Erik Pavia / Notes

Writing is thinking, but more than that, committing thought to writing is critical for creating thought.

The life expectancy of an unrecorded thought is low.
If you have a thought and you don't write it down, there is a high likelihood that you will forget it, and it will be as if the thought never existed.

A thought can be anything when it’s in your head, tethered to a cloud of neighboring neurons without form. Writing it down forces the probabilities to become discrete.

Putting a thought in writing, therefore, is an act of creation. You are making it real.

I got a fortune cookie that said, “The only way to have a friend is to be one.” The quote is attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson, but I won’t pretend to have found it in the depths of literary activity. I was eating Panda Express.

In the past, I’ve found myself wondering why I am the one initiating every conversation or hangout with some of my friends. They seem happy to hear from me, but they’re not the ones checking in on me. I wonder if they’re not interested in being friends. I also feel immensely guilty when others reach out to me and I’m unresponsive. I worry I’ve damaged the relationship and am reluctant to reconnect.

The fortune cookie revealed two important things.

First, people might be open to friendship, but may not make the effort for a myriad of reasons. They might be busy. They might not see you as a friend yet. Or they might not have internalized this fortune cookie/Emerson wisdom about the importance of being proactive in maintaining relationships.

Second, we all have meaningful power to create friendships simply by doing friend things. If there’s someone you want to be friends with, you can message them, call them, invite them to events, make jokes with them, or ride tandem bicycles until you’ve created a relationship.

Rather than take offense or be hurt by the fact that some of my friends don’t reach out to me, I can be happy that I have the ability to unilaterally build and sustain a friendship with people I care about.

A bed of mud. A nursery for the lotus.

The flower blooms whether one sees it or not.

Glittering fish shelter in shadows and shallow roots.

The great white heron hunts with wings unfurled and unseen.

These are a few lessons I’ve learned over a decade of supporting early-stage entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and El Paso. No entrepreneurial journey is the same, but these principles are broadly applicable.

• Only entrepreneurs can build companies.
• Only entrepreneurs can build themselves into entrepreneurs.
• There are unknowable and uncontrollable factors that can dictate an entrepreneur’s success or failure. Even the best founders can fail if market conditions aren’t favorable.
• In most cases, you will not have the applicable skills or experience to help entrepreneurs with any particular problem. The best way to consistently support entrepreneurs is to 1) help them maintain morale and 2) find people who can help.
• There is no right way to build a company, but there are countless wrong ways.
• Bad advice is worse than no advice.
• Your advice should be regarded as one data point.
• The winner is often whoever stays alive the longest.
• Every successful tech company must break a few important conventions, but it must not break all conventions. The challenge lies in picking the right conventions to break.
• Most companies should do most things conventionally so they can focus on breaking the right conventions.
• There are no shortcuts. Whatever impedes the entrepreneur’s path should become the path.
• A company needs people who can sell and people who can build.
• It is significantly easier to become a salesperson than it is to become a builder. AI is shifting this balance, but for now it still stands.
• A salesperson who cannot hire builders will not succeed.
• 99.9% of great ideas come from experience or networks with experience. Students and young entrepreneurs typically have little of either.
• Everyone wants to connect the dots, but few people want to go through the trouble of collecting dots.
• Expertise must be lived, and it goes stale fast.
• Real entrepreneurs don’t need permission to start.
• Money is an accelerant, not permission.
• If you think you know how to find the next great entrepreneur, quit your job and make billions as an investor.
• If you tell people they are something, eventually they start to believe you.
• You cannot alter risk preferences of sophisticated investors.
• Entrepreneurs should only take investments from sophisticated investors.