Quotes from Chamath Palihapitiya

Here's the thing - if you want to do good things in the world, there's just only so much time that one can spend being glass half empty.

Today we live in a world now where it is easy to confuse truth and popularity. And you can use money to amplify whatever you believe and get people to believe what is popular is now truthful. And what is not popular may not be truthful.

Half the population of the entire world is women, and people are somehow shocked that this entire half is as capable as the other half.

The goal of a private company is, first, zero to one: Get past the product-market fit; figure out whether people actually care about what you're trying to build and someone will pay you money for that. That's the zero to one problem.

If the government shuts down, nothing happens, and we all move on, because it just doesn't matter. Stasis in the government is actually good for all of us.

If you're trying to get to profitability by lowering costs as a startup, then you are in a very precarious and difficult position.

Your job as a smart investor is to separate the facts and the news from the fiction and the noise.

My mom was a nurse, and my dad worked in the Health Ministry as a civil servant. When I was 6 years old, my dad got a job at the Sri Lankan High Commission in Canada, so we moved there.

One of the things I have known my entire life is that I have an innate capability for making money.

The government - they're completely useless.

I think what IBM is excellent at is using their sales and marketing infrastructure to convince people who have asymmetrically less knowledge to pay for something.

The point of Silicon Valley, at least when I moved here, was we're all trying to do stuff, and none of us quite felt like we fit in anywhere else. But we were all trying to do good things. And the money was just the byproduct of good things.

Valuable companies take decades to build.

We curate our lives around this perceived sense of perfection, because we get rewarded in these short term signals: Hearts, likes, thumbs up. We conflate that with value, and we conflate it with truth, and instead, what it really is is fake, brittle popularity that's short term and leaves you even more vacant and empty before you did it.

Companies are transcending power now. We are becoming the eminent vehicles for change and influence, and capital structures that matter. If companies shut down, the stock market would collapse.

We need to divorce ourselves from venture capital as an occupation and focus on using capital as a way to take really big bets on things that just seem totally audacious.

We need to go after cancer, diabetes, climate change, the substantive problems of the world that, if were solved, would create immense wealth and opportunity that would cascade across countries.

All these social media sites allow us to confuse truth and popularity. That has to be fixed. Because every normal citizen has a right to know what is factual versus what is amplified by good actors or bad actors.

When I left Facebook, I left an enormous amount of equity on the table. I thought, 'I don't want to be a slave to money. I want to be a slave to something bigger: an ambition, a goal.'

I was born in Sri Lanka.