I think, as a society, we want more variety, we want more choice, we want more weirdness. We don't want to live in a world where there are four or five large tech companies. It'd be great to live in a world where there are a thousand small tech companies. I think in order to create that, we need to literally create and generate more founders. I don't think it's that the world is lacking in sufficient IQ or people that would be smart enough or people that would be gritty enough; I think it's that the world is lacking in a way to kind of radicalize people to pursue their passions.

The world really doesn't care about how much effort you put in; the world really cares about how much output you have. You want to be working hard and smart, not just hard.

In certain properites in the world—the internet being one of those worlds—you can grow much faster than you anticipate. That is the big thing people don't realize. They're sending 10 emails a week, not a 100,000 emails a week. They're trying to grow revenue $1,000 a month, not $1,000,000 a month.

You can kind of imagine the world getting split into two: jobs that have a very clear set of next steps—working in the military, or working at Starbucks, or working as a manager in a large company, clear jobs—and then you got opaque jobs. And I think starting a company is an incredibly opaque job—it's very unclear what to do next. It's very unclear, if you're starting a business, how it's going to become Stripe or how it's going to become Airbnb. That seems like an unfathomable goal.

For wherever you want to be—in terms of revenue, how much money you have, how many users you have—you could take whatever number that is, plug it into a spreadsheet, and just set 5% growth as your target weekly. It starts out really easy, but if you manage to keep the pace, you get to large numbers very quickly.

I find the question of talent to actually be the most important question in the world because it is, at the end of the day, required to do anything interesting.

Humans aren't born with the sense that they can start a company that turns into Amazon. Statistically, the odds are that it won't happen. But when it does happen to someone, it'll be started by the same person as you—as the person listening to this.

I feel like a lot of founders forget that everything big starts small.

I enjoy reading a lot of old news. I find that, at the end of the day, the world moves in cycles, and the tricky thing is the length of the cycle seems to be just ever so slightly longer than the length of the human lifespan—so it seems really new and novel to us, but it's exactly what people went through in prior times. And we don't read old news because I don't know why—new news seems more important. I find old news is a great decoder ring to life.

In my view, at the end of the day, when you're betting on a founder, especially if the market's not super clear, what you're trying to do is you're trying to predict that that particular person will have as many shots on goal as possible.

For me, being able to produce something that other people find worthwhile, that other people find useful—be that an email, a piece of software, anything really—that, for me, is joy.

We can kind of construe two different styles of jobs—maybe jobs where the delta between the median and the tail is maybe 10% or 20%, so like a cab driver. The best taxi driver in New York City is going to be 15% better than the median, but in a creative pursuit, or in investing, or software engineering, the tail is literally 10 times.

I think if we're able to build a reliable metric for day-to-day progress, it will not only be a great service for creating more startups, but I think it'll be a great thing for productivity—you don't improve what you don't measure.

There are thousands of amazing companies—your next Stripe, Facebook Pinterest, Snapchat, whatever—that are GitHub repos with 10 commits in them where the person then gave up because they lost motivation.

There is one question that Pioneer asks that's been, to us, the most revealing question, period ... 'What is something weird or unusual you built or did early on in life?'

Over the course of a couple of decades, centuries, a bunch of different psychometric techniques have been discussed. Myers-Briggs is a tremendously popular one that, in my personal and very humble opinion, is horribly inaccurate and doesn't regress to anything really material.

GPT-3 is a machine learning model that's been developed by OpenAI that's achieved a remarkable advance in the field of natural language understanding. From writing essays to summarizing text to doing question-answering, GPT-3 is not quite like a human, but it's surprisingly close.

We are the average of the people we spend time with, and you want to figure out ways to spend time with great people to increase your average.

There are a lot of questions you can't really ask people directly when you're talking to them in interviews or social settings... and I find their opinion on movies to be something that lets you have that conversation in a fairly coded way.