Sam Weinstein

.@naval on Tech Education: “Technology is a form of leverage—and it's the ultimate form of leverage. If I'm a programmer, what people don't realize is that I have a million robots working for me. If I come up with an idea, I code that idea up, and now a million robots carry that idea. They're just sitting in a data center—for heat, efficiency, and space reasons—loaned to me by Amazon through AWS, who takes a small cut. That leverage means that if I decide on the right thing to do versus the wrong thing to do, I can make $100 million—or zero. It's a very wide swing. Someone who isn't leveraged through technology doesn't have that force multiplier. Someone working in a traditional industry doesn't have that same advantage. When we talk about the distribution of capital, we're used to thinking of money as the main source of capital. Before that, the main source of capital was people. How many people are working for you? That's why older generations tend to be impressed by how many employees you have. People who are a little more savvy ask how much money you're managing or how much revenue you're doing. But the correct question is: How many robots are working for you? How many programmers are working for you? How many machines are working for you? Because those are the ultimate force multipliers. So I believe the way forward is through technology education. Where technology education falls down is that it's really popular to preach education for kids. Everybody wants to educate kids—because kids can't talk back. They have no choice. Go to school. Sit down. Shut up. Learn. But what about adults? We have this myth that adults can't be educated. That adults either self-educate or they can't be educated at all. We believe that if you're 45 years old and you lose your job because your factory shuts down, you're done. Your only options are: Society has to bail you out because you're destitute. Or we artificially preserve your job through tariffs, trade barriers, or tax breaks—even though the world no longer needs that job. Instead, I think we need a culture of adult education. Imagine a model where every four years it was socially acceptable—and financially supported—for you to go back to school for a year. You'd say: "This is my school year." Maybe this year you're going to learn electronics. You spend a year learning electronics. You could be 54 years old and learning electronics. That should be a normal part of society. We need continuous education built into society because the leverage you're craving is actually permissionless. It's available to everybody. But it's knowledge-based. The gate isn't a banker sitting on a pile of money. The gate is knowledge. It's building of that knowledge. And the sharing of that knowledge.”

In magic and sales, perception is reality.

.@davidsenra @eglyman on Finding High Agency People: “You should just find the highest agency person possible—for what you're trying to do inside your company. When hiring, there are two things I'm generally looking for. First, I agree with @tobi, evidence of a spike or some level of exceptional drive. There are many people who can be top 1% or 0.1% in some field. But if they are, there's usually evidence somewhere in their past. At Ramp, we found engineers because when they were 15 years old, they were playing 80–100 hours a week of Minecraft. Some were known for building private Minecraft servers that were so entertaining other kids wanted to play them. One of them paid his way through college by making something entertaining. He became a small business person when he was quite literally very small. Traditional hiring would have missed these people. They'd say: "They don't have a college degree. They aren't well-rounded." But they had incredible focus and drive. They were obsessive. Detailed. They were able to bend the API to do things we didn't know it could do because they were so discerning. You can often find people with incredible spikes. Sometimes it's through video games. Sometimes it's through sports. Sometimes it's through people who don't have the typical credentials but are out there making incredible work. I'm less interested in the resume. I'm far more interested in proof of work. It can be an award. It can be something you built. It can be a body of work that makes you say: "This is electric." Look for where people are producing interesting achievements, awards, and bodies of work. The resume tells you what someone has done. Proof of work tells you who they are.”

The result of math problems isn’t a grade. It’s proof of work.

Future resumes will just be who’s best on aux.

.@markpinc on Unlocking New Markets: “Games were not working on the Facebook ecosystem. I did it because I saw this ocean. I saw two oceans: social networking and video games. I was thinking, "If this works, it opens a little crack into mass-market casual gaming." One of the things I talk about in my book that I love — and I encourage people to consider — is: Find a mature market that's over. A market that's done. Dead. Played out. Online dating. eBay listings. Analog businesses that aren't attractive. Markets that VCs won't fund. They're red oceans. They're not growth markets. Find a market like that, but it has a lot of money in it and proven behavior. Video gaming was that. In 2007, video gaming was a $23 billion industry. It was barely growing. It wasn't even a top 10 behavior on the consumer web. It was stupid to go into. It was not fundable. Fast forward 19 years. It's a $283 billion industry. That was "not fundable." "Not growing." "Mature." Perfect. Because if you can find a new dimension that sparks people, you don't have to prove anyone wants it. You don't have to prove they'll spend money. The market already exists. You just have to unlock a new behavior. That was Google with search. And that was how I was thinking when I started Zynga. The year before, I was trying to buy CNET because I needed a gigantic captive consumer audience to test ideas like gaming. I needed to solve distribution. Consumer was not investable because of distribution. Today, consumer is not investable because of distribution. It's the perfect parallel. The new thing then was social networking. The new thing today is AI and agents. It's like a mirror in time. We are living in 2007. Consumer is not investable. Do consumer. The resume for me in consumer is traction. I cold mailed Shane on poltymarket when they broke through. So I would pay attention to anyone who’s getting a lot of heat in consumer because it’s so broken and rare.”

