Startups that grow into transformative companies do two things. Number one: They nail the basics. Number two: They cultivate the right habits—their core operating principles. The first is mandatory. If you don't get the basics right, in all probability, your company won't succeed.

When I make a new investment, I really want half of VCs to think I'm crazy and laugh at the investment. I don't want 100% to laugh necessarily because then I might actually be missing something ... But if none of them are laughing or 20%, then I'm probably not taking enough risk, and it's probably not a differentiated investment.

When growth is in your title, you better be growing, or you're not doing your job right ... There's a lot of accountability in that role.

The really great founders don't ask you 'Should I do A or B?' ... What they actually say to you—and this is almost verbatim—will be 'What's the best conceptual way to approach this problem? Can you give me a framework for deciding between A and B?'

Capital can be a competitive weapon. You have to be good at fundraising if you're going to be doing a startup in a competitive space. If you're going to try to build something at scale and speed, you can't have your competitors out-raise you. It's going to make it very hard for you. If you're not great at fundraising today, you need to get excellent at it really quickly.

There are 13 ways of doing anything; 11 of them will work. Just pick one and do it. The best founders avoid over-analyzing. As a startup, you don't have time, and the result will most likely be marginal. Pick a way and do it. Be consistently decisive.

I often ask founding teams, 'Do you use your product? How much do you love your product? Is it embodying your habits?' ... In the consumer world, that's foundational. If you don't love your product and use it all the time and haven't shifted over completely... it's going to be really hard for you to convince others to.

As a CEO, you are storyteller in chief. Telling your story in compelling ways and adapting that story to the audience and the moment is your most important job.

Of the companies I've hands-on worked [with] in the early days of bringing them to market, I think five of them reached billion-dollar plus valuations, and I would say, in each of those companies, that the most important growth driver was eventually strong, organic word-of-mouth.

That paper of Turing's is famous for what we call the Turing test, which is this idea that you can determine whether a machine is intelligent by having a conversation with it. And I believe exactly the opposite... A real true AI would be intelligent enough not to reveal its intelligence to us.

A product is not just the code ... Pushing code to production is not a launch; a launch is the point at which your target audience actually understands what you have to offer and why it matters to them.

The current pandemic crisis... it's going to push biotechnology the same way World War II pushed physics. Everybody's working on this biological problem, and that, in the end, will have all sorts of secondary effects.

I try to encourage my team to be wrong at least 50% of the time. If you're right too often, it means you haven't tried things that are sufficiently interesting.

To be an investor, one has to, by definition, see things that others don't see and appreciate them before other people do.

The strategy for building a successful platform is different from building a successful infrastructure company. Many people confuse the two and pursue the wrong approach as a company.

The more stress you have in your life, the better—the healthier you are, the wealthier you are, the happier you are.

There are very few ideas that have never been tried before. It's all about getting the right product at the right time with the right trend and wave.

It's good to recognize that this [COVID-19] is a wildly different time. Only super crazy people think that two months from now, it'll be back to where it was in January 2020. That's the insane point of view.

When the name of your company and your brand name become shorthand for the entire market category, like Google did with search and now Uber is for ride-sharing, it becomes an incredibly powerful defensive weapon and a growth mechanism.

I think there are a lot of areas where startups benefit a lot from overconfidence ... Being overconfident about your own intuitions about human behavior, I think, is very unhealthy.