Daniel's notes on The Anthology Of Balaji
The Anthology Of Balaji by Eric Jorgenson
240 notes
first 25, in reading orderTHE POINT OF DOING A STARTUP IS TO BUILD SOMETHING NO ONE CAN BUY. Today money can't buy you a trip to Mars, a neural implant, or a regenerated limb. In the recent past, money could not buy you a web browser, a search engine, or a smartphone.
SHEER, DOGGED PERSISTENCE IS OFTEN MISTAKEN FOR LUCK. SUCCESS MAY BE A LOW PROBABILITY EUENT. BUT PERSEUERANCE INCREASES YOUR SAMPLE SIZE.
As it was easier to start Bitcoin than to reform the Fed, it will actually be easier to start a new city than to reform San Francisco, and easier to start a new country than to reform the FDA.
Create a product. Solve a problem. Build.
Some people make a bit of money and go sit on the beach. I think of money as a stick of dynamite. It is leverage to go and blow up the obstacles in the path of my next goal.
Putting in a lot of labor doesn't necessarily generate value. Putting in the right technology often does.
BUILDING WHAT MONEY CAN'T BUY I look at money as a tool to build things I can't buy today.
Elon Musk is building SpaceX because he can't buy a trip to Mars. You can have all the money in the world, but you can't buy a trip to Mars. One hundred years ago, the richest man in the world couldn't buy an iPhone. That's the kind of progress I care about.
We don't have an unambiguous metric for progress. If you must pick one, we can make a strong case for life expectancy.
What really matters is building something you can't buy. That's how we actually improve metrics like life expectancy.
Science is theory. Technology is practice. It's applied science.
people pay for the value provided to them. They pay for the impact on them, not the cost to provide it.
The labor theory of value: value comes directly from labor. The technology theory of value: technology is actually where the value creation is happening.
Eventually, everything we can think of basically will be reduced to software. All the non-software components are gradually going to get commoditized.
We're going to robotify a lot of things. We will have self-driving trucks and fully robotic ports. We will talk later about generalizing the concept of printing on paper to "printing out" any material thing, like a bowl of food.
The leverage on software is only going to increase. This is where all the value creation is going to come from. It will be mainly software creating value and everything else executing it.
Technology's first law: whatever can be done over the internet will be done over the internet. (Though it might take a while for any given phenomenon to move online.)
In 2009, it would have been remarkable to claim "$100 billion in equity value is being held back by outdated taxi and hotel regulations." Uber and Airbnb showed it was true. The "next big thing" was being held back by those eighty-year-old regulations.
Unlocking unseen value  It requires more empathy and more imagination to think about value that isn't seen. You can see a skyscraper. You can't see what could have been built but wasn't.
SEC, FDA, FAA, hotel inspectors, … It's quite possible we can achieve many of the objectives of these regulatory agencies with new…
Today, we don't have the same level of risk tolerance. People want an extremely high level of safety, but they don't realize we can be too…
Believing the next problem is solvable is a fundamental tenet of the philosophy of technology.
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