sari

The best way to get a powerful person’s attention: offer to help them.

As chief of staff, I reviewed thousands of requests for Reid’s time/attention/money. It was stunning how few requesters actually offered to help him on something. Amusingly, many requests were framed as if the asking party were doing Reid a favor by giving him the opportunity to... See more

The second disadvantage, implicit in what I’ve been saying, is that an elite education inculcates a false sense of self-worth. Getting to an elite college, being at an elite college, and going on from an elite college—all involve numerical rankings: SAT, GPA, GRE. You learn to think of yourself in terms of those numbers.  

One of the reasons that angel investing in the Bay Area was such a status symbol is that it was fairly exclusive.

Even absent external feedback, it's possible to train yourself to spot the limits to your product. One approach I've taken when talking to companies who are trying to achieve initial or new product-market fit is to ask them why every person in the world doesn't use their product or service.

No effective central monitoring or controlled comparisons were possible without standard, fixed units of measurement.

An experiment to see if giving creative people a financial buffer accelerates their career.