Conversations with Tyler / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
39 published records
01 / preference
“I like to look for people who believe something very strongly. That can’t be the only qualification, but other economics departments tend not to do that.”
02 / belief
“Tyler, you are a very good mentor, and I think that has something to do with how generous you are.”
03 / belief
“You need to have eight or nine very definite things go to an A or A+ level for you, and it might happen for you and not for your identical twin. So, I think, at the highest levels of achievement, identical twins do not contain a lot of information, and they would not be that useful in talent search.”
04 / 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.”
05 / belief
“If I think of myself or the other people I’ve known their entire lives, which is not that many people, I just don’t see that much change.”
06 / belief
“I would say Tyler’s Bat-Signal is not the difference between Irish and Scottish Enlightenment, though that’s interesting.”
07 / belief
“I think a lot of our sciences are badly out of whack for this reason, and they should become more like start-ups again.”
08 / belief
“I think of myself as wealthier than them in human capital terms for the most part, so I’m pretty selfish.”
09 / belief
“I think we are declining in energy as a country. Putting immigrants aside, which is going to be a complex story of its own and may not be the same from all other places, but the country, to me, seems to have much less energy than it did even earlier in my lifetime, just anecdotally, so I worry about that.”
10 / 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.”
11 / 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.”
12 / 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.”
13 / belief
“Talent issues, I think about all the time. I said before, I’m an obsessive person.”
14 / 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.”
15 / belief
“Daniel, you run marathons, I believe, on every continent, and you’ve run one in Antarctica.”
16 / belief
“I’d rather eat in Israel, in Tel Aviv. There’s excellent chocolate ice cream, better than in Jerusalem, I think.”
17 / 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.”
18 / uncertainty
“I’d say both are pretty likely to be of the whatever Diet Coke signals. I don’t know.”
19 / belief
“Combination of level of aspiration, internet is good enough, enough people with enough English fluency, some underlying flexibility of worldview that I think has made Indians relatively well suited, say, to be CEOs in American companies in a way we might not have expected, say, 30 years ago.”
20 / 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.”
21 / belief
“I think the bigger and more globalized network the world gets, the higher the returns to the Bat-Signal, and Bat-Signals are still one of the most underrated ways to be effective.”
22 / 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.”
23 / 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.”
24 / commitment
“” Not believe in me, but they can’t even believe that someone actually trusts them with the money and really trusts the story that they’re selling to me, and so on. The first thing they say is, “I won’t let you down.”
25 / 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.”
26 / evaluation
“In fact, the way we’re supposed to interview now — not just supposed to, but do — is we’re to ask everyone the same questions, and we do. But that doesn’t matter.”
27 / belief
“I think that Borges’ notion of the infinite, unending system, the infinite library, is what really appeals to me.”
28 / belief
“I think there are many people who immigrate to San Francisco and California who feel similarly.”
29 / 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.”
30 / 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.”
31 / 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.”
32 / 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.”
33 / preference
“I think there’s something quite useful to just being obsessive and continuing, and almost not trying to figure out too much.”
34 / evaluation
“I can name plenty of individual politicians who I think are just absolute train wrecks, but again, I would think in terms of the main problem being the voter.”
35 / 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.”
36 / evaluation
“There are some people who really are thirsty to do things and run things and create and make a difference, and those people are trapped in academia because a lot of them can’t see a way of supporting themselves doing a different thing.”
37 / 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.”
38 / 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.”
39 / 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.”