Thread by @eriktorenberg

Some of my favorite takeaways & quotes from Daniel Gross👇

The best and biggest companies start out small, in an underrated community

Facebook started as a service just for elite colleges

SpaceX was initially formed just to get a drone to Mars to take a picture of the planet

Being a founder is like being a club promoter – you have to constantly promote your product, company, and brand to get people to buy the product and employees to buy into the vision

As a founder, you need be able to step out of first-person &move into a third-person view where you can see problems from different perspectives & make rational decisions instead of emotional ones

Develop the ability to distance your thought patterns & emotions from your actions

If there were two gifts Daniel could give people, he would give:

An innate sense of curiosity

The belief that you can follow your curiosity and figure things out you haven’t yet done before

As a founder, you should almost feel like you’re talking to your users too much because one of the biggest mistakes founders make is not taking to enough users and getting feedback

This doesn’t mean adding every feature users want, but it does mean considering their requests.

The difference between Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs is not value creation, but value capture – both men were geniuses, but only one found a way to capture the value created and become a billionaire

Cultivate an environment that will help you. Environments are like cheat codes

If you can surround yourself with builders, you will have a higher chance of becoming a builder

The physical environment that you are in, can affect your motivation, effort, and success

Kick off the positive feedback loop which gets you innately curious & willing to explore your interests

e.g Schwarzenegger only got started down his path after going to a gym in Austria where he won a weightlifting trophy

That positive feedback propelled him on his path in life

A lot of what drives curiosity is you ppl like it’s okay to go explore a particular direction (b/c of feedback)

The world needs more people who follow their curiosity

But there’s a shortage of positive feedback today, thus reducing the # of ppl who explore their curiosities

Nutrition, Exercise, Sleep, etc:

Self-experimentation is more important than the results

The point – Don’t wake up at 5 AM because so and so Twitter guru also wakes up at that time, do what works for you

Ultimate feedback loop–“Am I doing things that seem good to the local circle of ppl whose opinions I care about?”

What ppl think about you, especially the ppl you respect, is a very important signal as to whether you're on the right path. & it has a long-standing tribal history

Be focused, but also embrace 10-20% serendipity

Have your own iPhone moment: Focus on doing something that may not seem intuitive, that may not align with the metrics you’re collecting, and that may seem a little crazy, but has the potential of really changing your life

The best leaders are innately interested in the lives/problems of the people they lead – they have a deep sense of empathy

By learning about the personal stories of those you lead, you’re better able to design an environment that works well for them

Information diet may actually drive your food diet, and it may be more important.

Fiction books inject, at a much deeper level, information about how the world works

Humans walk around with a basic firewall up to a lot of the information we’re exposed to

But for a select few ppl (our tribe & those we look up to) – that firewall gets dimmed

So to change the way you think, surround yourself with ppl you want to be like.

If you want to poach someone, try it when they come back from vacation

Often when people come back to work from a vacation, their minds are much more open to other job alternatives

This is also why companies have offsites: new environments open our minds up to new possibilities

Happiness to me is flow + knowing you moved the needle of the planet.

I think it’s the struggle that really makes you successful as a company, whereas if you have the curse of plenty very early on, it’s really hard to develop that right organizational muscle in order to be successful

In the venture world, funds compete for a limited amount of deals so there isn’t much cooperation (zero-sum game)

But in hedge fund deals, people work together and even have company off-sites with other firms (positive sum game)

Play infinite games.

Religion should be respected even if you don’t believe in it because it's still here after so many years

Religion strengthens tribal bonds. It connects people who wouldn’t ordinarily connect with one another

How can we create a new religion to encourage people to work together?

It's criminal that we ask teenagers to wake up at 6:45

Adults want to wake up early, but children do not. I think school should start at 11 o’clock. That alone may change the world.

Studies have shown that children need to wake up later than adults

It is really important to make feedback a positive experience for other people because if you don’t, they won’t give you any.

