Find people who've been there

Lorraine on getting noticed for your work“Doing great work doesn’t guarantee recognition. Make your impact easy to explain so people can advocate for you when you’re not in the room.”

Guillermo on building Vercel and Next.js“The best things we've done for our brand is the things that we did without thinking we're working on our brand.”

Jim on enjoying competition when teammates are more intense“I stopped enjoying baseball when I was chasing what everyone else valued, and I found my game again only when I started competing to raise my own level, not to beat theirs.”

Nick on metabolic health, nutrition, and brain healthHarvard MD, Oxford PhD, Dartmouth valedictorian and #2 Science Bestseller on Substack.

Kit on cutting a huge to-do list to three big things“I used to write forty-item lists and call it ambition, but it was just avoidance dressed as hard work.”

Roelof on what separates enduring companies from others“The enduring ones are willing to have what I call multiple founding moments. We have a wall at Sequoia that says, 'We're only as good as our next investment.' You have to stay paranoid. Never get crater-lazy.”

Kirsten on understanding what consumers want“Before you ask whether the market is big enough, ask what’s changing in people’s lives. The best opportunities start there...”

Vanessa on sexual expectations couples never say out loud“I don't believe in a universal normal for any stage, but I do think it's completely natural for that early honeymoon frequency to taper off after about a year.”

Guillermo on building Vercel and Next.js“I want people to write these verification loops because it's gonna give me conviction in the product that it'll deliver to my customer.”

Peter on which AI tools are worth paying forLed product teams at Meta, Amazon, Roblox and reddit product 0 to 1M+ users.

Suzanne on what happens behind closed doors in a layoff“I've personally been involved in laying off well over a thousand people, and the part no one talks about is how fast the dignity gets stripped away: one minute you're trusted, the next a manager you've never met is reading you a script while someone cuts your computer access.”

Spencer on life inside an NBA organization“I used to think pushing past your body meant toughness, but the league taught me that the hardest skill is staying on the floor.”

Céline on protecting your health in a noisy information world“I protect my health the same way I protect my patients: by curating my information diet the way I curate my food. I go to the source, I follow people who've been right before and correct themselves when the evidence changes, and I stay open to changing my mind. Certainty that cannot bend is not strength; it is a vulnerability.”

Julian on using a system to curb phone distractions“I don't try to restart at full speed; I drop back to the mínimo viable version of each habit until the momentum returns, because a 20-minute workout and one focused block on the side project beats another day of zero.”

Stanley on turning a scrappy experiment into a public company“We saw a macaroon shop in Palo Alto with orders they couldn't fulfill, so we built a static HTML site with a phone number and took orders by hand. The scrappy part isn't a phase you graduate from; it's a discipline. You automate after you understand the problem deeply, not before. Change everything except the mission if the data says so.”

Grant on growing an AI startup“When growth stalls, doing more of the same won’t save you. Sometimes your small team needs to make one bigger bet.”

Matthew on finding the right partner“You want to be happy enough that the right thing doesn’t become your everything.”

Pedro on where machine learning is headed“The same basic paradigms have been used since the 1950s. At the end of the day, we’re going to need some new ideas.”

Dharmesh on where AI meets enterpriseCo-founder and CTO, HubSpot and bought chat.com for $15.5M, sold to OpenAI.

Kathryn on negotiating higher pay and getting it“I watched my own mom retire dramatically underpaid after 30 years, so I teach women to frame the ask around what they’ve already delivered and what they’ll deliver next, not just what they need.”