Naval Ravikant

nav.al · Personal blog · on HN since 2019

Naval Ravikant writes essays and hosts a podcast on wealth, happiness, startups, and ideas from David Deutsch.

What HN saysHN commenters cite his How to Get Rich essay and posts on long-term relationships and happiness, and his podcast series on Deutsch.
78HN people shared it
33linked it in comments
127stories submitted
2.4Kstory points
6 months agolast shared
2019people per year2026

Most-shared posts

  1. 1
    How to get rich without being lucky (2019)
    13 people · 448 points · first shared 2019 · 531 comments on HN
  2. 2
    Naval Interviews David Deutsch (2023)
    6 people · 9 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
  3. 3
    Homepage
    5 people · first shared 2019
  4. 4
    How to get rich without getting lucky (2018)
    3 people · 392 points · first shared 2019 · 184 comments on HN
  5. 5
    Build a Team that Ships (2012)
    3 people · 174 points · first shared 2020 · 102 comments on HN
  6. 6
    Learn to Sell, Learn to Build
    3 people · 7 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
  7. 7
    The Box
    3 people · 6 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
  8. 8
    The Beginning of Infinity
    3 people · 4 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
  9. 9
    The Methods of Mathematics Are Fallible
    3 people · 4 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
  10. 10
    Happiness
    3 people · 1 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
  11. 11
    Groups never admit failure
    2 people · 485 points · first shared 2021 · 346 comments on HN
  12. 12
    Finding Time to Invest in Yourself
    2 people · 198 points · first shared 2020 · 86 comments on HN
  13. 13
    How to Angel Invest, Part 2
    2 people · 81 points · first shared 2020 · 24 comments on HN
  14. 14
    We Are Qualitatively Different from Other Species
    2 people · 10 points · first shared 2021 · 16 comments on HN
  15. 15
    Happiness
    2 people · 5 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN

