Andrew Yang Quotes

Relationships have changed as well. Gender imbalances on many campuses — women now outnumber men 57 percent to 43 percent in college nationally — have helped lead to a “hookup culture” that erodes a sense of connection. One in three students say that their intimate relationships have been “traumatic” or “very difficult to handle,” and 10 percent say that they’ve been sexually coerced or assaulted in the past year. The academic Lisa Wade describes an environment where the prevailing norm is to downgrade your partner for days afterward to make sure that they don’t “catch feelings.” What was a couple generations ago an environment to find love and maybe even a partner is now a place where you prove yourself detached enough to ignore someone the next day.

It is impossible to overstate the importance of truck drivers to regional economies around the country.

Our lack of family leave for new parents is barbaric, antifamily, sexist, regressive, economically irrational, and just plain stupid.

College is being dramatically overprescribed and oversold as the answer to all of our job-related economic problems.

Capital doesn’t care about us.

On the flip side, it’s brutal trying to pull together the right people if you have someone around early on who doesn’t generate a high degree of confidence, enthusiasm, and respect. Cultures get built from the beginning, and whoever joins a company takes cues from whoever’s already there.

In 2009, Zeke and I decided to entertain suitors, in large part because Zeke’s charter school, the Equity Project, was in full swing.* It wasn’t an easy decision, but we felt that having a well-resourced parent would ensure that the company would thrive in the long term. After a competitive bidding process, we agreed to be acquired by Kaplan and the Washington Post Company in December of that year. I remember the day vividly. After all the documents were signed, I sat there and waited for the transfer to clear. I was sitting at my web browser, hitting refresh over and over again until it cleared in the late afternoon. And there it was. I let out a “Yeah!” and emerged from my office. I walked around dispensing checks to employees, as we had set aside a bonus pool for both staff and instructors. It’s a lot of fun giving away money. I was Asian Santa Claus for a day. I went home for the holidays the following week. At this point my parents were quite pleased with me; my assuming the mortgage on their apartment likely had something to do with that. I zeroed out my student loans that week too. I’d gone from scrapping and scrimping for almost a decade to being a thirty-four-year-old millionaire.

I propose an evolution of our current system of corporate capitalism to one that I call human-centered capitalism, or human capitalism for short. Human capitalism has three core tenets: Humanity is more important than money. The unit of an economy is each person, not each dollar. Markets exist to serve our common goals and interests.

The ratio of CEO to worker pay rose from 20 to 1 in 1965 to 271 to 1 in 2016.

All Bowser players are carried.

I learned a lot from the party business — it’s great training for running a business in general. Among the lessons I learned: • The default number of attendees is zero. You get out what you put in. • The personal touch is always best. If you write or call people individually they’ll come. • Don’t throw parties on Mondays or Tuesdays. • Choose your partners wisely. • The best way to get others to come to your party is to go to their parties. Reciprocity rules.* • It’s way easier to invite someone to a party and get them to come than it is to get a date with them. • Don’t save free drink tickets until the end of the night. Use them as soon as possible. • Nothing makes someone happier than skipping a line. • If a party gets too crowded, some people will leave. • When presented with an opportunity to be a jerk or let it go, let it go. • People get irrationally possessive and touchy about free gift bags. • If no one has shown up in the first hour, don’t worry — they’ll show. I got a great education and had some amazing times. If you want to throw a big party, give this a try — find a few people you like and respect but that you’re not that close friends with — people who have networks that are different from the ones you have. Convince them to cohost a party with you. If that works, you’ll be off to the races.

Our culture of achievement has grown to emphasize visions of success that are, for the most part, fairly predictable. Cole skipped a couple of steps. The basic plan is to go to Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, or the like, then maybe to a top-ranked business school, then back to banking, consulting, private equity, hedge funds, or a name-brand tech company. Or maybe go from law school to top firm to partner or in house at an investment firm, and live in New York, San Francisco, Boston, or Washington, DC.* Again, these institutions and roles are necessary, and they’re natural developments in our economy. We need them. But we need people doing other things too. We need people willing to take risks and, yes, to occasionally fail. Like real-world consequences fail. We need people committed over extended periods of time to creating value, no matter how hard that is. We need people who care deeply about the work they’re doing. Imagine someone who you think could stand to take on some risk — someone well educated who would always have something to fall back on, whose family might have some resources so he would be unlikely to starve. And this person would probably be young and free of major life obligations. Someone sort of like . . . Cole. What’s interesting is that many of the people I meet who are young, highly educated, and from good families are among the most risk-averse. They feel like they need to be making progress along a ladder with each passing month or year. Their parents have often set high expectations for them. They measure themselves each period against their peers, who are generally following various well-defined paths.

I had several friends from law school who were very enterprising guys, much more so than the average law student. They each started businesses after practicing law at large firms for multiple years. What kind of businesses did they start? They started boutique law firms. This is completely unsurprising if you think about it. They’d spent years becoming good at delivering legal services. It was a field that they understood and could compete in. Their credentials translated too. People learn from what they’re doing and do it again on their own. It’s not just lawyers; the consulting firm Bain and Company was started by seven former partners and managers from the Boston Consulting Group. Myriad boutique investment banks and hedge funds have spun out of large financial organizations. You can see the same pattern in the startup world. After PayPal was acquired by eBay in 2002, its founders and employees went on to found or cofound LinkedIn (Reid Hoffman), YouTube (Steve Chen, Jawed Karim, and Chad Hurley), Yelp (Russel Simmons and Jeremy Stoppelman), Tesla Motors (Elon Musk), SpaceX (Musk again), Yammer (David Sacks), 500 Startups (Dave McClure), and many other companies. PayPal’s CEO, Peter Thiel, famously made a $500,000 investment in Facebook that grew to over $1 billion. In this sense, PayPal is one of the most prolific companies of recent times. But if you look at any successful growth company you’ll start to see their alumni show up doing parallel things. Former Apple employees founded or cofounded Android, Palm, Nest, and Handspring, companies that revolve around devices. Former Yahoo! employees founded Ycombinator, Cloudera, Hunch.com, AppNexus, Polyvore, and many other web-oriented companies. Organizations give rise to other organizations like themselves.

That is, if we’re not good for work, is work good for us?

People were clapping us on the back, congratulating us on our accomplishments, and we were thinking to ourselves, What are you congratulating us for? The problems are just getting worse.