Chamath Palihapitiya Quotes

Chamath Palihapitiya

Profession : Businessman

Birth : September 3, 1976

I'm a living testament to the value of immigration. I escaped a civil war, and I came to Canada as a refugee, and they gave my family protection. I did my best to pay that country back, and I think I did that.

Chamath Palihapitiya

I was raised in a house where my mom was the primary breadwinner. It was a dysfunctional house, but she showed tremendous resilience.

Chamath Palihapitiya

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.

Chamath Palihapitiya

You need to use data science and machine learning to get the ground truth of what's happening inside of a company.

Chamath Palihapitiya

None of us are going to fix governance; it may just be beyond repair. But you can fix capitalism. And the reason you can fix capitalism - It is inherently numerical, and as a result, it is inherently objective. It can be done objectively.

Chamath Palihapitiya

I think when you think about immigration, what we need to do is realize that that human capital, if put in a place to succeed, will literally sacrifice everything.

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.

Chamath Palihapitiya

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.

Chamath Palihapitiya

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

Chamath Palihapitiya

All of the business of selling apps and selling subscriptions is extremely cruelly misunderstood, including by me.

Chamath Palihapitiya

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.

Chamath Palihapitiya

Good investors have to choose how to allocate their mind share with the precious capital they have.

Chamath Palihapitiya

I was born in Sri Lanka.

Chamath Palihapitiya

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.

Chamath Palihapitiya

My first job was at a Burger King.

Chamath Palihapitiya

VC has always been this high-touch, in-your-face-type business.

Chamath Palihapitiya

Much like Warren Buffett has said very famously - he doesn't buy technology stocks because he doesn't understand them- I will not buy consumer goods companies because I do not understand them.

Chamath Palihapitiya

You have to respect people for who they are on a basic level.

Chamath Palihapitiya

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

Chamath Palihapitiya

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.

Chamath Palihapitiya