"The person passionate about what he or she is doing will outwork and outlast the guy motivated solely focused on making money."

"The same instincts that make us good students can make us lousy entrepreneurs."

"One of the challenges in networking is everybody thinks it’s making cold calls to strangers. Actually, it’s the people who already have strong trust relationships with you, who know you’re dedicated, smart, a team player, who can help you."

"When you’re doing work you care about, you are able to work harder and better."

"Some people mistake grit for sheer persistence – charging up the same hill again and again. But that’s not quite what I mean by the word ‘grit.’ You want to minimize friction and find the most effective, most efficient way forward. You might actually have more grit if you treat your energy as a precious commodity."

"Opportunities do not float like clouds in the sky. They’re attached to people. If you’re looking for an opportunity, you’re really looking for a person."

"Great opportunities almost never fit your schedule."

"Hard work isn’t enough. And more work is never the real answer. The sort of grit you need to scale a business is less reliant on brute force. It’s actually one part determination, one part ingenuity, and one part laziness."

"It’s better to be the best connected than the most connected."

"Get busy livin’, or get busy dyin’. If you’re not growing, you’re contracting. If you’re not moving forward, you’re moving backward."

"Pay attention to your culture and your hires from the very beginning."

"Having a great idea for a product is important, but having a great idea for product distribution is even more important."

"Ironically, in a changing world, playing it safe is one of the riskiest things you can do."

"Ultimately, the alignment of interests, values, and aspirations increases the odds of a long-term strong alliance between a company and its talent."

"The key thing for all businesses, and especially of course technology businesses or businesses that employ technology as a key kind of strategic advantage, is you always have to be investing in the future."

"Success…is no longer a simple ascension of steps. You need to climb sideways and sometimes down, and sometimes you need to swing from the jungle gym and establish your own turf somewhere else on the playground."

"How you manage your own personal career is the exact way you manage a small business. Your brand matters."

"Make sure a certain percentage of the people that you’re hiring are generalists so that you can be, kind of reconfigured in the workforce pretty easily."

"Unfortunately, for far too many, focused learning ends at college graduation. They read about stocks and bonds instead of reading books that improve their mind."

"There are opportunities that you get during crises times. Crises times are a great time to start a business."

"I don’t normally think of like most successful moments, because like most entrepreneurs, I tend to think that however how high of a mountain I’ve climbed, I’m always looking at the next mountain to climb."

"Seeing what someone’s reading is like seeing the first derivative of their thinking."

"We don’t celebrate failure in Silicon Valley. We celebrate learning."

"Good ideas need good strategy to realize their potential."

"Everything in life has some risk, and what you have to actually learn to do is how to navigate it."

"A business without loyalty is a business without long-term thinking. A business without long-term thinking is a business that’s unable to invest in the future."

"Before dreaming about the future or marking plans, you need to articulate what you already have going for you – as entrepreneurs do."

"People who take risk intelligently can usually actually make a lot more progress than people who don’t."

"A leader’s job is not to put greatness into people, but rather to recognize that it already exists, and to create the environment where that greatness can emerge and grow."

"When you have an idea, a classic entrepreneurial impulse is to hold the idea close to you and not tell people and that’s almost always a mistake."

"You have to be constantly reinventing yourself and investing in the future."

"Start a personal blog and begin developing a public reputation and public portfolio of work that’s not tied to your employer."

"‘Keeping your options open’ is frequently more of a risk than committing to a plan of action."

"Remember: If you don’t find risk, risk will find you."

"Establish an identity independent of your employer, city, and industry."

"A product needs to be sufficiently innovative to distinguish itself from the pack, but not so forward thinking as to alienate the user."

"If you’re not growing, you’re contracting."

"All humans are entrepreneurs not because they should start companies but because the will to create is encoded in human DNA, and creation is the essence of entrepreneurship."

"Be persistent, and hang on to your vision. And at the same time, be flexible."

"You remake yourself as you grow and as the world changes. Your identity doesn’t get found. It emerges."

"The most entrepreneurial employees want to establish personal brands that stand apart from their employers’. It’s a rational, necessary response to the end of lifetime employment."

