The Anthology Of Balaji

Catching Fire by Richard Wrangham: Fire arguably made us human. This book talks about how the invention of fire allowed humans as species to outsource our metabolism to the fire and allocate more of our scarce calories to the brain. Fire relaxed an evolutionary constraint and made us smarter. We've been co-evolving with technology for a very, very long time, arguably for evolutionary timescales. Technology is actually what makes us human. It's what distinguishes man from animal.

Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital by Carlota Perez This discusses the fundamental cycle in technology: people get really amped about a technology, then they try to actually do it, they find it's actually hard, most people get demoralized, and they quit. It's those people who stick it out in the trough that make things actually happen. Carlota Perez has a whole theory about how and why that happens.

One of the funny things about the tech industry is if you stay in the game long enough and you take enough swings, some swings will connect much harder than you expect. There are investments I made that took five minutes that have returned more capital than five months of work.

The other interesting thing is VCs are incentivized to build people up. As an investor, you want to invest in somebody and make them richer than yourself. Peter Thiel invested $500,000 in a young Mark Zuckerberg building Facebook. Thiel earned a billion dollars on that investment, but obviously Zuckerberg earned many billions. Being incentivized to make other people richer, to build people up, is very unusual.

Venture capital has many, many faults. But there are a couple interesting things about it. One of the biggest is VCs are very interested in whether they were wrong. If they pass on companies that become successful, they want to understand why they were wrong. They want to admit they were wrong and potentially invest in them now. They have financial incentive for discovering truth, which is uncommon.

For those who aren't good at engineering-well, get good at content. Content is as important as engineering nowadays. Every new company could have a founding influencer on par with the founding engineer. Today, a founding engineer and a founding influencer are building a company. Tomorrow, a founding influencer and a founding engineer may be building a country.