Ruairí McLoughlin

BONUS CONTENT: Come for the quotes, stay for the pictures! Initial draft had more characters than a 2,000-page Russian novel. Here are is some great stuff that didn't make it. @jared_western "Truth is lost to looks. A machine on fire doesn't care what you say. [That's why] hard tech deals in truth." @jared_western "If you love someone, make copies of them." @ADoricko "I opened up at random to the Book of Lamentations, and was struck that the Bible and Christianity was not this happy faith for happy people." @ADoricko "We're going to make your life as imbued with meaning as it ever could be... And like — we're going to ruin your life. It's going to be a bit of a disaster." @isaiah_p_taylor"Every other nuclear startup on Earth as of today has a tick rate of infinity. Valar Atomics is the only one with a single point on the board." @isaiah_p_taylor "Our generation is either building crazy things or in the casino." @isaiah_p_taylor "People aren't having children because rats don't have children in captivity. They just don't. You can try to convince them, try to push them, but they're still in a cage. We need to actually be building again, and that means we need a frontier to build in." @tfeldmann "I didn't name the company after Durin the First. I named the company after Durin the Seventh, who was his descendant, and who came back and reclaimed the kingdom and restored it to its former glory. And that's what we're trying to do for the American mining industry." @tfeldmann "The best drillers have seven fingers and drive a Mercedes." @mchl_mthws on marriage: "There is no such thing as divorce. We don't acknowledge that. The only out is death -- that's our victory. No matter what happens, no matter how badly she hurts me or I hurt her." Pastor @bwolfmueller "The devil can only destroy and cannot create, Gnosticism is inherently destructive. So for someone to be creative — truly creative — is to return to this created order." And quoting Martin Luther: "This is how the Lord governs his saints: a tender heart, but rough hands." Ethan Wicko: "NASA fires you for blowing up the ship; Elon fires you for not blowing it up fast enough." @AlQaraghuli "The United States is the only video game where you can pick the character." Erik Halliwell: ""You just ask and you keep asking. You don't take no for an answer." At 17 he emailed the university satellite lead: "Look, can I just come hang out? Can I do anything?... put me to work. I need to do something... essentially I asked, and then I showed up — like every day for months on end." @avnerlip "Hi I'm Avner -- I'm a Jew -- and this is my cofounder Faiz -- he's a Muslim -- and we're solving world peace." Faiz Alam: "The greatest king of Egypt did not have access to the food and services that a common man earning five dollars an hour has in this world right now... we are living in abundance; wealth is abundant. It's just that we don't have direction... context is everything. If you don't have context, those are just garbage. So our soul is not getting satisfied by the amount of abundance that we have, and by a purposeless life." @RoMcLocko co-founder @RodrigoCorEst: His school wouldn't help him find an exchange, so he cold-emailed every English-speaking Waldorf school he could find: "I would like to go to your school. I know it's private in your country. I don't have any money... Would you please take me?" One in Maine said yes. His summary: "No one would have believed me if I said I went into a private school that cost over two or three thousand dollars a month — free, basically — if it wasn't because I sent a bunch of emails asking for it. And I got lucky, yes, definitely got lucky — but you're not gonna get lucky by doing nothing." @divalbanerjee was beyond my ability to express in words. His whole body became a poem when he talked about an old Bridgeport he had, the way time and weather and human hands were poured into it to make it an enduring thing. He connected this to the whole web of things that endure and the interplay between physical solidity and community-family-church and the sacramental character of real flourishing life. Darrion Vinson: "With a startup, it's just a bunch of pirates. And you hope your captain doesn't have the only lifeboat — actually, no: the truth is the founder is the only one with a life jacket." Some people who were extremely helpful even though they didn't always know it: @byjmitch @sthenc @hardaway_cam @12Palehorse @Chasecaffrey @nonequitypartnr