Episode 016: Naval Ravikant, co-founder of AngelList, explains why you don't need to be CEO

Today, if I could articulate how good my life is, they would have to lock me up because you can't have people this happy running around in society. My life is a 10 out of 10 across the board. It is perfect. It is fantastic. And it's because I got to engineer my life exactly the way that I want to with no compromises ... I only do things I find enjoyable at this point.

If you are the founder of a company, you're probably world-class in something ... You basically want to spend all your time on that thing, and everything else is a necessary evil that should be outsourced.

Companies exist because the founder had a burst of creativity and then executed around that creativity. And that creativity started with having an empty calendar, but over time, the calendar gets filled up, and it gets replaced with a busy calendar—and a busy calendar is the death of creativity.

One of the reasons why people don't like meditation or find it hard to meditate is because, when you first sit down, all of your unaddressed problems that you've been ignoring come barreling up to the surface and assault you. And some of these have been sitting there for a decade, waiting for you to address them while you've been busy, busy busy, busy, busy.

I can't emphasize this enough. People don't understand the value of free time.

Don't hire good people who make you miserable ... Get rid of those people immediately.

If you look at any company that really, really succeeds over the long-term... one consistent factor is that the core founder stayed engaged the entire time.

In the creative job, which is really what technology is... having control of your own time, assuming you're self-motivated, is the ultimate hack.

Creativity comes out of: You've turned some problem over in your head for a long, long, long, long time; you've seen it from every angle; you have other things to connect the dots to; and then you just wait; and then your subconscious mind does the processing.

What you'll find is, most of the times when people schedule a call with you, they don't actually have an agenda. They don't really need to talk to you. It's the easiest way for them to kind of check the box and get the current problem off their desk and turn it into a future problem.

The most money you make is at the end of the curve. The biggest impact is at the end of the curve. The largest customer base is at the end of the curve. So, you want to go as long and as far as possible. And that's only going to happen if it's sustainable, and it's only going to be sustainable if you enjoy it.

I think a CEO has at least three jobs, and those three jobs are raise money and keep cash in the bank, set and communicate the strategy, and recruit and retain the team.

I also think a lot of being a CEO is frankly being the company psychiatrist ... You're always dealing with people issues.