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 learning faster and remembering more“Before you decide you’re bad at learning, look at how you’re learning. Give yourself a method, remove distractions, and practice recalling what matters.”

Zack on a post-AI worldBuilt OpenAI's sales and partnerships teams and honorary Dean, HKUST AI Leadership School.

Keith on spotting founders nobody has noticed yet“Stop looking at résumés the way Google does.”

Moses on making it to the top when you started with nothing“I had love for the game, parents who kept me grounded, and a city that taught me how to compete. What kept me going was consistency and curiosity. You control what you can control, stack good days, and let the game reward you when it's time.”

Jeffrey on why treating symptoms is the wrong place to start“Symptoms are late signals, not first causes. In chronic illness the biology starts drifting years before a diagnosis. If you start at the symptom, you are downstream. You may mute the alarm without finding the fire. The body is a network, so ask what shifted in the person's story and physiology that made the symptom possible, then address that.”

Lenny on breaking into product management“A few paths actually work. The safest is transitioning internally, partnering closely with a PM until you can make the case. The second is joining an early-stage startup where everyone does everything. Regardless of path, become the person who deeply understands the customer and can translate that into product insight.”

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.”

Codie on buying businesses and building wealth“You don’t need a revolutionary idea to build wealth. You need a business people already pay for, and the skills to run it better.”

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.”

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.”

Andrej on how far we are from AGILed Tesla Autopilot computer vision team and founding member of OpenAI.

Madhavan on pricing for profitable growth“Don’t build a product and then ask what to charge. Find out what customers will pay for before you decide what to build.”

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.”

Nir on the science of living longer“To delay the biology of aging, we don't prevent just one disease, we prevent many of them. We used to think each age-related disease was separate, but they share common roots. Longevity becomes a side effect of staying healthy longer.”

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.”

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.”

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

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.”