We are seeing a lot of cases where the startups are writing the term sheet, dictating the terms, selling common stock instead of preferred stock, where they don't give the investor veto rights or board seat or privileges, and they are really asking the investor -- why should I take your money when there is other money available.

Naval Ravikant

Think of Bitcoin as a bank account in the cloud, and it's completely decentralized: not the Swiss government, not the American government. It's all the participants in the network enforcing.

Naval Ravikant

Work Men Government

The ledger, the distributed database - it's called a Blockchain - is held in the cloud by all the parties involved. It can't be broken by any of them. It's cryptographically too strong. You would have to compromise the entire network to take over Bitcoin.

Naval Ravikant

Work Art You

While the traditional banks and credit card companies lock down access to their payments infrastructure to a handful of trusted parties, Bitcoin is open to all.

Naval Ravikant

Trust Men Car

It's almost always possible to be honest and positive.

Naval Ravikant

Positive Ways Way

Cryptocurrency currencies take the concept of money, and they take it native into computers, where everything is settled with computers and doesn't require external institutions or trusted third parties to validate things.

Naval Ravikant

Trust Money Computers

Figure out what you're good at and start helping other people with it; give it away. Pay it forward. Karma sort of works because people are very consistent. On a long enough timescale, you will attract what you project.

Naval Ravikant

Work War Time

Money is a bubble that never pops. It's a consensus hallucination.

Naval Ravikant

Money Us T

People think about Bitcoin incorrectly. They think about it as currency or about gold or hoarding, speculation, about how much money do you make. When really, what it is is an API for programmable cash transactions.

Naval Ravikant

Money You Transactions

Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are already trustless - any machine can accept it from any other, securely. They are (nearly) free. They are global - no central bank required, and any machine can speak the language.

Naval Ravikant

Trust Age Us

If you're investing in a company in the Bitcoin economy, you have to compare the valuation of the company to the valuation of the entire economy.

Naval Ravikant

You Vest Tire

We can code wills, escrows, trusts, notaries, revokable charge backs, proof of contracts, intellectual property enforcement. What Wall Street does can be done in code by Bitcoin.

Naval Ravikant

Trust Men Wills

Entrepreneurship is really hard and painful - I'm not sure I'd recommend it for anyone who can't handle the extreme stress.

Naval Ravikant

Men Who T

Having a million-dollar net worth doesn't make you a genius, and having less than a million-dollar net worth doesn't make you a fool.

Naval Ravikant

You Worth Us

A block chain is a series of blocks. Each block is a series of computations done by computers all over the world using serious cryptography in a way that's very hard to undo.

Naval Ravikant

Computers World Way

Cryptocurrencies will create a fifth protocol layer powering the next generation of the Internet.

Naval Ravikant

Power Will T

I think it just helps to be very aware that fundamentally, there are no adults. Everyone is making it up as they go along. You have to find your own path, picking, choosing, taking and discarding as you see fit.

Naval Ravikant

War Men Car

I don't think I'm any smarter than any of my developers.

Naval Ravikant

Art Think Thin

The best founders are extremely thoughtful and have an eye for quality. I don't know if there's any generic advice here that would be helpful. Startup knowledge is a moving target.

Naval Ravikant

Knowledge Art Would

For us, just serving the market in the US and the UK, we can barely make the math work on an interesting business. My sense is that our clones and copycats are very manual. If they make it work, then congratulations to them!

Naval Ravikant

Work Business Very

I think long-term, Bitcoin is a currency of the Internet. So, even if humans don't use it, routers will use it. Web browsers will use it. Web servers will use it.

Naval Ravikant

Will Web Use

In an ideal world, you raise a lot of money and then there is a downturn, before you start investing so you get better deals. But it doesn't always happen that way.

Naval Ravikant

Any competent programmer has an API to cash, payments, escrow, wills, notaries, lotteries, dividends, micropayments, subscriptions, crowdfunding, and more.

Naval Ravikant

All of the marketplaces like Prosper, LendingClub, etc., as they get larger, they flip from being retail capital to institutional capital.

Naval Ravikant

Oddly enough, Bruce Lee wrote some great philosophy.

Naval Ravikant

Startups are constantly raising money, sometimes before they have even hired a lawyer.

Naval Ravikant

I think of Twitter as the place where I go to have a great conversation when I can't have one locally, which seems to be all the time, and the more time that I spend on Twitter, the more I sort of curate this incredible group of very intelligent people that I just get to know purely through the quality of their thoughts.

