Edwin Chen

The types of companies are going to change too. It won't just be that they're smaller, we're going to see fundamentally different companies emerging. If you think about it, fewer employees means less capital. Less capital means you don't need a raise. So instead of companies started by founders who are great at pitching and great at hyping, you'll get founders who are really great at technology and product.

I used to work at a bunch of the big tech companies and I always felt that we could fire 90% of the people and we would move faster because the best people wouldn't have all these distractions.

I think the only way you build something that matters that's going to change the world is if you find a big idea you believe in and you say no to everything else.

Don't pivot. Don't put scale. Don't hire that Stanford grad who simply wants to add a hot company to your resume, just build the one thing only you could build, a thing that wouldn't exist without the insight and expertise that only you have.

If you could choose the perfect model behavior, which model would you want? Do you want a model that says, 'You're absolutely right. There are definitely 20 more ways to improve this email,' and it continues for 50 more iterations or do you want a model that's optimizing for your time and productivity and just says, 'No. You need to stop. Your email's great. Just send it and move on'?

I wish I'd known that you could build a company by being heads down and doing great research and simply building something amazing. And not by constantly tweeting and hyping and fundraising.

You are your objective function. So we want the rich, complex, objective functions and not these simplistic proxies.

I think there's a big difference between moving from 80% performance to 90% performance to 99% performance to 99.9% performance. Within the next one or two years, the models are going to automate 80% of the average L6 software engineer's job. It's going to take another few years to move to 90%, and another few to 99%.