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

People around you repeating the same idea may have gotten it from the same source. This fools our truth sensors, but popularity does not equal truth. There is no point debating someone who can’t whip out plots, primary URLs, or raw data. Argue with signal sources, not signal repeaters.

Businessman and investor Ben Horowitz has a great blog post about founders’ persistence called “Nobody Cares.” (I actually do care about entrepreneurs, and so does Ben.) But I send the post to entrepreneurs sometimes when they need to hear it.

A good question for a software company is: what’s your billion-dollar function?

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.

I lie awake at night and think, Okay, here’s what I’ve learned today. How does that fit into my broad collection of ideas? Where are the contradictions, overlaps, and so on? Most people do not do this. They just compartmentalize. They’ll learn something, but they won’t try to propagate it through other things they know to see if it conflicts with o

At each stage of life, I used my current skill and applied it in a new domain to learn another skill. I never started completely at zero; I was always building from a previous skill.

Business is simply a vehicle to push the future forward and drive human progress. Whether that is accomplished through an open source project, an academic paper, or a research lab, the tool doesn’t matter. The goal is to advance technology.

Law, medicine, education, finance, real estate…all of these are lagging areas that are regulated or subsidized. Technology has partially reformed them, but not fully. Now, they’re just relics being dragged into the future.

Unpopular truth is a reliable source of profit. Behind every great fortune is a great thoughtcrime.