"Whatever the situation, actions, not plans, generate lessons that help you test your hypotheses against reality."

"Managing risk is a key variable, frankly, all aspects of life, business is just one of them, and one of the things that most people do in terms of managing risk, that’s actually bad thinking, is they think they can manage risk to zero. Everything has some risk to it. You know, you drive your car down the street, a drunk driver may hit you. So what you’re doing is you’re actually trying to get to an acceptable level of risk."

"Involve yourself in organizations that try to systemically improve society at a massive scale."

"Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market."

"It’s nice to be happy. But the meaning of life is meaning – what’s the impact you’re having on the world. Suffering to accomplish that is a perfectly fine thing."

"Throwing your heart into something is great, but when any one thing becomes all that you stand for, you’re vulnerable to an identity crisis when you pivot to a Plan B."

"Until you hear No, you haven’t been turned down."

"Theodore Roosevelt’s famous dictum, ‘Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.'"

"Whether you want to learn a new skill or simply be better at the job you were hired to do, it’s now your job to train and invest in yourself."

"When the naysayers are loud, turn up the music."

"Change is the only constant."

"Founder’ is a state of mind, not a job description, and if done right, even CEOs who join after day 1 can become founders."

"The fastest way to change yourself is to hang out with people who are already the way you want to be. – Reid Hoffman (This is one of my favorite Reid Hoffman quotes and advice."

"Each year, I ask, ‘Now that I have this knowledge, these resources, what can I do?'"

"You need to think and act like you’re running a start-up: your career."

"A networker likes to meet people. I don’t. I like accomplishing things in the world. You meet people when you want to accomplish something."

"Finished ought to be an F-word for all of us. We are all works in progress. Each day presents an opportunity to learn more, do more, be more, grow more in our lives and careers. – Reid Hoffman (One of my favorite Reid Hoffman quotes on success."

"One of the metaphors that I use for start-ups is, you throw yourself off a cliff and assemble your airplane on the way down. If you don’t solve the right problem at the right time, that’s the end. Mortality puts priorities into sharp focus."

"What makes the meaning of life is people, so you try to be good to people immediately around you and in your broader community. So a lot of my projects are about how I can affect the world in the hundreds of millions."

"An entrepreneur is someone who jumps off a cliff, and builds a plane on his way down."

"What happens during recessions, is you have less windfalls just helping you cover mistakes. You have to be more careful about not making mistakes."

"Your network is the people who want to help you, and you want to help them, and that’s really powerful."

"If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product you’ve launched too late."

"Over the last 20 years, I’ve worked on or invested in many companies that scaled to 100 million users or more. But here’s the thing: You don’t start with 100 million users. You start with a few. So, stop thinking big, and start thinking small."

"Help the people in your network and let them help you."

"No matter how brilliant your mind or strategy, if you’re playing a solo game, you’ll always lose out to a team."

"The best ideas make you want to say ‘yes’ and ‘no’ in the same breath."

"My belief and goal is that every professional in the world should be on a service liked LinkedIn."

"If you don’t start out aiming for the big game, you almost never can get there. – Reid Hoffman (This is one of the best Reid Hoffman quotes for entrepreneurs. S"

"Observe, orient, decide, act. It’s fighter pilot terminology. If you have the faster OODA loop in a dogfight, you live. The other person dies. In Silicon Valley, the OODA loop of your decision-making is effectively what differentiates your ability to succeed."

"Not only can anyone be an entrepreneur, but they must be."

"Often it’s when you come in contact with challenges other people find hard but you find easy that you know you’re in possession of a valuable soft asset."

"Entrepreneurs are like visionaries. One of the ways they run forward is by viewing the thing they’re doing as something that’s going to be the whole world."

"The thing that changes your professional life, your capabilities, your learning, your understanding, your opportunity flow, your ability to make things happen, is the center relationships you have with powerful and effective people around you in the industry, in the activity that you want to be doing."

"Every internet entrepreneur should answer these questions: How do we get to 1 million users? Then how do we get to 10 million users? Then how will you get deep engagement by your users."

