Ajinkya Wadhwa

My perspective on having a wedding shifted from “Why the hell are we doing this absolutely irrational thing; no one should do this” to “Wow, that was an absolutely important thing for us to do; everyone should do it” almost instantaneously, and this view hasn’t faded away since.

As we discussed in Chapter 1, the animal world is really a world of strands of genetic code, each in a never-ending quest for immortality. Animals are just the biological containers that genes use as temporary homes during this quest. And to control their containers, genes have their animals running on primitive automated software.

We talked about emergence and how the giant is what humanity looks like a few floors up the tower from the individual.

The key is not to discard The Box of Daily Experience and find a new one — it’s to warmly embrace the one that we have now — with its joys, its flaws, and everything in between.

Finding startup ideas is a subtle business, and that's why most people who try fail so miserably. It doesn't work well simply to try to think of startup ideas. If you do that, you get bad ones that sound dangerously plausible. The best approach is more indirect: if you have the right sort of background, good startup ideas will seem obvious to you. ... See more

Live in the future and build what seems interesting.

And Moochie shapes right up.

The psych equilibrium of a culture exerts a vertical pull on the individuals within it—filling each culture with a kind of electrical current.

In the most independent-minded people, the desire not to be told what to think is a positive force. It's not mere skepticism, but an active delight in ideas that subvert the conventional wisdom, the more counterintuitive the better.