Choose Good Quests⁠↗

Silicon Valley’s best — our top operators, exited founders, and most powerful investors — are almost all on bad quests. Exiting your first startup only to enter venture capital and fight your peers for allocation in a hot deal is a bad quest. Armchair philosophizing on Twitter is a bad quest. Yachting between emails in de facto retirement at age 35 is a very bad quest.

Even among the talented who choose a path of building, most take safe, incremental bets — another SaaS company, another turnkey consumer startup, another digital Beanie Baby. Such pursuits not only fail to push the world forward, but pose a cost in opportunity. There are important challenges facing humanity that no one is working on, including critical, and even existential challenges. In other words, if you are an exceptionally capable person, failure to pursue a good quest is not neutral. It constitutes a loss for humanity. Among our very best, dropping out, or chasing nonsense, is actually unethical.

A hard quest is high-risk and operationally complex, with a low chance of success. Reversing aging, going to Mars, curing cancer, building a supersonic plane, creating AGI, or founding a new country — these are all hard quests, and most players attempting these quests will fail.

In other words, if you are an exceptionally capable person, failure to pursue a good quest is not neutral. It constitutes a loss for humanity. Among our very best, dropping out, or chasing nonsense, is actually unethical.

Beyond investing, many former founders leverage their success to become public pseudo-intellectuals, speaking on podcasts and broadcasting their thoughts on popular tech Twitter accounts. But unless you are a truly generational thinker, proselytizing is far less impactful than building a specific, better version of the future. To the public intellectual, one must ask: if your ideas are so good, why aren’t you executing on them? It is much easier (and less impactful) to write about the importance of “green tech” than to build Tesla. Moreover, many self-titled public intellectuals are not even particularly intellectual. They are just… public.

The impact of a player’s abilities particularly matters with hard quests, where the likelihood of success is already slim. If someone with no background in nuclear physics, no money, and no network chooses not to work on nuclear fusion it doesn’t really matter. In fact, their chances of success were so low that pursuing such a goal would have actually been bad — an opportunity cost, where they could have worked on a more natural fit that would have enriched their lives and the lives of those around them. But if a talented nuclear physicist with compelling insights into the field, ample resources, and many well-connected peers decides to open a tiki bar in Bali that is an extraordinarily bad quest.

If you are an experienced founder with lots of money or social capital, leave the next food delivery startup to the Level 1 neuromancer, and ask yourself: what would the world look like if our best players took on good quests?

The world is filled with good quests that require massively leveled heroes to complete: semiconductor manufacturing, complex industrial automation, natural resource discovery, next-generation energy production, low-cost and low-labor construction, new modes of transportation, general artificial intelligence, mapping and interfacing with the brain, extending the human lifespan. These future-defining problems are hard to recruit for, difficult to raise money for, and nearly impossible to build near-term businesses around, which is why they are exactly the types of problems we need the most well-resourced players pursuing.