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

Maybe the new local news is by intellectual vertical, rather than geographic area.

The 6 Ps are a useful checklist. Product—What are you selling? Person—To whom? Purpose—Why are they buying it? Pricing—At what price? Priority—Why now? Prestige—And why from you?

Managing A founder’s role changes a lot as a company grows. An analogy from the sports world: 1–10 employees: player 10–100 employees: coach 100–1,000 employees: general manager 1,000+ employees: commissioner

Brian Chesky, founder of Airbnb, learned from a bunch of articles written in the late 1800s about rooming houses. Room sharing was much more popular around 1900 than in 1950. He saw solutions in a sharing economy from a hundred years ago. Then he modernized, transplanted, and used those ideas today. Reading books about societal arrangements at othe

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

When you’re beginning to scale your business (when users or revenue growth are consistently growing), here’s a piece of advice: include a paired metric of quality to compensate for possible cheating of the main growth metric.

The Paladin has to get profitable to avoid bankruptcy, and The Dark Knight has to get to a certain level of popularity to avoid being banned.

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.

Today, there are four possibilities for the frontier: the land, the internet, the sea, and space. If we assess where we are right now, we learn that currently 7.7B people are on land, 3.2B on the internet, about 2–3M on the high seas, and fewer than 10 in space.