Bitcoin is a swarm of cyber hornets serving the goddess of wisdom, feeding on the fire of truth, and growing more powerful as it devours heat.
I would rather Ethereum die than see it become something that sacrifices its values.
Investing is not about being smarter than everyone else. It is about having a framework and sticking to it when it is uncomfortable.
Sound money is the foundation of civilization. Without it, everything else is rented.
Central banking is the root of most societal evil. It is the legalized counterfeiting of money.
The pursuit of wealth without happiness is the most expensive mistake a person can make.
Money is like water. It flows. If you try to hold onto it too tightly, it slips through your fingers.
There are two kinds of money: Happy Money and Unhappy Money. The difference is entirely in how you feel about it.
Financial planning without lifestyle planning is just math without meaning.
The goal of money is freedom. If your financial plan doesn't increase your freedom, it's the wrong plan.
Every piece of software we build is an opinion about how people should work.
If you are not happy, even if you have everything — the big house, the nice car — it doesn't matter. Delivering happiness is the most important thing.
We want to make software that feels like a craft, not a factory.
I don't want to live on Mars. I want to live on Earth. But I want the option of visiting a million-person colony on Mars.
A thousand true fans is all you need. You don't need millions of followers. You need a thousand people willing to pay $10 a month.
Compliance shouldn't be an annual fire drill. It should be a continuous process running in the background while you focus on building your product.
Every SaaS company thinks they need to be the best at one thing. We think integration IS the thing. Good enough across ten categories beats best-in-class in one.
Liquidity equals value. The most dangerous thing you can do is get yourself in a position where you can't act.
If you don't have integrity, you have nothing. You can't buy it. You are what you are.
Sovereign immunity is not a license to steal. Contracts must mean something, or the global financial system breaks down.
Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. But having said that, I don't know anyone who's happy who doesn't have a level of success.
Information is the edge. Everything else is just capital and courage.
The system has to be bigger than any individual in it. That includes me.
I learned from my days as a caddy that the fundamentals matter. You need to know the course, know the conditions, know the other players. Stock picking is no different.
I have always believed that markets would ultimately reflect fundamentals. This is not always the case in the short run.
Being a student of Julian Robertson meant learning that the most important question is always: does this business have the right to be great? Everything else follows from that.
We don't try to predict the economy or interest rates. We try to understand businesses. Those are very different activities.
Science, at its best, is about finding the truth. That's what I find compelling about both computational finance and computational biology — they're both attempts to find real patterns in complex systems.
The infrastructure of a nation is the foundation of its prosperity. Everything else — technology, trade, culture — flows through physical infrastructure. That is why I build what I build.
I am not a financier. I am a builder. And luxury is not a product, it is a culture.
The most important thing I've learned is to stay in your lane. Invest in what you know, what you believe in, and what you can add value to.
I've never invested in a market. I invest in people who understand a market better than anyone else alive.
The best investors I know hold a strong thesis and simultaneously know exactly what evidence would break it — and they stay genuinely open to seeing that evidence.
Physics teaches you one thing above all else: your intuitions are wrong and the model is right. Build the model. Trust the model.
I never cared about being rich. I cared about making things that matter. The money is just what happens when you build something people actually need.
Our job is to find moments when the market is wrong. Not always wrong — mostly right. But occasionally spectacularly, obviously wrong. That's where we want to be.
The market can tell you the price of a stock every second. It cannot tell you the value of a business. Those are different things, and confusing them is the most common mistake in investing.
The market does not care about your conviction. It cares about whether you are right.
I came to faith relatively late and it changed everything. Not just how I think about my personal life, but how I think about what I owe to other people and to society.
Conservation and capital allocation aren't that different. In both cases, you're trying to preserve something worth preserving.
Missing a train is only painful if you run after it. Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that's what you are seeking.
Effective altruism isn't just about donating money. It's about choosing to work on things that actually matter. Asana is part of that for me.
Zerodha proved Indians would trade. We're proving Indians will invest. Trading and investing are opposite things. One makes brokers rich. The other makes users rich.
