Balaji Srinivasan Quotes

The man who wants to be CEO, because he gets to be important, should not be CEO.

The man who does not want to be CEO, because he gets the importance, should be CEO.

The Industrial Revolution improved everyone’s life, in the long run.

But in the medium run, it caused the rise of communism, the murder of capitalists, and the advent of world war. Technological advance caused political chaos.

Then again, would you prefer no electricity?

Tech is limited by founders.
AI is limited by prompters.

AI copy on the page is the new lorem ipsum.

It's lorem aipsum.

Future books will be written monk-mode, by hand, completely offline, in digital monasteries purpose-built for focus.

Distinguishing social consensus from truth is really important because they’re not the same.

In the 90s, the worry was that only the rich would have digital products. That was called the digital divide. And it turned out to be completely wrong.

Because digital is cheap.
Physical is the premium product.

You cannot automate something until you’ve done it manually many times. Control all of the factors and show technology cuts costs. Remember, for many legacy companies, information technology is only a cost center. They only adopted the code. You were born in it, molded by it. A full-stack entrant into a new vertical is formidably protean. You can morph your product just by hitting keys. Tesla’s over-the-air updates for its cars are a fantastic example.

There is low-level programming, high-level programming, and AI-level programming.

Every AI agent ultimately has a human principal.

Too many are interested in “tech” (by which they mean money) but they aren’t interested in tech (by which I mean math).

Here’s a reframe.
AI doesn’t take your job.
AI allows you to do any job.
So a coder can now make films.
And a filmmaker can now write code.
It allows a non-specialist to get started.
But a specialist will be needed for polish.

AI makes everyone a tech CEO, crypto makes everyone a venture capitalist.

Winners write history.

So: if you do not write the history, you will not win.

Fortunately, the Bitcoin blockchain is the most unfalsifiable form of history ever invented.

A cryptohistory.

The lesson of deals is that if you have two, you have one. And if you have one, you have zero.

In other words: the second bidder sets the price and ensures the deal goes through. If you only have one bidder, the price floor is zero. And the deal may not get done at all.