The Anthology of Balaji: A Guide to Technology, Truth, and Building the Future

Life extension should be technically feasible now. That’s the thing people don’t get yet. Reversing aging is possible. It’s starting to happen now in mice. There is almost nobody who gets older and enjoys it, right? Life extension products would be some of the most popular products ever.

Start out with some end-state of the world you’d like to achieve; for example, youth extension, people on Mars, or building new cities. Your goal doesn’t have to be that ambitious. Usually it springs from some passion—often a positive passion, but sometimes a negative passion. For example, you might hate the way healthcare insurance works and try t

A good question for a software company is: what’s your billion-dollar function?

Becoming a full-stack creator is also important. Social media is about to become far, far, far more lucrative and monetizable than people realize. They think it’s over or stagnant. But we’re just getting started. Many who want to build billion-dollar companies will have to also build million-person media followings.

It’s not just about free speech. It’s about the cost of speech. If you’re jailed by the state for speech, you may not speak out. But if you’re fired by an employer for speech, that is costly too—a cost greater than most can pay. Costly speech means only the wealthy speak freely.

My favorite books give me a new type of X-ray vision. They teach me how to see new layers of the world I didn’t understand or even notice before.

people pay for the value provided to them. They pay for the impact on them, not the cost to provide it.

I’m not a consumption person; I’m a production person. I’m not burning capital on stuff. Everything is going into the next compounding outcome—not just compounding money, though money is an important tool. Knowledge compounds on other knowledge. Impact, same thing.

Businessman and investor Ben Horowitz has a great blog post about founders’ persistence called “Nobody Cares.” (I actually do care about entrepreneurs, and so does Ben.) But I send the post to entrepreneurs sometimes when they need to hear it.