CAREER

Nobody talks about negotiating your salary. It is the single highest-ROI financial move most people will ever make, and it takes one conversation.

I skipped college and got my real estate license at 18. That decision had more impact on my financial life than any other single choice I made.

The most important thing you can do for yourself in your career is to work on something you love with people you love.

Specific knowledge is knowledge that you cannot be trained for. If society can train you, it can train someone else, and replace you.

Don't optimize for money. Optimize for learning. The money follows.

I've always felt that journalism was the best possible training for venture capital. You learn to understand businesses quickly, ask uncomfortable questions, and figure out what's really going on.

I was the youngest person on the SAP executive board. I walked away from a clear path to CEO. People thought I was insane. Maybe they were right.

I have been working on distributed systems my entire career. AI just happens to be the most important distributed systems problem of this generation.

I spent 7 years running Google's enterprise business. The thing I learned is that AI is not magic — it is math applied to better data. Lending just happened to have the worst data practices of any industry.

I co-founded Benchmark Capital. I know what great investing looks like. And I can tell you — most financial advisors are not doing it. They are selling products and calling it advice.

I built CrowdFlower, sold it, and then spent two years doing ML research. The tooling was so bad I kept building internal tools just to get work done. That became Weights & Biases.

I grew up in Detroit with nothing. I went to Wharton, worked at Deutsche Bank, got fired, discovered Bitcoin, and built a billion-dollar company. America is wild.

I joined Blackstone at 22 years old and never left. People ask me if I missed out by not going anywhere else. I went from a junior analyst to overseeing a trillion dollars. I think I did okay.

I went from covering the drug war in Mexico to trading at Goldman Sachs to buying car washes. My career makes no sense on paper. But every step taught me something the last one couldn't.

The most powerful financial asset you can build is a skill that generates income independent of any single employer.

Young people, I am going to let you in on a secret: nobody has any idea what they are doing. The successful ones just do not stop.

Quitting medicine was the scariest financial decision I ever made. It was also the most profitable by a factor of fifty.

I made more money from my first year on YouTube than I would have made in ten years as a doctor. The math was not even close.

We partnered with the best universities in the world because credibility matters. A certificate from Stanford or Google means something. That is what gets people hired.

I was a civil rights lawyer before I was an investor. Both jobs require the same thing: looking at a bad situation and figuring out how to make it better.

I started as a chemical engineer. That taught me to think in systems. Every business is a system. Optimize the system and the results follow.

I co-founded Apollo, then left to start Ares. Sometimes you have to leave something great to build something that is yours.

I cleared the UPSC exam at 22 and became an IAS officer. Then I quit to teach on YouTube. Everyone thought I was crazy. Now millions of students learn from me daily.

Never take a job for the money. Take it for the experience. The money follows the skill, not the other way around.

I wrote a book exposing creative accounting and got fired for it. Best career move I ever made.

I never went to business school. I went to the mailroom. That was my MBA.

I was Enron's best trader. That is the most complicated sentence in my biography.

I was the White House Deputy CTO. Now I am scaling Ethereum. Both are about building infrastructure people depend on.

HIV was supposed to end my life. Instead it started my second career. I have been investing for 30 years now.

I have been at JP Morgan for 28 years. Loyalty is underrated in an industry that changes jobs every three years.

I joined Ariel as an intern at 18. I became president at 31. Nobody handed me anything. I showed up and I worked.

I took eBay from 30 employees to 15,000 and eight billion in revenue. Then I lost a governor's race and joined Quibi. Life is a mixed bag.

I left PIMCO to spend more time with my daughter. I wrote her a letter about it. That letter went viral. I did not expect that.

If you're offered a seat on a rocket ship, don't ask what seat. Just get on.

I started at ABC making $150 a week. Every job I've had was earned, not given.

I lasted 11 days in the White House, but I've lasted 20 years on Wall Street. One of those is harder.

I quit my hedge fund job to make YouTube videos about math. My family thought I was insane.

Find your tennis ball — the thing you obsessively chase. Life is too short to work on things you don't care about.

Wall Street is a meritocracy with sharp elbows. If you can survive that, you can survive anything.

I went from the streets to the boardroom. Same hustle, different suit.

