entrepreneur, investor, fixer. past: @rupa_health, @goforward, @khoslaventures, @Square, Silver Lake
San Francisco, CA
Joined February 2009
- Tweets4.3K
- Following467
- Followers1.4K
- Likes28.8K
Nicholas Moryl retweeted
every data center story says it uses "as much power as 100,000 homes" like that's a scandal. an aluminum smelter pulls five times that and it's why airplanes are cheap. measuring industry in homes is how you train a country to believe building things is a crime
Nicholas Moryl retweeted
When my dad died, @om sent me this beautiful message. Today, his words feel prescient.
“His life was a gift… I hope you will find his memories and his lessons as a guiding light for the future.”
Here’s the to carrying Om’s light forward. ✨🙏❤️
Nicholas Moryl retweeted
All Roads Lead to @om, remembering my dear friend: ma.tt/2026/06/om-forever/
Nicholas Moryl retweeted
Quake of course is one of the supreme achievements in the history of technology. (And everything is hard!)
There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days.
Quake was overly ambitious technically. We could have done all the great multiplayer and modding work inside a Doom++ engine, allowing the designers to work with a more stable base instead of rug-pulling everything out from underneath them a couple times. The follow up game could have then brought in full 6DOF environments and characters.
I pushed everyone too hard. I didn’t appreciate how maturing companies need more slack, and that running people at startup intensity constantly will wear them out. Quake was also where I really had to accept my personal limits. I was working pretty much as hard as humanly possible, and I was still slipping past my goal points.
On all of the founders’ shoulders, our original corporate stock arrangement and buy/sell agreement was a mistake, and resulted in bad incentives. We wanted to ensure that all ownership rested in the hands of people working hard on current projects, but the Silicon Valley standard approach of vesting stock would have worked out better.
One real problem that I don’t accept the blame for is that we were insisting that level designers be not just game designers, but also have strong visual design esthetics. They needed to make things that not only played well, but looked awesome, and it got more challenging as the technology provided a richer palette. Romero covered that well, which set our company expectations early on.
We should have figured out how to pair up artists and designers earlier, but there was infighting among the designers, and the ones that could manage the visuals were happy to disparage the ones that couldn’t.
Sorry, Sandy.
Nicholas Moryl retweeted
I’m proud of Quake. We all are. Quake changed games forever. That said...
There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days.
Quake was overly ambitious technically. We could have done all the great multiplayer and modding work inside a Doom++ engine, allowing the designers to work with a more stable base instead of rug-pulling everything out from underneath them a couple times. The follow up game could have then brought in full 6DOF environments and characters.
I pushed everyone too hard. I didn’t appreciate how maturing companies need more slack, and that running people at startup intensity constantly will wear them out. Quake was also where I really had to accept my personal limits. I was working pretty much as hard as humanly possible, and I was still slipping past my goal points.
On all of the founders’ shoulders, our original corporate stock arrangement and buy/sell agreement was a mistake, and resulted in bad incentives. We wanted to ensure that all ownership rested in the hands of people working hard on current projects, but the Silicon Valley standard approach of vesting stock would have worked out better.
One real problem that I don’t accept the blame for is that we were insisting that level designers be not just game designers, but also have strong visual design esthetics. They needed to make things that not only played well, but looked awesome, and it got more challenging as the technology provided a richer palette. Romero covered that well, which set our company expectations early on.
We should have figured out how to pair up artists and designers earlier, but there was infighting among the designers, and the ones that could manage the visuals were happy to disparage the ones that couldn’t.
Sorry, Sandy.
Nicholas Moryl retweeted
There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days.
Quake was overly ambitious technically. We could have done all the great multiplayer and modding work inside a Doom++ engine, allowing the designers to work with a more stable base instead of rug-pulling everything out from underneath them a couple times. The follow up game could have then brought in full 6DOF environments and characters.
I pushed everyone too hard. I didn’t appreciate how maturing companies need more slack, and that running people at startup intensity constantly will wear them out. Quake was also where I really had to accept my personal limits. I was working pretty much as hard as humanly possible, and I was still slipping past my goal points.
On all of the founders’ shoulders, our original corporate stock arrangement and buy/sell agreement was a mistake, and resulted in bad incentives. We wanted to ensure that all ownership rested in the hands of people working hard on current projects, but the Silicon Valley standard approach of vesting stock would have worked out better.
One real problem that I don’t accept the blame for is that we were insisting that level designers be not just game designers, but also have strong visual design esthetics. They needed to make things that not only played well, but looked awesome, and it got more challenging as the technology provided a richer palette. Romero covered that well, which set our company expectations early on.
We should have figured out how to pair up artists and designers earlier, but there was infighting among the designers, and the ones that could manage the visuals were happy to disparage the ones that couldn’t.
Sorry, Sandy.
How Quake ruined id Software.
There has been a lot of praise of Quake of late, with its 30th anniversary, and it's deserved. Quake is an amazing feat of art, programming, and design. I worked on it, and everything came together almost perfectly from all of us. We ended up with a free-wheeling, frenetic action game with enough of a visible world to grip the imagination.
All the team did a brilliant job, fulfilling tasks just right. But at a grim cost. We worked long and hard, and I think it broke us spiritually.
