Nick Bennett

This tension between conformity and individuality is at the heart all startups, if not of all corporate life. How much of ourselves we give up for other people — how much we imitate others rather than act as ourselves — is the philosophical question at the heart of entrepreneurship.

There is much good writing available about how to be anti-mimetic, but nothing can substitute for the expansion of your imagination. Art provokes like nothing else can. All great art—music, movies, paintings, literature, architecture, photography, theatre—can be a means of expanding our consciousness, including biographies of Tesla. Travel accompli... See more

You can no longer make students do the reading or the writing. So what’s left? Only this: give them work they want to do. And help them want to do it. What, again, is education? The non-coercive rearranging of desire.

Within five years, it will make little sense for scholars of history to keep producing monographs in the traditional mold—nobody will... See more

Rao:

“Yes, because we’re obsessed with scaling before weirdness. True innovation is psychotic at first—it doesn’t appeal to the rational investor. We killed the weirdo inventor in favor of the fundraising founder.”