Please, someone tell the VCs.

Ego is definitionally a self-limiting belief…

There is a necessary tension here: creativity is an egoic act. Yet it is a beautiful one when pursued holding equal weight of humility in the other hand.

We overindex culturally on attention lavished on the entrepreneurial sociopaths, but I’m confident the most capable among us -- the ones working to heal the world, not to control it — are the ones who hold what Arun joking/not-jokingly calls "crushing self doubt."

What that transition took wasn’t about self-reassurance; it was about freeing myself from self-limiting beliefs. Realizing no previous beliefs or accomplishments (or lack thereof) limit what I am capable of -- that was the unlock.

An entrepreneur is a creative force, an agent shaping the world -- sometimes at incredible scale.

The "winners" in AI will either be:

1) Companies built with trust as their central principle + Everyone in society

2) Nobody, because we will destroy ourselves

The point of business is to create value, and you can't do that without trust - it is literally the most valuable problem to solve in the world right now.

Cute side projects - like philanthropic giving - to distract from the harm they create isn’t enough to make up for irresponsible, exploitative products.

No wonder antipathy toward tech is rising.

youtu.be/tiZ3FyuaHlI

With gen AI the "move fast and break things" of Silicon Valley becomes "move fast and break people."

We must do better.

The callousness of Altman and OpenAI is astonishing, as told by the CHT podcast: repeatedly, OpenAI rushed to market w/o adequate safety testing - "bottom line is that this was foreseeable and preventable. And the fact that it happened shows OpenAI's complete and willful disregard for human safety."

Despite the mountains of evidence on the damage wrought on individuals and to our social fabric by social media and the ad-driven Internet's Distraction Economy, somehow, some companies are *still!* willing to sacrifice human wellbeing for more "engagement"??

This is a photo of me (left) at the same age as Adam, similar lanky frame and wavy hair. Like Adam, many of us have gone through a dark period where we didn't feel like we could go on. I cannot imagine having had tech that holds the potential for this kind of harm when I was at that vulnerable age.