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.

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?

It surprises me that more people don't want to be philosophers, but I guess it depends on what society values. We're not really a society that values truth right now (Ivanka launched a meme coin and Trump lies every other sentence). And we're a bit afraid of authority (see: charlie kirk getting assassinated, the pope touching little boys, fauci cosplaying as a scientist).

People want security, and asking questions makes people uncomfortable. That's why Socrates was executed. Why are we here? How did we get here? Who are we? How do we live well? These make people uncomfortable, even if they're interesting questions to ask.

If you ask 'how do I live a good life?' you've stumbled into ethics. Philosophers have interesting answers. Aristotle would say be virtuous. Christ would say love thy neighbor, take the stick out of your eye, and all that. (His sermon on the mount is basically just him spitting bars on how to live well.)

Seneca offers a hotter take: think of death, stop wanting more, accept what you have, live simply, study, learn. It is telling that the greatest philosopher in history smelled bad and didn't wear shoes.

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

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

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.

First, it means do not build a company. For most people this is a bad idea. You will suffer enormous amounts of pain and failure, it will take a significant toll on your personal life, your family life, and relationships. It is pretty simple. Do not build a company.

If you insist on building a company, then the second meaning is this: it is not about the company, but the solution. Build a solution.

Fall in love with this, and form everything around this solution. This is your vision for what you are creating. This is the north star you are chasing after. The solution is everything. Your dream. What you envision to bring into the world.

Around this solution, the structure and formation of a company will naturally emerge. But if you are the founder/CEO/creator/leader, and you want to do something meaningful, then I think you must understand the vision and the solution you are creating and believe in it 1,000,000x more than anyone else.

Understand this solution in ways others do not. That is your leverage. You understand the solution crystal clearly. Then, the company becomes a vehicle for delivering the solution at scale, and realizing the vision you set out.

For example, Steve Jobs wanted to create a personal computer. He was obsessed with that idea and the potential of computing. The kinds of things he cared about were consciousness, design, human computer interactions, expanding the human mind. Not funding, headcount, profit, and stakeholder value...

I believe the best entrepreneurs are accidental. They come from people who started building their dreams or pursuing great ideas that would change the world, and had a chip on their shoulder. Not people who wanted to build companies.

1. Spiritual Alignment

It is important that the mission of your team resonates with you deeply and spiritually.

You should do something important, and that resonates with you on a profoundly personal level. Or else it will be hard to wake up in the morning and keep doing it.

Only you know if this is really true.

2. Designing Technology

Designers and engineers are the same. Designers are more connected to human emotions and experiences. The designers taste has to be respected and understood by the engineers, or else there will be a disconnect in the team culture and product experience. The limitations of engineering have to be understood and respected by the designer.

In it's purest form, anyone can have good ideas in design - the designer is responsible for bringing them together.

On the right team, design and engineering are blended, they are sitting next to each other, and are developing the best experiences together for the customer. They do not applaud each other, but create experiences that are magical. 12/10 experiences.

The best designers are visionary, able to take abstract visions and shape them into reality for engineers to understand and build. I don't believe it is possible to be both a world class designer and a world class engineer.

3. Great engineering

Is not about technology but about deep understanding of how to build things. Great engineers can solve problems and build things creatively at layers deeper than other people are seeing. Many engineers think in ways that non-engineers will never understand.

A SpaceX, one interview question is "explain what happens when you tap a letter on your keyboard and it appears on my screen." The interviewer hopes you can reason through keyboard interfaces, binary switches, chip design, transistors, the internet, information packets, etc.

It is not about being able to recite or memorize an answer, but how they think. Is this person able to reason about it well enough to display the ability to think deeply about this topic?

Great engineers aren't by default social, and they are often hard to communicate with. This means in searching for engineers, you need to correct way more for your bias on how "friendly" they are or how much you like them.

The best people to evaluate great engineers are great engineers.

4. Ambition

Know the ambitions of the people you are working with. Don't get excited by generic ambition, but the right kind of ambition. Does this person just want to make money, and make a lot of it? Is this person seeking status? This tells you a lot about them.