.@markpinc on Scaling FarmVille: “All I cared about was winning. I hired a PR firm to keep us out of the press to dampen down the story. We had figured something out with user pay, and I didn't want to announce it to the world. We were just trying to win as many sprints as we could before inviting a lot of competition. We were buying a company every month. A lot of the companies we bought—no one else was bidding on them. You bought the company that became FarmVille, right? Well, not really. The real story is that I couldn't get anyone at Zynga to build FarmVille because they thought it wasn't cool. They wanted to build CoasterVille, Cafe World, and nobody in video gaming wanted to make a farm simulation game. There was nothing less cool. I wasn't from video gaming. I had a farm fantasy. I wanted to create Pincus Valley Ranch and have our vegetables served at Chez Panisse. I have four sisters, and I felt like I really connect with middle-aged women. I didn't want Twitch, fast-moving games. I wanted something I didn't have to pay any attention to. I wanted a farm. I thought that would be the game that could appeal to anyone in the world because nobody needed instructions on how to play. Bing won't admit it, but he tried to convince me not to build it, even from a business standpoint. He said, "Farm simulations never do well, Mark." I finally bought this little failed Flash gaming company because they had four Flash engineers. Then I put them and four or five other people in an alcove outside my office and checked in with them every day. We built FarmVille together in six weeks. We were going to buy the company that made FarmTown, but the guy doubled the price from $40 million to $80 million. He had the right to. He was winning. But we were building our own version. Our game wasn't Proven Better New. It was Proven Better Less. Our crops were better. Our art and math were better. We had more polish. And we took out the stranger danger part. He had ways to meet other community members, and we thought our users didn't want that. I had this tough call with him on Friday. I said, "I don't think this is going to work. We're not going to buy you." Our team said, "Mark, this is ready to go." So on Sunday we turned on FarmVille. It was one of those lightning-in-a-bottle moments. 171,000 installs the first day. No marketing. It was just viral. By the end of the first week, we were doing one million installs a day. We passed FarmTown within three or four weeks. FarmVille peaked at around 30–32 million daily active users. At its peak, 15–20% of people on Facebook had used it. FarmVille 2 eventually did over $1 billion in revenue. At the time, no one thought a casual video game could do over a billion dollars. I remember explaining it to Fidelity. I said, "That's going to be normal." "$3 million a day, baby. That's going to be the new benchmark for a good game." But I hired a PR firm because I didn't want my "fur coat moment." I didn't want to be on the cover of Fortune. The fur coat moment came from American Gangster, where he's sitting front row at a boxing match in a fur coat, ends up on the front page of the New York Times, and everything goes downhill. I didn't want to be on the front page of anything. I was the equivalent of that. A 41-year-old retired guy who wasn't supposed to be doing anything important. People were writing articles asking, "Can you back a founder over 30 in consumer?" I didn't fit the narrative. I was a counterfactual. Consumer wasn't supposed to be working. So our financial performance was a trade secret. I wouldn't tell investors. I said: "I'll tell you a price. You decide if you want to invest. Afterwards, I'll show you our financials. If you don't like it, you can get out." Which, obviously, made people want to invest more. We went public after four years. We had over a billion dollars in cash on our balance sheet. We had never spent a dollar of the capital we raised. The year before we went public, I think we did around $450 million in free cash flow. My point is: I let our story be told by our competitors and the press. I didn't talk to investors. Zynga was nuanced, so I let the story go out that we were making all our money from advertising. But it was really user pay. I didn't want to come out and say, "No, you're wrong." Then Michael Arrington wrote a whole TechCrunch series called "Scamville." They said we must be making all our money from scammy ads. But that wasn't true. We were making money from our whales. Then Arrington played CityVille. He spent $550 in the game. And he said: "I'm so sorry. I was wrong. I get it why adults would spend money in your games now." At the time, people thought there was no way adults would pay money for virtual items. But we had a nurse in Indiana spending a couple thousand dollars a month on FarmVille. Maybe her husband spent more on fishing, skiing, or hunting. But this was her hobby. So we reframed this as: We're helping to nurture a hobby somebody has, and this is a small amount to spend on a hobby. Whereas for a video game, it seemed like a lot. I didn't do myself any favors. I didn't go on press tours. I didn't talk to investors. I said: "I'm going to be selfish to our users and our employees." "My kids, my players, my employees." Everyone else told the story. We fired a lot of people, and they were out telling our story. We had a meritocracy. Every quarter, we forced managers to rate 10% of their team as low performers. If you were low two quarters in a row, you were fired without question or exception. The video game industry hated me. I was like Darth Vader. They said: "You're not real games. We're never going to give you an award or invite you to GDC." I said: "That's cool. None of my users go to GDC." It was never cool to say: "I love FarmVille." But somehow everybody was playing. That was the problem. Don't look for respect from your peers. If you're doing something different, people around you won't always want to see you succeed. Because your success forces them to question their own choices. They think: "I paid all these dues. You don't get to make it without paying the same dues." If you're truly ambitious: Burn your resume.”

