"The last week was funny and also tiring, I worked 14 hours per day on average. My normal average is 4/6 since early Redis times, but the first few months of Redis were like that."

If I had to ask myself the question — had I the right to gain power? — then I certainly hadn’t the right

The two-minute rule

• Take whatever habit you're trying to build and scale it down to something that takes 2 minutes or less.
• Read 30 books a year becomes read one page. Do yoga 4 days a week becomes take out my yoga mat.
• People resist this because they know the real goal is bigger. That's the point.

You have to standardize before you optimize

• A habit must be established before it can be improved. It has to become the standard in your life before you scale it up.
• Standardize before you optimize.
• We get all-or-nothing about habits. We hunt for the perfect sales strategy, business idea, or diet plan and stay in research mode.

• Every action you take is casting a vote towards being the type of person you want to be
• Act of doing it is proof you are that type of person
• Behavior and belief is a two-way street. What you believe will influence the actions that you take, but the actions that you take can also influence what you believe about yourself. Every time you show up and do it in some small way, you prove to yourself a little bit, hey, maybe I am that kind of person. So my encouragement, my suggestion is to let the behavior lead the way. To start with some small action and then prove to yourself in that moment that you were that kind of person. As you start to foster and build that identity, sticking with the habit becomes easier.

Change in the environment such that the behaviour that you want is obvious.

You want to be able to walk into your rooms each day and the good habit is the path of least resistance

Good questions:

• am i creating the conditions for success
• how can I make this behaviour more obvious
• What is this space designed to do
• What is obvious? Are you creating conditions where the change that you want or the behavior that you want is obvious, attractive, easy, and satisfying? The more that you can do that, the more likely it is that you'll follow through

So many of your behaviors will curtail themselves possibly to the desired degree if it is less obvious, if it's not as accessible.

In a lot of ways, I actually think the most powerful form of mental toughness, the most powerful or resilient form of preparation is a mindset that can handle uncertainty. We all try to resist this. We try to control reality. We try to predict scenarios and outcomes. We try to figure out what's going to happen ahead of time. But really all you need is not to predict the future. What you need is the confidence that you can handle uncertainty. That whatever happens, I will be able to figure it out. I think if I was going to encapsulate entrepreneurship in a nutshell, I would say it is the trust and the willingness that you can figure it out.

No amount of information is going to allay the fact that all of your knowledge is about the past and all of your decisions are about the future.' It's just a fundamental reality of life. Knowledge is purely about the past and what has been learned and decisions are purely about the future and what cannot be predicted. And so you have to become okay with that reality.

People talk themselves out of things long before the world actually shuts the door.

Work backwards from magic

"One of my little sayings internally is I try to work backwards from magic. So what would the magical outcome be? And then let me try to figure out a couple different paths that could potentially get me there and I'll start to take steps forward and then I'll get feedback from the world. I don't tell myself no. Maybe the world will tell me no and I need to adjust the course. But I start with the magical outcome and then go from there."

Reputation

"I guess the main way that I think about it is I want to be known as someone who is useful. Useful is a word that I come back to a lot. Josh Kaufman has a good framework. It's like three things. I think it's true, useful, and clear. Ultimately, your reputation will be the work, the quality of the work that you do. So, it is, I think Brent Beshore said at one point, it's like the range of outcomes that you can expect from a brand. And so the more that you do things that are high quality and useful and valuable and actionable, the more that you will become known for that."

The financial behaviors are downstream of the psychological experience: When the future feels foreclosed, your brain starts optimizing for the present. And when you’ve internalized the idea that effort doesn’t connect to outcomes, you stop making the kinds of financial decisions that require believing in your own future.

The political scientist Peter Turchin has a framework for understanding this group historically. He calls it “elite overproduction”: Societies produce more people who expect elite positions than positions exist. It’s the engine of the American Dream running hotter than the economy can support. For example, master’s degrees have doubled since 2000. The credentials of elite status — the graduate degree, the knowledge-work title, the coastal zip code — have proliferated, while the economic substance has concentrated into a smaller and smaller group at the very top. You end up with an enormous class of people who did “everything right” and are one bad quarter away from the financial crisis.

Yes, many upper-middle-class households fall within the top 20% or even top 10% of earners. Statistically, they’re doing well. But the chasm between the upper middle class and the actual ownership class — the people whose wealth generates its own income without labor — is quite large, and widening. The top 20% accounts for 59% of all consumer spending. But within that top 20%, the real divide is between people who earn and people who own.

