Top 66 Quotes & Sayings by Chamath Palihapitiya
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American businessman Chamath Palihapitiya.
Last updated on September 17, 2024.
We curate our lives around this perceived sense of perfection, because we get rewarded in these short term signals: Hearts, likes, thumbs up. We conflate that with value, and we conflate it with truth, and instead, what it really is is fake, brittle popularity that's short term and leaves you even more vacant and empty before you did it.
Today we live in a world now where it is easy to confuse truth and popularity. And you can use money to amplify whatever you believe and get people to believe what is popular is now truthful. And what is not popular may not be truthful.
I was raised in a house where my mom was the primary breadwinner. It was a dysfunctional house, but she showed tremendous resilience.
Betting against entrepreneurs who are changing the world has never been a profitable endeavor.
Zuck is unemotional. He doesn't get influenced by ego.
Companies are transcending power now. We are becoming the eminent vehicles for change and influence, and capital structures that matter. If companies shut down, the stock market would collapse.
All these social media sites allow us to confuse truth and popularity. That has to be fixed. Because every normal citizen has a right to know what is factual versus what is amplified by good actors or bad actors.
Not everybody is right all the time.
I wish I had invested in the series A of Snapchat and Uber.
I'm a living testament to the value of immigration. I escaped a civil war, and I came to Canada as a refugee, and they gave my family protection. I did my best to pay that country back, and I think I did that.
There's a handful of exceptionally good companies, but there's always one company that's the best.
If you're trying to get to profitability by lowering costs as a startup, then you are in a very precarious and difficult position.
Early traction of Tesla is tracking very closely to Apple.
Being a tech company has to be about a pattern of repetitive innovation.
You have to respect people for who they are on a basic level.
I've found that a lot of successful poker players grew up poor. And I'm convinced that poor people have a risk tolerance that rich people don't have because poor people fundamentally don't value money that much because they're used to not having it.
None of us are going to fix governance; it may just be beyond repair. But you can fix capitalism. And the reason you can fix capitalism - It is inherently numerical, and as a result, it is inherently objective. It can be done objectively.
When Facebook went public, they didn't have a particularly strong model of governance.
The government - they're completely useless.
I think when you think about immigration, what we need to do is realize that that human capital, if put in a place to succeed, will literally sacrifice everything.
The point of Silicon Valley, at least when I moved here, was we're all trying to do stuff, and none of us quite felt like we fit in anywhere else. But we were all trying to do good things. And the money was just the byproduct of good things.
When I left Facebook, I left an enormous amount of equity on the table. I thought, 'I don't want to be a slave to money. I want to be a slave to something bigger: an ambition, a goal.'
It's important to understand the compensation equation that a CEO and a founder has with his or her employees.
One of the things I have known my entire life is that I have an innate capability for making money.
I wasn't blessed with the natural ability to rein myself in.
I think what IBM is excellent at is using their sales and marketing infrastructure to convince people who have asymmetrically less knowledge to pay for something.
The goal of a private company is, first, zero to one: Get past the product-market fit; figure out whether people actually care about what you're trying to build and someone will pay you money for that. That's the zero to one problem.
Good investors have to choose how to allocate their mind share with the precious capital they have.
We need to divorce ourselves from venture capital as an occupation and focus on using capital as a way to take really big bets on things that just seem totally audacious.
Facebook could have gone public whenever it wanted. We decided the right time was 2012. It could have easily been 2010 or 2014.
Startups should be - if you graph their financial performance, it should be what's called a J curve. You start out at zero. you're not making any money; you're not losing any money.
I want children who can make eye contact. I want children who know how to resolve conflicts with their peers. I want children who understand the dynamics of interpersonal relationships that are physical and tactile. I do not want children that only know how to interface with the world through a screen.
My mom was a nurse, and my dad worked in the Health Ministry as a civil servant. When I was 6 years old, my dad got a job at the Sri Lankan High Commission in Canada, so we moved there.
Valuable companies take decades to build.
Here's the thing - if you want to do good things in the world, there's just only so much time that one can spend being glass half empty.
All of the business of selling apps and selling subscriptions is extremely cruelly misunderstood, including by me.
