It takes discipline not to let social media steal your time.
To join in the industrial revolution, you needed to open a factory; in the Internet revolution, you need to open a laptop.
The social-media landscape changes incredibly fast, so you have to be open-minded and nimble to keep up with it.
Being effective at social media, whether for business or personal use, means capturing people who have short attention spans. They're only a click away from a picture of a funny cat, so you have to make your thing more compelling than that cat. And that can be a high bar.
Unless it's really an emergency, I'm not going to bother you. And you can see people chafe at that. 'You're in the same office and instant-message each other? Why don't you just walk over?' That's the perfect example of how ingrained the status quo is. To certain people, it may seem lazy, but I would argue it's much more efficient and considerate.
I hate phone calls, so I believe in a telephone armistice. To me, the idea of calling someone unprompted is basically saying, 'Hey, stop whatever you're doing and talk to me right now.' If you find yourself in the middle of something, getting an unprompted annoyance is incredibly frustrating.
If you've never seen people taking the pledge of allegiance for the first time as U.S. Citizens, it will move you: a room full of people who can really appreciate what I was lucky enough to grow up with, simply by being born in Brooklyn.
Word of mouth now has a unprecedented influence because it spreads so far and so fast.
As long as people are using the Internet, people are going to do stupid stuff, and people are going to do bad stuff. And by the time that robots are sentient, they're going to enslave us anyway, so it won't matter.
I'd like to see the word 'entrepreneur' knocked off its pedestal. Being 'entrepreneurial' is something I look for not only in founders to invest in, but also employees to hire.
I've been learning how to soft-scramble eggs. And once you've had an amazing soft-scrambled egg, you cannot go back. It takes a little bit more work, but they're really great.
I am consistently impressed by reddit. I'd say on a near weekly basis, by little things. Whether it's - I absolutely love seeing the Photoshop jobs that people do. Not of silly cats, but of redditors who are like, 'I have this photo of like my mom. This is the last photo I took with her. She was in the hospital. Can any of you clean this photo up?'
Reddit is a network where someone with a million karma points has an equal shot as someone with 10 karma points to hit the #1 post or comment.
On my father's side, I'm descended from immigrants, one of whom was a Syrian refugee from the Armenian genocide, and my mother was an immigrant from Germany whose visa had expired and, for a year and change, was undocumented here in the U.S.
Pitch tip: Speak confidently about your product, but be able to admit when you need more information, and get it to the people you're pitching quickly after the meeting.
So much of Reddit as a product was built on the shoulders of giants... We did some novel remixes of it but, at the end of the day, it was that: Grit and good luck.
Let's all strive to be more entrepreneurial, and I think we'll all be in a better place.
My junior year, I went to an LSAT-prep course. I flipped over my test and thought, 'You bastards.' I walked out and went to Waffle House. That's where I had what I call 'The Waffle House Epiphany': I didn't want to be a lawyer. I wanted to make a dent in the universe.
I want to stay hungry. I really believe my resources are best used to help projects that make the world suck less.
The best part of being an angel investor is seeing these kids coming up with companies that get way more traffic than Reddit had when we sold it. I think, 'Are you kidding me? They're just kids, and they've done so much.'
