Benedict Evans

as well as you know learning to think maybe learning to think is what i do maybe that's not what you should be doing you should be learning what is it that you should be learning to do what are the things that you're good at try all the different things i don't know it sounds like a like in a university commencement speech now i don't know um but you don't know what you're going to be good at so you kind of want to try and like create options for yourself what did you learn about investing working at a 16z

So there's a bunch of like maxims or sayings.

That's probably, I wouldn't want to dignify them as like theses or anything else, but there's a whole bunch of maxims and sayings in venture, which, you know, we could have a podcast talking about.

There are better people to give you a podcast talking about the mechanics of venture.

But like you have, you're understanding what startups are and how they work and how the machine works.

And startups are an industry and Silicon Valley is like a machine for creating startups.

Yeah.

And still too many people kind of look and say, well, that was a dumb idea.

And it's like, well, that's the wrong question.

The question is, if you look at a startup and you think, could it work?

And if it did work, what would it be?

And could those people make it work?

And then you understand more, you like the mechanics of, well, how does social media work and how do people build companies and what is it like to create a startup, which is a whole other conversation.

I think something else that I learned was calibration.

This is sort of, again, another metaphor I always think of, which is that if you go to like a really great art gallery, like you go to the MoMA or, you know, the Met or the Louvre or something, everything there is a masterpiece.

If you go to a smaller, weirder art gallery, like London's a gallery in London called the Wallace Collection, or I was in Rome a couple of weeks ago and I went to one of the sort of old aristocratic palaces.

And this palace is like, it's like 10 or 15 rooms of pictures.

And they've got like a quite good Tintoretto and a maybe Titian and a Raphael.

You see it glowing across the room.

They're like, oh, that's why he's Raphael.