Welcome to our collection of quotes by Naval Ravikant. We hope you enjoy pondering them and please share widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Naval Ravikant
Naval Ravikant is an Indian-American entrepreneur and investor. He is the co-founder, chairman and former CEO of AngelList. He has invested early-stage in over 200 companies including Uber, FourSquare, Twitter, Wish.com, Poshmark, Postmates, Thumbtack, Notion, SnapLogic, Opendoor, Clubhouse, Stack Overflow, OpenDNS, Yammer, and Clearview AI, with over 70 total exits and more than 10 Unicorn companies.
Ravikant is a Fellow of the Edmund Hillary Fellowship. He is also a podcaster who shares advice on pursuing wealth and happiness.
If you're good with computers, if you're good at basic mathematics, if you're good at writing, if you're good at speaking, and if you like reading, you're set for life.
Specialisation is for insects. I don't believe in this model of trying to focus your life down one thing. You've got one life just do everything you want.
Status is your ranking in the social hierarchy.
Reading is the ultimate meta-skill that can be traded for anything else.
Competing without software is like competing without electricity.
Forty hour workweeks are a relic of the Industrial Age. Knowledge workers function like athletes -- train and sprint, then rest and reassess.
Getting in the middle of financial transactions is a regulatory minefield.
On AngelList, we get 100 new companies created a day. That's an insane flood.
Unlike a normal venture fund, we never stop raising capital. We can always absorb new capital on the platform and into the next deal as long as we feel it won't distort the allocation and the pricing.
With tech startups, it's all loose-goosie. You raise money as you go, often from friends, family and investors.
Startups are constantly raising money, sometimes before they have even hired a lawyer.
Startups often want to control the timing of their financing announcement and prefer not to reveal amounts raised for competitive reasons. If more of the Form D information was confidential rather than public, compliance rates would jump dramatically.
One philosophy I have at AngelList is I would rather have someone working on the wrong thing and do it their way and be motivated, than working on the right thing and do it my way and not be motivated.
At the end of the day, what makes Silicon Valley work is technology and the outcome of making money. Those two things have to be healthy. It has to matter a lot more than who is the celebrity and who is famous and who goes to the best parties.
People come in. They are too gung ho. They invest too much money in things they don't know. They lose it and then they clam up and stop investing. Then they miss the actual boom. That's the nature of the market.
China may censor YouTube. China may censor Twitter. They won't be able to censor Bitcoin. There's no central authority. There's no one you can go to and say, 'We're going to turn Bitcoin off.'
We're going to try and prove to the market that you can do a legal coin offering. If the SEC doesn't crack down, this party will be amazing -- the biggest party in town for a long time. If they do crack down, a lot of people are going to feel a lot of pain.
A block chain is a series of blocks. Each block is a series of computations done by computers all over the world using serious cryptography in a way that's very hard to undo.
ICOs are obviously a new and interesting form of funding for blockchain-based protocols, but it's not clear that all of them comply with U.S. securities laws or that all of them are companies that have good native use cases for new coins.
There's so much innovation going on, and there are lots of people funding that innovation, but there's very little innovation on that infrastructure for innovation itself, so we like to do that ourselves to help companies create more tech companies.
We just think it's important that everybody have some technical training and background. Even though not everybody is coding but even our deals team and our designers all have GitHub accounts and they go into the code base.
Cryptocurrencies will create a fifth protocol layer powering the next generation of the Internet.
Rules that may be easy for Wall Street are a death sentence for startups. They are easy to break accidentally and the penalty for noncompliance is severe.
In an ideal world, you raise a lot of money and then there is a downturn, before you start investing so you get better deals. But it doesn't always happen that way.
The best founders are extremely thoughtful and have an eye for quality. I don't know if there's any generic advice here that would be helpful. Startup knowledge is a moving target.
Cryptocurrencies are an emergent property of the Internet -- almost a fifth protocol in the Internet suite. If Satoshi Nakomoto did not exist, it would still be necessary to invent them.
Within my social circle, there is a large group of people who will take bitcoin as legal tender; like, you can go to them and settle debts in Bitcoin, and they will happily take it.
Having a million-dollar net worth doesn't make you a genius, and having less than a million-dollar net worth doesn't make you a fool.
It's important not to think about Bitcoin as a replacement for cash or gold or something that works alongside that; it's to think of it as programmable money. And we just cannot even imagine what that will be used for.
If you're investing in a company in the Bitcoin economy, you have to compare the valuation of the company to the valuation of the entire economy.