"The way you deal with bullies is you change their economic equation. Make it more expensive for them to hassle you."

"The value of being connected and transparent is so high that the roadbumps of privacy issues are much lower in actual experience than people’s fears."

"A business that isn’t investing in tomorrow’s opportunities and technologies – well, that’s a company already in the process of dying."

"The opportunity to build an enduring product far outweighs the cost of alienating a few users along the way. And the sooner you internalize that trade-off, the faster you’ll move along the path to scale."

"What great founders do is seek the networks that will be essential to their task… Usually it’s best to have two or three people on a team rather than a solo founder."

"Most often I am only interested in an idea if it’s going to get hundreds of millions of users. That’s the scale that I am always trying to play to."

"Blitzscaling is what you do when you need to grow really, really quickly. It’s the science and art of rapidly building out a company to serve a large and usually global market, with the goal of becoming the first mover at scale. This is high-impact entrepreneurship."

"If you want to build a strong network that will help you move ahead in your career, it’s vital to first take stock of the connections you already have."

"Silicon Valley is a mindset, not a location."

"A startup, to a some degree, is a set of those challenges of, ‘If you don’t solve this, you’re dead.'"

"If you are not receiving or making at least one introduction a month, you are probably not fully engaging your extended professional network."

"In the venture capital industry, just picking winners is a losing strategy. The goal is to pick blockbusters, companies that can scale from a team of founders in a garage to a multi-billion dollar IPO in less than a decade."

"Innovation comes from long-term thinking and iterative execution."

"One lunch is worth dozens of emails."

"Society flourishes when people think entrepreneurially."

"The key issue when you’re looking at cost cutting is to always plan for the future."

"People change. You change. Some relationships just aren’t meant to last beyond a certain point. It’s okay to simply let those friendships fade. This is a natural evolution of some relationships. Unlike romantic relationships, with friendships there’s rarely a reason to have a full-on breakup. Even if people go in different directions and the friendship slowly peters out, trust can endure. And unlike most exes, it is possible to rekindle/reactivate friendships later on when your lives are more aligned."

"That focus on language and what that means for identities, how we communicate and how we collaborate is one of the key learnings I drew from studying Wittgenstein"

"Philosophy isn’t just an abstract intellectual exercise. At its core, it focuses on improving our understanding of humanity, of how we evolve as individuals in a society."

"We’ve evolved from living in tribes and thinking of kings as gods to valuing human rights as part of a nation-state. All these changes, including the birth of science itself, started with philosophy."

"The purpose of philosophy is not to convey literal truth in the form of the beliefs of the philosophers and their words, but rather for those philosophers and their thoughts to provoke and improve your own thinking."

"A key philosophical technique for understanding other people, ideas and theses is to ask yourself both what’s right and wrong about them."

"The search for truth begins with questions."

"one of the things I’ve said about entrepreneurship is that it should include an embedded theory of human nature. If you develop a theory about how human beings identify themselves, connect with others, view themselves to be part of a group and pursue a theory of the good, the conclusions you reach can help you design a product or service that appeals to people on a fundamental level."

"everyone wants to be the hero of their own story, and great entrepreneurs make every user or customer a hero."

"Aristotle taught us to revise our theories based on practice. The loop between theory and practice is to engage with the world to generate the theory, apply that theory to the world, and use the results to refine that theory. Lather, rinse, repeat."

"My oft-quoted aphorism, “If you’re not embarrassed by your first product launch, you’ve launched too late,” is all about making sure that you’re balancing theory and practice. It doesn’t mean don’t have a theory. But it does mean to always be refining your theory with engagement."

"Nietzsche felt that while the past was great, what really mattered was the creation of the new"

"Rather than trying to copy the past, he believed we should pursue the act of creating better versions of ourselves."

"Entrepreneurs invent businesses that attack the current “idols” (industry, markets, products) by creating something new and disruptive."

"In the search for truth, language itself is where we need to start our examination."

"“If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.”"

"The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a very good online resource for finding and studying the great philosophical questions of the past."

"a core part of philosophy — all the way back to Socrates — is discussion."

"finding time for discussing philosophy (even via Zoom) can be a powerful tool to build greater, deeper understanding."

"Reid’s first principle is speed. One of his most popular quotes is, “If you aren’t embarrassed by the first version of your product, you shipped too late.”"

"“In founding a startup, you throw yourself off a cliff and build an airplane on the way down.”"

"Reid once told me that the key for big companies like LinkedIn is not to pursue strategies where being fastest is critical — big companies that adopt strategies that depend on pure speed battles will always lose. Instead, they need to devise strategies where their slowness can become a strength"

"Reid’s second principle is simplicity — simplicity enables speed."

"in a group decision-making process where there are various points of view, it’s important for the leader to distill and frame the option set with simplicity."

"Reid frequently groups the possible options into “light, medium, heavy” or “easy, medium, hard.”"

"When there’s a complex list of pros and cons driving a potentially expensive action, seek a single decisive reason to go for it — not a blended reason."

"If you come up with a list of many reasons to do something, Nassim Taleb once wrote, you are trying to convince yourself — if there isn’t one clear reason, don’t do it"

"In that essay, Hoffman described the ways the “wild idealism” of the era led to major advances that both positively and negatively impacted the world, and how the “seven deadly sins” of humanity form the basis of many technological pursuits."

"“Just because you have something that we would describe as a sin or as a negative emotion, it doesn’t mean in itself you’re bad or anything else,” says Hoffman. “It’s a question of what you do with them.”"

"Now, Reid, back in October, you wrote an essay about your experience with Web 2.0. And in it, you extended on your famous heuristic about investing in the Seven Deadly Sins."

"Well, first to back up a bit on history, which I think even Web 1.0 (the internet), had that kind of wild idealism."

"And there’s a little bit of, consciously, today’s color to say all that was wrong as opposed to that was right, which I think it was right at that time."

"I think that part of what was happening in the creation of the internet was the notion of redefining this kind of space by which people could communicate and find each other by which information could flow."

"And then, Web 2 brought your real identity and your real relationships."

"So, that as a baseline for saying kind of the principles of what’s going on Web3, I think the answer is it’s good."

"And the theory by which Web3 folks are talking about this, which I think is very interesting, you say, “Look, what happened with the baseline internet technologies is we learned how to ship bits around that didn’t really carry a lot of intrinsic value.”"

"They might have a lot of value as an essay or piece of information, or communication, or a video or a song. But they’re not like themselves carrying the value that money or contracts bring."

"“crypto capital systems” –which capitalize upon on currency, asset platform cap, capital systems – that will actually facilitate commerce and trade within the world. And I think this wild idealism is the right place to start."

"""There are reasons why getting these systems to scale still adds even more value. But it comes with some prices that we should mitigate."""

"We regulate speech already. It’s just the question of where you draw the lines, that we try to draw the lines with a maximum orbit against major harms. And we just have to understand other major harms, and then redraw with maximum orbit on major harms and how you do it and how you use technology in order to do that. And so, I think that those are the questions of how you address some of the Web 2.0 stuff."

"I think it can have a very negative impact, or very limiting of the future impact. And the question is essentially How do we shape the future?"

"“If I take that concept of Web3 and ownership, and compare it to Web 2.0 and the creativity that it unleashed, it’s something where we had a lot of new user-generated content in the Web 2.0, well, it’s almost like we have user-generated assets or user-generated value in the web 3.0 world.”"

"So, there’s all kinds of ownership that actually can play into this as well."

"And part of what I think is very interesting is, is the various ways in which ownership, like we all tend to say ownership is I have this complete ownership. And actually, in fact, I think as technology evolves, we realize that ownership is a sophisticated relationship."

"All of this stuff are questions around ownership that begin to enter once you have more sophisticated technology. And I think that more sophisticated technology always enters it."

"""I think what is super interesting about Web3 is this notion of, 'Well, since we have ownership as part of it, how does that notion of ownership evolve?'"

