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

Wealth creation is the technological creation of order. It is the difference between a bunch of bricks lying on the ground and a house; the difference between a bunch of pieces of wood lying on the ground and a chair. You can see those differences in physical space.

A framework I use often is the evolution from the physical version to the intermediate form, and then to the internet-native version. If you’re into electrical engineering, you can think of this as the evolution from analog to analog/digital, and then to native digital.

Google founder and computer scientist Larry Page said any law more than fifty years old has to be re-examined. Any law written before the internet needs to get re-examined, or it’s going to collapse.

If the purpose of technology is to reduce scarcity, then the ultimate purpose of technology is to eliminate mortality.

The really cynical person and the really docile person have one thing in common: they never make bold moves.

Financial decision-makers will always care about truth. And crypto is turning the world into investors, just like the internet turned the world into publishers.

As jobs become more automated, investing may become the most common “job” of the twenty-first century. The 1800s was about farming, and the 1900s was about manufacturing. This transition toward everyone investing may already be quietly underway.

People around you repeating the same idea may have gotten it from the same source. This fools our truth sensors, but popularity does not equal truth. There is no point debating someone who can’t whip out plots, primary URLs, or raw data. Argue with signal sources, not signal repeaters.

The point of doing a startup is to build something you can’t buy. Today money can’t buy you a trip to Mars. Or a neural implant. Or a medical tricorder. In the not-too-distant past, money could not buy you a web browser, a search engine, or a smartphone. When the iPhone did not exist, people had to invent it.