Silicon Valley is not a milieu known for glamour and charisma. Still, Peter Thiel has cultivated a mystique. A billionaire several times over, Thiel was a co-founder of PayPal, the digital-payment service, and the first outside investor in Facebook. He went on to co-found Palantir, the…
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🌟 Not yet a member? Apply here to join the Founders You Should Know community. Everyone wants in. Thousands of candidates are chasing the same roles you are at breakout startups, and most of their resumes check the same boxes as yours. Whether you’re an engineer or operator, everyone comes back to…
I’m constantly networking with other consultants. I like learning from experts about their domains, talking shop, and finding opportunities to collaborate. I’m a people person. With brand new “nice to meet you” convos, there are a few things that help me keep other consultants top-of-mind: A good…
🌟 Not yet a member? Apply here to join the Founders You Should Know community. When community members hear of an opportunity at a startup in our network, we often get requests to make a warm intro the founder. We’re always happy to help — after all, this is the ethos of our community. All we…
One of the things I have spent a lot of time doing is interviewing software engineers. This is obviously a hard task, and I don’t claim to have a magic solution; but it’s given me some time to reflect on what effective software engineers actually do. When you watch someone who knows what they are…
Of all the questions I'm living right now, this is the one I've been most humbled by. For the last decade, I've tried to thread the needle between my soul work (aka what feels most alive and resonant), and my desire for financial security. I've hustled and pushed and forced my way through the land…
For the last year, I've been weaving together a new philosophy of marketing, designed to radically reshape the emotional landscape of the internet. Like all marketing, it aims at finding and creating new customers, specifically for solo and creator-style businesses. But beneath the surface,…
I first encountered Figma in 2013, when Dylan Field demoed an early prototype to me at O’Reilly’s Foo Camp. I remember the pen tool feeling surprisingly elegant, but I missed the bigger picture: the radical implications of a design tool that ran in the browser. A decade later, Figma is a core part…
A decade ago, Gokul Rajaram fundamentally changed the way he makes decisions. Then a product management director for Google AdSense, he was presenting to Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt. A gnarly challenge related to Google’s display ads business surfaced, and the discussion got heated. Schmidt’s voice…
If someone helped build and lead a company from $0 to over $20 Billion in revenue, you'd be pretty interested in how they did it, right? That's exactly what Andy Grove did at Intel. And lucky for all of us, he's written numerous books on the key concepts he felt made his company successful. The most…
Gokul Rajaram 11 min read· Oct 10, 2016 -- The other day, I attended an event that took me through the gamut of emotions. I was educated, inspired, amused, moved and energized. There were moments where I could literally feel chills down my spine. When it ended, I wanted to go leap tall buildings in…
Kevin Kelly isn’t known for one ‘big thing’, and doesn’t aspire to be. He’s as intelligent, hard-working, ambitious, and prescient as history’s most iconic entrepreneurs—only without any interest in building a unicorn himself. Instead, in his words, he works “Hollywood style”—in a series of creative…
How do you build a moat in consumer AI? Right now, sorry to say, there is none. The landscape is simply evolving too quickly. When foundational models and infrastructure are shifting every month — introducing new updates weekly! — it’s become nearly impossible to build as slowly or methodically as…
I think the AI industry is facing a handful of urgent problems it’s not addressing adequately. I believe everything I write here is at least directionally true, but I could be wrong. My aim isn’t to be definitive, just to spark a conversation. What follows is a set of expanded thoughts on those…
When Cluely, a startup claiming to be building a product that helps people “cheat” on everything, announced that it raised a $15 million Series A financing round from Andreessen Horowitz, some people on X criticized the VC firm for backing the controversial company. After all, Cluely isn’t just…
SUMMARY Our business model optimizes for measurable value that is shared with customers and partners, not captured solely for the business and its owners. It takes into account social and environmental benefits and costs as well as the responsible management of financial capital and profit that is…
SUMMARY We surrender our personal ambition to God and seek first the good of others, not ourselves. Instead of privately yielding our desires to an accumulation of wealth, power, and prestige, we cultivate gratitude, joy, and humility in the way we lead and serve. OUR REALITY As entrepreneurial…
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. March 2009 A couple days ago I finally got being a good startup founder down to two words: relentlessly resourceful. Till then the best I'd managed was to get the opposite quality down to one: hapless. Most dictionaries say hapless means unlucky.…
From: screwtape@infernalinitiatives.org To: wormwood@earthlyerrors.com Subject: The AI Masterstroke Wormwood, my dear, I hope this email finds you mired in delightful mischief. Your recent report on your patient's spiritual wobbling pleased me greatly, but I sense you're missing the grand design.…
“Real quick, whole squad on that real sh*t 0 to 100, n***a, real quick” —Drake, “ 0 to 100/The Catch Up” I am a giant advocate for technical founders running their own companies, but one consistent way that technical founders deeply harm their businesses is by screwing up the budgeting process. Yes,…
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I got this email recently from a CEO:
“Hey Gokul, I want to start a biweekly newsletter to the entire co. I read your blog post on all hands. Was super helpful. Do you have any guidance or examples on how to best structure a regular written update?”