You want the critical feedback because you want data on how to be better.

We view it as a pejorative that someone will play The Sims or Fortnight for many hrs

But what you're doing is solving resource allocation problems. You're literally doing the same thing a McKinsey analyst does, for fun

And yet your parents are angry at you. That's interesting

Could you possibly bring that same nuclear energy of productivity into other realms into software in general?

You should not be stymied by your mood. software should enable you to jump & punch above your weight & current mood and it should use all these psychological techniques

One of the most powerful game mechanics: Leaderboard

Because a leaderboard is merely digitizing what we do all the time. So when you sit down to at say a dinner party and you meet a bunch of new people. You're basically assessing who's good who's bad who's interesting who's not

Be careful what you measure though.

CrossFit, for example, optimizes like for you to do as many reps as possible.

You can always accomplish more reps by breaking form and by hurting yourself.

So people get injured as an emergent property of the system

Another important game mechanic is injecting randomness into things.

This is why humans play the lottery over and over is because of the random nature of it. They can't model it

Ppl say you should be contrarian & not care what others think about you.

It's not clear to me that that is true b/c what other people think about you, at least what the ppl you respect think about you, is a very important signal as to whether you're doing the right thing or not

What the people you respect think about you is actually really important training data because that gives you a sense of where you stand in the world.

And I'm not talking about the masses or Twitter.

I'm talking about the 15 ppl that are influential to you, that you care about.

Pull vs Push mode of talent sourcing:

Initially it was like, let's find unrepresented talent globally and it turns out the way you find them is you by actually building a thing for them to play where the act of playing makes them better & then you see who are the best players?

The world where we're in today is there's a shortage of positive feedback, especially positive feedback to the right people.

It is scary to read stories of how great ppl got their break when someone gave positive feedback to another person, e.g an email from someone you admired

The goal is to get people stuck in a positive feedback loop, rapidly iterating in the positive feedback loop, making a lot of progress and reaching a point where that positive feedback loop doesn't plateau and then hopefully repeating that process over and over again.

These are fun studies where people move to different zip codes and their weight always fluctuates in the same direction. If you want to lose weight the simplest thing you can do is to move from SF to NYC. Everyone else is working out and eating healthy and you'll do the same.

Willpower is overrated.

Your environment is a one-time CapEx expense on your willpower. You do it once. You fly to a place, start working in a company or go to a campus or make this new friend. And then it just yields dividends.

People are often interested in specifics like: what time do you wake up? What do you eat? What's your workout regimen?

That's is actually the wrong message to send bc I can tell you what time I wake up, but what's more important is the fact that I'm obsessed about optimizing it

The takeaway that I think more people should be in the business of self-experimentation is actually more important than the results because the time that I wake up is pretty individualized to me think a lot of happen to today

How's work going? People have a cached answer to that.

So they're doing mental substitution: "Well, how was today?"

So if you want to get someone to quit their job find them on a bad day and ask them that Q....suddenly they start telling themselves work isn't great isn't it?

Most major career decisions are made on moments of vacation b/c you come back to work and what happens is not necessarily work is good or bad but you're flooded with work, which is not as fun as vacation. That catalyzes you to go out and look for another job.

Viewing ppl as emerging properties of underlying systems:

Instead of saying that person's good or bad, look what cause that person to do X or Y.

Then you can decode people, predict them better, which means you can interact w/ them better & create new structures to manifest that

What separates I think successful & unsuccessful people is these Loops that they get stuck in and I think the most important interventions basically change the loop and certainly that's what we're trying to do at scale.

There's a lot to be learned from that in terms of setting up a positive feedback loop for yourself.

Fall in love with what you do so that you get to work on what you love

Benefits to impacting people younger:

I mean it seems like as you age you basically trade novelty for pattern recognition and the brain is much more plastic and malleable when you have less dated a pattern recognizer on so shaping someone's life early on in life.

on CRISPR:

We don't understand the computer, so why edit the source code

Start small:

There's these amazing interviews with with Mark Zuckerberg in 2005 where he says, yeah, our goal is to really be a good director at Harvard and maybe other few universities.