What HN people wrote when they linked it

raelmiu · 2020-01-04
I really loved Naval's tweet storm How to Get Rich (without getting lucky) and while I really enjoy the podcast (https://nav.al) I wanted it as a kindle book as well... So I made one! Hope you enjoy it. Any feedback is much appreciated, this is my first book design ever (as you can probably tell).
equalarrow · 2019-06-27
Driving, for me, is a massive exercise in being mindful. My goal, however, is not to mind the suffering of others but instead, to take those inputs, not associate with them, and let them go. For instance, some driver doesn't want to get in the queue at the back, so they drive up and cut over in front of me or a car or two up. There are a lot of thoughts on that that could go through your mind. These range from "no fair" to "jerk" to other things. But, I've come to realize the best way to deal with that is to detach. You can either not let the person in and then go down that range of thoughts/emotions (primarily negative) or just let them in and not dwell on it. Observe it (assuming it's not jeopardizing anyone's safety) and let it go. This is a very simple exercise, but it has the potential to be carried on to larger experiences in life. I'm not here to judge if you don't think it is, I just know what makes sense to me. And this is not something I have come up with on my own. This and similar techniques have been highlighted in quite a few books I've read, people I've listened to at various events. This for me is a much deeper discussion and I think completely personal to the experiencer. I tend to fall on the side of being mindful of yourself and the struggles/suffering of existence are of your own doing and choices (obviously, this is a simplistic statement, but to me true on a high level). I've been listening/watching quite a bit of Naval Ravikant podcasts/videos. I…
safety1st · 2022-08-12
The risk of focusing on more transient relationships is that in the long run you won't reap the benefits of compounding interest, which is arguably where all the best stuff in life comes from: https://nav.al/long-term
goindeep · 2022-08-10
Naval has a great definition which I agree with. Happiness Is Peace in Motion Peace is happiness at rest https://nav.al/peace-motion Another less liked person, haha is that Andrew Tate knob, and while for a knob, he does have some good ideas, one of them is something along the lines of, I dont need to be happy, I dont even think about it, as long as there are no problems, I am happy, if there are problems I am unhappy, unless I am unhappy, then I would say that I am happy.
jessenichols · 2022-04-08
It's amazing work. Building from his work around The Beginning of Infinity, and The Fabric of Reality (1997), which Naval has been doing a podcast on: https://nav.al/agi
AlchemistCamp · 2021-12-25
My favorite podcasts this year were Lex Fridman's: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Naval's: https://nav.al/podcast
rglover · 2021-07-14
> It's not always good to keep going. Sometimes you're throwing your life away. That's a conditioned response. "Throwing your life away" is subjective. Edit: https://nav.al/kapil <-- Worth listening to.
randymonday · 2021-05-27
https://blog.openstartuplist.com/ Open Startup List blog https://tinyprojects.dev/blog tiny projects blog http://hummusrezept.de/ food recipes blog https://nav.al/ Tech investments blog
cyberlab · 2021-04-16
Naval Ravikant has a small post about this here: https://nav.al/kelly-criterion I first heard about it from him. He summarizes it as follows: > Naval: The Kelly criterion is a popularized mathematical formulation of a simple concept. The simple concept is: Don’t risk everything. Stay out of jail. Don’t bet everything on one big gamble. Be careful how much you bet each time, so you don’t lose the whole kitty.
ultrasounder · 2019-06-30
Was also quoted by Naval Ravikant's podcast with Nivi, based on his Tweet storm by the title of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75tUgLxzE7Q. The entire Podcast can be listened to here; https://nav.al
adeptima · 2025-01-21
Feeling the same pain of walking through the creator's hell. Heard somewhere we are not supposed to be happy and absent minded. Staying on hard side of things shapes us and make complete. I'm not sure if this helps, but I’ve personally stopped stressing about outcomes, "get rich quick" schemes, or being in the perfect moment. The journey is what truly matters. I use my own tools for consulting and eventually outsource myself as needed. If clients want to hire someone else, I don’t resist. I simply ask for two or three months’ salary for training and limited support afterward. I’m not trying to build something worth millions to sell. I used to sell CRMs built on top of WordPress for a long time. Eventually, it evolved into a CRM I now use across several businesses. Over the years, I’ve also created numerous small tools that I’ve been using for over a decade—tools for tracking trends, education, and more. I don’t aim to be in the top 5% of earners, just be in the middle for targeted niche is ok. For me, freedom means working in "Pendulum mode"—six months of active client phases followed by six months of prototyping new ideas. That balance keeps me sane. No conflict of interests. Clients know I worked hard to kick off things, and productive than most other engineers in slow mode. As for pressure of being update - I made a simple commitment to try new things 4-8 hours a week min. AI, ML, K8s, hyped programming languages. It was brutal at the beginning, and extremely…
swyx · 2023-01-02
Ah, my topic of specialty. I've been doing this for a decade, but only figured it out over the past ~5 years. Pros: - Inbound Marketing: You not only are able to bring part of your work with you between jobs, but your thinking and learning in public demonstrates your interest, expertise, and growth over time such that it tends to attract jobs and other opportunities to you (including opps that are not formally open to everyone yet) - Bloom's Taxonomy: Retain more of what you learn by writing it down in your own words rather than simply holding it in your head - The 1% Rule: 99% of people lurk, less than 1% make content, you stand out in your field simply by saying something - Cunningham's Law: “The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it’s to post the wrong answer.” Being publicly wrong attracts teachers, as long as you don’t do it in such high quantity that people give up on you altogether. Conversely, once you’ve gotten something wrong in public, you never forget it. - Positive Reinforcement: Building in a social feedback mechanism to your learning encourages more learning. As you build a track record and embark on more ambitious projects with implicit future promise, your public activity becomes a Commitment Device. - Productizing Yourself: well, Naval said it best so I'll just drop a link https://nav.al/productize-yourself Cons: - It takes extra effort to write down something you're already thinking. E.g. it can feel like…
deadcoder0904 · 2022-08-09
