Chamath Palihapitiya Quotes

Goldman Sachs preaching about diversity so it can be at the front of the line for the next government bailout. It’s AstraZeneca waxing eloquent about climate change so it can secure multibillion-dollar government contracts for vaccine production. It’s State Street building feminist statues to detract attention from wage discrimination lawsuits from female employees, all the while marketing its exchange-traded fund with the ticker “SHE.” It’s Chamath Palihapitiya founding a social impact investment fund and criticizing Silicon Valley, even though he and his wealth are products of Silicon Valley, all to cover up for his prior tenure as an executive at Facebook who dreamed out loud about a private corporate military. Those companies and people use their market power to prop up woke causes as a way to accumulate greater political capital—only to later come back and cash in that political capital for more dollars.

The billionaire investor and former senior executive at Facebook, Chamath Palihapitiya, argues that we must rewire our brain to focus on the long term, which starts by removing social media apps from our phones. In his words, such apps, “wire your brain for super-fast feedback.” By receiving constant feedback, whether through likes, comments, or immediate replies to our messages, we condition ourselves to expect fast results with everything we do. And this feeling is certainly reinforced through ads for schemes to help us “get rich quick”, and through cognitive biases (i.e., we only hear about the richest and most successful YouTubers, not about the ones who fail).

I believe that social media, and the internet as a whole, have negatively impacted our ability to both think long-term and to focus deeply on the task in front of us. It is no surprise, therefore, that Apple CEO, Steve Jobs, prohibited his children from using phones or tablets—even though his business was to sell millions of them to his customers! The billionaire investor and former senior executive at Facebook, Chamath Palihapitiya, argues that we must rewire our brain to focus on the long term, which starts by removing social media apps from our phones. In his words, such apps, “wire your brain for super-fast feedback.” By receiving constant feedback, whether through likes, comments, or immediate replies to our messages, we condition ourselves to expect fast results with everything we do. And this feeling is certainly reinforced through ads for schemes to help us “get rich quick”, and through cognitive biases (i.e., we only hear about the richest and most successful YouTubers, not about the ones who fail). As we demand more and more stimulation, our focus is increasingly geared toward the short term and our vision of reality becomes distorted. This leads us to adopt inaccurate mental models such as: Success should come quickly and easily, or I don’t need to work hard to lose weight or make money. Ultimately, this erroneous concept distorts our vision of reality and our perception of time. We can feel jealous of people who seem to have achieved overnight success. We can even resent popular YouTubers. Even worse, we feel inadequate. It can lead us to think we are just not good enough, smart enough, or disciplined enough. Therefore, we feel the need to compensate by hustling harder. We have to hurry before we miss the opportunity. We have to find the secret that will help us become successful. And, in this frenetic race, we forget one of the most important values of all: patience. No, watching motivational videos all day long won’t help you reach your goals. But, performing daily consistent actions, sustained over a long period of time will. Staying calm and focusing on the one task in front of you every day will. The point is, to achieve long-term goals in your personal or professional life, you must regain control of your attention and rewire your brain to focus on the long term. To do so, you should start by staying away from highly stimulating activities.

In a speech at Stanford, Chamath Palihapitiya, Facebook’s former VP of user growth, told the audience, “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created [at Facebook] are destroying how society works—no civil discourse, no cooperation, misinformation, mistruth.”135 When asked about his children’s online habits, he added, “They’re not allowed to use this shit.

Here’s Chamath Palihapitiya, former vice president of user growth at Facebook: The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works.… No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth. And it’s not an American problem—this is not about Russian ads. This is a global problem.… I feel tremendous guilt. I think we all knew in the back of our minds—even though we feigned this whole line of, like, there probably aren’t any bad unintended consequences. I think in the back, deep, deep recesses of, we kind of knew something bad could happen.… So we are in a really bad state of affairs right now, in my opinion. It is eroding the core foundation of how people behave by and between each other. And I don’t have a good solution. My solution is I just don’t use these tools anymore. I haven’t for years.2

The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works—no civil discourse, no cooperation, misinformation, mistruth. —Chamath Palihapitiya, former Facebook VP of user growth

Chamath Palihapitiya, Facebook’s former vice president of user growth, was quoted in the New Yorker saying Facebook was “destroying how society works—no civil discourse, no coöperation, misinformation, mistruth.” Palihapitiya said his children were “not allowed to use this shit.

Leading the Product Vision There are two critical roles in your app company at this stage. One is responsible for figuring out what product to build and the other is responsible for how to build it. These two people are going to be joined at the hip, so they need to work extremely well together. The person behind the ‘what’ is the head of product. The person behind the ‘how’ is the CTO, or chief technology officer – the person in charge of building the actual software. In many very successful tech companies – especially app-centric ones – the first head of product is usually the CEO. They have the vision about what to build, and in many cases cofound a company with someone rich in engineering experience to deliver the how. Over time, as the CEO role becomes broader and more demanding, a dedicated head-of-product role needs to be created and filled with someone entirely focused on that mission. It’s tough to lead product development. It’s the role that I have been lucky to hold in a number of companies. The best product people listen to everyone’s vision, assumptions and ideas, and then ensure there is a clear, data-driven process about how to build, test and roll out product improvements. One of the key qualities of this person (besides being laser-focused on testing new product improvements and measuring their effectiveness) is the ability to say no. ‘No’ is a critical word to the success of any startup because it enables focus. Given limited time, money and resources, maintaining focus is the only way to get to product–market fit. Chamath Palihapitiya is a rather outspoken product guy who was part of the team that put Facebook on the path to a billion users.3 He explains the role of the product team very simply: testing, measuring and trying. In order to create a killer product, all you need to do is come up with good product features, build them quickly, test them with a subset of your users, gather the data, and then, if the new feature improves one of your key metrics (how often people use the app, how much time they spend using the app or if they end up spending more money), then you roll out the feature to all your users. If the product improvement doesn’t work, it must be changed or killed. It’s that simple. Since data doesn’t lie, there isn’t much that can go wrong with the process, unless you’re not very good at (i) coming up with product improvements to test, (ii) figuring out how to measure the performance of your product improvements, or (iii) judging from the data whether a product feature is improving core metrics or making them worse.