Summary

Key Quotes

To be a startup, miracles need to happen

Investors are people with more money than time. Employees are people with more time than money. Entrepreneurs are simply the seductive go-between.

Have a mad vision and you're a cook. Get a crowd to believe in it as well and you're a leader

Silicon Valley runs on seductive go-betweens — entrepreneurs who match people with more money than time (investors) to people with more time than money (employees). The game is programmatic ads, credit derivatives for attention, and the relentless climb up the greased pole of Silicon Valley fame and power. Unlike the East Coast, it's more meritocratic — YC goes to bat for founders by threatening VCs, and maniacal focus beats pedigree. But the startup world is also ruthless: acquisition offers are excuses for incumbents to dissect your company, the founder-investor split is zero-sum, and Facebook's culture under Zuckerberg reveals that being a PM is like being a portfolio manager — betting on ideas with little more than intuition. Startups need miracles, and the people who make them happen are driven by revenge, fear, and continuous self-development reflected through the capitalist system.

Key Takeaways

Notes

1: Disturbing the peace

• Credit derivatives: perceived value of an intangible good
• Finance was first to embrace computers due to high stakes
• Big company vs startups: politics vs uncertainty
• Programmatic ads
• Publisher vs advertiser data
• Realtime bidding (RTB)
• “To be a startup, miracles need to happen”
• “Investors are people with more money than time. Employees are people with more time than money. Entrepreneurs are simply the seductive go-between.”

2: Pseudo-randomness

• ROAS
• Big terms: lawyers, loan, etc.
• CEO benevolent dictatorship
• Startups are a people > tech problem
• Scoble the tech influencer
• YC demo night as a lottery
• “Greased pole of Silicon Valley fame and power”: unlike East Coast, more meritocratic
• YC going to bat for founders by threatening VCs
• Maniacal focus
• Importance of revenge, fear
• Any half decent startup will get a dozen acquisition offers, but more an excuse for an incumbent to dissect company on the founder’s time
• Keep acquisition talk siloed
• Misalignment of VC, founder risk outcomes
• Silicon Valley: “continuous self development reflected through the capitalist system”
• Upon acquisition, the split between founders and investors is a zero-sum game, moral choice for founders

3: Move fast and break things

• Facebook’s strong culture (onboarding)
• Zuck is not a product genius but an old school genius
• Immortality project:
• “Have a mad vision and you’re a cook. Get a crowd to believe in it as well and you’re a leader”
• “By imprinting this vision on his disciples, he founded the church of a new religion”
• PMs need to win the trust of their SWEs
• Role of a Facebook PM: “safely ship new product the market seemed to want, leveraging an engineering team that respected my product guidance, and with a plan to iterate the product going forward with metrics to mark our progress”
• Being a PM is like a portfolio manager: betting on sets of ideas with little more than intuition
• Users used to be able to vote on changes to Facebook’s data policy (>= 30% needed)
• Internal rift caused by IPO and disparities in wealth (microcosm of US, world)
• Push-pull between monetization and growth
• Big tech power struggle to control identity, targeting, and attribution
• Joins with other massive data aggregators
• IPO stock pops are bad for existing shareholders
• IAB ad standards

Afterword

• Cambridge Analytica is overblown
• “Capitalism morphs every relationship or avenue of life into a marketing problem”
• Secondary orality / the Gutenberg parenthesis: post-literacy; knowledge is increasingly formed thru the Internet, not literature
  • “Media medievalism”
• Privacy is a very modern concept
• “Ultimately, nobody really cares about privacy, except media elites, underemployed bureaucrats, and zealots who’ve made it a career”
• Zuck’s 2016 manifesto on replacing the church / third space
• “In the future we’re only going to have one sin, and that sin is hypocrisy”
  • The world won’t judge you as long as you embrace your quirks