If you are a manager, your reports will probably talk negatively about you on grapevine. If you are a CEO, your managers will criticize you on Glassdoor. If you are a VC, your (as well as other) founders (as well as anonymous strangers) will criticize you on Reddit.

The fun part is anyone can make anything up.

The realization you have after spending time on social media is that a lot of people are just waiting to pull you down.

I know if I end up becoming even semi-successful, a lot of anonymous users will mock me too.

Sam Altman can’t escape it. Elon can’t. At this point, you can’t even write Chamath is probably not an idiot and has some smart takes. He is far more successful than most of us on Twitter.

Did he dump his SPACs on retail? Yes. People were also greedy and jumped on the stocks to make a quick profit.

So you probably can’t escape this. The rise and fall of a person used to take time. Now cycles are shorter.

One piece of advice someone gave me is to be low status and never tie your social media account and public persona with your self-worth.

Have I joked about Naval? Yes. It is just funny sometimes. Would I swap my life with Naval’s? Yes.

Same with a lot of other successful people. It is okay to accept that we all have that critic inside us. The problem is when you think your criticism is actually justified and is not mimetic theory playing out.

I still remember the time when I made a comment on some internal Slack thread saying ‘we are overindexing on the input from one user and we can’t change our entire roadmap based on one user’ or something like that, and some person leaked it to the biggest corporate meme page in Indonesia. And a post came out saying ‘Indian PM says users don’t matter’ or something similar. This is how the world works.