Pieter Levels: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Yeah. But it’s interesting how people are pulled towards that, to scale, to go really big. And you don’t have that honest reflection with yourself, what actually makes you happy? Because for a lot of great engineers, what makes them happy is the building, the “individual contributor,” where you’re actually still coding or you’re actually still building, and they let go of that and then they become unhappy. But some of that is the sacrifice needed to have a impact at scale, if you truly believe in a thing you’re doing. Look at Elon, he’s doing things million times bigger than me, and would I want to do that? I don’t know, you cannot really choose these things, but I really respect that. I think Elon’s very different from VC founders. VC start … it’s software … There’s a lot of bullshit in this world, I think. There’s a lot of dodgy finance stuff happening there, I think. And I never have concrete evidence about it, but your gut tells you something’s going on with companies getting sold to friends and VCs and then they do reciprocity, and there’s shady financial dealings. With Elon, there’s not. He’s just raising money from investors and he’s actually building stuff. He needs the money to build stuff, hardware stuff. And that I really respect. You said that there’s been a few low points in your life, you’ve been depressed and building is one of the ways you get out of that. But can you talk to that? Can you take me to that place? That time when you were at a low point?…

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