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Choose Good Quests
Beyond investing, many former founders leverage their success to become public pseudo-intellectuals, speaking on podcasts and broadcasting their thoughts on popular tech Twitter accounts. But unless you are a truly generational thinker, proselytizing is far less impactful than building a specific, better version of the future. To the publ
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A hard quest is high-risk and operationally complex, with a low chance of success. Reversing aging, going to Mars, curing cancer, building a supersonic plane, creating AGI, or founding a new country — these are all hard quests, and most players attempting these quests will fail.
An easy quest is typically more straightf
... See moreMarkie Wagner • Choose Good Quests
The world is filled with good quests that require massively leveled heroes to complete: semiconductor manufacturing, complex industrial automation, natural resource discovery, next-generation energy production, low-cost and low-labor construction, new modes of transportation, general artificial intelligence, mapping and interfacing with the br
... See moreMarkie Wagner • Choose Good Quests
Therefore, there is a moral imperative for our best players to choose good, hard quests.
Markie Wagner • Choose Good Quests
To the public intellectual, one must ask: if your ideas are so good, why aren't you executing on them? It is much easier (and less impactful) to write about the importance of “green tech” than to build Tesla. Moreover, many self-titled public intellectuals are not even particularly intellectual. They are just... public.
Markie Wagner • Choose Good Quests
As a culture, we have a tendency to celebrate status that emerges from net worth and network signaling rather than the work ethic of a second-act founder using his net worth and network, while he grinds on a project, to drive the world forward. This is totally backwards.
Markie Wagner • Choose Good Quests
But today there are more people "helping the builders" than actually building, fighting one another in a zero-sum game for allocation in competitive deals. Incredibly, being an investor has become one of the highest status jobs in Silicon Valley — higher even than playing an important operating role at a great company. This has led to an over
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Since it is difficult to find a quest that is easy and good , most people optimizing for an easy goal will end up on a quest that is both easy and bad. Now, the degree of “bad” varies depending on who you are, and what you can do.
Markie Wagner • Choose Good Quests
In the 1980s, a venture capitalist could truthfully say their investment was the difference between life or death for an important, generational technology company. Funding such companies, in this way, was absolutely a good quest. But today there are more people "helping the builders" than actually building, fighting one another in a zero-sum game
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