Eric Jorgenson: Lessons from Naval Ravikant

Naval [Ravikant], I don't know if he's working out on Christmas day ... Twenty six-year-old Naval would have said, 'Fuck yeah. Get back to work.' ... Current day Naval would say, 'My money is working on Christmas day; my software is working on Christmas day; my Twitter is going on Christmas day; but I'm not doing anything.'

Your manager is one of your biggest 'multiply by zeroes.' If you have a terrible manager who doesn't like you, you could have your dream job at a dream firm, and your life is still going to be miserable ... Every day is going to feel like a slog.

[Babak] Nivi says that startups are where quality and scale meet. So, it has to be massively high scale and massively high quality. If you have massive scale without high quality, you have McDonald's; if you have massive quality without scale, you have Ritz-Carlton or pick your premium brand. But when you have a company that is completely determined to deliver higher quality at higher scale than anyone has ever done before, now, all of a sudden, you have Amazon, now you have Netflix, now you have Google.

You don't decide to write a book once; you decide to write a book a hundred times. You continuously re-decide to stay committed to this project.

What I find interesting about Naval [Ravikant], Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Balaji Srinivasan, [and] a lot of the big names in Silicon Valley is how many of them would have been academics in another life, but [they] decided to come into the Silicon Valley entrepreneurial culture, and a non-trivial amount of the intellect of Silicon Valley is downstream of these academic types.