"And I do think ownership is one of the key things. Although, frankly, I think part of what defines human society and progress is how we stand in regards to relationship to each other:"

"How do we find each other, our identities? How do we ally? How do we form groups in societies and corporations and teams? And how do we work together and collaborate together and live together? All of these kinds of things."

"If you look at what I was saying as ownership as a sophisticated [concept], it’s because I think that ownership plays into how we relate to each other."

"The other side is the phrase “Greed is good.”"

"“Using this framework, it seems pretty likely that if we look back at the mature Web3 a decade or so from now, the original sin would be greed.”"

"But this question is the reason why they’re identified as original sins is because they’re things we all grapple with. They’re deep in human nature. They’re our appetites or our reactions. And the things that get to breadth have that tie, that reflex."

"That’s part of the Theory of Moral Sentiments is like, “Look, by being greedy, we are being of service to each other.”"

"And that’s part of progress in society. And so, greed starts that, but it transforms to a how do we make essentially a nobler society."

"There’s different kinds of tempos and goals and other kinds of things and shapes and who works on the project and what’s coming out of it. But I think that all of that creates new infrastructure."

"But obviously, when you sublimate it, when you transform it, and [think about] the theory of moral sentiments into other things, that becomes what’s good."

"But we also want to make sure that we’re always targeting what’s the good outcome here."

"And I think one of the things you wrote, which is really important, is that it takes hard work."

"You said, in retrospect though, “What I didn’t sufficiently factor into my seven deadly sins heuristic is that the seven deadly sins are an enduring index of human behavior."

"Because the work is hard, that means there’s risk. The work also has costs that you as a platform developer could conveniently sidestep if you’re catering to or even just passively benefiting from people’s negative emotions and appetites. Your economic term returns will likely be lower."

"And so, I think that again, it comes back to the Theory of Moral Sentiments. This is a moral choice that people need to make. It is not purely an economic choice. We are going to choose something that may be even slightly negative economically but will be more beneficial to society."

"At LinkedIn, our tempo was always time saving, not time wasting."

"Because time saving is better for your economic things. So, the whole thing is for every individual and groups to better control their economic destiny."

"And we just got around later to figuring out one of the key things that I put in the essay, which was that societies and groups are put together by leadership, by role models, by people leading groups"

"And then the other question is more broadly as, “How do you make the terms of this transformation? How do you hook from these the original things into much more valuable things for individuals and society? And how do you build them?”"

"And it sounds like, again, if you think about the transformation that’s occurring, you have these technologists, entrepreneurs, and investors Web3, they may be using greed as this hook. But if they are thinking carefully about how they’re actually structuring the things that they’re building and building towards outcomes that are not just purely based on greed, then you can actually use that ostensibly negative emotion or negative desire to power positive results."

"And it’s kind of a question of, just because you have an appetite or just because you have something that we would describe as a sin or as a negative emotion, it doesn’t mean in itself you’re bad or anything else. It’s a question of what you do with them."

"As Joshua points out, decentralization and democratization ethos has been an element of each of these new generations of digital technology, dot com, Web 2, and today, Web3. So, how achievable is this kind of decentralization?"

"Well, I think what happens throughout all the history of human society, I think there’s another grand history like Jared Diamond’s or Yuval Harris’ that’s in the stance of centralization and decentralization."

"And I think part of how we make progress is we got centralization in the cities, and we have farming and so forth."

"And that allows us to have more human beings and allows us to get what Marxists refer to as surplus labor and other kinds of things to make progress. And we’re not just sustenance as we progress."

"And I think some of that comes from various forms of centralization. Technology, by the way, is – and this is the thing that’s fictional here – it’s mostly a centralizing force, not a decentralizing force."

"But a technology emerges out of centralizing because we’d like, “Well, if we have together a town and we have someone who can now be a tool smith and can be tinkering with tools and making better tools, you can make better plows and you can domesticate cows and dogs and chickens and you can have chicken coops. And that tool cycle is a really important part of this. And that’s part of that centralization loop.”"

"And so, we should be enabling that decentralization and that decentralization is part of what creates an effort meritocracy and an effort at making more talent, and being able to have more amazing results."

"And obviously, I think our talent aside is to say every person can deploy their talents to their best available abilities in general, and then get some benefit from it. That is, generally speaking, where we want to strive towards, where we want to be towards."

"""Whether or not the perfect utopian outcome is ever possible seems unlikely, but it does seem that we could get better and better. And that's where some of the effort of how you balance centralization and decentralization comes in."""

"And part of that decentralization allows it to be kind of these questions where it allows this decentralized innovation as a way of paying for it, and the question of whether decentralization to allow entrepreneurial innovators is one of the things that’s created a huge amount of value. And so, that’s part of what is always staying."

"I think there’s a certain poetic justice in beginning with Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, and now coming around to really Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations as we’ve been discussing the importance of these kinds of things."

"both empower individuals and transform the madness of the masses into the prosperity and well-being of the crowd?"

"One, we’re already in the metaverse."

"I think we will get those probably first through entertainment versus anything else. And I think that there’s a bunch of interesting things that can come out through the metaverse."

"And, obviously, when you begin to put together items of value where you can create NFTs and create a maker economy and have services of all courts, including digital services, you can begin to interrelate those things."

"Most people tend to be blinded by the now; they tend to think that the past isn’t that different from the present. They don’t realize the profound shifts in thinking that have occurred with the passage of time."

"The other common misconception about philosophy is that it’s about providing the answers. The purpose of philosophy is not to convey literal truth in the form of the beliefs of the philosophers and their words, but rather for those philosophers and their thoughts to provoke and improve your own thinking."

"HOW PHILOSOPHY WORKS"

"It develops from the way those words interact with the things that are in your own mind, and the way that philosophy causes you to develop new frameworks for grappling with truth."

"Fundamentally, philosophy has a “question-first” orientation."

"Aristotle believed that because we’re embedded in the material world, philosophy starts by studying that world. That’s also the reason why I believe Aristotle is a good philosopher for entrepreneurs."

"If you develop a theory about how human beings identify themselves, connect with others, view themselves to be part of a group and pursue a theory of the good, the conclusions you reach can help you design a product or service that appeals to people on a fundamental level."

"Aristotle taught us to revise our theories based on practice. The loop between theory and practice is to engage with the world to generate the theory, apply that theory to the world, and use the results to refine that theory."

"It’s the combination of theory and practice that is so impactful and important. In both entrepreneurship and investing, this means taking an Aristotelian approach of developing an investment thesis, testing it in practice, then honing that thesis to a razor-sharp edge."

"2. NIETZSCHE & CREATIVE DESTRUCTION"

"In contrast, Nietzsche felt that while the past was great, what really mattered was the creation of the new, including the future human being he termed the Übermensch (sometimes translated as Overman or Superman). Rather than trying to copy the past, he believed we should pursue the act of creating better versions of ourselves."

"This emphasis on the importance of the individual, and that individual being creative by engaging in creative destruction, is what makes Nietzsche my patron philosopher of entrepreneurship."

"The linguistic turn would say, “That sounds like a well-formulated question but that impression is an illusion of language. The fact that we can assemble these nouns and verbs to follow the rules of syntax makes us think there’s a very important question there, when actually, in fact, what we’re asking is nonsense.”"

"The final words of his book are simply, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”"

"Wittgenstein asked: What can we understand about the world that we’re in? How do we express that understanding in a form of language that we can communicate with others? And how can we use that understanding to inform our theories of the world, our theories of humanity and our theories about what is and isn’t possible?"

"That focus on language and what that means for identities, how we communicate and how we collaborate is one of the key learnings I drew from studying Wittgenstein."

"The meaning of our rituals, and how we change and extend them, is something that Wittgenstein called an “agreement in form of life.” We decide on the most effective rituals (e.g. How do you run meetings? How do you collect feedback? How do you coordinate all your work?) based on their application, and whether or not they help us create a high-performing team."

"“There are two things that need to be explained away in order for me to invest in your startup: An MBA or a background in management consulting.”"

