#338 Chamath Palihapitiya: Money, Success, Startups, Energy, Poker & Happiness

We are all equal, and you will fight this demon inside you that says you are less than a lot of other people for reasons that will be hard to see until you're much, much older. And so, you have to find [people]... that will remind you in key moments of your life that that is true. Otherwise, you will give in to that beast.

If you've been lucky to have a wonderful life and you had wonderful parents, man, you should go and give them a huge hug, because they did you such a service that most folks don't do to most kids, unfortunately. And it's not the fault of these parents, but it's just tough. Life is tough.

My firm belief is that life success really boils down to how do you control your mistakes? Now, this is a bit counterintuitive: The way you control your mistakes is by making a lot of mistakes.

If your precondition is to start something successful, you've already failed, because now you're playing somebody else's game. What success means is not clear. You're walking into the woods—it's murky, it's dark, it's wet, it's raining, there's all these animals about, there's no comfort there. So, you better really like hiking.

I think that you have to have some very, very strict boundaries, but otherwise, I think balance is kind of dumb. It will make you limited. I think you need to immerse yourself in the problem, but you need to define that immersion with boundaries.

All of the Millennials and Gen Zs, you're about to get a boatload of money from your parents. And you better figure out how to be happy before you get that money, because, otherwise, you will be miserable.

I read a study ... It said that the absolute maximal link between money and happiness is around $50M.

The minute you try to wait for perfection in order to make a bet, either on yourself or company or girlfriend, whatever, it's too late.

I think mistakes scare people because society likes these very simplified boundaries of who is winning and who is losing, and they want to reward people who make traditional choices and succeed. But the thing is, what's so corrosive about that is that they're actually not even being put in a position to actually make a 'mistake' and fail.

Starting in 2023, or right now, you have the two most important tectonic shifts that have ever happened in our lifetime in technology. They're not talked about, but these things allow AGI, I think, to emerge over the next 10 or 15 years where it was impossible before. The first thing is that the marginal cost of energy is zero ... And the second is the marginal cost of compute is 0.

In fact, I think if you focus on trying to have an impact on the world, I think you're going to end up deeply unhappy.

When somebody gets ahold of a lot of money, it tends to cause them to become exactly who they were meant to be.

I know people that are much, much, much richer than I am... and they are just so completely broken.

Keep meetings to less than 30 minutes ... I'm trying to reinforce that it's very rare that we all have something really important to say.

Anybody who really wants better for their kids and doesn't have a good toolkit to give it to them, some of them just, they choke up on the bat. They just get so agitated about this idea that all this sacrifice will not be worth it that it spills out in really unproductive ways.

You are going to take all of that disharmony in your childhood, and you're going to inject that disharmony into, whether it's your professional relationships or your personal relationships or both, until you get to some form of rock bottom and you start to repair.

I think the challenge for most people is to realize that this escalating arms race of more things will solve your problems is not true. More and better is not the solution.

Now, take investing. Every time you buy something, somebody else on the other side is selling it to you. Is that their mistake? We don't know yet. But their mistakes minus your mistakes is how you make a lot of money over long periods of time as an investor.

The worst job was I worked at Burger King when I was 14-years-old, and I would do the closing shift, and that was from like 6 PM till about 2 in the morning.

The thing that's happening today, which I think is... the most important trend right now in the world, is that 100 million homeowners are each going to become their own little power plant and compete with these 1700 utilities.

Between 2010 through 2020, really the idea was everybody should be on AWS except the biggest of the biggest folks. I think, in the 2020s and 30s, I think the answer is, actually, everybody should be in these public clouds, and the reason is the engineering velocity of the guts.

I've been through a divorce. It's gut-wrenching. The most horrible part is having to tell your kids. I can't even describe to you how proud I am of and how resilient these three beautiful little creatures were when my ex-wife and I had to sit them down and talk through it.

My observation is that starting a business is really hard, any kind of business, and most people don't know what they're doing. And as a result, we make enormous mistakes.

When I first meet people, I never ask to see a resume. And when I'm meeting a company CEO for the first time, I couldn't care less about the business, in fact, and I try to take the time to let them reveal themselves.

It's much better and much more likely to be successful as a 46-year-old in 2023 than a 26-year-old in 2023. Because, in my case, I have demographics working for me; for the 26-year-old, he or she has demographics working slightly against them.

I think [Phil] Hellmuth is the antidote to computers, more than any other player playing today. And when you see him in a heads-up situation... He's played, like, basically, call it 10 of the top 20 people so far, and he's beaten all but one of them.

People, through a whole set of situations, have lost belief in themselves. And I think that that comes up as this very virulent form of rejection that they tried to put into these social networks.

You have to think about yourself self-worth like a knot ... The whole goal is to loosen those knots. And it happens slowly, it happens unpredictably, and it takes a long time.