Learning from Balaji Srinavasan: Tech Visionary
Balaji Srinavasan is one of the most influential people online, formerly of Silicon Valley, now residing in Singapore. Libertarian & wildly successful tech investor & entrepreneur in both biotech and crypto. He is a wickedly sharp observer of the world. A true savant.
His keen knowledge is clear in this interview with Peter Diamandis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJ_S6S7-z5E&t=5879s. I’ve rewatched it a few times and pulled out some recommendations he has on how to thrive in the future below.
Peter Diamandis: “So between the entrepreneurs out there and people just listening who are tech fans what's your top points of advice. What's your most heartfelt advice to both entrepreneurs and the average individual listening to this?”
Balaji: “Okay. So for entrepreneurs first I would say go direct. Build your own following
on social media, get good at AI, create content, don't give interviews to legacy media, only do tech podcasts, tech shows, but even more than that, basically build your own influential individual voice as a creator, as the authentic voice of your company. Don't hire public relations people. Only hire creators if you're hiring them. You don't have to hire too many but basically don't outsource your content creation. Content creation is as
important as code and you should be doing that in-house and you should be using all the modern tools and you don't have to use full AI by the way. You can use half AI. So go direct. That's number one.
Number two: move to Florida or Texas. Get there as soon as you can if you can. Get to a place. Move to Starbase maybe where Elon is. And you know essentially take it from a company town to a portfolio town and a tech town. If I was in the US, I'd be in Texas or Florida, specifically Miami or Austin and near Starbase and so on and cluster with other folks there. I think property rights have a better chance of getting protected there.
Number three: if you have cryptocurrency, get your keys off exchanges. Get your coins off exchanges. Do that now. Figure out your cold storage. Figure out all that stuff. And don't talk to anybody about the details of it. Right. I'm just saying that basically you don't want to. I don't have any imminent thing, but I'm just saying to do that now. And there are two things. Exchanges can be and governments can take them over. Yes. Like look, if Bitcoin really really runs, if it really runs, then at a certain point people basically start getting scared and then all kinds of crazy things are going to happen, right? So, be in a state where property rights are respected, where Bitcoin is respected like for example, Texas, I think the state legislature has something which is the right to hold Bitcoin shall not be infringed, right? That's a good place to be, you know, right, with your cryptocurrency and so forth.
Get involved with your local tech community. Tech is a community. And so, actually thinking of it as a community and doing as much offline social. I almost don't have to say this because people kind of already do it organically in tech, right? But tech is a community. And so, for example, that might mean not simply homeschooling, but crowdschooling, microschooling, right? Where you're educating your kids together, right? Start doing collective action, you know, things with tech people in your spare time because you're going to want community in, I think, the years to follow, right? You're going to want people you can rely on in the physical world, not simply the digital world. That's why I'd also go to those places.”
Location matters, especially places full of like-minded individuals. But also places that recognize property and money rights. This has been eroding in almost every part of the world but especially in Europe, Canada and America in the recent decade.
“Finally I would say read as much as you can of BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, China) content in translation.Okay? Because unless you've actually and and travel, if you have not been to Riyadh, if you haven't been to Dubai, if you haven't been to Shanghai, if you haven't been to Bangalore, if you haven't seen how much better the rest of the world is getting and has gotten at in a meteoric rate over the last 5 to 10 years.
You aren't calibrated unless you've been to Shenzen, Bangalore, Dubai, and also Eastern Europe. Hopefully Russia there's some peace treaty or something like that. I would also say you know hopefully Russia gets to peace and the Russia Ukraine thing gets to peace. I think Moscow has also improved a lot since the Soviet era but Eastern Europe, Russia, India, China and Dubai and Riyadh have radically changed. So really calibrate what the world is because movies will not show you that. The only movie that's shown rich non-westerners in recent times is probably Crazy Rich Asians or maybe Squid Game, right? And so they're not really showing it, right? So you have to get the on the ground experience. Otherwise, you're not calibrated.”
This part is the most important. You have to get out of your bubble. Both your information and location bubble. These are dangerous blinders and the only way to open them is to travel and read things that don’t just confirm your world view. Most dangerous if you only follow Western media, it’s the most dangerous and deceptive filter bubble around. The West has fallen behind and it becomes clear when you travel to Asia or the Middle East. The first part of dealing with a problem is acknowledging you have a problem.