We do not have a screen on purpose. A screen turns a health device into a notification device. We want you looking at your body, not your wrist.
Selling a building is like selling a child. You just do not do it. You hold it, you improve it, you pass it on.
I would rather own one iconic building than ten ordinary ones. Real estate is about address, design, and prestige. Everything else is a commodity.
I started with $10,000 and built affordable housing that nobody else wanted to build. Now I build neighborhoods. The principle is the same — find what other people will not do and do it better.
What is the ONE thing you can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary? That question changed my life and it has changed the lives of millions of people who read the book.
Financial freedom is not a number. It is the moment your rental income exceeds your living expenses. After that, work becomes optional. That is the whole game.
People ask me why we did not raise more money. Raise more money for what? We were profitable. We were growing. More money just means more people telling you what to do.
Delay gratification. The most important ability is to resist short-term temptation for long-term reward. This applies to companies, careers, and life.
Clothes should serve you. You should never serve your clothes. The moment you dress to impress, you've already lost. Dress to live.
Africa doesn't need sympathy. It needs investment. Aid creates dependency. Business creates prosperity. That's what Africapitalism means.
Technology should be public infrastructure, not a private moat. Identity, payments, data sharing — these should be open platforms that anyone can build on. Like roads. Like electricity. Open and universal.
Time is the only truly non-renewable resource. Spend it like it is worth more than money — because it is.
Productivity is not about doing more things. It is about doing the right things and actually enjoying the process.
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.
Effective altruism asks a simple question: how do you do the most good with the resources you have? The answer is rarely what you expect.
Screw it, let's do it. That has been my business philosophy for 50 years and it has worked out more often than not.
Decentralization is not a technology. It is a philosophy. No single entity should control how people communicate or move money.
The internet was built to be decentralized and free. Telegram is one of the last platforms that still believes in that original promise.
Real estate is a relationship business that happens to need technology. Not a technology business that happens to involve relationships.
The irony of MakerDAO is that we are decentralizing money by using centralized collateral. Progress is not always pure.
Privacy is not about having something to hide. It is about having the right to choose what you share.
The forest for the trees. That is the name of my firm and my entire investment philosophy. Zoom out.
AI in healthcare works when it handles paperwork not patients. The moment you try to replace clinical judgment you fail.
None can destroy iron, but its own rust can! Likewise, none can destroy a person, but their own mindset can.
Love is the answer to most of humanity's problems. I know that sounds naive, but I believe it deeply.
Philosophy taught me more about product design than any engineering course ever could.
Money is not the goal. Building something that earns genuine trust is the goal. Money follows trust, not the other way around.
Being rich is not about money. It is about freedom. The moment you confuse the two, you will be neither rich nor free.
Privacy is the most undervalued asset a wealthy person can own.
I model everything I do after Warren Buffett. If that’s arrogant, so be it. There’s no better model.
Philosophy taught me to ask better questions. In venture capital, the quality of your questions determines the quality of your investments.
Wealth is not about accumulating money. It is about building things that employ people and serve society. The money is a byproduct.
Happiness is really just about four things: perceived control, perceived progress, connectedness, and vision or meaning.
Money is a tool, not a trophy. The question is always: what are you building with it?
The most important form of capital is not financial capital. It is human capital.
Money is a trust given to us by God. We are accountable for how we use it.
It is better to be in the best stocks of a growth industry than to look for cheap companies in declining ones.
The ability to say 'I don't know' is the most underrated skill in investing.
The greatest risk is not volatility. It is the permanent impairment of capital.
Diversification is protection against ignorance. If you know what you own, you don't need to own fifty things.
Safe and cheap. That's my investment philosophy in three words. Everything else is noise.
Infrastructure assets have a unique quality: they generate cash regardless of what the stock market is doing. That consistency is not boring — it is the point.
Money is not wealth. Freedom is wealth. Money is just one way to buy some of it.
You cannot build homes without building community. The moment a developer forgets that, they start making mistakes.
