Lida Michaud

Nvidia, $NVDA, CEO: “you cannot show me a task that is beneath me.”

Acquiring knowledge is easy, the hard part is knowing what to apply and when. That’s why all true learning is “on the job.” Life is lived in the arena.

Steve Jobs explains the importance of both thinking and doing “The doers are the major thinkers. The people that really create the things that change this industry are both the thinker-doer in one person.” This is applicable outside of tech too, and he uses Leonardo DaVinci as an example: “Did Leonardo have a guy off to the side that was thinking five years into the future about what he would paint or the technology he would use to paint it? Of course not. Leonardo was the artist, but he also mixed his own paints. He also was a fairly good chemist. Knew about pigments. Knew about human anatomy. And combining all of those skills together—the art and the science, the thinking and the doing—is what resulted in the exceptional result… There is no difference in our industry. The people that have really made the contributions have been the thinkers and the doers.” Jobs speculates that one of the reasons people might mix this up is because it’s easy to take credit for the thinking: “It’s very easy for someone to say ‘I thought of this three years ago.’ But usually when you dig a little deeper you find that the people who really did it were also the people who worked through the hard intellectual problems.”

On this day in 1995: the first story about Amazon was published.

“Courage without genius might not get you where you need to go. But genius without courage almost certainly won’t.” ~ Marc Andreessen

Be You, Be Weird. @jayshetty

"An entrepreneur without drive is just unemployed." @naval

we believe the world needs more ai infrastructure--fab capacity, energy, datacenters, etc--than people are currently planning to build. building massive-scale ai infrastructure, and a resilient supply chain, is crucial to economic competitiveness. openai will try to help!

Airbnb cofounder Brian Chesky on how to design a product for a million people “How do you make something for a million people? I don’t know where to start. But if you pick one person, study them, and take their journey, you can actually build something really personal. You can design something and keep iterating until they love it. Don’t stop improving it until that person loves it, and you’re not allowed to move to the second person until the first person loves it. Then you get the second person and keep iterating until they love it. And so on.” Source: @StanfordGSB

"Neuralink will help restoring functionality to people who have lost the connection between their brain & the body. It will also help in restoration of eyesight."

Mastery is not a function of genius or talent. It is a function of time and intense focus applied to a particular field of knowledge.

Steve Jobs: Asking for help is a superpower

Sam Altman on why you shouldn’t track absolute user growth in the early days of a startup “Nothing but a great product will save you; you can get everything else right and it still won’t work.” He points out that almost all startup founders get the following wrong: “It is more important to have a small number of users that love you than a lot of users that like you… Eventually what you want of course is a lot of users that really love your product, but that’s almost impossible to do.” In practice you have two choices: 1. Deep and Narrow: “You have a small number of users that really love you and then find out how to find more and more of those users and broaden the appeal of the product.” 2. Shallow and Wide: “You can have a lot of people that sort of use the product once or twice and kind of like it and try to figure out how to get them more engaged over time.” “With high confidence, I can say that you want to start with a small number of users that really love you. Almost all great companies have products that start this way.” And he argues that a good indicator of users loving your product is retention and frequency of use: “In fact, I think this is so important that you actually shouldn’t track absolute growth in number of users in the early days of a startup. You should just track how often they’re using it… That’s a good early indicator of users that love you—better still is them spontaneously telling their friends to buy your product.” Video source: @StanfordOnline

Steve Jobs once said: "Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do." 11 more golden nuggets on decision-making from the founder of the first trillion-dollar company:

Personal energy management is as important as any technical skill.

On this day in 1939, HP launched in this Palo Alto garage. It is considered the birthplace of Silicon Valley.

“Focusing is about saying no.” ~ Steve Jobs

Somewhere in the world, an unknown young person is probably starting a company now that will eventually be as big as today's tech giants.

A masterclass on team alignment by Jeff Bezos