Palmer Luckey on the advice that shaped how he hires: "The most important advice that I can give people is to work on projects that you care about." Palmer warns against looking to formal education. Whether college or the state-mandated school system to tell you what to build or how to learn it: "Don't look to them to tell you 'here's what electronics projects you should be working on, here's what you should be doing to learn how to do these things.'" He gives two reasons. The first is that institutions move slowly: "They're often years or even decades behind what industry and hobbyists are actually doing, so you're going to be learning how to do things that are ancient." The second is about ownership. When the project is yours alone, your judgment sharpens: "When you're working on something that you're only doing for yourself, you're going to make way better decisions… in what you teach yourself, in how you do things." This belief carries directly into how he hires at Anduril: "I look for people who have done projects that were outside of what their work paid them to do or what their school made them do, because that means they're the type of person who is willing to work on things with their own money and their own time. Because they want to bring something into this world that wouldn't have existed otherwise." And to @PalmerLuckey, those self-driven projects aren't just impressive on a resume. They're where the real learning happens: "To me, those are the projects… that's what drives you to learn the most."

Mark Zuckerberg on why a "ragtag group of children" built Facebook when Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo couldn't: Zuckerberg returns to a question he's thought about from time to time: why was his small team able to build Facebook when much bigger companies didn't? "It wasn't like it was a super novel idea. There was Friendster before, there was MySpace, there's all this stuff. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, they all had versions of it. Why didn't they do it?" It wasn't talent or resources. If anything, the odds were against him: "We were like a ragtag group of children. And they had all these serious engineers and serious infrastructure." So what was the difference? According to Zuckerberg, big companies lose because they can't see the value in new ideas early enough: "I kind of think the reason is because people doubt new ideas before they come to fruition." He traces the exact sequence of doubt that social networking had to survive: "The narrative with social networking is like, this is just a college kid thing. Okay fine, maybe not college kids, but it's probably a fad. Maybe it seems like it's going to be around for a while, but it's probably not going to make money. Okay, it's making money, but the switch to mobile is going to be pretty hard. And then by the time we figured that out, it was too late. The companies had lost their advantage." The failure, he suspects, rarely comes from a total absence of belief. Somewhere inside every big company, someone saw it: "There's probably some team buried deep inside those companies that believed in it, and probably some VP person who is like, eh, that's probably not the biggest priority, and just pours sand in the gears." His conclusion is a prediction about where opportunity actually lives. Even when a large company holds an obvious distribution advantage, he doesn't think it protects them: "I would guess that big companies are going to fumble two-thirds of those." And the opportunities that don't come with an obvious incumbent advantage, the ones that plug into existing distribution channels are, in his words, "just kind of free."

Airwallex founder Jack Zhang on why he turned down Stripe's $1.2 billion offer to buy his company: In October 2018, Stripe reached out. Patrick Collison wanted to catch up, and the two founders ended up spending a whole day together. The proposal was direct: they should either work together, or Stripe should buy Airwallex. Jack's instinct was to slow things down. "Let's just spend more time together," he said. What followed was an unusual courtship. Patrick built out a 10-to-20-page document in a Google Sheet laying out his thinking and asked @awxjack to comment on it. As they worked through it together, Jack had a realisation: "I was like, wow! The vision of the company in the next decade is kind of very much the same. We all wanted to build AWS for financial services." Stripe was far ahead of them. At the time, before Covid it was around a $9 billion company, which Jack notes is similar to the scale of Airwallex today. He was also struck by Patrick himself: "This guy is so smart. The Collisons are always held as geniuses. He's just so intellectually honest about everything, and also able to go deep in multiple dimensions." Then came the offer. Jack breaks down the structure: around $800 million on the cap table, $350 million to him and his co-founders, and roughly $25 million to core employees, close to $1.2 billion in total. Jack met with the whole team, came away impressed, and verbally told them: "I think we're going to do it." But the decision wouldn't settle: "On the back of your mind, are you really going to do it? I flew back and I was walking around San Francisco for two weeks trying to figure it out. I couldn't figure it out." What finally tipped him came from a question he'd asked Patrick about the long term whether he planned to be at Stripe forever: "Patrick said he's going to build Stripe for the next 20, 30, 40 years. I've just never heard a founder tell me that people would dedicate their entire life to building a business. That was so inspiring to me. I'm like that's what I want to do."