Ero

I challenge all of you to work long enough on a math problem until you start hallucinating. The degree of imagination you need to comprehend higher levels of mathematics is not one accessible to normal humans.

Of course everything is imaginary, but simply stating that is lazy epistemology. Many people imagine they have a theory of everything and yet it doesn’t hold up.

@Nemra Please share trip reports once you have them. Safe travels

LSD for me by far.

If one only knew the degree to which Russian imperialism has been the cause of turmoil in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, there wouldn't even be base for comparison.

Nothing like a roach/bed bug or flea infestation to change your mind.

“An alien amongst the sheep, this is who I am.”

I don’t eat McDonalds, but I do occasionally eat fast food like chipotle, Bosnian grill or Popeyes/fried chicken sandwiches. I don’t have a chef, I cook myself mostly. I didn’t use to eat at restaurants that often, but now I am trying different cuisines.

@LoneWonderer Thank you man. I never had a silver spoon, I’ve starved many times in my life, as recently as this June when I was trying to make this happen. Forget the money for now and figure out what have you been put on earth to do that no one else can.

@Lucasxp64 0) There are two approaches: the first is finding a market inefficiency and iterating directly with customers to solve it. This is “Y Combinator” style. They have a lot of recourses you can go through. The downside is that there will be a lot of other people who try get there before you so it’s all about speed and execution. A dog fight. The second is what I am doing, which is going after a strong belief of where technology should be going far in the future. Here, you are trying to crystallize a murky and sometimes illegible vision. Those bets are “deep tech” and require a lot of technical execution, because you are essentially creating the foundations from scratch. Approach 1 never interested me, approach 2 is what I have always been drawn to. I thought my first company with the cryptography was approach 2, but it was actually approach 1, which is why it didn’t blow up. What I am working on right now is as approach two as it gets. 1) You try and give it to customers as early as you can. Working in isolation is a risk, but if you know the field well enough, you will know the biggest pain points already. 1.1) I saw the problem first and then I built the algorithm. It was very much I saw a gap and went after it. 1.2) The first company was fully bootstrapped, the second also was for quite a while. I recently took on an investment from Sequoia. 1.3) No longer working on cybersecurity, but when I did, it was mostly cold outreach to CISOs through email and LinkedIn. 2) No one at Harvard is holding your hand for anything, but I did meet a lot of people who are building businesses on their own, some of which are now billionaires. 2.1) Harvard was absolutely instrumental. In more way than one. I could totally have done it without it, but it most definitely accelerated my path significantly. 3) I do not. I prefer the technical work, because that one is the crux and the most rewarding, but I can do a lot. Of course, as we scale, I will be delegating more and more of the operations. 4) Steve Jobs and Elon Musk’s biographies were very influential. Study Khosla, Thiel, Alex Karp, Zuckerberg, Gates, etc.

@ivankiss Thank you man

That’s not how money works. There was a question meant to check a person’s understanding of economics. Would you have 50k when everyone else has 30k or would you have 80k when everyone else has a 100k? If everyone had a million dollars, then a million dollars wouldn’t be that much. Capitalist outcomes are necessary following a power law.

I don’t know what you are expecting. I’m not there yet, but there is a level of money at which you can start bending reality, so whatever problem you think you are having, there is a way around it.

I do