These days, if you're in Silicon Valley, and eventually in the rest of the world, either you're telling a computer what to do or the computer's telling you what to do. Either you're programming the Uber app or the Uber app is programming you and telling you where to drive the car. You don't want to be on the wrong side of that transaction.

The history of the human race is the history of technology. If it weren't for technology, we would just be monkeys sitting around in the cold trying to figure out how to start a fire. Fire is the beginning of technology that turned us from being prey into being predators. And all human progress comes from technology.

There's no substitute for learning by doing. So, for example, if you want to start a company at some point... just go start a company. You're going to learn far more starting that company than you will apprenticing with other people on how to start a company.

You don't get rewarded in society anymore for doing things that you can be trained how to do, because if you can be trained how to do them, then the next monkey can be trained how to do them.

The mind is part of the brain, and it's attached to the body, and we're mechanical mobile creatures. There's just no way of getting away from that. If your body is not healthy, then your mind won't be sharp either, or at least not once you're past your 20s.

I really try to understand everything from first principles. First principles means that you should be able to derive it without relying on definitions. If you keep having to define things by using fancy words, then that's a problem. The fancier the words you have to use to explain something, the less you actually understand it.

At the end of the day, having a great startup boils down to picking the right team in a great market. And that's glib, that's simple, that's easy—except it's incredibly hard.

The current education system is much more about... filtering and credentialing. I think people waste a lot of time learning things that no longer have value. All the memorization-based stuff should just go away. We have Google these days, and our kids will have Google or equivalent, so they don't need to memorize so many things anymore.

What I realized, at the end of the day, is that you don't have to give reasons why. You can just say, 'You know what, that doesn't feel right to me.' And as much as it seems like a cop out, and as much as we all want to be rational beings, no one can argue with your feelings.

Study the hard things. Study the STEM topics—science, technology, engineering math—because those are foundational skills that are not going to go out of style. They're going to help you no matter what you do.

You're not going to beat anyone else at being them, and no one's going to beat you at being you. So, you may as well figure out what you're the best in the world at, and then go see if the world needs that thing.

The first principles that I would stick to is only work with really amazing people—you're better off not working with anyone than working with the wrong people—and try and do something that you think is going to be huge, because it takes no extra work compared to being small. Trying to do something small takes just as much work.

I'm a technology bull. I still think that technology is underrated relative to the impact it's going to have.

Being good at the basics is way more important than being good at the advanced stuff. So, even in math, being great at arithmetic and geometry is going to be much more useful... to you in life than being incredibly good at calculus—unless you happen to be in a profession that needs calculus.

Unless you can reconstruct it from the ground up through pure logic, you don't really understand it.

People, inherently, they know how to eat and how to work out, but they spend a lot of time arguing or optimizing what the workout is or what they should be eating, and that's just a way of procrastinating from the inevitable.

I think VCs spend too much time talking to other VCs, writing about themselves, and doing generic things like conferences and meetups and cocktail parties. When in reality, they should be becoming domain experts on something where they can add value.

I see founders spend too much time chasing VCs for money. When the reality is, if you're building a great product, fundraising is actually relatively easy.

I think, eventually, we will start also viewing social media, at least parts of it, as a disease, like a real disease ... Over-reliance on social media is making people unhappy.

The older you get, the more you realize that life is really mainly a single-player game. You're running against yourself. You're born alone. You'll die alone. You have to choose what to do. You have to choose what gives you meaning. You have to choose what kind of people you like. And a lot of it is just about you.