@DavidDeutschOxf: “You've said that people are valuable because they are different. Could you elaborate on that in relation to comparative advantage? How can we better understand and harness human uniqueness?” “Yeah. So as you began the question I was about to say, well, in the simple case there is a principle of comparative advantage. But it extends far beyond that because comparative advantage exists in a model where preferences are constant, where the participants are just exchanging things and making the knowledge to satisfy the other person's wants. But the deeper thing that is going on is that we are discovering new wants and new criteria and new preferences, and that is an inherently creative process. And that is why the nature of humans is central to that process. You could program robots and LLMs to enact a market economy, but only up to the point where they are sort of satisfying fixed preferences. Where they evolve new preferences, better preferences, what counts as better, what counts as counting as better, there you need an AGI or a GI such as a human or an AGI. And that is why they are valuable.”

@DavidDeutschOxf: “Playing video games is indistinguishable from doing scientific research. What did you mean by that? "Well, there is only one successful kind of thinking and that's what Popper delineated: conjecture and criticism. Whenever a mind makes progress at anything, it must be doing that. It must be doing conjecture and criticism. Now when you're making your way through a video game and successfully reach the end and kill the final boss, what you have done along all that path is successful. If you didn't know it before, you know it now. It must have happened by the Popperian method and therefore it must be the same as doing science. The first time I realized this was when I realized that Popper was saying that when you learn something, anything from anybody, you are creating it anew yourself. That's his demolition of the bucket theory of the mind. There's no way of transferring knowledge into a human. It must be the same because it can succeed. One of my favorite David Deutsch quotes: "Chemical elements are Pokémon. There's no difference." What did you mean by that? "I would be surprised if this wasn't actually in the minds of the designers. Originally at the invention of Pokémon there were 150 Pokémon. There are only 100 elements. So chemistry is easier than Pokémon. They come in groups which can be ordered both horizontally and vertically. The vertical ordering is more binding, but the horizontal ordering is subtle and it's exactly like chemical elements. They each have their properties, and the properties all have numerical attributes like in chemistry you have density, electronegativity, and so on. I remember because as a child I was obsessed with chemistry before I was obsessed with physics. I can see the way I thought about the elements, the way I eagerly looked up the properties of elements I'd never heard of and then saw the connection with others. Marveling at the fact that fluorine was more powerful than chlorine. Fluorine is probably every chemistry addict's favorite element. The two obsessions are the same."”

@Trace_Cohen @kbalian90 Theatre kid

@kbalian90 Why is he there?

BREAKING: U.S Democratic Representative Ro Khanna has become the first American congressman in history to be detained by Israeli settlers while on a visit to the West Bank.

The studio is the new classroom.

The democratization of technology allows anyone to be a creator, entrepreneur, scientist. The future is brighter.

The next stage of the web is the decentralized creator economy.

Be a creator and you won’t have to worry about jobs, careers, and AI.

Rising junior Eitan Zarin on why he chose STEM at UATX.