Naval Ravikant

Be present. Be meditative. Form real friendships. Stay away from business networking events or friendships where there is always an underlying business angle.

Naval Ravikant

I think almost everything about humans and human civilization is explained better by evolution than anything else.

Naval Ravikant

Within my social circle, there is a large group of people who will take bitcoin as legal tender; like, you can go to them and settle debts in Bitcoin, and they will happily take it.

Naval Ravikant

It's important not to think about Bitcoin as a replacement for cash or gold or something that works alongside that; it's to think of it as programmable money. And we just cannot even imagine what that will be used for.

Naval Ravikant

Rules that may be easy for Wall Street are a death sentence for startups. They are easy to break accidentally and the penalty for noncompliance is severe.

Naval Ravikant

We are seeing a lot of cases where the startups are writing the term sheet, dictating the terms, selling common stock instead of preferred stock, where they don't give the investor veto rights or board seat or privileges, and they are really asking the investor -- why should I take your money when there is other money available.

Naval Ravikant

One philosophy I have at AngelList is I would rather have someone working on the wrong thing and do it their way and be motivated, than working on the right thing and do it my way and not be motivated.

Naval Ravikant

Our mission is to help founders and anyone or anything that helps founders helps us with our mission.

Naval Ravikant

There's so much innovation going on, and there are lots of people funding that innovation, but there's very little innovation on that infrastructure for innovation itself, so we like to do that ourselves to help companies create more tech companies.

Naval Ravikant

People come in. They are too gung ho. They invest too much money in things they don't know. They lose it and then they clam up and stop investing. Then they miss the actual boom. That's the nature of the market.

Naval Ravikant

Nation states that are used to imposing capital controls will face a quandary: ban cryptocurrencies and live in the technology dustbin; enable them, and this virus - this religion, this protocol - will enable the free flow of money and language, along with packets, around the globe.

Naval Ravikant

ICOs are obviously a new and interesting form of funding for blockchain-based protocols, but it's not clear that all of them comply with U.S. securities laws or that all of them are companies that have good native use cases for new coins.

Naval Ravikant

It's probably easier and cheaper to counterfeit hundred-dollar bills than it is to counterfeit Bitcoin.

Naval Ravikant

VC firms that don't have a brand are going to struggle. Because there is a lot of money out there, you need to have a point of view, a brand, to really add value. You can't just talk about it, and say well, we are smart people.

Naval Ravikant

We're going to try and prove to the market that you can do a legal coin offering. If the SEC doesn't crack down, this party will be amazing - the biggest party in town for a long time. If they do crack down, a lot of people are going to feel a lot of pain.

Naval Ravikant

If you use a bad password, your Bitcoin will get stolen.

Naval Ravikant

China may censor YouTube. China may censor Twitter. They won't be able to censor Bitcoin. There's no central authority. There's no one you can go to and say, 'We're going to turn Bitcoin off.'

Naval Ravikant

Humans don't 'need' math-based cryptocurrencies when dealing with other humans. We walk slowly, talk slowly, and buy big things. Credit cards, cash, wires, checks - the world seems fine.

Naval Ravikant

Cryptocurrencies are an emergent property of the Internet - almost a fifth protocol in the Internet suite. If Satoshi Nakomoto did not exist, it would still be necessary to invent them.

Naval Ravikant

Just as the web democratized publishing and development, Bitcoin can democratize building new financial services. Contracts can be entered into, verified, and enforced completely electronically, using any third-party that you care to trust, or by the code itself.

Naval Ravikant

Take a very small amount of money, your throwaway money, treat it as if it's already gone, you've mentally set it on fire, and put it in some distribution of a few truly legit layer 1 blockchains.

Naval Ravikant

If you go to a venture firm, what you're doing is you're buying money from them in exchange for equity. They have a commodity that they're selling and they have to differentiate themselves.

Naval Ravikant

At the end of the day, what makes Silicon Valley work is technology and the outcome of making money. Those two things have to be healthy. It has to matter a lot more than who is the celebrity and who is famous and who goes to the best parties.

Naval Ravikant

Our model is very, very different to LinkedIn. We only deal with very small companies. We don't have any support for recruiters. In fact, recruiters are not supposed to be on AngelList Talent. It's a direct market where we connect CEOs and the founders and the head of products with their talent directly.

Naval Ravikant