The ledger, the distributed database -- it's called a Blockchain -- is held in the cloud by all the parties involved. It can't be broken by any of them. It's cryptographically too strong. You would have to compromise the entire network to take over Bitcoin.
We can code wills, escrows, trusts, notaries, revokable charge backs, proof of contracts, intellectual property enforcement. What Wall Street does can be done in code by Bitcoin.
Money is a bubble that never pops. It's a consensus hallucination.
Cryptocurrency currencies take the concept of money, and they take it native into computers, where everything is settled with computers and doesn't require external institutions or trusted third parties to validate things.
Think of Bitcoin as a bank account in the cloud, and it's completely decentralized: not the Swiss government, not the American government. It's all the participants in the network enforcing.
Knowledge is either from direct experience or from verifiable, falsifiable science. There is knowledge that is transmitted but not verifiable falsifiable, and this knowledge is indistinguishable from that which is false.
Now we have the Internet, which is the greatest weapon of knowledge ever created, completely interconnected.
Knowledge is useful when applied, but over-accumulated for its own sake is a burden.
I know just enough to know how little we know.
Recover time and happiness by minimizing these three apps: phone, calendar, and alarm clock.
Most of the gains in life come from suffering in the short term, so you can get paid in the long term.
Sit with the pain until it passes, and you will be calmer for the next one.
Future: Money becomes information. Weapons become information. Land becomes information. Software eats society.
Anti-establishment candidates are the future.
A future society may support overclocking brilliant young scientists with mental performance enhancing drugs to get more scientific breakthroughs.
If you want the truth, take no one else's word for it. Accept only science, reason, and direct experience. Start on solid ground. Mind each step.
Charisma is the ability to project confidence and love at the same time.
Cool people are considered cool because they break the rules and get away with it.
When you understand something, then it naturally calms you down.
If you want to be effective in business, you need a clear, calm, cool, collected mind.
More patience, more presence, less anxiety.
Relax. You'll live longer and perform better.
A fit body, a calm mind, a house full of love. These things cannot be bought -- they must be earned.
Boredom is a defense mechanism to avoid having to sit alone with our unaddressed thoughts.
This task is yours and yours alone.
Most of life is about searching, it's not about doing. People spend too much time doing and not thinking about what they should be doing.
No one can compete with you on being you. Most of life is a search for who and what needs you the most.
Three things in life -- your health, your mission, and the people you love. That's it.
Don't settle, and don't struggle. Life is what flows in between.
Self-esteem is just the reputation you have with yourself. You'll always know.
The more worldly success you have, the more your ego gets built up. The more fearful you might be of losing it all.
Swearing signals a lack of eloquence and emotional control.
It's becoming easier and easier to be social, but exceptional people are built in solitude.
The closer you are to the truth, the more silent you become inside.
The only opinion of me that I care for is my own, and the only timeframe is now.
Someone who doesn't care, can't be hurt.
You're offended when you fear that it might be true.
The less scheduled you are, the more creative you're going to be.
Creativity is obscured by the conscious mind.
Better wrong alone than right with the herd.
If you don't care to be liked, they can't touch you.
The secret to a happy relationship is two happy people.
If you attack someone's identity, you shut down all conversations with them.
The more you judge, the more you separate yourself.
Anger is its own punishment. An angry person trying to push your head below water is drowning at the same time.
Judge, and feel separate and lonely. Anger, and lose peace of mind. Cling, and live in anxiety. Fantasize, and miss the present. Desire, and suffer until you have it.
Keep a nimble mind, and err on the side of precaution.
It's such a poisonous emotion because, at the end of the day, you're no better off, you're unhappier, and the person you're jealous of is still successful or good-looking or whatever they are.
Nothing matters and that's a good thing as it sets you free.
I don't care whether you're a top Wall Street banker, if somebody has to tell you when to be at work, what to wear, and how to behave, you're not a free person.
Be impatient with actions but patient with results.
The price of trying to make everyone else happy is making yourself miserable.
Your trauma creates you.
The most important relationship you have is with yourself … That is your world. That is the world you live in. That's the worldview you have. That's the lens you see through, and that's going to determine the quality of your life more than anything else.
The great viruses of our time spread through minds, not through bodies.
Earn with your mind, not with your time.
The mind itself is a muscle -- it can be trained and conditioned.
When the mind is speaking without permission, it's lying.
Our mind is evolved to be paranoid, fearful and angry.