The best developers are not builders. They are community creators. The building is just the container.
Own the real estate. Do not rent it. That is true in property, in media, in your career. If you are performing on someone else's platform, you are enriching them.
Philosophy teaches you to sit with uncertainty. Most of the important decisions you face in business are uncertain decisions. That training has mattered more than I expected.
Money is just a tool. What you build with it — that's what matters.
Safety and helpfulness are more complementary than they are at odds. We don't see them as a tradeoff.
I want to work for profit, but not live only for profit.
Marcus Aurelius said: do not seek fame. Work well, and the rest follows.
We work to live well, not to become rich. There is a profound difference.
I always felt fashion was underestimated. People consider it superficial. I think it is a very complex topic.
I am not interested in doing what has already been done.
I never set out to become a billionaire. I set out to solve a problem. The financial outcome was a consequence of getting the science right.
The Thomson family's greatest inheritance is not the companies or the capital. It is the understanding that information, delivered with accuracy and speed, always creates value.
From 400 kilometers above the earth, every problem that felt enormous from the ground looks like what it actually is — a temporary inconvenience on a very small planet.
I work with long-term thinking as a philosophy in my ownership.
I don't believe in luck but I believe that if you work hard, things fall in place.
It's all about serendipity, and taking chances, and leaning in, and raising your hand.
We seek to make reasoned decisions, attempt to adjust for natural biases and emotions, and focus on building portfolios one company at a time while seeking an attractive margin of safety.
The situation for each of us is always the result of one will and of circumstances. Sometimes the will prevails over the circumstances and sometimes it is the opposite.
I don't believe in 50 friends. I believe in a smaller number. Nor do I care about society events. It's the most senseless use of time.
This is what I love doing. To do well in investing, one has to be 100 per cent committed. The day one feels like slowing down, it is better to just retire. In this business, you are either 100 per cent engaged, or not at all.
Making money is just a means of keeping score, to know how well you are doing as a trader and investor.
I don't love the term hedge fund because it really refers to a fee structure more than it refers to a strategy.
There's no such thing as toxic assets, only toxic prices and toxic debt levels.
If transactional ideas can be imagined outside-in, transformational ideas can only be done from the inside, with deep engagement and only if you've built trusting relationships.
It's not corporate raiders taking over a business, it's not activists going in to kick out a bad CEO, it's a public market investor lending a skill set of acting like a business owner when they buy stocks to make them more valuable.
We like sitting with the founder till the IPO baton has passed. That's our DNA.
I love working with founders that are looking for a partner, not just capital. Capital is a commodity.
I am drawn to founders who hold themselves to a high bar, stay connected to reality, and build with purpose.
Life is millions of combinations of probabilities that are interdependent, hard to predict.
Firm ahead of individuals. That's the Sequoia philosophy that most resonates with me. Nobody's too big and nobody's idea is too small.
Chase the story behind the stock, not the money on the table. Money will make you rich, but the story will make you wealthy.
Invest like a bull, sit like a bear and watch like an eagle.
Money is made by looking through the windshield, not the rearview mirror.
Only thinking about how to make money in your own little corner is the view of a frog at the bottom of a well. Greed is the root of evil. There is a lot of money in this world you should not take.
Money is easy to find. Access and trust are the hard parts.
To be honest, I am almost only interested in changing the system, or moving the system.
I originally liked creating new things, from zero to one.
I don't want to create services just for technology's sake, but services that make convenience accessible to people.
We have to look at founders as human beings. They are not money-making machines, they are human.
The journey is very hard, from helping them hire people, to doing big partnerships, to giving them the capital they need.
If the definition of success should simply be measured by a balance sheet, then it is pretentious to claim otherwise. But life is not simply a balance sheet, right?
I think I've always had a certain skepticism towards authority, so when I see authority at work, I do question: Is this the way we want the world to operate?
I'm not a crypto native, I'm really a tech investor, so I don't believe in decentralization for the sake of decentralization.
The separation of money and state hasn't really happened since Julius Caesar bound the two together by stamping his face on gold coins.