Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
30 transcript-backed records
01 / belief
“The company thing cannot fail.” I think that type of perseverance . . . Look, every single great start-up has had these dark moments of death or near death.”
02 / belief
“I think a lot of that comes out of just a general sense of vigorousness and vitality that I think is somewhat correlated with this sense of ambition, too.”
03 / belief
“For example, I think very good investors are the right degree of optimistic but also realistic, whereas founders are too optimistic, which they should be.”
04 / uncertainty
“Oddly, I think the simplest thing — I don’t know about EV — but certainly, I find what I’ve done over the course of my career that people seem to say has been useful for them is either just funding, or at least encouraging people to move — to Silicon Valley, ideally, if they’re in tech, but even just to a new city.”
05 / belief
“The person who’s hyper conscientious, who really dots every i and crosses every t — it’s exceedingly rare, I think, to find someone that is really, really conscientious and also really open.”
06 / belief
“In a city like San Francisco, where it’s hard to go out and not see someone running, I don’t think it’s particularly remarkable to be a runner. But yes, I think we have very different philosophies when it comes to exercise.”
07 / uncertainty
“I’d say both are pretty likely to be of the whatever Diet Coke signals. I don’t know.”
08 / belief
“I appreciate the questions are very colorful, better than some of the questions we’ve gotten. I think no one has, to date, asked us how to screen for human Martian settlers.”
09 / belief
“I think there are psychometric personalities — I imagine mine — that are relentlessly interested in improving, and for that, getting a tight feedback loop with any type of numerical score is very good and very simple.”
10 / belief
“I think that the amazing thing about the reality we live in today is yes, you can interview literally millions of mentors on YouTube for free, basically anywhere in the world.”
11 / belief
“I think the one thing I’d add to that is that the best people are ones that view you as a way to gain advantage for themselves.”
12 / belief
“I think there are many people who immigrate to San Francisco and California who feel similarly.”
13 / belief
“I’d be looking and asking for groups of people — I would make no case on what form of religion is the best — but groups of people that are very connected on some very deep level because otherwise, I think you can end up with something that blows up.”
14 / recommendation
“There’s something that’s been helpful for me that I’ve realized I have, that I think many people have — I don’t know if it’s totally ubiquitous — is, in the process of an interview — which you do in venture a lot, hundreds and thousands of times a year — being able to build a grid of the person that’s talking to you, who they most remind you of and the outcomes that those people have had, is I think a pretty important skill.”
15 / evaluation
“Many of those fail, but occasionally, those work, and it creates the microphones that we’re using, the building that we’re in, and the city and world that we live in.”
16 / evaluation
“I think that affords us all modalities because I really think there are very few people that don’t want to improve at least themselves, if not want to compete against others.”
17 / evaluation
“The guarantee Pioneer gives you is that if you’re in the top decile, we will review your application, but you could be 25th or 32nd — it doesn’t matter, we still review your application.”
18 / prediction
“The really tricky thing — in venture, in particular — is regressing on success is pretty hard, not just because the data points are pretty sparse, like, what great founders look like — maybe you have 10,000, which is not that helpful.”
19 / preference
“I think that might be because — I’d be curious if you’d agree that it’s because, for most tasks, doing gleans far more information than thinking.”
20 / uncertainty
“Certainly, with start-up founders, which is maybe the area I most studied in, you tend to see first-generation immigrants. But these are people that come to the United States usually not out of sheer desperation to have some basic form of economic success, because they were somewhat suppressed in their origin country, but more people in search of some spiritual belonging that they believe they found in whatever technology they’re working on.”
21 / belief
“I think there’s a humbling lesson there that you could learn in the opposite direction about the JFK assassination.”
22 / belief
“I would probably say that I agree with that, but I think, ultimately, the mitochondrial efficiency that that person has is a by-product of the nutrition they got early on in life.”
23 / belief
“I really think, and this theory is definitely not mine — there are all sorts of researchers on Twitter that are expert at this — but I think a lot of what is driving American mood today or conversation today is a byproduct of lithium we put in the water or plastics we consumed from when we were children.”
24 / evaluation
“I think he was the 10th or 11th engineer Google hired, and he’s basically responsible for the fact that Google Search works.”
25 / evaluation
“Like this very conversation we’re having — you can tell if people are having fun with each other’s questions and whatnot, or whether it’s monotonous. And someone who locks up and freezes when you ask them if maybe Diet Coke is correlated to productivity — which is a bit of a silly question at the end of the day — just the fact that they’re not having fun with it, I think, is something to look for.”
26 / evaluation
“I think a lot about this whole idea of gamification. It sounds childish and silly, but if we take that as a given, that there are these pieces of software that people really yearn to use .”
27 / evaluation
“I think that works because you can learn a lot from what someone says — they’re not likely to make up a story — but it’s also fun, and it is a common thing many people share, even in this era of HBO and Netflix.”
28 / recommendation
“Another idea, I think, that we discuss in the book that works pretty well is repeating questions, which is a bit uncomfortable to do, but can work, especially if you’re asking something that the person may not have an answer for, because they’re thinking about it for the first time.”
29 / preference
“Someone comes in who’s always effervescent and bubbling and happy and laughing, and you really feel the mood change. It’s important to try and be that type of person because, I think, all humans really pick up on that extremely quickly.”
30 / evaluation
“I definitely think for the role of founder — the one I specialize in — looking for someone to start a business that has a chance of becoming the next Thermo Fisher or the next Facebook or the next Apple, yes, I think intellect is very much overpriced or overvalued.”