Do not work with people who are in it for money or status, because both will lead them, and you, away from your purpose.

Seek people whose ambition is towards the mission you are on, and towards mastering their craft in that mission. Design, product, engineering, lights, audio, video, story telling. These are crafts. Seek those who understand 1) the mission and 2) aim to be the best at their craft.

An astronaut's mission is to land on the moon, and to get there they master space flight, navigation systems, physics, gravity, communication, physical performance, etc.

5. Questioning yourself

Before I started latch, I interned at a small business run by a family friend. The CEO never questioned himself, and when I asked questions about why we were doing certain things, was shut down and told to focus on my responsibilities. This made me leave pretty quickly.

You are wrong all of the time - and good ideas can come from anywhere.

Pay attention to your own biases. "How we do things" is a bias. Wishful thinking is a bias. There are also the emotions of meeting someone, and hoping they will like you or want to work with you. This is another form of bias.

Aim to leave your emotions out of it and analyze the situation. Bring people you can trust in to evaluate people.

6. What people do

Pay more attention to what someone does, not what they say. There is a lot of noise, you have to look for the nugget of truth and signal in their actual outputs or behavior.

7. Bureaucracy

Fight bureaucracy at all costs. Eliminate rules, cancel policies, stop trying to run things like a military encampment.

Your responsibility is to lead towards a common vision, to bring everyone towards a clear understanding of where we are going, and to create an environment to push them to thrive in. You have to pay close attention to whether people are actually thriving. If someone is not doing well, you should be able to just tell from a brief conversation. T

Meetings, meetings about meetings, rules, policies, rituals, and systems to try and create structure early on will hinder your progress endlessly, creating bloat and stupidity.

Creativity is breaking through these systems constantly and upending them.

This is not to undermine the value of systems and design thinking. Sometimes you need systems, for instance to track your competition, to to track your metrics. But often times these systems can be created out of fear, and indicate you are seeking to control the situation.

8. Politics

Avoid politics. Politics are the social dynamics, posturing, and role playing that occurs in human social situations. It's signaling that you are doing the thing, instead of doing the thing. Fuck. That.

Creative design and engineering is free of politics.

The creative way is where everyone is doing great work together towards a common vision, trusting that each person on the team is incredible and capable of playing the right role towards that vision. There is an organic flow of information and mutual trust.

The state of creating the art is the sole thing that matters - the politicking is a negative side effect of that.

9. Free expression

Create an environment of free expression and lively debate. Encourage people to speak up. Never shut down the opinions or ideas of your team, without first making it clear that you value their view points and are striving for the truth. If you do, then you will create resentment and distrust. People will think you care more about your ego and being personally right than understanding the truth. And they will be right.

Note: Being an asshole is not acceptable even if you are right. There is a way to be right and kind.

9. Make decisions fast

Make decisions quickly. Do not wait week to decide, just decide right now. It is more likely your opinion won't change in a week, your initial instinct was correct, and you are just losing time. The benefit of deciding instantly is greater than the cost of a few bad decisions.

9. Hell yes or no

This is the simplest and best hiring advice I've ever heard. But no one listens to it. We've hired a few people in the past that were a weak yes, and all of them eventually left the company. The damage to culture and progression is palpable.

If the immediate reaction after the first interview is something like:

"I'm on the fence with this one..."

"That part was good, but..."

"He messed this up, but..."

Then listen to your instinct and pass. This is the wrong person for the organization.

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

I do not believe in free will.

By believe, I mean hold to be true by empirical evidence or by experiment

Yet I live my life as if I have free will. This is self-deception for evolutionary reasons. And I am fine with it.

I find it perfectly rational to understand free will is an illusion and to still live your life as if is is real. My friends, for example, do not abandon League of Legends just because it's all transistors and pixels. They behave as if it is real, lest they get caught in a paralysis of thought.

