Category: Notes

Platforms of any type that have a data or informational advantage and network effect tend to vertically integrate. Vertical integration might be a necessary enabler of increasing network effects.

– Brad Slingerlend

The example of great scientists is the light which guides all workers in science, but we must guard against being blinded by it. There has been too much talk about the flash of discovery, and this has tended to obscure the fact that discoveries, however great, can only give effect to some intrinsic potentiality of the intellectual situation in which scientists find themselves.

– Michael Polanyi

Being an entrepreneur is hard. Having supportive and caring investors helps.

– Fred Wilson

We make no heroic assumptions in our analysis, hoping, instead, that by compounding multiple conservative assumptions, we will create such a substantial margin of safety that a lot can go wrong without impairing our capital much or even at all. We never invest just to invest and don’t bet blindly on mean reversion or on historical relationships holding up. Our settings are permanently turned to “risk off.”

– Seth Klarman

Accepting that we cannot predict the future — i.e., that there will always be unexpected and highly consequential events — is the first step in becoming less fragile and more adaptable. People should be highly skeptical of anyone’s, including their own, ability to predict the future, and instead pursue strategies that can survive whatever may occur.

– Seth Klarman

I taught myself how to breathe slower. How to slow things down. How to not answer somebody instantaneously. You can always move slower. The world will basically wait for you if you’re deciding something consequential. And you can always say, “I’d like to think about that a little bit.” So the only reason to feel panicked is if you’re panicking yourself, and that’s your fault. You don’t have to do that. You can take your time, you can weigh things. It’s very infrequently that the timing has to be instantaneous.

– Stephen Schwarzman

Steve had told me back in 1998 that the only reason for companies to exist was to build products; he was now using his company to build more than just products. Apple was now creating a holistic customer experience.

– Brent Schlender & Rick Tetzeli, Becoming Steve Jobs

Risk is what’s left over after you think you’ve thought of everything.

– Carl Richards

What an astonishing thing a book is. One glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person — maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.

– Carl Sagan