Balaji Srinivasan: Living in the Future

I feel really bad for somebody who is a morning person, is extremely 9-5, wants a routine, doesn't like computers, wants to come into the office every day and high-five somebody—essentially the kind of person that the 1950s was built around. Nothing against that person ... That morning person-type mentality is just the opposite of the way the world is going. It's going from synchronous to asynchronous. It's going from in-person to remote. It's going from pull the same lever a thousand times to think deeply, and then write a piece of code that just does it.

It's actually kind of interesting how little collaborative work is done on the Internet. I mean, we have Wikipedia—that's one of the great ones. There's obviously GitHub... There's Google Docs. You might say, 'Well that is a lot of collaborative work,' and I agree, but I think there's so much more that can be done. Why aren't there more things like Google Docs where you can collaborate in real time and see the thing coming together? You can see people fighting in quasi real time on Twitter, but you can't necessarily see them building things together, and that's partially because the division of labor is challenging, rewards are challenging, approval of digital work is challenging...

The reason genomics is important is that your genome is your OS. That is your operating system, and we now can read the source code for that. You can actually look at that on the computer, and you can see how your genes help determine your body, your metabolism, [and] your makeup. And you can click those genes and see whether you can metabolize caffeine [or] whether you're predisposed to this or that cancer. All this stuff is there, but you kind of have to be sort of an expert to do it. I think it's going to become extremely accessible.

The most challenging thing to do as an entrepreneur—but it's also absolutely necessary—is to hire people who are better than you.

You have to rank order what you're paying attention to, and the infotainment stuff should be filtered out of the feed. One way of thinking about this is the analogy between your diet and your information diet ... Having a cookie from time to time might be fine, but if you're only eating cookies, and you're not eating healthy food, you're going to have negative metabolic consequences, your health is going to be messed up, your life is going to be worse, and so on. In the same way, I'm not saying never have fun or never watch something interesting, but I do feel that Twitter and a lot of social media are like a restaurant that's learned to put sugar in their food.