Lessons from Nat Friedman

"As human beings it is our right (maybe our moral duty) to reshape the universe to our preferences. Technology, which is really knowledge, enables this." [1][2]
"You should probably work on raising the ceiling, not the floor." [1][2]
"The laws of physics are the only limit. We are tied down by invisible orthodoxy." [3]
"AI is clearly more capable than humans now. We know this is going to get better. When does it slow down? Right now it's a few companies doing this but we need standards around it and we need the expansion." [4]
"We don't really quite understand mechanically what's happening inside them [AI models]... they're not engineered and designed, they're kind of grown." [4]

"It's important to do things fast. You learn more per unit time because you make contact with reality more frequently." [1][2]
"Going fast makes you focus on what's important; there's no time for bullshit." [1][2]
"‘Slow is fake’" [1][2]
"A week is 2% of the year. Time is the denominator." [1][2]
"Smaller teams are better. Faster decisions, fewer meetings, more fun." [1][2]

"Great individuals should be fully empowered to exercise their judgment." [1][2]
"The goal is not to avoid mistakes; the goal is to achieve uncorrelated levels of excellence in some dimension." [1][2]
"The cultural prohibition on micromanagement is harmful." [1][2]
"No room for mediocre people (can pay more, too!)" [1][2]
"Many tech companies are 2–10x overstaffed." [2]
"You have to care about building great products and you have to care about winning." [8]

"Enthusiasm matters! It's much easier to work on things that are exciting to you." [1][2]
"It might be easier to do big things than small things for this reason." [1][2]
"Energy is a necessary input for progress." [1][2]
"I kind of have learned to trust my enthusiasm. It gets me in trouble too, but if I get really enthusiastic about something and that enthusiasm persists, I just indulge it." [9]
"We do these things not because they are easy, but because we thought they would be easy." [9]

"The efficient market hypothesis is a lie. At best it is a very lossy heuristic." [1][2]
"The best things in life occur where EMH is wrong." [1][2]
"In many cases it's more accurate to model the world as 500 people than 8 billion." [1][2]
"‘Most people are other people’" [1][2]
"We know less than we think. The replication crisis is not an aberration. Many of the things we believe are wrong." [1][2]
"We are often not even asking the right questions." [1][2]
"Better to get your dopamine from improving your ideas than from having them validated." [1][2]
"It's ok to get yours from ‘making things happen’" [1][2]

"The founders who have the courage to scale and believe that high quality data plus lots of compute plus good talent combining those things will lead to like a better product... those Founders will outpace the ones who don't." [8]
"Good products nowadays are kind of the artifacts of healthy useful conversations." [8]
"Proprietary models will always beat open models... because you can take the open model and bring your private data to it and optimize it." [4]

"You can do more than you think." [3]
"I don't have that filter that says the world's efficient don't bother someone's probably got it covered." [11]
"I'm a little bit mystified by why people don't do more things too... I think most rich people are boring and they should do more cool things." [11]

Learn more: