VCs need to believe that your company could be a billion-dollar business and generally lack imagination — you need to paint a vivid picture of this path for them, starting with the striking protagonist character you play in your company’s story.Your alter ego should never lie, but it should be completely comfortable showing the fullest expression of your ambition to people who probably intimidate you. Fundraising is a snap judgment game — most VCs are trying to pattern-match you to a founder archetype who already won. They index primarily on IQ, self-belief, experience, and personability (in that order). A general rule of thumb is that to be taken seriously in SV, male founders would benefit from acting warmer, while female founders are taken more seriously when they act colder. Both benefit from acting a little entitled.

a VC’s job is to make a diversified portfolio of bets — you are only one. Most founders find being around VCs distracting and draining because they feel pressure to perform the role of ‘impressive person.’ If you can’t immediately capture value from your performance… why waste your energy?

don’t expect the average investor to provide much value beyond money and connections. This makes the 10% of investors who can be legitimately useful to your business worth their weight in gold. Develop litmus tests to identify the valuable ones quickly and avoid wasting your time trying to convince nonbelievers.

our goal here is to spend as little time fundraising as possible — which requires being strategic about the order in which you talk to investors and how you talk about where things stand as you progress through the raise. The combined force of controlling those two variables are what “generates momentum” during your fundraise process.

Make a list of all the investors you know and can get introduced to, ordering them by the ones you most want on board to the ones you couldn’t care less aboutTalk first to a few low-stakes investors at the bottom of your list to practice your pitch and identify common investor questions and critiques you’re going to getIf available to you, next get a few investors who already wanted to give you money on board so you have a dollar amount you can say you’ve raisedWork your way up your investor list, talking to the investors you most-want-on-board-but-still-need-to-convince last (this optimizes your odds they say yes)

This all goes by much faster if you court investors similarly to how hot girls treat their many potential suitors. If your raise is already a little taken and you exude an air that you don’t need them, mimetically-minded investors become much more interested.

If you’re anything like me, you will worry intensely about not making a fool of yourself. It will probably go ok, but not as amazing or illuminating as you’d hoped. You might leave and feel a deep sense of lostness set in. This is all very normal. In time you will see them in increasing clarity, often noticing the differences between your and their values and why you would not enjoy living their life at all.

the people on pedestals probably hate being there. It’s lonely, hard to trust that the intentions of the new people around you are pure, and you often feel like you’re constantly letting people down. In the end, idolization hurts everyone involved.

Beware of intellectual dementors and clout demonsIntellectual dementors will try to eat your ideas and interestingness — not necessarily to copy you, but to wring your brain dry to amass knowledge themselves. They often play mini IQ games/tests of will in conversation and masquerade as investors while never actually investing. Clout demons are similar, but view people less as brains and more as stepping stones towards supreme social status. The power move to protect yourself from both is to simply abstain from playing their games — give as little info on yourself and your ideas as possible and reflect their questions directly back at them.

People will help you if you ask for what you want clearly and concisely

Knowing what you want requires a lot of upfront soul-searching, followed by strategic and long-term thinking once you’ve committed to a thing (I can’t really demystify this more). Once you’re all in, I highly recommend diligently keeping a list somewhere of the top three things you currently need help with so when people ask, you’re ready.

You don’t want to make people feel like you’re using them but you do want to use your social capital for things you care about. General rule of thumb: ask for things either 1) after a positive interaction or 2) completely out of the blue with a concisely written and compelling email/text. Tone matters because you don’t want to sound desperate and you do want to show you know how to play the game (write like the founder you most admire talks).

once we’ve taken action on behalf of something, our brain assigns more value to said thing. Tim Keller: “The feeling of love follows the action of love.” Love is a strong word here, but the point stands — help people help you. Startups are long-term games, so it only makes sense to do them with people you truly want to be around for a very long time.

To write about something hard to explain, write a detailed letter to a friend about why it is so hard to explain, and then remove the initial “Dear Friend” part and you’ll have a great first draft.

To be interesting just tell your story with uncommon honesty.

Most articles and stories are improved significantly if you delete the first page of the manuscript draft. Immediately start with the action.

Each technology can not stand alone. It takes a saw to make a hammer and it takes a hammer to make a saw. And it takes both tools to make a computer, and in today’s factory it takes a computer to make saws and hammers. This co-dependency creates an ecosystem of highly interdependent technologies that support each other

On the other hand, I see this technium as an extension of the same self-organizing system responsible for the evolution of life on this planet. The technium is evolution accelerated. A lot of the same dynamics that propel evolution are also at work in the technium

Our technologies are ultimately not contrary to life, but are in fact an extension of life, enabling it to develop yet more options and possibilities at a faster rate. Increasing options and possibilities is also known as progress, so in the end, what the technium brings us humans is progress.

Libraries, journals, communication networks, and the accumulation of other technologies help create the next idea, beyond the efforts of a single individual

We also see near-identical parallel inventions of tricky contraptions like slingshots and blowguns. However, because it was so ancient, we don’t have a lot of data for this behavior. What we would really like is to have a N=100 study of hundreds of other technological civilizations in our galaxy. From that analysis we’d be able to measure, outline, and predict the development of technologies. That is a key reason to seek extraterrestrial life.