In a previous post, I talked about a company’s…
Gokul Rajaram 5 min read· Jul 24, 2018 CEOs wear several hats — strategic, operational, financial. In One On One, Ben Horowitz makes a profound statement: “Perhaps the CEO’s most important operational responsibility is designing and implementing the communication architecture for her company.” My…
As a coach who helps recovering people-pleasers master the art of self-advocacy, I've learned that differences in communication style can lead to some of our deepest wounds and feelings of invisibility in our relationships. That’s why my reel about the three communication differences—Volunteer vs.…
Ten years ago, in the summer of 2013, my startup failed. We had run out of money, everyone was laid off, and I ran down my personal savings trying to make it work. I needed a job as soon as possible, and there was only one place I wanted to work: betaworks. At the time, betaworks was a startup…
Imagine you meet a teenage girl who starts telling you about her childhood, when she mentions, somewhat casually, that she was shown porn by a strange man. He introduced her to it when she was nine, before she had even held hands with a boy, before she had gotten her first period, without her…
After almost 8 years in big tech engineering leadership 1, I’m taking the leap to go full-time on Instapaper (again!) I have a lot of mixed feelings about the change: nervousness, excitement, and a bit of the old FUD… Sustainability Since Instapaper spun out of Pinterest in 2018, it’s been a…
When building products, there’s a tension between building something quickly versus building something high quality. In order to build good products, it’s important to balance velocity with quality. At certain phases it’s appropriate to build it “quick and dirty”, in others it’s important to take…
TESCREAL—pronounced “tess-cree-all.” It’s a strange word that you may have seen pop up over the past few months. The renowned computer scientist Dr. Timnit Gebru frequently mentions the “TESCREAL” ideologies on social media, and for a while the Twitter profile of billionaire venture capitalist Marc…
For years, I expected my family to leave me alone for a period of “decompression” when I got home from work. I’ve always worked in highly relational, conversation-based roles. I’d often arrive home overstimulated and disappear into my office. My wife would want me to address a discipline issue with…
Maybe you have heard it said that you will be content when you learn to empty yourself of all your desire. If you want nothing, you will always be happy with what you have. Maybe this seemed like an extremely godly point of view, and you felt guilty that you had not yet achieved a complete void of…
Fred Freundlich is an American researcher who has been working for Mondragon, the world’s largest group of worker cooperatives, for the last 25 years. Here’s our interview about what it’s like to work for a company that is also a democracy and why we need to create more social businesses. Elle…
Oxfam’s Inequality Report recently wrote that “the world's five richest men have more than doubled their fortunes since 2020… while nearly five billion people have been made poorer.” Oxfam keeps reporting it like that, as do many media organizations, but those two things are not correlated. Five…
“I am a capitalist, I believe capitalism has the opportunity to be an incredible force for good,” says Davis Smith, CEO of Cotopaxi. “ It has lifted billions of people out of poverty. Like we are eradicating extreme poverty.” According to the World Bank, since 1990 more than 1 billion people were…
Facing Our Difficulties Sometimes, the struggles we face, both as individuals and as a society, seem insurmountable. While there is much around us that is good, some problems and conflicts—personal, relational, political—can appear intractable. It may not always be reasonable to be optimistic, but…
Yaqub Chaudhary is a Visiting Scholar at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge. At the time of writing, several leading AI companies have demonstrated new conversational agents that can generate intelligible fluent speech with a wide range of vocal…
Sometime around 1830, a young Frenchman of aristocratic family, with liberal sympathies, got on a boat headed to America. He wanted to see the new democracy in action. He travelled around and reported what he saw: a vigorous spirit of self-government that manifested in a hundred little ways. But he…
“The substance of the good life must be taken into consideration if radical political reform is to become a live option.” — Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life (1984) In 1943, Simone Weil, the French philosopher and activist who was living in England at the time, was…
Let me tell you a story. This story begins in a garden, at the very beginning of all things. All life can be found in this garden: every living being, every bird and animal, every tree and plant. Humans live here too, and so does the creator of all of it, the source of everything, and he is so close…
This is the second in my ongoing series of fortnightly essays. If you’d like to receive all of them as they are published, please subscribe. Otherwise, you can sign up for free to receive some of them. There is no such thing as a perfect society, and anyone who tries to build one will either go mad…
There is a growing consensus among social scientists and philosophers alike that a sense of life’s meaning and purpose is a key aspect of flourishing, and one that is irreducible either to happiness (in the sense of positive emotion) or goodness (in the sense of personal virtue). A group of…
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