Kyle Giffin

For better or worse...

• Owning capital - a slice of a company, stocks, assets, real estate - that compounds over time is how to build wealth. You only build wealth by owning compounding assets. Your ability to invest - early and often - in compounding assets, is your ability to build wealth.
• Owning attention - compounding assets applies to the attention economy as well. Your media following is a lever you can pull to activate the attention of others. You want to show the circus something worth paying attention to.
• Labor - income, hourly pay, working for a wage - is not compounding and therefore prevents you from building wealth. It is typically a waste of time.

If you aim to build wealth, then acquire a piece of as many private or public companies as you can, and hold these assets forever, never selling them or letting go of them. This is how you build wealth.

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I've been learning a lot about philosophers lately. I'm not interested in them because they have grand answers (they don't) or because I want to become one (I like computers too much). What's interesting is that they ask good questions. A philosopher is a normal person who can't accept the things they're being told, so they keep asking 'why?' and pulling at interesting threads until they find surprising insights. And I really vibe with that.

I think it helps to state what I mean by philosopher. It's someone who loves knowledge for its own sake. They want to know things, really bad, especially true things. But they also want to 'know' things we often deem 'unknowable.' Like, is there a soul? What is justice? What is love?

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Algorithm

get smart, technical people together

give them a lot of freedom

create an atomsphere where everyone talks to everyone else

no one is hiding in a little corner

provide the best infrastructure (computers, models, location, etc.)

be genuinely fun

make everyone partners

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Being good (self-reliant, kind, knowledgable, hard-working) makes you American. Not whether you were born here (country of origin, ethnicity, etc.). This is what immigration policy should be screening for. Some of the best people I know are immigrants.

"You can go to live in France, but you can't become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany, Turkey, or Japan, but you can't become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the earth, come to America and be an American." - Reagan in '98

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These are some of the things I've learned, and wish someone had told me when starting a company.

0. Don't

This is perhaps the most fundamental piece of advice I could offer. And it has two meanings.

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Note: This was written December 20, 2022 at 9:46 AM

I do not believe in free will.

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