Sam Hinkie

Write.

Write and put your thoughts out, particularly if you're proud of them, particularly if you want to make them better.

This is something I've really only come to understand, I think, in the last several years, last couple of years, which is the returns to writing well and the returns to getting better and better at writing.

I love the way I'm a Stripe fan in a whole bunch of ways and their business and their founders and all of that.

I love the way Patrick talks about that they're in some ways kind of writing to the unborn employees at Stripe.

You can have a meeting and you can have an all hands meeting and Stripe must have 2,500 employees, maybe 3,000 employees these days.

They could do an all-hand Zoom meeting and it would capture all those.

What do you do about the 3,001st employee?

What do you do about the 6,000th employee?

What do you do about the 30,000th employee?

And one of the ways to do that is to write, is to write down what you were thinking at the time, to write down where you thought the things should go, to write down why you made the decision you did so that someone that starts on the job next week or next decade can

could learn from it in a way that is useful.

Most of the writing I do is sort of among my friend group and I share things I've written and documents and things with a small set of friends around me.

I don't do a whole lot of that publicly to date.

I just think it's terribly critical as a way to sort of put your mark in the sand about what it is that you believe.

And by the way, people may not agree with you.

You may get criticized massively about it, but over time it ends up being a shelling point where many people will sort of come your way if they resonate with it in one way or another.

You just made me connect two dots, which is so interesting.

A friend of mine and the CEO of a company called Bottomless, in which I'm an investor, has this idea that the internet is the space of infinite possible actions.

And that a lot of what's so magical about technology and software is making stuff that was not readable to software, legible to software.