouTube video—and there’s a lot of YouTube videos—then Gemini has the data advantage of YouTube. So Gemini is really getting by on data advantages. It doesn’t feel like the best model to me, but it has the best underlying data. And then Grok is the one I can count on to tell me the truth. It’s like the least neutered, least nerfed. It’s got access to X, so it’s very good at news. And it’s very good at technical problems. So if you’re asking a deep, difficult problem in the scientific/mathematical domain, then I think Grok is actually quite good—not that the others aren’t, but I just think Grok is standout there. And that reflects the biases of the companies that created them and trained them and are driving them. Currently all four of the leading frontier models have a place.” Full episode: https://youtu.be/lIUEJqIDPcA

Pure Software is Uninvestable

“Naval: There’s never been a better time to be alive as a creator of software. Now, are the same market opportunities still there? That’s a big question. They’re shifting very, very fast. It may be the case that the big companies are vulnerable because now anyone can create software. It may be the case that they have more of an advantage because they have distribution. They can just fill all the gaps with all the software they can dream up. But I actually think this is a renaissance for individual software creators. Now, one other tweet that I put out was something like, “There’s no market for venture-backed software anymore,” or, “Pure software is not venture investable anymore.” Nivi: I think it was like, “Pure software is rapidly becoming uninvestable,” if I remember correctly. Naval: Yeah, that’s a watered-down version of what I really wanted to say, which is that pure software is uninvestable. I would just full stop right there. If your whole advantage is like, “Hey, I’m building cool software that other people don’t know how to build,” I think that’s uninvestable. And it’s uninvestable for two reasons. One is they can just hack it together today. And the second is the coding agents are getting better so quickly that within a year, or even less, they’ll probably be building scalable software with good architecture. So I think we’re going to see leaps and bounds improvements. That genie is out of the bottle. So if you’re a venture investor now, you’re looking for hardware, you’re looking for network effects, you’re looking for AI models. And I would argue that training AI models is the new building software for however long that lasts until autoresearch and autotraining starts working. But I think vibe coding, it’s more fun than playing video games. It’s more productive. It’s more constructive. It has better feedback loops. You build something you want. You’re at the bleeding edge of technology. You may even make some money or career out of it—although careers are kind of dead—but you may make an interesting opportunity out of it. And you learn a lot about computers just by doing. I’ve seen kids who are vibe coding. It’s hard to get kids to program. You can throw Swift Playgrounds and ScratchJr and all of that at them and hope that they pick up coding. But if you throw vibe coding at them, they’re going to get instant feedback and instant rewards. Maybe along the way they’ll pick up fundamentals because these things still require some skill to operate. And in the process of operating them, you’ll be forced to figure out the command line; and you’ll be forced to figure out how basic computer architecture works; and you’ll be forced to figure out concepts like caching, and backing off in a network, and sharing streams, and writing to disk; and latency versus bandwidth trade-offs, et cetera, and all of those things. So you’ll be forced to learn some basics of computer algorithms and architecture. And it’s just a fun way to go. I’ve been up late nights, probably spending a couple hours every night—the time that used to go into reading, or doomscrolling, or playing video games—is all now in vibe coding. In fact, that’s why I haven’t been active on X recently. I’ve been completely missing on X because I’m buried in Claude and Codex.” Full episode: https://youtu.be/lIUEJqIDPcA

‘Nothing Ever Happens’ Is Over

00:00 The Fully Interconnected Startup 04:14 You Don’t Need the Explicit Intranet Anymore 06:55 May You Live in Interesting Times 10:40 Drones Democratize Violence 12:43 Biothreats Could Also Get Democratized 15:09 AI Interfaces Unlock Hardware 17:35 Optimism Requires Creativity -- Transcript: http://nav.al/over USVC is a product of AngelList, where we are founders and hold equity.

On Vibe Coding

00:00 A Return to Coding 03:08 The Personal App Store 06:12 Vibe Coding Is a Video Game with Real-World Rewards 10:23 Pure Software Is Uninvestable 14:09 A Place for Each Model 17:44 AI Is Eager to Please 21:58 Why Math and Coding? 24:04 The Beginning of the End of Apple’s Dominance 27:43 Coding Agents As Customer Service Reps -- Transcript: http://nav.al/code Presented by AngelList: http://angellist.com/podcast We founded AngelList and have equity in the company.

All true learning is on the job

You start with reasoning and then you build up your judgment. And then when your judgment is sufficiently refined, it just becomes taste or intuition or gut feel, and that’s what you operate on. But you have to start from the specific. If you start from the general, and stay at the level of the general—and just read books of principles and aphorisms and almanacs and so on—you’re going to be like that person that went to university: overeducated, but they’re lost. They try to apply things in the wrong places. What Nassim Taleb calls the intellectual yet idiots, IYIs. One of the tweets I was going to bring up is exactly that. From June 3rd: “Acquiring knowledge is easy. The hard part is knowing what to apply and when. That’s why all true learning is on the job. Life is lived in the arena.” Naval: I like that tweet. Actually, I just wanted to tweet, “Life is lived in the arena” and that was it. I wanted to just drop it right there. But I felt like I had to explain just a little bit more because “The man in the arena” is a famous quote, so I wanted to unpack a little bit from my direction. But this is a realization that I keep having over and over.