"Notice that I didn’t say I wouldn’t invest in a founder with an MBA"

"In fact, I generally view pursuing an MBA as an adverse signal for entrepreneurship."

"The broad brush description of entrepreneurs is that they are Nike fans – they just do it."

"In contrast, earning an MBA or working as a management consultant is less a final destination and more a way station on the way to a better future, usually with a vigorous salary."

"I try to give MBA students tough love; I’m not trying to insult them, I’m trying to get them to reflect on why they’ve chosen a particular path, and what the path ahead looks like."

"My general advice is to go join a startup as an employee, and learn from experience."

"It’s okay to prepare yourself first."

"By the way, one of the things that I find to be a positive predictor of entrepreneurial success is when an MBA drops out after realizing that the standard curriculum won’t help them start a company, and that they should just start doing it."

"The Network May Not be as Valuable as It Seems"

"In the startup world, one of the most important parts of building a network for non-technical entrepreneurs is getting to know brilliant engineers and technologists."

"You’re much better off going to work for a phenomenal company, which does a great job of recruiting not just engineers, but also product managers, designers, go-to-market specialists, and many more, all of whom have a strong bias towards action, and all of whom are interested in the challenge of building a great technology company."

"The risk-averse argument is that a strong network is a safety net."

"Entrepreneurs should build a trampoline network that helps them reach higher"

"Network strength is one of the reasons that people who want to build great software businesses have, and will continue to move to Silicon Valley. Despite the overblown stories about the decline of Silicon Valley, the fact is that it remains the strongest entrepreneurship network in the world."

"THE CASE FOR PURSUING AN MBA"

"Many MBAs student are performing what I call “career laundering."

"Many of my classmates at Harvard Business School had come out of the military or out of the nonprofit world."

"And by the way the management consultants and investment banks in the world are now wining and dining you, begging you to work for them."

"The challenge that business schools face is that entrepreneurship is learned, not taught."

"What business schools can provide is an opportunity to learn a set of skills that can be helpful on the entrepreneurial journey."

"But while this is valuable, none of it is the actual learning of entrepreneurship."

"I went to business school because I thought, “I don’t have first-hand experience with how a normal business works."

"And if I’m going to defy conventional wisdom, I want to understand it first.”"

"I think a lot of entrepreneurs don’t fully understand how venture capital works."

"An MBA can also help you fill in some of those blanks that most of us would otherwise never learn."

"VENTURE CAPITAL AND THE MBAS OF SILICON VALLEY"

"I think the reason why MBAs are so common in venture versus entrepreneurship is that entrepreneurs are focused on gathering the necessary resources to execute on a vision, whether that is hiring people or raising capital. In other words, execution."

"Whereas investors have to be much better at asking the question, “Do I think this is the kind of business that will be enormously valuable?”"

"Venture returns tend to be correlated with industry and business model–for example"

"An MBA often encourages a focus on market value is one of the central aspects to the investing mindset, yet is less essential to the entrepreneurial mindset."

"WHAT ABOUT PHILOSOPHERS?"

"There is a legitimate reason why people don’t picture philosophers as making good entrepreneurs, and that’s because philosophers tend to deal with remote abstractions."

"They don’t tend to have an orientation to experimentation and taking action in the real world."

"Philosophers who are drawn to the subject by the abstraction won't make very good entrepreneurs. However, the students that take what is good in philosophy – namely an ability to state theses with precision – and apply it to entrepreneurship, will find tremendous value."

"There is an entire element of philosophy which focuses on speculating on how humans might interact with something that’s not there–the counterfactual."

"“If we build it, will they come?” And just as importantly, how might potential competitors respond."

"The best philosopher-entrepreneurs possess a multidisciplinary focus."

"In the field of technology startups, a multidisciplinary focus tends to be a higher predictor of entrepreneurial success than even a sole focus on a topic like computer science."

"Taking a multidisciplinary approach to iteratively engaging with the world is central to entrepreneurial success. And philosophy can be a really key element of that."

"One of the historical legacies that Oxford has as an educational institution is the belief that no one is mature enough as an undergraduate for a pure philosophy degree, so their philosophy degrees are always mixed."