Quotes from Naval Ravikant

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

On AngelList, we get 100 new companies created a day. That's an insane flood.

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.

Getting in the middle of financial transactions is a regulatory minefield.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.'

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.

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.

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!

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.

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

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.

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

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

Oddly enough, Bruce Lee wrote some great philosophy.

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.