You only learn by doing

"Life is lived in the arena. You only learn by doing. And if you’re not doing, then all the learning you’re picking up is too general and too abstract. Then it truly is Hallmark aphorisms. You don’t know what applies where and when. And a lot of this kind of general principles and advice is not mathematics. Sometimes you’re using the word rich to mean one thing. Other times you’re using it to mean another thing. Same with the word wealth. Same with the word love or happiness. These are overloaded terms. So this is not mathematics. These are not precise definitions. You can’t form a playbook out of them that you can just follow like a computer. Instead, you have to understand what context to apply them in. So the right way to learn is to actually go do something, and when you’re doing it, you figure something out about how it should be done. Then you can go and look at something I tweeted or something you read in Deutsch or something you read in Schopenhauer or something you saw online and say, “Oh, that’s what that guy meant. That’s the general principle he’s talking about. And I know to apply it in situations like this, not mechanically, not a hundred percent of the time, but as a helpful heuristic for when I encounter this situation again.”

Best products are opinionated.

"Every great founder I’ve seen up close, or even from afar, is highly opinionated and they’re almost dictatorial in how they run things. Also, early-stage teams are opinionated. And the products they build are opinionated. Opinionated means they have a strong vision for what it should and should not do. If you don’t have a strong vision of what it should and should not do, then you end up with a giant mess of competing features. Jack Dorsey has a great phrase: “Limit the number of details and make every detail perfect.” And that’s especially important in consumer products. You have to be extremely opinionated. All the best products in consumer-land get there through simplicity. You could argue the recent success of ChatGPT and similar AI chatbots is because they’re even simpler than Google. Google looked like the simplest product you could possibly build. It was just a box. But even that box had limitations in what you could do. You were trained not to talk to it conversationally. You would enter keywords and you had to be careful with those keywords. You couldn’t just ask a question outright and get a sensible answer. It wouldn’t do proper synonym matching, and then it would spit you back a whole bunch of results. That was complicated. You’d have to sift through and figure out which ones were ads, which ones were real, were they sorted correctly, and then you’d have to click through and read it. ChatGPT and the chatbot simplified that even further. You just talk to it like a human—use your voice or you type and it gives you back a straight answer. It might not always be right, but it’s good enough, and it gives you back a straight answer in text or voice or images or whatever you prefer. So it simplifies what we looked at as the simplest product on the Internet, which was formerly Google, and makes it even simpler. And you just cannot make a product that’s simple enough. To be simple, you have to be extremely opinionated. You have to remove everything that doesn’t match your opinion of what the product should be doing. You have to meticulously remove every single click, every single extra button, every single setting."

Get comfortable with repeated slow failure.

It's not 10,000 hours, it's 10,000 iterations.

"Malcolm Gladwell popularized 10,000 hours. 10,000 hours is directionally correct, but it’s not exactly correct. It implies that if you spend 10,000 hours doing something, you get mastery. Let’s put aside whether 10,000 is the right number or not. It’s not just hours put in—it’s iterations. How many learning loops do you have that drive the learning curve? What is an iteration? An iteration is when you do something and then you look at the result; you test the result somehow—ideally against a free market, nature, or physics. Then you ask, “Did this work or not? What part of this experiment worked or not?” And then based on that, you make a new creative guess on how to improve that thing, and you do it again. The number of times you can do that rotation, that iteration, the faster you’re going to learn. That’s the curve you want to be on. Great people will distill insights from every iteration. So it’s not as simple as finding one secret. Yes, every company makes a secret bet. They have a theory as to how the world is going to work out that other people don’t necessarily have en masse, or it’s not conventional wisdom yet. But along the way, they’re going to discover thousands of insights, and each one will build upon the last, and that’s all going to be driven by the number of iterations they can do."

You can't fix motivation

"The thing you can’t fix is motivation. If someone’s just unmotivated, if they don’t want to apply themselves fully, if they have other things going on in their life, then you just have to cut them off at this point. One of the things that’s less talked about is often you’ll meet the right person at the wrong time. They just have internal problems—life problems, home problems, health problems, things that are going on—that make them not capable of functioning at the level that you need. And that’s a sad situation, but it happens all the time. On a related note: People say, “Oh, I’m burned out. I need to take a break for a month or two and recharge.” In my experience, that’s largely not true. Usually burnout is a sign you’re working on something that either isn’t working or you don’t enjoy the work fundamentally. Just taking time off won’t fix it. If you’re really enjoying what you do, generally that’ll give you more energy and more motivation. There are rare cases—like I know Elon is famous for flogging his teams until four in the morning and calling staff meetings at odd hours of the night and doing crazy death marches. That’s the culture that he sets and builds—that’s fine. In those situations, I could see certain people burning out. But even there, what they’re saying is, “I cannot sustain this workload in the future.” So even there, taking time off doesn’t work because when you come back, he’s going to put you to task the same way as earlier. So generally when someone says, “I’m burned out,” I just read that as, “I want to quit.” Even if they don’t necessarily realize that themselves."