You need to use data science and machine learning to get the ground truth of what's happening inside of a company.
Much like Warren Buffett has said very famously - he doesn't buy technology stocks because he doesn't understand them- I will not buy consumer goods companies because I do not understand them.
I feel like a lot of entrepreneurs hear all this talk about profitability and realize they need to lower their burn. So, they just start chopping off perks and people.
At some point, Apple will become much more aggressive and much more daring in taking their brand and capital to really reshaping markets.
Your job as a smart investor is to separate the facts and the news from the fiction and the noise.
Half the population of the entire world is women, and people are somehow shocked that this entire half is as capable as the other half.
Something like bitcoin is really important because it is not correlated to the rest of the market.
I was born in Sri Lanka.
We need to go after cancer, diabetes, climate change, the substantive problems of the world that, if were solved, would create immense wealth and opportunity that would cascade across countries.
VC has always been this high-touch, in-your-face-type business.
If the government shuts down, nothing happens, and we all move on, because it just doesn't matter. Stasis in the government is actually good for all of us.
My first job was at a Burger King.
I think Apple is a productive cash machine.
As you start the company, you start spending spending spending ahead of revenue but then you come out of it and very quickly you should become a company that spends less than it makes. And what I mean by very quickly, is that window of time should be in that 6 to 8 year time frame. And the reason is because if you build your business model correctly it's almost unavoidable.
The reason to go public is that it is a massive branding, marketing, credibility, trust-building exercise with your customers, and then it allows you to consolidate power and scale and market share. Do we want to be a huge company with a huge impact? If the answer to that is yes, the only way that that happens is by going public. It is effectively a branding event that catalyzes interest. It helps with recruiting, it helps with marketing, it helps with sales. It just helps on many dimensions. I think it's basically a litmus test for the CEO's ambition.
If you're trying to get to profitability by lowering costs as a startup then you are in a very precarious and difficult position. You need to grow through profitability.
I think the reality is that it's never been a better time to be an entrepreneur, it's never been a better time to work at a startup. You work at a really intellectually free environment, you get to work with people who are like-minded, it's very energetic. It's wonderful.
I think unfortunately in this gold rush mentality that we've been in for the last years there has been not enough focus on business model quality. So when push comes to shove, there actually aren't that many great businesses that can go public. Because I think if you're going to thrive as a public company, it presupposes that you make more money than you spend.
What you should be in a rush for isn't necessarily the immediate monetary return, but it's to know that this equation existing between an employee and a company is being honored. What's the equation? I'm going to give you my most precious thing that I have - my time and my reputation. That's what the employee says. And the company says I'm going to take your time and your reputation and direct it at things that we believe collectively have a huge impact opportunity to do something extremely positive. And that positivity will get measured in impact and also economic upside.
The goal of a private company is, first, zero to one. Get past the product market fit, figure out whether people actually care about what you're trying to build and someone will pay you money for that. That's the zero to one problem. So scaling, one through N, is figuring out can you do that at scale and how big is the scale. And when people pay you more than what it costs for you to make it, does that equation end up leaving you with money left over, i.e. profits.
If you look at the ecosystem, entrepreneurs as a class have gotten younger, younger, and younger. They also as a class have become less and less and less experienced. The good part about that is that you're unlocking this ability to start a company to so many more people. That's an amazing positive. The negative is they're coming to that job with dramatically less experience than they've ever had. So there needs to be someone around the table that can then help them.
Startups should be, if you graph their financial performance, it should be what's called a J curve. You start out at zero, you're not making any money, you're not losing any money.
If the investors themselves are not sophisticated, if they themselves are not putting a lot of their own money to work, if they themselves don't understand the continuum of capital and how different parts of the capital structures react differently, then they're basically worthless. They're not going to give great advice to these entrepreneurs who then need it. So that is unfortunately the cycle we're in and we have to break the cycle.
It's OK, by the way, that it takes 10 years for you to make "money." Since when was it that being in your mid-30s to make a few hundred thousand dollars or a million dollars was like egregiously unfair? I think we have to have a sense of perspective here. We're all going to live into our 80s or 90s. So what is everybody in such a rush for?
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