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If you don’t know Naval Ravikant, you should. When it comes to investing, he’s the best of the best. He’s backed over a 100 companies, including tech unicorns that went on to become runaway successes, like Twitter and Uber. He also founded AngelList, a kind of speed-dating resource for angel investors and entrepreneurs.
But that’s not really enough for me to give the man much credit. Unlike a lot of folks, I’m not dazzled by success. You can be successful and be an idiot. As Eckhart Tolle once said “You don’t have to be smart to make money, you just have to be clever.”
But Ravikant is smart.
And not just because his top books list matches up pretty closely with some of my favorites.
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I’ve probably read Siddhartha (Hilda Rosner translation) about twenty times in my life. If you’re surprised to see a bunch spiritual and philosophical books on an angel investor’s list, that should be your first clue that you’re in the presence of a unique mind. Most of the business school bros I knew at NYU thought Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead was the only book ever written.
Flip through Ravikant’s Twitter feed or listen to this interview and you’ll quickly realize that more than anything the man knows how to think. Critical thinking is the most essential skill for today and tomorrow’s world.
Most recently he’s been thinking about blockchain (along with the two other technologies that I see as the most world-changing, CRISPR and AI). A few weeks back he dropped an epic series of 36 tweets on blockchain and the markets of tomorrow. They’re destined to go down as classics. I’ve already read them dozens of times and I will read them dozens more. Every time I look at them they deliver deeper insights.
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They’re a fractal that seems to go down forever.
There’s no way he tossed them out off-the-cuff. And if he did, God bless him, he’s even smarter than I thought. But I doubt it. It’s obvious they represent the crystal clear distillation of years of thinking about what the blockchain means for societies and the world.
The blockchain revolution is coming like a tsunami that will remake every aspect of society but most folks don’t see it yet. That’s because their true impact is still to come. People often struggle to understand breakthrough technologies because they have no frame of reference for it. Imagine describing a web browser to an 18th century farmer. It won’t even begin to make any sense. See more for yourself here (https://hackernoon.com/reflections-on-the-best-blockchain-tweets-ever-written-d488af960d4f).