.@naval on Competition and Authenticity: “Competition is this terrible trap you can fall into. A lot of it comes through what René Girard, the French philosopher and polymath, called mimetic theory. Most of your desires are actually copied from the people around you. From a very young age, you take cues from others about what to want and what to pursue. The obvious example is advertising. But the more subtle version is: "I went to law school. Everyone around me is competing for that law clerkship with the Supreme Court Justice. So I assume that's the highest calling." But maybe the right answer for me was to become a food entrepreneur. I'm not even considering it because I'm surrounded by law students competing with each other. That's how you get sucked into competition. The way to escape competition is through authenticity. Because no one can compete with you on being you. No one can compete with your business on doing what it uniquely does. And that's the beauty of the internet. The internet allows you—no matter how strange, odd, weird, or specific you are—to find your tribe. You can be obsessed with Legos as an adult, and I guarantee there are enough Lego collectors online that you can make a fortune collecting and building Legos. The most successful entrepreneurs are extremely authentic to who they are and what they uniquely can do. As a result, they don't really operate in competition. I've learned this the hard way because I'm actually a very competitive person. Earlier in my Silicon Valley career, I focused heavily on my competition. One of the companies I started was Epinions, which became an online comparison shopping site. Our fierce competitors were BizRate, Nextag, PriceGrabber, and others. We competed intensely. But it was completely wasted time. It turned out that all retail was won by Amazon. And all the reviews we were working on should have gone local instead of online price comparison. Because we were focused on competition, we actually did the wrong things. If we had stayed authentic to what we were really focused on—reviews—we might have become Yelp. Competition can suck you in and make you think it's reality. But it's often not. The easiest way to see this: Think of any human being you know. Now imagine if that person wasn't in your life. Who would replace them? Who would provide the same personality, intelligence, insight, behaviors, emotional support, and actions? The answer is nobody. Every human being is so unique that there is no substitute for them. Parents understand this. You can have three kids, and they're all completely different. Where did that come from? Companies are the same because companies are just collections of humans. When you're competing, you're assuming a similarity that doesn't actually exist. Consumers are starving for authenticity. They want brands that are unique. Brands that are authentic to the founder. Brands expressing something they can't find anywhere else. People don't want just another Starbucks. They want the local, unique place. Every time you walk into a store, you look for what's different. What's unique? This is the result of wealth, taste, technology, and individualization. We're moving away from a factory-based industrial world built in the 1800s, where one-size-fits-all was optimized for efficiency. We're moving toward a boutique, artisanal world where 7 billion people will want 7 billion products. Competition exists. I'm not saying it doesn't. But it exists most strongly in artificial human-made games like sports and politics—where for one person to be above another, someone else has to be below. Those are status games. But when it comes to creating new things—ideas, books, products, companies—competition disappears. No two authors truly compete with each other. You can't replace one author's book with another because each is an authentic expression of who that person is. All products and services are moving in that direction. Don't try to compete. Become a market of one.”

.@naval on Creativity: “Technology is a tool. You can use it for anything. You can use it for consciousness. You can use it for unconsciousness. Social media brings people together—but it can also bring people together to form digital mobs and fight each other. It can play on both sides. Unfortunately, I think that in many cases, the destructive power of technology arrives before the creative power. But the creative capabilities of technology are actually unlimited. The destructive side has a limited downside. What happens when you destroy something? It ends. But when you create something, it's almost impossible to predict the levels it can reach. No one sitting around in Jesus' time, for example, could have predicted anything like what is happening here today. It would have been impossible. Because the ability to combine, recombine, and create new things—new forms of life, new systems, and new civilizations—is unlimited. But if you want to talk about destruction, it always ends the same way. It's just barren.”

@Mahesh_Lambe @chamath True x.com/jasonfreedman/…

@chamath obsess with agency and adoption, not agents and tools.

Using AI to code, without a clear intent upfront, is just AI slop waiting to happen.

.@naval on Tech Education: “Technology is a form of leverage—and it's the ultimate form of leverage. If I'm a programmer, what people don't realize is that I have a million robots working for me. If I come up with an idea, I code that idea up, and now a million robots carry that idea. They're just sitting in a data center—for heat, efficiency, and space reasons—loaned to me by Amazon through AWS, who takes a small cut. That leverage means that if I decide on the right thing to do versus the wrong thing to do, I can make $100 million—or zero. It's a very wide swing. Someone who isn't leveraged through technology doesn't have that force multiplier. Someone working in a traditional industry doesn't have that same advantage. When we talk about the distribution of capital, we're used to thinking of money as the main source of capital. Before that, the main source of capital was people. How many people are working for you? That's why older generations tend to be impressed by how many employees you have. People who are a little more savvy ask how much money you're managing or how much revenue you're doing. But the correct question is: How many robots are working for you? How many programmers are working for you? How many machines are working for you? Because those are the ultimate force multipliers. So I believe the way forward is through technology education. Where technology education falls down is that it's really popular to preach education for kids. Everybody wants to educate kids—because kids can't talk back. They have no choice. Go to school. Sit down. Shut up. Learn. But what about adults? We have this myth that adults can't be educated. That adults either self-educate or they can't be educated at all. We believe that if you're 45 years old and you lose your job because your factory shuts down, you're done. Your only options are: Society has to bail you out because you're destitute. Or we artificially preserve your job through tariffs, trade barriers, or tax breaks—even though the world no longer needs that job. Instead, I think we need a culture of adult education. Imagine a model where every four years it was socially acceptable—and financially supported—for you to go back to school for a year. You'd say: "This is my school year." Maybe this year you're going to learn electronics. You spend a year learning electronics. You could be 54 years old and learning electronics. That should be a normal part of society. We need continuous education built into society because the leverage you're craving is actually permissionless. It's available to everybody. But it's knowledge-based. The gate isn't a banker sitting on a pile of money. The gate is knowledge. It's building of that knowledge. And the sharing of that knowledge.”