Sublime

Thiel wrote Zuckerberg a check for $500,000. Eight years later, he sold most of his stake in Facebook for roughly a billion dollars. Thiel saw past the False Fail of Friendster, just as Endo saw past the False Fails of the statins and Folkman saw past the False Fails of his blood-vessel inhibitors.

In 2006, billionaire technology investor John Doerr announced that “green is the new red, white and blue.” He could have stopped at “red.” As Doerr himself said, “Internet-sized markets are in the billions of dollars; the energy markets are in the trillions.” What he didn’t say is that huge, trillion-dollar markets mean ruthless, bloody competition

Bill Gates has shown how highly visible success can attract highly focused attacks. Gates embodied the founder archetype: he was simultaneously an awkward and nerdy college-dropout outsider and the world’s wealthiest insider. Did he choose his geeky eyeglasses strategically, to build up a distinctive persona? Or, in his incurable nerdiness, did his

FTX that said, in effect: Hey, you don’t know us, but here’s a million dollars, no strings attached. Your job is to give it away as effectively as you can. The FTX Foundation, started in early 2021, would track what these people did with their million dollars, but only to determine if they should be given even more.