Sergio Zafra

What you do is what matters, not what you think or say or plan

Loved this video mashup. Good luck to all the entrepreneurs doing the hard, meaningful work of building! 1. Value is everything Build something people genuinely want, not something clever. A business only works if it creates value and can capture it. 2. Solve real, painful problems The strongest companies remove friction, save time, or eliminate frustration. If it feels optional, it likely is. 3. Distribution matters as much as product A great product without reach is invisible. Winning companies obsess over how they get in front of people. 4. Focus is a competitive advantage Most people dilute their energy. Great founders concentrate on a few high-leverage moves and ignore the rest. 5. Speed compounds Iteration beats perfection. Launch, learn, refine, repeat, faster than feels comfortable. 6. Simplicity scales The best businesses are easy to understand, easy to use, and easy to explain. Complexity is friction disguised as sophistication. 7. Mindset is not soft, it is structural Resilience, long-term thinking, and tolerance for discomfort are not personality traits, they are requirements. 8. Build for longevity, not noise Short-term hacks create spikes. Enduring companies are built on trust, brand, and consistency. 9. Leverage is the force multiplier that transforms effort into scale. Technology, media, capital, and people multiply output. The goal is not to work harder, but to work in systems that scale. 10. Execution is the separator Ideas are abundant. Relentless, disciplined execution is rare. The essence : find a meaningful problem, solve it simply, distribute it aggressively, and execute with focus over the long term.

There's a physicist at Stanford named Safi Bahcall who modeled this exact principle and the math is wild. He calls it "phase transitions in human networks." When you're stationary, your probability of a lucky event is limited to your existing surface area: the people you already know, the places you already go, the ideas you've already been exposed to. Your opportunity window is fixed. When you move, your collision rate with new nodes in a network increases nonlinearly. Double your movement (new conversations, new cities, new projects) and your probability of a serendipitous encounter doesn't double. It roughly quadruples. Because each new node connects you to their entire network, not just to them. Richard Wiseman ran a 10-year study at the University of Hertfordshire tracking self-described "lucky" and "unlucky" people. The single biggest differentiator wasn't IQ, education, or family money. Lucky people scored significantly higher on one trait: openness to experience. They talked to strangers more, varied their routines more, and said yes to invitations at nearly twice the rate. The "unlucky" group followed the same routes, ate at the same restaurants, and talked to the same 5 people. Their networks were closed loops. No new inputs, no new collisions. Luck isn't random. Luck is surface area. And surface area is a function of movement. The lobster emoji is doing more work than most people realize. Lobsters grow by shedding their shell when it gets too tight. The growth requires a period of total vulnerability. No protection, no armor, soft body exposed to the ocean. That's the cost of movement nobody posts about. You have to be uncomfortable first. The new shell only hardens after you've already moved.

Happy Easter to everyone celebrating #RedTogether

Capitalism creates so there’s more for everyone. Socialism is the weaponization of greed and envy making everyone worse off.

Students who took notes by hand scored ~28% higher on conceptual questions than laptop note-takers. Writing forces your brain to process and compress ideas instead of copying them.

This is the best thing I have ever seen.

Going to leave you with this tonight: The best thing you can do for yourself is actively increase your surface area for luck to hit you. Go outside, travel more, go to new cafes, museums, events, take a new route home, go for hikes, see cities, countrysides, take your notebook, speak to people, ask questions, start businesses - go on more side quests. You can literally just do things, and the more you do, the more serendipity and synchronicity will find you. Night gang.

I use this analogy a lot. This is what a room full of computers looked like in old times:

Some of our best hires were totally unqualified on paper. They always had the same qualities: entrepreneurial, high agency, smart, mission aligned, and they got shit done. If you’re hiring, especially in early stages, seek out & bet on these people. Don’t over-index on resumes.

"The reality is, nobody's hiring." Marathon Founding Partner @gokulr reacts to the Block layoffs and predicts that over the next 18 months, every public company is going to have a 30%+ cut because of AI: "If they don’t, I question their leadership."

1999: Small, lean, quick, fit, profitable. 2026: Small, lean, quick, fit, profitable. The fundamentals are the fundamentals.

i wish there was a way to know you're in the good old days before you've actually left them.

LOLLLLLL yes I bet Iranian New Yorkers are feeling VERY unsafe now that the people who just gunned down 30,000 Iranians in the streets have been killed 😂

Bueno muchachos fue buena la Maestría en Finanzas mientras duró

When you’re 5 years old, a year is 20% of your life. And when you’re 50 years old, a year is 2% of your life. This is an explanation given why time speeds up as you age. It's called Janet's law. It states you’ve experienced roughly half of your perceived by life by 20 years old. Or to put it another way: A summer holiday for a 5 year old feels as long as the 10 years from 40 to 50 years old. But Janet's law can be broken with high agency. You have agency over the speed time. You're not a passive victim. A better explanation of why time speeds up as you age is because you have fewer new experiences as an adult, so your brain deletes the memories. If you take agency over your life, do new things and create memory dividends, time slows down. If you live your life on autopilot, you may die at 80, but feel like you died at 20 years old. If you take agency over your life, you may diet at 80, but feel like you died at 200 years old.

SF is back. Charts of the Week: a16z.news/p/charts-of-th…

you pity the moth confusing a lamp for the moon, yet here you are confusing a screen for the world

Billie Eilish says America is on stolen land. Ok. Who should we give it back to? The Tongva people? Or the people they stole it from?

The day you realize that the world belongs to high energy, risk-takers who are not afraid to expose themselves to uncomfortable positions with uncertain endings is the day everything will start to work in your favor It is a lie that you need to be ultra-intelligent to make it