When information is processed in a computer, it is being ceaselessly replicated and re-copied while it computes. Information wants to be copied. Therefore, when certain people get upset about the ubiquitous copying happening in the technium, their misguided impulse is to stop the copies. They want to stamp out rampant copying in the name of "copy protection,” whether it be music, science journals, or art for AI training. But the emergent behavior of the technium is to copy promiscuously. To ban, outlaw, or impede the superconductivity of copies is to work against the grain of the system.

the worry of some environmentalists is that technology can only contribute more to the problem and none to the solution. They believe that tech is incapable of being green because it is the source of relentless consumerism at the expense of diminishing nature, and that our technological civilization requires endless growth to keep the system going. I disagree.

Over time evolution arranges the same number of atoms in more complex patterns to yield more complex organisms, for instance producing an agile lemur the same size and weight as a jelly fish. We seek the same shift in the technium. Standard economic growth aims to get consumers to drink more wine. Type 2 growth aims to get them to not drink more wine, but better wine.

to measure (and thus increase) productivity we count up the number of refrigerators manufactured and sold each year. More is generally better. But this counting tends to overlook the fact that refrigerators have gotten better over time. In addition to making cold, they now dispense ice cubes, or self-defrost, and use less energy. And they may cost less in real dollars. This betterment is truly real value, but is not accounted for in the “more” column

it is imperative that we figure out how to shift more of our type 1 growth to type 2 growth, because we won’t be able to keep expanding the usual “more.”  We will have to perfect a system that can keep improving and getting better with fewer customers each year, smaller markets and audiences, and fewer workers. That is a huge shift from the past few centuries where every year there has been more of everything.

“degrowthers” are correct in that there are limits to bulk growth — and running out of humans may be one of them. But they don’t seem to understand that evolutionary growth, which includes the expansion of intangibles such as freedom, wisdom, and complexity, doesn’t have similar limits. We can always figure out a way to improve things, even without using more stuff — especially without using more stuff!

the technium is not inherently contrary to nature; it is inherently derived from evolution and thus inherently capable of being compatible with nature. We can choose to create versions of the technium that are aligned with the natural world.

Social media can transmit false information at great range at great speed. But compared to what? Social media's influence on elections from transmitting false information was far less than the influence of the existing medias of cable news and talk radio, where false information was rampant. Did anyone seriously suggest we should regulate what cable news hosts or call in radio listeners could say? Bullying middle schoolers on social media? Compared to what? Does it even register when compared to the bullying done in school hallways? Radicalization on YouTube? Compared to talk radio? To googling?

Kids are inherently obsessive about new things, and can become deeply infatuated with stuff that they outgrow and abandon a few years later. So the fact they may be infatuated with social media right now should not in itself be alarming. Yes, we should indeed understand how it affects children and how to enhance its benefits, but it is dangerous to construct national policies for a technology based on the behavior of children using it.

Since it is the same technology, inspecting how it is used in other parts of the world would help us isolate what is being caused by the technology and what is being caused by the peculiar culture of the US.

You don’t notice what difference you make because of the platform's humongous billions-scale. In aggregate your choices make a difference which direction it — or any technology — goes. People prefer to watch things on demand, so little by little, we have steered the technology to let us binge watch. Streaming happened without much regulation or even enthusiasm of the media companies. Street usage is the fastest and most direct way to steer tech.

Vibrators instead of the cacophony of ringing bells on cell phones is one example of a marketplace technological solution

The long-term effects of AI will affect our society to a greater degree than electricity and fire, but its full effects will take centuries to play out. That means that we’ll be arguing, discussing, and wrangling with the changes brought about by AI for the next 10 decades. Because AI operates so close to our own inner self and identity, we are headed into a century-long identity crisis.

What we tend to call AI, will not be considered AI years from now

What we are discovering is that many of the cognitive tasks we have been doing as humans are dumber than they seem. Playing chess was more mechanical than we thought. Playing the game Go is more mechanical than we thought. Painting a picture and being creative was more mechanical than we thought. And even writing a paragraph with words turns out to be more mechanical than we thought

out of the perhaps dozen of cognitive modes operating in our minds, we have managed to synthesize two of them: perception and pattern matching. Everything we’ve seen so far in AI is because we can produce those two modes. We have not made any real progress in synthesizing symbolic logic and deductive reasoning and other modes of thinking

we are slowly realizing we still have NO IDEA how our own intelligences really work, or even what intelligence is. A major byproduct of AI is that it will tell us more about our minds than centuries of psychology and neuroscience have

There is no monolithic AI. Instead there will be thousands of species of AIs, each engineered to optimize different ways of thinking, doing different jobs

Now from the get-go we assume there will be significant costs and harms of anything new, which was not the norm in my parent's generation

The astronomical volume of money and greed flowing through this frontier overwhelmed and disguised whatever value it may have had

The sweet elegance of blockchain enables decentralization, which is a perpetually powerful force. This tech just has to be matched up to the tasks — currently not visible — where it is worth paying the huge cost that decentralization entails. That is a big ask, but taking the long-view, this moment may not be a failure

My generic career advice for young people is that if at all possible, you should aim to work on something that no one has a word for. Spend your energies where we don’t have a name for what you are doing, where it takes a while to explain to your mother what it is you do. When you are ahead of language, that means you are in a spot where it is more likely you are working on things that only you can do. It also means you won’t have much competition.

Your 20s are the perfect time to do a few things that are unusual, weird, bold, risky, unexplainable, crazy, unprofitable, and looks nothing like “success.” The less this time looks like success, the better it will be as a foundation