When you make a decision or think a given thought, there is a direct firing of neurons locatable in your brain. Wiggle your pinky, neurons in your brain fire (in the "pinky" area of your motor cortex). Think of an abstract pink elephant, neurons in your brain fire (in various areas, more complex). The brain is your command center for literally everything you do, say, think, and feel.

It is observed that electrical activity spikes in the brain when an action is taken or a thought occurs. This is always true. This happens on a spectrum. You hear a loud siren outside, the sound waves vibrate your inner ear drum which pulses rapid neural signals to your brain. You see an emotional tweet, your visual cortex sends signals to your occipital lobe and your amygdala.

At all times and during all moments, your senses transmit information to your brain.

None of this is chosen by you.

You do not choose the way you hear music. You do not choose the way you see green. You do not choose the sensation of your toes against wet sand. You do not choose how your heart beats.

Why do we think we are the author of our own thoughts? Who are "we" in this equation?

Humans are the highest level of consciousness evolved on planet Earth, in our solar system, and potentially in the universe. But we don't know the right questions to ask of the universe. The universe is the answer. What we see see a cosmic puzzle of epic proportions.

I do not think consciousness emerged by accident. What it feels like is a test, experiment, simulation, or opportunity to see what we will do. Can life understand the nature of reality.

There is almost zero chance we find out the truth. We are a million generations away. We did not evolve to see truth. Yet it 'feels' like something wants us to know. To strive and search.

There are massive challenges facing humanity and threatening our ability to survive and understand reality. Bombs, heat, war, and time - the sun will destroy Earth eventually.

There are no known civilizations to whom we may pass the torch. No other life exists as we know it, making life on Earth responsible for determining the fate of consciousness in the universe.

We must preserve humanity's knowledge and spirit across time, and advance our understanding of reality, in order for life to survive at all.

A few good ways to do this are to:

• Create good families, children communities, and institutions that seek truth
• Make breakthroughs in physics (gravity or relativity level)
• Extend human lifespans (biotechnology)
• Make life multiplanetary (space travel & infrastructure)
• Build aligned superintelligent systems

A common theme to me over the past decade is an increasing cultural addiction to technology and more closely addiction to distraction. The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops of today's technology are probably atrophying the minds of our youth and most people don't care. I seriously worry about the long-term impacts of technologies like TikTok, and wrote about them here.

Somehow we are all ok conducting a massive, population-wide experiment on our collective ability to think in exchange for comparatively minor benefit of fun distracting videos. Remember, these videos are fed to you entirely by AI out of China.

Note: This was written September 17, 2022 at 11:16 AM

"The object isn't to make art, it's to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable." -- Robert Henri

When I visit home, my mom always asks me to watch TV with her. She can watch for hours: murder mysteries, parodies, specials, you name it. Often she relegates the decision of what to watch, allowing Netflix's auto-play feature to decide for her.

I love my mom, and to some extent I accept this, but I usually get antsy after 30 minutes of viewing. The reason not only the sense of uselessness. Sure, there is time for TV, and yes mom of course I could binge Breaking Bad (again).

The reason I am antsy is the influence. Someone, somewhere, created videos that caught six hours of my mom's attention today. It's wild. She is totally enraptured by someone who is simultaneously enrapturing millions of people just like her with a story they totally invented.

The power law of influence is real. Influence is a product of creativity and network. I sense today's highly influential people A) create often and B) develop a wide network to distribute creations.

Having A and not B makes you hard to notice. The gifted artist who cannot market herself is nowhere to be found.

Interestingly, it seems like network is starting to beat creative output. Elon musk today tweeted "." and reached one hundred million people. TikTok creators do weird ASMR stuff like chewing gum and get millions of views. And yet a real painter cannot find a buyer.

We need smart people to create stuff they think will help other people. Owing to increased access to information feeds, I sense many smart people are consuming when they could be creating. Myself included (hold the smart).The truth is most of my intelligent friends do not write their ideas or share them.

Writing is indistinguishable from clear thinking. To logically place on paper what is in the mind is painstaking, which is also why it has utility. A well written piece is basically your clearest thinking, shared with your friends, colleagues, and peers. Done well, it is a gift.