Julian Shapiro

Don't start a startup where you need to go through someone else to get users.

If I'm going to pay you money I owe you for splitting dinner on Venmo, or a business expense that I'm paying you, you're my vendor on PayPal, or anything that's allowing me to just pay you money I owe you and I have to use a product to do so, whoever is collecting the money from me is going to make an account on that product if necessary to claim their hard earned money.

People mistake product-led acquisition for referral programs, which it is not. Because the referral programs are a tact on incentive trying to give people something to encourage them to invite because they otherwise are not inviting.

Writing quality equals novelty times resonance. Novelty is like we discussed, here are all these things that are giving you dopamine hits where I'm opening your eyes about how the world really works and shocking you and elegantly synthesizing things, times resonance and resonance means I can tell you the most novel thing on the planet. But if I don't wrap it in a way that resonates and really lifts off the page and into your mind and is something you remember, then it's fairly ineffective novelty.

I have 20 friends read something I've written and highlight the sentences that made them go, 'Whoa.' And then I have this visualized map in a given blog post, where are the areas that people go, 'That's really interesting,' and then I can see all the white space between the interesting parts. I go in and I condense that white space.

Your likelihood to follow through on something you start writing is a function of the objective you have with writing that piece and how strong your motivation is for seeing that objective to fruition.

The more you play any given game, the more state you're accruing. That might be your armor, your weapons, your character skins, and whatever. As a player of the game, the more state you build, the more you're compelled to stick around, because you don't want to lose everything you've worked so hard for.

This building state concept is why mediocre companies like eBay or Craigslist remain completely unbeatable for decades. Even though the UX is bad, people don't like using them, they fail to innovate, no one topples them and it's because of state.