Why people don't talk to users:

There's a psychological software bug in your brain where it is more satisfying to build the thing than to show the thing to users.

Maybe b/c it predicts there will be more flow in working on the things as opposed to showing it to ppl.

the twist on this is you shouldn't do exactly what your users tell you to do but you should engage with them a lot. You want to engage with them and figure out what the underlying problem is. File it as input, but don't necessarily react to every single feature request.

Advice on advice:

if you want to become a good advice giver - you want to figure out who are you in life a real influencer for -- the people for whom you have write access to their brain -- such that you can give them advice literally no one else can give, and they will listen.

You don't want to overly rely on metrics. e.g. Google got to the point where it was A/B Testing shades of blue.

You don't get the iPhone that way.

Personal iPhone moment: Do something that may seem crazy & may not align w/ the data but has the potential of changing your life

Avoid a sort of innovator's dilemma:

In order to reinvent yourself, you need to both cannibalize existing business models and certainly redirect resources in a way that doesn't immediately kill your core biz.

Google model better for incremental innovation, Apple for disruptive.

On having sufficient struggle:

Google and Facebook's culture really stuck a toothpick into the sand and had a massive oil will come gushing out.

Hard for them to have same sense of urgency as, say, Amazon that had to struggle for a long time to succeed or Apple that almost died

Playing the game of life in third person as opposed to first is important b/c you're going to have good & bad days you're going to be sitting at some point in a 1-1 w/ someone & it's going to be a bad day & they're going to deliver bad news & you're going to need to react well

As a manager & as a leader you want to design the best game that both aligns company incentives & employees desires & the real way to understand people is kind of through this deeper substrate level where you actually become a genuinely interested in them & their lives & stories

Read fiction while you're young:

if you're a disagreeable rational person you have this mindset where you're constantly judging & thinking 'well is that true' fiction right below that enters your psyche at a deeper level & helps you develop more models about how the world works

In general we walk around the world and we have a pretty strong firewall set up against things other people say or do.

Some of that gets toggled off when it's someone from your own tribe.

Everyone has a tree of influence and if you want to change their opinion, identify it.

If you meet someone you really respect because their opinions in art and you talk to them about business that may change may surprise yourself and how much that changes your views as well.

If you're firing your 4th person, it's the same as Tesla letting go 1/4 of their workforce, b/c you were relying on that person to contribute that much & then you remove them from that & then all of a sudden everyone else has to balance the workload & cultural impacts are larger.

we're trying to figure whether you can make software that can detecting great founders.

But I think the even more exciting Q is can you make software that can creating great founders b/c, especially early in life, you can radicalize them to become great if they have it in them.

Paradox of conscientousness:

what drives a lot of conscientious people is a sense that they are not good enough where they are and they need to improve.

This leads you to get better, but also leads you to sometimes question how great and big you can become in the first place.

What happens is someone else challenges them to realize just how great they can become & so they manage to break this vicious conscientiousness loop where you're constantly thinking to yourself 'I'm not good enough, must work harder' which prevents you from reaching for the stars

How do people make life decisions?

How do people decide when to change their job?

How do people decide political affiliation?

How do people decide who to marry?

I'm in this privileged situation to have built the right skills at the right time (writing software in SV) which is a bit like being a merchant in Venice in 1760. Thus have a responsibility to pay it forward and so the dream is work on something that improves the lives of others

The big Silicon Valley cultural secret is that, for whatever you're currently doing—your startup, your art, your personal growth—you can do it 10x bigger, an order of magnitude bigger than what you thought you could (should you want to).

One way to dramatically change the world is to work on global warming or space travel, but just as important as that is to work on increasing the amount of people working on that stuff an order of magnitude. Like let's get 10x more people curing cancer, climate change, etc.