Do as much as necessary and as little as possible

• Nvidia's job: turn electrons into tokens. Do as much as necessary and as little as possible to make that happen.
• Whatever Nvidia doesn't need to do itself, it partners out and folds into the ecosystem.
• Result: the largest partner ecosystem in the industry, upstream and downstream.
• The test is simple: if we don't do it, does it get done?
• NVLink, the full stack, 20 years of CUDA at a loss, CUDA-X libraries, cuLitho for computational lithography — none of this existed without Nvidia building it.
• If nobody else will build it, Nvidia commits fully. Whole company, all the might.
• Clouds already exist. If Nvidia didn't run one, somebody would.
• So Nvidia doesn't become a cloud. It doesn't become a financier either. There are people in the financing business already.
• The business model stays simple on purpose.

AI is a five-layer cake

• AI isn't just a model. It's a five-layer stack.
• The bottom layer is energy. Above that sits chips, then systems, then models, then applications.
• Abundant energy makes up for weaker chips. Abundant chips make up for weak energy.
• The US is scarce on energy, so Nvidia has to push architecture and extreme co-design to get max throughput per watt.
• If watts are free, you don't care about perf per watt. You can run old chips. 7nm chips are essentially Hopper.
• This is why China having cheap abundant energy matters so much for their AI position.

Every layer has to win, not just one

• Applications matter most because that's where AI diffuses into society and drives the industrial revolution.
• But every layer has to succeed. You can't sacrifice one to protect another.
• Conceding the chip layer in China to protect the model layer is picking a fight with your own stack.
• Long-term tech leadership means winning all five layers, not trading them off.

Conceding China is a loser's premise

• Nvidia's share is growing, not shrinking. The assumption that they'd lose China anyway is wrong on the facts.
• Jensen didn't wake up a loser. The US isn't a loser. The industry isn't a loser.
• Walking away from the second largest market in the world because you assume you'd lose it makes no sense.

The policy argument relies on extremes

• The export-control case depends on absolutes: any compute at all means we lose everything.
• Real life isn't absolute. You can keep the best tech at home and first, and still compete abroad.
• Both things can be true at the same time. It takes nuance and maturity, not all-or-nothing thinking.
• Conceding China hands away ~40% of the world's tech industry for the benefit of one layer of the stack.
• That's a disservice to the country, to national security, and to American tech leadership.
• The goal should be: best tech here first, and compete to win everywhere else.

"This is one of the concerns that I have about the doomers describing the end of work and killing of jobs. If we discourage people from being software engineers, we're going to run out of software engineers. The same prediction happened ten years ago. Some of the doomers were telling people, 'Whatever you do, don't be a radiologist.' You might hear some of those videos still on the web saying radiology is going to be the first career to go and the world is not going to need any more radiologists. Guess what we're short of? Radiologists."

Why jobs and tasks are not the same thing

• A job is the full role. A task is one thing inside it.
• A radiologist's job is patient care. Reading a scan is just one task.
• AI automating the task doesn't eliminate the job. It frees the person for the rest of the role.
• Confusing the two is how you end up with a shortage of radiologists and worse healthcare.

• Moore's Law now delivers about 25% per year. That's it.
• Between Hopper and Blackwell, the transistors themselves got roughly 75% better over three years.
• But Blackwell is 50x Hopper. Lithography can't explain that gap.
• Jensen originally announced Blackwell as 35x more energy efficient than Hopper. Nobody believed it. Dylan later wrote that Jensen sandbagged and it's actually 50x.

Where the 10x–100x leaps actually come from

• The lever is computer science, not transistors.
• Great algorithm work adds another ~10x on top of Moore's Law each year.
• MoE is the clearest example. New attention mechanisms also cut compute dramatically.
• Most of AI's recent progress came from algorithm advances, not raw hardware.

Why Nvidia can capture those algorithm gains and TPUs can't

• CUDA is programmable enough to invent new architectures on, whether that's MoE, diffusion, disaggregated inference, or hybrid SSMs.
• Nvidia is an extreme co-design company. They can change the processor, system, fabric, libraries, and algorithm at the same time.
• They push computation off the chip into the fabric via NVLink, or into the network via Spectrum-X.
• Without CUDA underneath, Jensen says he wouldn't even know where to start doing this.

Why process node isn't the whole story

• There's no 10x gap between 5nm and 7nm. Lithography is a small part of the picture.
• Architecture matters. Networking matters, which is why Nvidia bought Mellanox. Energy matters.
• Semiconductor physics still counts, but computer science and the full stack above the transistor drive most of AI's impact.

When designing a consumer product, you should consider every tap by a user to be a miracle. The motivation to stop using a new app will always be stronger than to use it To signup & complete a profile on Gas, we got it down to 15 taps total—with no keyboard required at any stage

They also don’t realize that yea I could keep going through thier onboarding flow, but timewise it’s competing with me looking at more dancing/cat videos on Tik Tok, and that is some seriously compelling content to compete with!

There’s some weird cognitive bias where product creators vastly overestimate how likely people are to do or pay attention to something based on how much the product creator wants them to, and they vastly underestimate how lazy people are.