Max Beauroyre

Most organizations cannot ship the most basic applications imaginable with any consistency, and you're out here saying that the best way to remain competitive is to roll out experimental technology that is an order of magnitude more sophisticated than anything else your I.T department runs, which you have no experience hiring for

Sunil and Anil spent five years, just the two of them, in China and back home, doing R&D. Learning, tinkering, thinking. They didn’t hire Meter’s first employee until five years in, until they knew what they wanted to build, and how.

Though taste may appear effortless, you can’t have taste by mistake. It requires intention, focus, and care. Taste is a commitment to a state of attention.

I wasn’t just letting go of a job, I was letting go of how I saw myself and how I imagined others saw me. I disappeared for a while. I walked, I slowed down, I lived more internally. Then when I was ready to explore more actively and come back into the world, I was very intentional about maintaining a level of silence and stillness.

Before a candidate meets with me, I send them a list of questions to respond to in writing. It allows me to see how structured their thinking is and how they perform on asynchronous tasks without time pressure. I ask questions like:

• How do you practice becoming better at what you do?


• What’s an unpopular opinion you hold?


• What’s something that wouldn’

... See more

More recently I’ve kept repeating to myself, don’t abandon your vision . Decisiveness is knowing myself well enough to take the plunge, then the rest is all faith.

On the optimistic side, many of the health interventions in the previous bullet point are likely to organically increase economic growth: eradicating AIDS/malaria/parasitic worms would have a transformative effect on productivity, not to mention the economic benefits that some of the neuroscience interventions (such as improved mood and focus) woul

... See more

I kept a notebook where I jotted down things I wanted to google and twice a week I’d go down to the local library, look at the list, and say, why on earth did I want to know Justin Bieber’s net worth? And then I’d go home again, to read and write, listen and talk.

To presume to point a man to the right and ultimate goal— to point with a trembling finger in the RIGHT direction is something only a fool would take upon himself.