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The standout: Rachel Wetstone’s commencement address
Andrew McDonald, Uber’s president and COO, said the best advice he had received came from a commencement address by Rachel Wetstone, who sent it to the company in her first week. Its central thesis was “always say yes, just jump at the next adventure.” McDonald says the advice resonated because a career opportunity can look risky before you begin; his rule is to bet on yourself, learn by doing, and come out better even if the bet fails.
- Title: Rachel Wetstone’s commencement address — no formal title is supplied; “Always say yes, just jump at the next adventure” is its stated thesis.
- Content type: Commencement address / speech.
- Author/creator: Rachel Wetstone.
- Link: No direct speech URL was supplied; the recommendation appears in the 20VC interview with Andrew McDonald.
- Recommended by: Andrew McDonald.
- Key takeaway: Say yes to the next difficult opportunity as a bet on yourself; success brings progress, while failure still brings learning.
- Why it matters: This is a practical decision rule rather than generic motivation: it gives ambitious readers a way to evaluate opportunities without demanding certainty in advance.
Curiosity before utility: The Uselessness of Useless Knowledge
Scott Belsky highlighted Abraham Flexner’s 1939 essay by sharing a passage arguing that major discoveries often come from people driven by curiosity rather than by the desire to be immediately useful. The excerpt also warns against people who constrain the human spirit so that it “will not dare to spread its wings.”
- Title:The Uselessness of Useless Knowledge.
- Content type: Essay.
- Author/creator: Abraham Flexner.
- Link: No direct essay URL was supplied; Belsky’s post contains the excerpt.
- Recommended by: Scott Belsky.
- Key takeaway: Curiosity can be a better starting point for discovery than an immediate promise of usefulness.
- Why it matters: It is a compact counterweight to choosing what to study only by near-term utility, and a useful principle for deciding which obscure or unfashionable questions deserve sustained attention.
Arnie Milstein’s Stanford studies on human–AI performance in medicine
In response to the question “Will AI alone beat a doctor plus AI in delivering medical care?”, Vinod Khosla answered “Absolutely” and directed readers to studies by Arnie Milstein and his Stanford team. Khosla summarized the studies’ relevance this way: “Humans degrade the performance of good AI.”
- Title: No study title is supplied; this is a lead to Milstein’s Stanford research on human–AI clinical performance.
- Content type: Research studies.
- Author/creator: Arnie Milstein and his Stanford team.
- Link: No direct study link was supplied; see Khosla’s recommendation.
- Recommended by: Vinod Khosla.
- Key takeaway: Khosla points to the studies as evidence that adding a human to a capable AI system can reduce performance.
- Why it matters: This is a concrete evidence lead for readers assessing human-in-the-loop design in medicine. Because the post gives no study title, methods, or direct paper link, it is a pointer to investigate—not a substitute for reading the underlying research.
Direct answer: The transcript contains one explicit named-resource recommendation: Rachel Wetstone’s commencement-address speech, which the Uber President/COO presents as the source of his "just say yes" advice.
Finding: Asked for the best piece of advice he has ever been given , the Uber President/COO says that Rachel Wetstone (as named in the transcript) — hired around 2015 or 2016 to run communications and policy — sent the whole company the speech from a commencement address she had given; its central thesis was "always say yes, just jump at the next adventure." He says it resonated with him and that he tells people "just say yes" because it is a bet on yourself: you’ll figure it out and be better off, and even failure teaches you.
Gap: I find no other explicit recommendation of a named book, essay, article, paper, podcast, or video in the transcript. Mentions such as a Bezos quote, the "in the arena" allusion, and product/tool names are references or promotions, not recommended resources.
Jason Lemkin (@jasonlk) shared a SaaStr AI talk by Klaviyo CEO @abialecki as a YouTube video resource: "Klaviyo's @abialecki at SaaStr AI on how a 2,300-person $1.5B ARR public company actually builds with agents" (https://youtu.be/hdZY2T8o4M4?si=DnMn7ldHFt4hYWMJ) . Highlights:
- Klaviyo requires every employee to hit "L3" (running multiple agent sessions/teams) by end of June, and everyone from CEO to interns commits code; agents are built by "Dark Factory," a prompt-driven PM that decomposes problems into subsystems and writes contractual API interfaces before subagents build, and Composer hit 95,000+ users in month one after a one-weekend run .
- Klaviyo treats base models as "athletic high schoolers" coached by a harness (proprietary data feed + coach agent scoring every campaign); agents are power users — Composer asked for email APIs almost no human customer figured out — and customers get agents pre-trained on 5-10 use cases at 50-70% resolution .
- Headless/API-first is key: Twilio was "left for dead" 18 months ago at 4% growth, now almost 20% because the API works with agents .
- Lemkin's standalone quote of the talk: "If you can't try an agent out of the gate and just get it into production, you're dead" — the WOW is an agent working for real on Day 1 .
Uber president and COO Andrew McDonald ("Mac") credited a commencement address by Rachel Wetstone — Uber's communications and policy lead, hired around 2015-2016 — as the source of his best career advice. Wetstone sent the address to the whole company in her first week; its central thesis was "always say yes, just jump at the next adventure" . Mac said it "really resonated," and he now tells people to "just say yes because a bet on yourself": you'll get in there, figure it out, and be better off — or learn a lot from the failure .
Vinod Khosla recommended studies by Arnie Milstein and his Stanford team as evidence that "Humans degrade the performance of good AI" in medical care, supporting the view that AI alone can outperform a doctor-plus-AI combination . The recommendation came in response to @CMichaelGibson's question of whether AI alone will beat a doctor plus AI in delivering medical care .
Scott Belsky shared an excerpt from Abraham Flexner's 1939 essay "The Uselessness of Useless Knowledge," highlighting that the greatest scientific discoveries came from curiosity rather than the desire to be useful, and that the "real enemy" is anyone who tries to mold the human spirit so it will not dare to spread its wings . He linked the quote to his own earlier post arguing that curiosity is the purest form of motivation and guards against building under the influence of headlines, buzzwords, and what VCs are chasing .