If they can take your integrity away from you, it’s not integrity.
How To Value Things
It is my practice to try to understand how valuable something is by trying to imagine myself without it.
Creating Value
Value is generated when the capital required to get a business to sustainability is meaningfully less than what the business is worth when sustainability is reached.
Revolution Requires Collaboration
Revolutions are usually made by small networks of agitators rather than by the masses. If you want to launch a revolution, don’t ask yourself, ‘How many people support my ideas?’ Instead, ask yourself, ‘How many of my supporters are capable of effective collaboration?’
– Yuval Noah Harari
Don’t Stare At The Winners
We should not stare too much at our big winners. We don’t learn that much from them. We should stare at our big mistakes, because we do learn a lot from them.
– Fred Wilson
Vagueness and Precision
Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.
Observation
Most people think of art as learning to draw or some kind of self-expression. But what artists do is learn to see and the actual training is one of observation.
Growth Without Goals
There are no price targets, no return targets, no staking my results on a given outcome for a given company. A goalless process like this is incredibly hard to maintain in an industry which has convinced itself that the passage of three months requires that we get together and retrofit a narrative to explain what was likely pure noise.
Surprises Shouldn’t Be Surprising
The habit of making decisions whose origins are so heavily weighted with retrospection is part of the process of change itself and part of the forces that shape the future. Rational expectations models so often go astray, in fact, because they are unable to accommodate this dynamic aspect of the process. More important, it is the main reason why surprise is so frequent in its occurrence and so shattering in its impact. Although human beings are always being taken by surprise, we have learned not to be surprised by surprise.