Adrian Aoun

“Let's say you're in one bucket, for the same price you could cure all of cancer, or you could get internet to the next billion people. Like, which would you rather do? Turns out, actually the one that's more impactful, as crazy as it sounds, is getting internet to a billion people is more impactful than cancer.”

“If you go talk to anybody who worked at Forward and say, what was the one thing Adrian tried to teach us at all times? It was actually that the problem is more important than the solution. This is really weird, right? If I come to you and I'm like, hey, Auren, I'm working on a new company, you're immediately like, what is it, right? It's like drones for fighting wildfires, right? It's like, sure, but actually, that means I'm attaching myself to a solution. And for all I know, in two weeks, I'm going to wake up and realize drones weren't the smart thing, lasers were smarter, right?”

“One of the data sets that I've looked at is what happens to people as they become an expert in an industry and it turns out they become much worse angel investors in that sector. It's like, I've done a lot of healthcare. I'm probably a worse angel investor in healthcare. Why? Because now I just see all the problems, right? It's like, I don't have it. Whereas whatever, some random person off the streets, like, I didn't even know that. I didn't even know the FDA would say no to that. I'm just gonna give it a shot.”

“There's really only two things that keep me going to my iPhone today and not switching to someone else. The hardware is actually kind of a commodity. Like Samsung's got pretty good hardware. Well, first is just the app ecosystem. It's the millions of apps that are really good quality and kind of the default is on the iPhone. But again, AI can replace that one. And then the second thing is messaging. It's iMessage and FaceTime. And so I think that the iPhone franchise is actually under far more threat than I think most people think it is.”

“I think we have some miracle drugs. Like I think GLP-1s are as close as we've seen in our lifetime to pretty much miracle drugs. Typically, the only downsides, the only kind of side effects that happen in any real amount of prevalence right now are kind of, think of it as like habituation issues where you're adjusting to it as you first get on it. So it's a lot of GI issues, nausea, etc.”

“I think the flu shot's roughly ridiculous. I think that this is another example of us spending god knows how many billions of dollars or tens of billions of dollars in this country and getting everybody to go take an action, drive across town, go get this shot, blah, blah, blah. And it turns out the amount of lives that we save every year from the flu shot, even as estimated by the CDC as last I checked, it was like single digit thousands. If you want to get all of America to drive across town and go see a medical professional, can we please talk about their cholesterol?”

“I started a healthcare company and got a roughly half billion dollar lesson in the incentives and economics of healthcare, aka I lost about $475 million learning this lesson. And mostly the lesson is that doing the right thing for people is not actually what makes you money in healthcare, and that's really, really terrible. And I don't think that's changed fundamentally. I do think there's an opportunity for that to change because of AI.”

“And that's actually how I view my job. My job is not to pick the winners. My job is to remove the ones that are obviously losers. It's much easier to see the dispositive. It's very obvious when somebody isn't a founder.”

“I was in a long-term relationship about 10 years, about halfway through the relationship. We started to talk about, maybe we should think about having kids. But her and I, we hadn't figured everything out in the relationship yet. We still had some issues, we weren't sure. So we said, let's go ahead and wait on that. In the end, we didn't iron out all of our issues, and we didn't have kids. So we're not together. What that's done is that's actually just caused, for me, a delay in life and having kids. What I realized is I would have played that differently if I had done it again, which is I just would have had kids anyway.”

“I think that kids will become a resource that we can dial up or down, because I think that we're going to basically have artificial wombs sooner rather than later, and we'll be able to make it happen. What's fascinating is that number is coming down one or two weeks every one or two years. So I don't presume that the problem is linear. If I had to guess, like 20 years from now, we'll be able to just kind of turn on the microwave and pop out a kid.”