#149 - The Craziness of r/WallStreetBets, an $100k Bet, and Startup Ideas with Mercury Banks Founder

I think that most of us in Silicon Valley... the more successful you get, the more buttoned up you typically get. I think what you see some people doing—Chamath [Palihapitiya] is doing a ton of this, Elon [Musk] does a ton of this—which is, when you're supposed to be buttoned up, and then you act a little wild, you get this disproportionate reward of attention because that community doesn't get a lot of that.

The longer you go at it, I feel like the harder problems people tackle ... I'm seeing people raise like $8 million, $10 million on an idea, which I think is crazy, but it does mean that people can tackle much more ambitious problems.

Writing a newsletter consistently is significantly harder than probably any other medium. Well, maybe not video, but it's really hard.

One of the reasons I invest is to broaden my kind of experience horizons and learn things—you get that more from these, like, hard tech companies than you do from, like, a pure software play.