Employee number 30 at a company worth $65 billion. The lesson: join rockets, not safe bets.

Join the right company early, learn how generational businesses are built, then invest in the next generation.

I was in law school using Shopify to sell T-shirts. I loved the product so much I called Tobi and said I have to work here.

I started at GM checking hoods and fenders on the factory floor. The company gave me a chance, and I never forgot where I came from.

Being a woman in tech in the 1980s meant being the only woman in the room. Every room. For years.

I won a silver medal at the Math Olympiad, worked at Amazon, and co-founded a hedge fund. Math has been the through-line for everything.

I wanted to be a brewmaster like my father. No brewery in India would hire a woman. Biotechnology was my second choice — and my best decision.

I moved from the south of France to Silicon Valley with no network and no connections. If you have the skills, the system eventually lets you in.

I ran a product used by 2 billion people. Then I chose to run a company that delivers groceries. People thought I was crazy. I wanted to be CEO.

I started my career at Lehman Brothers right before the financial crisis. Nothing at Lyft was ever as scary as that September.

I gave up law because I realized I would spend my life arguing about other people's problems. I wanted to build something that was mine.

To be a MotoGP rider is not just a profession. It's a way of life.

Every year I think about retiring, and every year the bike pulls me back.

I have travelled more miles and played more golf than any man alive. And I would do all of it again.

If you get the opportunity to do something you love, protect it. Don't let money make you do things you don't believe in.

The hardest thing is knowing when to walk away from what defines you. The second hardest thing is building something new.

I didn't realize until I was already gone how lucky I was to drive for Hendrick Motorsports my entire career.

I built roads for twenty years before I realized the real money was in financing the roads.

The biggest risk in my career was not joining Alibaba. It was staying comfortable at a job that paid well but would never change my life.

I always did something I was a little not ready to do. That's how you grow.

Find something you're passionate about and stay tremendously interested in it.

I spent twenty-four years advising bankrupt companies. Then I realized I should be buying them.

I came to New York with five hundred dollars and a car. I had no connections. I figured that out as I went.

I spent 40 years building tools for employers. I wish I had gone independent 20 years sooner.

Going to the army was the most important decision in my life. Everything I learned about discipline, I learned there.

I left News Corp because I needed to prove to myself that I could build something independently. I needed to know that.

The CFO is the co-pilot of the business. You have to understand every part of how the company works, not just the numbers.

Leaving Facebook was the right move. I wanted to build something from scratch. That is a different experience from building inside a rocket ship.

I left Harvard Business School in my first year to start Yelp. That was the best educational decision of my life.

I have never defined myself by a job title or a company name. I am a problem-solver. Companies just pay me to do that at scale.

If you're going to work on something for the next decade, it should be something that matters. For me, that's financial access.

Stop dressing for the job you have. Start dressing for the job you want.

I didn't leave Enron because I thought something was wrong. I left because I didn't get the job I wanted. Looking back, that was the luckiest day of my career.

I am what I am because of creativity.

I had the privilege of working with more than 100 entrepreneurs very closely, and that's when I realised that intrinsically I am an entrepreneur.

I have spent my whole life proving disbelievers wrong.

You learn a lot of things more through adversity than you do through success.

I had gained a lot of experience and growth at Cisco, where I had been for 15 years.

One of the huge attractions of Arista was that it was small and entrepreneurial.

You can be an entrepreneur and an executive.

If somebody can do it, why can't I do it?

My mantra is to show up and raise my hand, and to do things that really interest me.

I fell in love with investments.

It's all about serendipity, and taking chances, and leaning in, and raising your hand.

It teaches you to think logically, evaluate arguments, to be critical, and open to new ideas.

As it turned out I was quite good at picking our short ideas.

Being a woman in this business means people notice your misses more. So you make sure you have the wins.

I was a bit naive. I was also disheartened because nobody thought I was being rational.

Looking back now, I am glad I didn't get into the first UN program. My life would have been completely different.

I am excited to announce that I am joining Paradigm as a Research Partner, to help Matt Huang, Fred Ehrsam, and Charlie Noyes build a new kind of investment firm.

In a salary negotiation, never be the first person to name a number.

Andreessen is the only one of the large platforms that I even considered joining because I felt they were the only ones who actually got crypto.