Peter Diamandis: “All right. For the general public, you hit that for entrepreneurs.
Let's go to the individual who's in a job in LA, in San Francisco, in middle America. What's the most important you know things that they need to be thinking about?”
Balaji: “Where's all the money going into? It's going into the tech companies, and it's now going into all the crypto treasury companies, right? Which is like the Bitcoin treasury companies, but also Ethereum treasury companies, all this kind of stuff, right? So, in a sense, American capital markets are getting sunsetted in favor of internet capital markets. And actually if you look at just crypto alone, crypto is the number four global market after Shanghai, NYSE, NASDAQ and gaining fast and will become the number one global market. Right? If you don't own crypto right now, begin to look at it. I never give anybody financial advice in that sense but as a technology and as a platform yes, it's taking over. Right now every bank is adopting it. And so you should definitely understand it.
It's kind of one of those things, sometimes what happens is people will see something in the news and they'll see it says it was a scam or whatever. And they tune out of it and they come back, you know, years later like, "Wait a second, it actually developed a lot." Like the dotcom crash and then web 2.0 was like that. People didn't pay attention to the internet over the 2000s and the whole thing got built back up, right?
So that's a related kind of concept when you see something in the news, especially if it's like an asset. Again, I'm not telling anybody to buy any asset, but a useful thing to do is set like a if you see something that's interesting, set a calendar reminder for it. And then 30, 60, 90, 120, 150 days or what have you, you can make a purchase or whatever decision, a research decision when it's not in the news. Because when in the news, it's usually overpriced or underpriced because it's making a big move, right? When it's outside the news, you're not reacting on emotion and you can reallocate your position accordingly, right? So, that's just something I think is a useful thing to do. You can be hyper hyperrational about it especially if you write down, you know, what your long-term thesis on it is.”
Basically Balaji says track the trends that you see around you, whether geopolitical, demographical or even technological, both short term and long term. This is fun and can be incredibly profitable. Additionally it helps you understand what is happening around you and buffer you from the shocks.
Balaji: “Related to that, don't gamble, right? There's a lot, unfortunately, there's a lot of, you know, day trading type stuff andI know people like to do that, but I think it's just too hard to just buy and hold for the long run if you're if you're putting something somewhere else.
Let's see other things. I would say that from social media that it's like watching pro sports in the sense for example when you watch like tech founders or something like that on X it's like watching really really successful athletes on TV. Like if you ever dribble the ball it's actually really hard to dribble a ball and run and dunk and and they make it look effortless. They make it look so easy to do that and it's really so so so hard right? So, anybody who is building something, first you yourself should be a builder, but second, you should also in general not attack other builders, right?
It's always easy to do that on social media. It's a cheap way to make oneself feel superior. ‘Look how dumb Elon is. I can't believe he missed a spot on that rocket.’ There's like a lot of people who do this kind of thing, you know what I'm talking about, right? And so, look, if Elon isn't successful, nobody's successful. If Elon isn't smart, really, there's very few people who are smart.
You know, so you have to be able to give respect to others to get respect for oneself, right? And so just like, you know, I'm not saying slavish. You don't have to flip to the other extreme, but just know that game recognizes game, right? You know, respect people online and try and build. I mean, I know X is just a player versus player environment. Everybody yells at each other all the time. There's sites like Farcaster and so on that have a more healthy and civil atmosphere.
So try to seek out online communities as well that model the civility that you want to communicate to your friends, to your family members, your loved ones and you know community members….. Be a relatively good example. I've recognized by the way that sometimes you have to defend yourself online and it's a dangerous environment and all that kind of stuff. But try not to be the person who's doing the first strike, you know. Try to make it a better world for people in that sense.”
No one likes a jerk. Yet it feels like the internet is filled with them due to the engagement algorithms. Be a good citizen, be a good human, be a good example. Try to stay positive and be supportive of other creators and builders.
So much to take in but you can never go wrong from listening to Balaji, one of the first truly world internet citizens. He really knows what he is talking about. So pay attention if you want to really thrive in this new world.