If you are gonna be a founder, you gotta choose if you are going to be an insider or an outsider.
Insider: Nirav
Outsider: Naval
Every insider secretly wants the freedom to be an outsider. Every outsider secretly wants the respectability of being an insider.
🧵 Insiders protect the status quo and change things gradually at the margins.

Outsiders are bomb throwers. They tend to be more disagreeable and they are less likely to fit in.

The real value from data comes from connecting it across multiple disparate datasets through a common standard (or join key).

Will Lansing (CEO of @FICO) and I wrote a 4000+ word piece about standards and how they can make data much more valuable.

A thread on our learning … Linking data to other data makes all the data MUCH more valuable
Standards (also known as join keys) are the most valuable ways to link data together
2/

Economic downturns are good for innovators and bad for pretty much everyone else. This was true in 2008 and still true today.

There are obvious winners in today’s environment like video conferencing and work-from-home solutions, but there are also less obvious winners... Products that help companies save money.

In recessions, all companies are looking for ways to cut costs without sacrificing their core product offering. If you can help a CFO (who has more power in a recession) save money, you're going to get stronger during a downturn.

experts keep saying the U.S. has not had high inflation in the last 40 years ... but they are wrong

inflation is not about a basket of eggs and milk.

inflation is about what we care about most: asset prices
(more) the economists have never been more wrong. inflation has been very high in the U.S.

while the price of things made in China have not risen much, the prices of things we REALLY care about (education, housing, healthcare, stocks) have risen massively

to be a 10xer:
(1) See opportunities where others only see threats.
(2) Create a bias for action.
(3) Be positive, not negative. (“Yes, and” beats “no, but”).
(4) Make your team better.

more... 1. See opportunities where others only see threats.

The ability to understand and analyze threats to a business is important. But if you want to be a 10xer, you need to be the one discovering massive opportunities for growth.

Here's why the Peter Thiel interview question ("what is a heretical view you have") is so predictive:

It reveals that most people hold conventional opinions and call them “heretical.” Almost everyone cannot come up with an answer that most people they know do not agree with. What makes for a good answer?

One that sparks a unique view of the world and shows the candidate doesn’t think like their peers.

This signals that the candidate:
1) thinks differently
2) is open-minded
3) is brave enough to discuss an unpopular opinion

1/ Written interviews can help companies better hire thoughtful people.

As an interviewer, my goal is not to hear the first answer … I prefer to hear the candidate’s best answer. 2/ Giving candidates a couple of days to answer a question (instead of a couple of seconds) yields better answers.

1/ Data businesses are generally misunderstood. DaaS has different metrics than SaaS.

While there has been a lot written about SaaS businesses (how they operate, what metrics to watch, etc.), there has been surprisingly little written about data businesses. 2/ Great data companies look like the ugly child of a SaaS company (like Salesforce) and a compute service (like AWS).

DaaS companies have their own unique lineage, lingo, operational cadence, and more. They are an odd duck in the tech pond.

three reasons why SF is such a poorly run city:

1. Transience.

2. Too expensive.

3. Elections in odd years. 2/ on #1: SF is a transient city. Most people in SF do not have roots and not sure they will still be in SF in five years.

the company in martech that we all should be rooting for is @Comscore .

ComScore is such an important company and very key to have as an independent measurement voice.

they have had a trying few years but we all should hope they are ultimately very successful. @Comscore comscore still has amazing assets and has plenty of very talented people

Venture Capital firms rarely take their own advice when running their own firm.

Private Equity firms (like Blackstone, KKR, Vista Equity Partners, etc.) and hedge funds (esp quant funds) are actually much more like venture portfolio companies than VCs are. the best example of an ambitious VC firm is @socialcapital (they have a myriad of products and focused on growth) -- but those types of firms are extremely rare.