Many historians still tend to assume that the spread of an idea or an ideology is a function of its inherent content in relation to some vaguely specified context. We must now acknowledge, however, that some ideas go viral because of structural features of the network through which they spread. They are least likely to do so in a hierarchical, top-down network, where horizontal peer-to-peer links are prohibited.

— Niall Ferguson, The Square and the Tower

Pity makes suffering contagious

— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist

The right culture also unlocks internal talent, because you don’t add innovation to a company—you get out of its way. An executive once told me “We can’t copy Netflix because we don’t have the people.” My response was “Where do you think they used to work? We hired them from you and got out of their way…”

— Stephen Orban, Ahead in the Cloud

One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil.

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

For a long time my perspective has been that being able to write code, in our current time, puts you in one of the best positions in the history of humanity, in terms of job security and trajectory, and that seemed like enough for me.

— Will Larson and Tanya Reilly, Staff Engineer