nope, not only this guys examples are bad but he just tries too hard to be a contrarian for the sake of being contrarian. i called him that & he blocked me [1] for some reason. probably there's some truth in it that he got hurt. his examples are so bad. i've read paul graham's essays, naval's thread & alex hormozi's $100m offers book & all are quite good & easy to understand. naval's thread is a big hard but he has whole bunch of podcasts (4 hours) [2] explaining them in detail & articles [3] to accompany them. the op's entire schtick is to sell his courses by writing articles. first he wrote an article on build a business, not an audience [4] & then did a complete 180 turn & has been building an audience ever since. then he started selling courses. it's like his schtick is to go against the popular ideas & attack them to garner following. although, he does have some good insights in a few of his articles like when he summarized a book (nathan latka) or a video (sam parr)... rest of his posts are purely trying to hard to be a contrarian. tries to hard to be like peter thiel except he doesn't have any real arguments. you don't have to believe me. just read $100m offers & apply it. that book could've saved me many years of trying to figure out the framework myself & has every single technique mentioned on how to make a good offer. if you actually follow the advice to the t, you will actually be on the pathway to your 1st million. not to say, the author himself is worth…
wunderflix · 2021-03-26
The story about Jobs and Woz is super fascinating and also filled with many stories about how Jobs was unfair / a jerk etc. I believe that neither would have been able to build Apple so successfully without the other. It was the perfect symbiosis. There is an exciting piece in Naval's "How to get rich" podcast about exactly this model: The Builder + Seller framework "The Silicon Valley model is a builder and seller So, generally, the Silicon Valley startup model tends to work best. It’s not the only way, but it is probably the most common way, when you have two founders, one of whom is world class at selling, and one of whom is world class at building. Examples are, of course, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak with Apple, Gates and Allen probably had similar responsibilities early on with Microsoft, Larry and Sergey probably broke down along those lines, although it’s a little different there because that was a very technical product delivered to end users through a simple interface." https://nav.al/rich
hshshshshsh · 2024-11-05
I was listening to a podcast with Naval and David Deutsch yesterday. They talked about this. He said these kind of studies are kind of pointless. Yes. It's likely twins will more or less end up with same outcomes in life. Because they look the same and society has a tendency to treat people who look certain in certain way. But that does not mean what they can do in life is limited by their genes. What they think plays much more important role than their genes. https://nav.al/deutsch-files-iii
smugglerFlynn · 2024-08-08
What Naval was talking[0] about is that you start to know whom to trust when playing the long game, and people start to trust you in return. Which is exactly what causes those quiet exceptions to be handed out. While it does not seem to be ‘fair’, this is how long term game actually looks like. [0] - https://nav.al/long-term
RandomCitizen12 · 2024-06-14
I dearly hope it becomes a movie. It reminded me of Naval Ravikant idea, except Ravikant was talking about money and Chiang wasn't: "In 1,000 parallel universes, you want to be wealthy in 999 of them. You don’t want to be wealthy in the 50 of them where you got lucky. We want to factor luck out of it." (https://nav.al/rich)
herbertl · 2024-04-04
"Desire’s a contract you make to be unhappy until you get what you want." https://nav.al/desire
quirk · 2023-12-01
If you don't like being depressed by that, you could read: https://nav.al/david-deutsch
sebmellen · 2023-11-30
https://nav.al/build-sell > Bill Gates famously paraphrases this as, “I’d rather teach an engineer marketing, than a marketer engineering.”
zuhayeer · 2023-08-20
This feels like the modern equivalent of Malthusian theory. Many people have had similar thoughts throughout much of history, but human prosperity has always prevailed. Knowledge is infinite, and as long as there is new knowledge to seek, things are never going to stagnate or be over. Atoms have never been the limiting factor, it's been knowledge on what to do with them. Knowledge makes the existence of resources infinite: https://nav.al/infinite-resources Pessimism seems like an intellectually serious position: https://nav.al/pessimism
yrannes · 2021-08-19
"How to Get Rich" by Naval Ravikant https://nav.al/rich Also maybe not life-changing, but absolutely gave me a lot to think about that I found incredibly rewarding and enjoyable.
sagivo · 2020-12-27
Naval - "how to get rich" is truly a masterpiece. https://youtu.be/1-TZqOsVCNM. Transcript: https://nav.al/rich
avthar · 2020-11-09
It's something I picked up from Naval Ravikant (@naval on Twitter) [1] "Marc Andreessen came up with the concept of the “product-market fit.” I would expand that to “product-market-founder fit,” taking into account how well a founder is personally suited to the business. The combination of the three should be your overwhelming goal." [2] [1] https://twitter.com/naval [2] https://nav.al/work-hard
agounaris · 2020-05-28
Engineers are hired to deliver and produce value. Tooling can be a part of it but if you can outsource something which is not your source of income, you have to do it. Engineering time is more valuable. I also know many startups and small companies investing 5 people and 6 months to get an observability platform up and running while they could just get datadog or new relic for half the price... and I don't get into account outages and updates to the platform. I remember a recent uber blog post on how they moved from build tool A to build tool B and a couple of weeks later, 3000 people where laid off. It's important to spend development time on revenue streams. This is some nice piece of advice https://nav.al/build-a-team-that-ships "Outsource everything that isn’t core. Resist the urge to pick up that last dollar. Founders do Customer Service."
sigil · 2020-01-12
Tyler Cowen interviews Sam Altman — https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/tyler-cowen-sam-altman-ai-… Naval’s “You Won’t Get Rich Renting Out Your Time” (and the whole series) — https://nav.al/renting-time The Portal: Werner Herzog — https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Eua5iPUKw6Y
txredking · 2019-12-05
www.nesslabs.com www.waitbutwhy.com www.moretothat.com www.daedtech.com www.kalzumeus.com https://medium.com/the-year-of-the-looking-glass https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/authors/morgan/ https://nav.al/how-to-get-rich —- not personal blog per se but collection of all personal interviews. Excuse the clickbaitish title, it is not a pitch of any kind.
flowen_nl · 2019-10-06
agreed it is a bit general, but principles usually are believe. See chapter 25 of the podcast @ https://nav.al/how-to-get-rich Naval: The tweetstorm is very abstract. It’s deliberately meant to be broadly applicable to all kinds of different domains and disciplines and time periods and places. But sometimes it’s hard to work without a concrete example. So let’s go concrete for a minute.
HiPHInch · 2025-04-08

Keyboard shortcuts

/Search
j kNext / previous blog
EnterOpen selected blog
vVisit the blog site
fFollow / unfollow
lSwitch grid / list view
dSwitch dark mode
g hHome
g pTop posts
g tTopics
g fFollowing
g lLiked
g yHistory
g qFAQ
EscBack / close