from Stephen Cohen, co-founder of Palantir:

“We tend to massively underestimate the compounding returns of intelligence. As humans, we need to solve big problems. If you graduate Stanford at 22 and Google recruits you, you’ll work a 9-to-5. It’s probably more like an 11-to-3 in terms of hard work. They’ll pay well. It’s relaxing. But what they are actually doing is paying you to accept a much lower intellectual growth rate. When you recognize that intelligence is compounding, the cost of that missing long-term compounding is enormous. They’re not giving you the best opportunity of your life. Then a scary thing can happen: You might realize one day that you’ve lost your competitive edge. You won’t be the best anymore. You won’t be able to fall in love with new stuff. Things are cushy where you are. You get complacent and stall. So, run your prospective engineering hires through that narrative. Then show them the alternative: working at your startup.”

http://www.quora.com/What-are-some-of-the-better-carrots-used-to-attract-top-engineering-talent-in-Silicon-Valley-besides-equity-and-salary/answer/Gregory-Terzian-1

Elon Musk

The work of Elon Musk’s companies makes the accomplishments of the average tech startup look trivial. Reading about Musk makes a person reconsider whether or not they should be working on improving ad performance on the Internet when he or she could be helping to put a man on Mars.

via http://murtza.org/2011/12/27/elon-musk-pushing-human-race-forward/

A really good episode of “Bloomberg Risk Takers” on Elon Musk here: http://www.bloomberg.com/video/73460184/

Interesting post on the Hacker News link: 

Elon Musk is my ultimate role model as an entrepreneur.

This article, for me, is somewhat bittersweet. I look up to Elon Musk and what he’s doing, because it’s really making a difference in the world. That’s what I aspire to do someday. But my day to day job is as the first engineer of an advertising startup, where we make boatloads of money helping companies better monetize and promote crappy mobile games. Sometimes I wonder if I’m creating any value in the world.

Hopefully this’ll be a stepping stone towards financing a startup that’ll be a little more meaningful.

Source: news.ycombinator.com