Words matter. These are the best Naval Ravikant Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Figure out what you’re good at and start helping other people with it; give it away. Pay it forward. Karma sort of works because people are very consistent. On a long enough timescale, you will attract what you project.
Humans don’t ‘need’ math-based cryptocurrencies when dealing with other humans. We walk slowly, talk slowly, and buy big things. Credit cards, cash, wires, checks – the world seems fine.
There’s so much innovation going on, and there are lots of people funding that innovation, but there’s very little innovation on that infrastructure for innovation itself, so we like to do that ourselves to help companies create more tech companies.
The best founders are extremely thoughtful and have an eye for quality. I don’t know if there’s any generic advice here that would be helpful. Startup knowledge is a moving target.
We’re going to try and prove to the market that you can do a legal coin offering. If the SEC doesn’t crack down, this party will be amazing – the biggest party in town for a long time. If they do crack down, a lot of people are going to feel a lot of pain.
If you’re investing in a company in the Bitcoin economy, you have to compare the valuation of the company to the valuation of the entire economy.
All of the marketplaces like Prosper, LendingClub, etc., as they get larger, they flip from being retail capital to institutional capital.
The ledger, the distributed database – it’s called a Blockchain – is held in the cloud by all the parties involved. It can’t be broken by any of them. It’s cryptographically too strong. You would have to compromise the entire network to take over Bitcoin.
Startups are constantly raising money, sometimes before they have even hired a lawyer.
VC firms that don’t have a brand are going to struggle. Because there is a lot of money out there, you need to have a point of view, a brand, to really add value. You can’t just talk about it, and say well, we are smart people.
Nation states that are used to imposing capital controls will face a quandary: ban cryptocurrencies and live in the technology dustbin; enable them, and this virus – this religion, this protocol – will enable the free flow of money and language, along with packets, around the globe.
People come in. They are too gung ho. They invest too much money in things they don’t know. They lose it and then they clam up and stop investing. Then they miss the actual boom. That’s the nature of the market.
For us, just serving the market in the US and the UK, we can barely make the math work on an interesting business. My sense is that our clones and copycats are very manual. If they make it work, then congratulations to them!
People think about Bitcoin incorrectly. They think about it as currency or about gold or hoarding, speculation, about how much money do you make. When really, what it is is an API for programmable cash transactions.
I don’t think I’m any smarter than any of my developers.
We can code wills, escrows, trusts, notaries, revokable charge backs, proof of contracts, intellectual property enforcement. What Wall Street does can be done in code by Bitcoin.
One philosophy I have at AngelList is I would rather have someone working on the wrong thing and do it their way and be motivated, than working on the right thing and do it my way and not be motivated.
I think almost everything about humans and human civilization is explained better by evolution than anything else.
Think of Bitcoin as a bank account in the cloud, and it’s completely decentralized: not the Swiss government, not the American government. It’s all the participants in the network enforcing.
In an ideal world, you raise a lot of money and then there is a downturn, before you start investing so you get better deals. But it doesn’t always happen that way.
Cryptocurrencies will create a fifth protocol layer powering the next generation of the Internet.
If you go to a venture firm, what you’re doing is you’re buying money from them in exchange for equity. They have a commodity that they’re selling and they have to differentiate themselves.
China may censor YouTube. China may censor Twitter. They won’t be able to censor Bitcoin. There’s no central authority. There’s no one you can go to and say, ‘We’re going to turn Bitcoin off.’
While the traditional banks and credit card companies lock down access to their payments infrastructure to a handful of trusted parties, Bitcoin is open to all.
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