#98 Sahil Lavingia: Observing the Present

Those are the people that I look for—the people who want something so badly that they just figure out how to do it ... They just get started, and then they figure things out as they go.

The skill that's been really top-of-mind for me, right now, is the ability to save other people time.

That’s what being present is to me—just really focusing on the present moment and noticing as many things as possible, which sounds easy, right? It’s almost paradoxical. You’re obviously here. What does that mean? You’re obviously looking out through your eyes. You’re smelling things through your nose. But if I said, 'Okay, how many times did you blink in the last three seconds?', you wouldn’t even remember the last time you blinked.

I think expectations cannot be underrated, and I think your peer group also can't be underrated ... You're kind of the average of your five friends.

Before I even wanted to fundraise or thought about it as an idea, I felt like I wanted to be a founder. So, I spent a lot of time hanging out with founders, hanging out with early employees, working at an early-stage startup. I think that’s the best thing that you could do.

One of the reasons to raise money is a social one where it gives you a sort of credential that is very useful. I can still, to this day, go into a room and say 'Hey, I raised money from Naval [Ravikant], Max Levchin, Kleiner Perkins, Chris Sacca, First Round,' and people will take me seriously for that.

When you go on your phone, you’re seeing the way that a certain group of people see certain things. I think this has actually been accelerated with COVID, because you don’t have maybe some of the back and forth. It’s this very asynchronous medium. So, you end up just absorbing all of this content, and your perception is your reality.

Silicon Valley is a game of finding these crazy, outsized returns ... 30% of your companies die, 30% of your companies return less than 1x, and so you kind of need the last third... to return over 10x of the initial principal capital.

Almost every single person I meet who runs a profitable business, especially one powered by software—they wouldn't trade it for the world.

The reason, I think, people don't often read a lot of these old books is because that social incentive goes away. You read this book, and then you're smarter, but that's it.