The Architecture of Tomorrow: An Interview With Ben Horowitz

My advice that I'd go to jail for (provided anyone would listen to me) is "let's focus our energies on fixing the old corrupt systems rather than tilting at the windmills of eliminating the bad people." Efforts to fix bad people always get lots of supporters, but never seem to get any actual positive results.

There are two dominant narratives in human literature: Good vs. Evil and Humans Against the Gods. Most people in life gravitate towards Good vs. Evil. They constantly try to identify the evil bad people. Who are they? Republicans? Antifa? Tech Bros? Politicians? Teachers Unions? Democrats? Police? White Supremacists? Woke Supremacists? Muslims? Jew... See more

I go back to something the great Andy Grove said about the microprocessor. A reporter asked whether it was good or bad and Andy said: "That's the wrong question. That's like asking whether or not steel is good or bad. It just is. The right question is 'how do we make it good.'"

Balaji has a theory that cloud-based cultures are forming and superseding geographic cultures. That may be true, but it hasn't happened comprehensively yet. Finally, there's an issue of the local culture accepting foreigners. There's a saying that anybody can be an American, meaning that anyone can be a first-class citizen here, but not anybody can... See more

If kids are reading this, depending on who you are, college is probably still worthwhile right now, but 5 years from now, I expect things will be quite different. Peter Thiel has run a really interesting experiment with his Thiel Fellows program whose graduates (including Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin) have done far better than university propon... See more

Fast forward to today and all of the knowledge is available free on the Internet and there is far more efficient instruction (both time- and money-wise) from places like Lambda School. Recently, most schools are dropping SATs and ACTs, so the universities no longer are proxies for intelligence tests. As a result, the value of going to a prestigious... See more

In my experience there are really two things that lead to happiness and everything else is mostly noise. The two things are contribution and abundance. Contribution is basically exactly as it sounds. If you can align your life with where you have the talent to make a large, meaningful, and real contribution to the world, your circle, or your family... See more

I think VC-backed companies often compete with entrenched big businesses and entrenched big businesses often partner with the press and the government to enable them to win when they might not otherwise compete effectively. Note that this tactic doesn't work all the time, because government officials still have to deal with the will of the people t... See more