Naval Ravikant, Sahil Lavingia, & Ben Thompson on The Creator Economy - 3/27/21

I think most people are working too hard. I think most people are just basically spinning wheels... The older you get, the better you get at just declining work that you know is useless. I have this theory that 99% of work that you do is useless. You still have to do it because it's iterating your way to the 1% that is useful. But, in an ideal world, if you are omniscient, you would just cut to the 1%.

If you wanted to get rich in the 1700s or 1800s, you did with labor. If you wanted to get rich in the 1900s, you did it with capital. If you want to get rich in the 2000s, you do it with code, maybe media.

Startups are the Olympics of technology. You're getting the absolute best and brightest people in the world who've been training their entire lives—just like Olympic athletes—and they moved to Silicon Valley, and they dedicated their lives to their craft, and they work day and night. These are some of the smartest people in the world ... They compete in a winner-take-all playing field where the number one wins everything, the number two gets like a little something, and the number three just completely loses. So, you don't show up in the app game to build any kind of a serious app unless you are going all-in with an A-class team.

Everyone has some personal curiosity and obsession that's driving them. And the beauty of the Internet is no matter how bizarre and strange that is, there are a bunch of people out there who are really into it—and probably large enough that you can form a small business or audience around it.

I think the work-life balance thing is nonsense. It kind of implies that work is suffering and life is relief, and that just means you're in a bad situation to begin with, and you need to get out of that situation where you control your own life.

If you feel like you need to pursue work-life balance, you are not in a work that is going to lead to great creative outcomes or building some sort of business ... It's got to be something you're obsessed with.

I don't believe in self-promotion. I think [what] the world is really craving is authenticity. Very, very few people are actually authentic ... People, deep down in their gut, they know when someone's putting on a show and when they're not, and so I think people crave truth.

Intelligence plus experience equals wisdom ... Wisdom naturally brings peace, and peace naturally brings happiness. Peace in motion is happiness.

To be a good creator, you just have to be creative—and 'creative' means that you're constantly creating things. It's not like you're just creating one thing; your creativity is who you are and what you do. You're always creating things in your domain nonstop constantly.

Your work should be fun. It takes just as much effort to do well at a video game as it does to start a company.

A lot of judgment is just knowing not what to do in the first place. The ability to say 'no' and be correct that that was a 'no' is a superpower. You want to be able to filter out things very efficiently, and that just comes through experience.

I think for every hundred companies that I have seriously made an effort at starting, one has gotten launched. The hit rate is that low. You're just constantly trying stuff. You're just constantly iterating.

I have mixed feelings about the phrase 'the creator economy' because I think the economy has always been the creator economy in the sense that the creative people are the ones who get to run things and get paid the most; it's just that there have been very few of them.

Credibility matters more than distribution. So, a thousand true fans matters more than having a hundred thousand-a-week fans.

My general rule in venture capital is if the venture capital industry by and large hates it, you should do it.

You want to have a small number of diehard fans and a small number of haters. What you don't want is a large number of kind of 'meh people' who are like 'Yeah, sort of interested,' but no one's willing to lay themselves down the line positive or negative.