Nat Friedman

Some things about me:

• Grew up in Charlottesville, VA
• On the Internet since 1991, which is my actual "home town"
• Went to MIT because I loved the Richard Feynman autobiographies
• Started two companies
• CEO of GitHub from 2018 through 2021
• Live in California
• Working on reading the Herculaneum Papyri
• Tested 300 Bay Area foods for plastic chemicals

Some things I believe:

• As human beings it is our right (maybe our moral duty) to reshape the universe to our preferences
• Technology, which is really knowledge, enables this
• You should probably work on raising the ceiling, not the floor
• Enthusiasm matters!
• It's much easier to work on things that are exciting to you
• It might be easier to do big things than small things for this reason
• Energy is a necessary input for progress
• It's important to do things fast
• You learn more per unit time because you make contact with reality more frequently
• Going fast makes you focus on what's important; there's no time for bullshit
• "Slow is fake"
• A week is 2% of the year
• Time is the denominator
• The efficient market hypothesis is a lie
• At best it is a very lossy heuristic
• The best things in life occur where EMH is wrong
• In many cases it's more accurate to model the world as 500 people than 8 billion
• "Most people are other people"
• We know less than we think
• The replication crisis is not an aberration
• Many of the things we believe are wrong
• We are often not even asking the right questions
• The cultural prohibition on micromanagement is harmful
• Great individuals should be fully empowered to exercise their judgment
• The goal is not to avoid mistakes; the goal is to achieve uncorrelated levels of excellence in some dimension
• The downsides are worth it
• Smaller teams are better
• Faster decisions, fewer meetings, more fun
• No need to chop up work for political reasons
• No room for mediocre people (can pay more, too!)
• Large-scale engineering projects are more soluble in IQ than they appear
• Many tech companies are 2-10x overstaffed
• Where do you get your dopamine?
• The answer is predictive of your behavior
• Better to get your dopamine from improving your ideas than from having them validated
• It's ok to get yours from "making things happen"
• You can do more than you think
• We are tied down by invisible orthodoxy
• The laws of physics are the only limit