The Anthology of Balaji: A Guide to Technology, Truth, and Building the Future

Elon, Zuckerberg, and all the smartest founders are building their own media arms, going direct and routing around legacy media corporations. Doing so is now a core competency. A CEO or a founder who does not build direct distribution is not doing it right. It’s like a company not building a website.

Today, we don’t have the same level of risk tolerance. People want an extremely high level of safety, but they don’t realize we can be too conservative. Being too conservative on safety actually leads to systemic risk. Systemic risk happens when you stop taking risks and get stuck with a system that no longer improves.

Higher productivity also means quicker failures. Quicker failure means you can create more trials. More trials means you have more chances to find your comparative advantage. Iterate.

Build products based on truths many people can’t grasp. If it works, they’ll buy it. Their incomprehension is your moat.

As this technological trend accelerates, the capital requirements to produce a product will decline precipitously. To run a small robotic factory could be like running your own data center, well within reach of the individual entrepreneur.

Many industries will evolve like this: Human Service Semi-automated service Fully automated Human, then human/machine pair, then machine.

A framework I use often is the evolution from the physical version to the intermediate form, and then to the internet-native version. If you’re into electrical engineering, you can think of this as the evolution from analog to analog/digital, and then to native digital.

The newest technical papers and the oldest books are the best sources of arbitrage. They contain the least popular facts and the most monetizable truths. What do you know to be true that others cannot or will not bring themselves to admit? There is your competitive advantage.

Believing the next problem is solvable is a fundamental tenet of the philosophy of technology.

My favorite books give me a new type of X-ray vision. They teach me how to see new layers of the world I didn’t understand or even notice before.