Nick Nikolov

What drove the man through all those decades of setbacks and obscurity? One biographer attributed it to his “ inquiétude ”—his drive, restlessness, anxiety. He just kept pushing himself to get better.

“Apple became the most valuable company on earth and it wasn’t even one of Steve’s goals. He wasn’t trying to be rich. He wasn’t trying to be famous. He wasn’t trying to be powerful. He was obsessed with the creative process and building something beautiful.”

Steve Jobs is well-known for his meticulous eye for elegance and design when it comes to Apple’s products. But another area where this fanaticism for detail came out was with regard to the steel beams used in the construction of the Atrium.

“The architects used cold-rolled, bead-blasted steel, and all connections are custom-bolted, not welded, purel... See more

Marc Andreessen, co-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, once argued that early-stage investors and serial entrepreneurs should not be too influenced by disappointments. “The right thing to do . . . is to play the next hand of poker the exact same way you played the previous hand.” Failure is more “the result of randomness” than... See more

“Everyone bifurcates the world into content and distribution,” Whaley told me. He has brown hair, is of average height, and was wearing a nondescript gray t-shirt and jeans when we talked. “From the beginning, we viewed those as the same thing. Each object gets better with more participation, and so does MSCHF. Scale is not the goal. Scale is a too... See more