On Artificial Intelligence

If you want to learn, do 0:00 Vibe coding is the new product management 2:13 Training models is the new coding 6:49 Is traditional software engineering dead? 10:13 There is no demand for average 13:07 The hottest new programming language is English 14:12 AI is adapting to us faster than we are adapting to it 18:36 No entrepreneur is worried about AI taking their job 22:56 The goal is not to have a job 26:46 AIs are not alive 29:49 AI fails the only true test of intelligence 32:55 Early adopters of AI have an enormous edge 36:49 AI meets you exactly where you are 39:37 Always leverage the best intelligence 43:02 If you can't define it, you can't program it 44:37 The solution to AI anxiety is action 49:37 -- Transcript: http://nav.al/ai

Founders Cannot Outsource Recruiting

“Recruiting is the most important thing because you need creativity; you need motivated people. Ideally, the early people are all geniuses. They’re self-managing, low-ego, hardworking, highly competent, builders, technical—maybe one or two sellers—but you can’t watch everything. You can’t micromanage everything. The early people are the DNA of the company. When you outsource recruiting, when you have other people hiring and interviewing and making hiring decisions without your direct involvement and veto, that’s a sad day. That’s the day that the company’s no longer being driven directly by you. There’s now a fly-by-wire element in between. There’s some mechanical linkage going through another human, often at a distance. And other people are not going to have the same level of selectivity that you will as a founder. The important size at which a company starts changing is not some arbitrary number, like 20 or 30 or 40. It’s the point at which the founder is not directly recruiting and managing everyone. The moment that there are middle layers of management, then you are somewhat disconnected from the company, and your ability to directly drive a product team that can take the company from zero to one goes away. So we really cannot outsource recruiting. People think you can. They hire recruiters, for example. Maybe you can outsource a little bit of sourcing, but I would even argue that’s difficult. The reason recruiting is so, so, so important—and a lot of it is obvious, I’ll skip the obvious reasons—but one non-obvious reason is that the best people truly only want to work with the best people. Working with anyone who’s not at their level is a cognitive load upon them. And the more people they’re surrounded by who are not as good as they are, the more keenly they’re aware that they belong somewhere else, or they should be doing their own thing. The best teams are mutually motivated. They reinforce each other. Everyone’s trying to impress each other. One good test is when you’re recruiting a new person, you should be able to say to them, “Walk into that room where the rest of the team is sitting. Take anyone you want—pick them at random—pull them aside for 30 minutes, and interview them. And if you aren’t impressed by them, don’t join.” When you do that test, you will instinctively flinch at the idea of them interviewing randomly a certain person that’s kind of in the back of your mind. That’s the person you need to let go. Because that’s the person keeping you from having this high-functioning team that all wants to impress each other.” Full episode: https://youtu.be/S8x978NnZSI

The three most Important decisions

Good Products are Opinionated

“Every great founder I’ve seen up close, or even from afar, is highly opinionated and they’re almost dictatorial in how they run things. Also, early-stage teams are opinionated. And the products they build are opinionated. Opinionated means they have a strong vision for what it should and should not do. If you don’t have a strong vision of what it should and should not do, then you end up with a giant mess of competing features. Jack Dorsey has a great phrase: “Limit the number of details and make every detail perfect.” And that’s especially important in consumer products. You have to be extremely opinionated. All the best products in consumer-land get there through simplicity. You could argue the recent success of ChatGPT and similar AI chatbots is because they’re even simpler than Google. Google looked like the simplest product you could possibly build. It was just a box. But even that box had limitations in what you could do. You were trained not to talk to it conversationally. You would enter keywords and you had to be careful with those keywords. You couldn’t just ask a question outright and get a sensible answer. It wouldn’t do proper synonym matching, and then it would spit you back a whole bunch of results. That was complicated. You’d have to sift through and figure out which ones were ads, which ones were real, were they sorted correctly, and then you’d have to click through and read it. ChatGPT and the chatbot simplified that even further. You just talk to it like a human—use your voice or you type and it gives you back a straight answer. It might not always be right, but it’s good enough, and it gives you back a straight answer in text or voice or images or whatever you prefer. So it simplifies what we looked at as the simplest product on the Internet, which was formerly Google, and makes it even simpler. And you just cannot make a product that’s simple enough. To be simple, you have to be extremely opinionated. You have to remove everything that doesn’t match your opinion of what the product should be doing. You have to meticulously remove every single click, every single extra button, every single setting. In fact, things in the settings menu are an indication that you’ve abdicated your responsibility to the user. Choices for the user are an abdication of your responsibility. Maybe for legal or important reasons, you can have a few of these, but you should struggle and resist against every single choice the user has to make. In the age of TikTok and ChatGPT, that’s more obvious than ever. People don’t want to make choices. They don’t want the cognitive load. They want you to figure out what the right defaults are and what they should be doing and looking at, and they want you to present it to them.” Full episode: https://youtu.be/S8x978NnZSI