simplicity

The easiest thing always seems to be to add another feature. But each feature you add interacts with other features, often increasing complexity exponentially, not linearly.

“Limit everything to the essential but do not remove the poetry.”

— Dieter Rams, quoted in Less and More: The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams

The better the investor, the simpler the questions. When I started, I was obsessed with jargon, complex questions and spreadsheets. Now I ask things like “what does it do?”, “why do people buy it?”, and “why are you selling?”. And I never do more math than I can fit on a napkin.

Here's what I've come to see as the guiding light of my life: simple ideas, explained very clearly. You only really need, like, one or two compelling ideas that you deeply understand. And then you have to be able to make other people understand them, which is the hard part. You have to distill, and in a way distillation is harder than creation. Sim... See more