1/3
Nicholas Moryl retweeted
The craziest thing about Quake is how many modern FPS games originate from it somehow
Valve's Source engine was a modified Quake 1 engine which spawned Half Life, Counter Strike, DOTA, Apex Legends, Titanfall
The entire Call of Duty and Warzone series originates from a modified Quake 3 engine that's continously iterated since!
There are a few things that I look back on as my mistakes in the early days.
Quake was overly ambitious technically. We could have done all the great multiplayer and modding work inside a Doom++ engine, allowing the designers to work with a more stable base instead of rug-pulling everything out from underneath them a couple times. The follow up game could have then brought in full 6DOF environments and characters.
I pushed everyone too hard. I didn’t appreciate how maturing companies need more slack, and that running people at startup intensity constantly will wear them out. Quake was also where I really had to accept my personal limits. I was working pretty much as hard as humanly possible, and I was still slipping past my goal points.
On all of the founders’ shoulders, our original corporate stock arrangement and buy/sell agreement was a mistake, and resulted in bad incentives. We wanted to ensure that all ownership rested in the hands of people working hard on current projects, but the Silicon Valley standard approach of vesting stock would have worked out better.
One real problem that I don’t accept the blame for is that we were insisting that level designers be not just game designers, but also have strong visual design esthetics. They needed to make things that not only played well, but looked awesome, and it got more challenging as the technology provided a richer palette. Romero covered that well, which set our company expectations early on.
We should have figured out how to pair up artists and designers earlier, but there was infighting among the designers, and the ones that could manage the visuals were happy to disparage the ones that couldn’t.
Sorry, Sandy.
Nicholas Moryl retweeted
now that AI makes information consumption and transformation easier than ever I would like to bring back this old banger by Sasha Chapin about how books are not information transfer devices but subjectivity-merging devices
in fact I would say content consumption in general is more about subjectivity-merging than information transfer, which is why I am generally much more interested in writing by humans than by AI
Nicholas Moryl retweeted
Mocking unconsciously repeats negativity and inadvertently shapes your identity.
You become what you repeat.
Neuroplasticity can't decipher between good and bad.
Nicholas Moryl retweeted
This is, somehow, meant to be an anti-Sherrill argument, but even when trying to pretend affordability would be bad they make the upzoned city look unfathomably cool. We could have this. You could afford to own a home and start a family. It'd be amazing.
Nicholas Moryl retweeted
NIMBYism is economic suicide. Housing bans in SF and NYC didn’t just make rent expensive—they strangled 36% of all US economic growth for decades.
That is $8,775 stolen from every American worker’s paycheck, every single year, just to protect the views and property values of a few incumbents.
They aren't "preserving neighborhood character." They are running a cartel that loots the working class to subsidize the landed gentry.
End the blockade. Yes, In My Backyard.
eml.berkeley.edu/~moretti/gr…
Nicholas Moryl retweeted
Mandatory reading worksinprogress.co/issue/the…
Nicholas Moryl retweeted
Keith Rabois shares the decision-making framework he learned from Reid Hoffman
“Reid has a very specific view of how to make decisions… Most people create pros and cons lists. But Reid was adamant that that was the worst possible way to make a decision. He trained me to never do that… So since this conversation in 2002, I have never done that. You will never find a notebook where I write down the pros and cons of any decision.”
Instead, Reid advocates for strictly ranking your priorities — this could be priorities in your life, priorities for your company, etc.
Then you try to make the decision based solely on the first priority. Only if there’s a tie do you go to your second or third priority. As Keith explains:
“The reason Reid’s model is so brilliant is because when you create a pros and cons list, you’re creating effectively — and visually — a false equivalence.”
When your brain sees two pros and three cons it looks at each item as though it’s equivalent. But usually the reasons for doing something will follow a power law. The first one might be really, really important, while the second factor is only slightly important.
But when you see them all listed equally in a pros and cons list, you’re brain will often make the wrong decision.
Video source: @khoslaventures (2023)
Nicholas Moryl retweeted
Juniper returned $7b+ to Kleiner's ~$500m fund ... I think it was 2500X but often ignored. Only player doing TCP/IP for the public internet in 1996 when every telco customer wanted ATM. If Juniper had not started the internet likely wasn't going to be TCP/IP. The CTO of @Cisco told me they would never do a router above OC12! wsj.com/articles/winning-bet…
Think Juniper remains the greatest VC investment of all time. >2000x return in 3yrs. @vkhosla
Nicholas Moryl retweeted
Larry and Sergey can’t stay in California since the wealth tax as written would confiscate 50% of their Alphabet shares.
Each own ~3% of Alphabet's stock, worth about $120 billion each at today's ~$4 trillion market cap.
But because their shares have 10x voting power, the SEIU-UHW California billionaire tax would treat them as owning 30% of Alphabet (3% × 10 = 30%). That means each founder's taxable wealth would be $1.2 trillion.
A 5% wealth tax on $1.2 trillion = $60 billion tax bill, each.
That's 50% of their actual Alphabet holdings—wiped out by a "5%" tax.
Section 50303(c)(3)(C) of the 2026 Billionaire Tax Act states: "For any interests that confer voting or other direct control rights, the percentage of the business entity owned by the taxpayer shall be presumed to be not less than the taxpayer's percentage of the overall voting or other direct control rights."
This means if a founder holds shares representing only 3% of economic interest but 30% of voting control (through Class B supervoting shares), the tax would presume their ownership stake is at least 30% for valuation purposes, not 3%.
The wealth tax is poorly defined and designed to drive tech innovation out of California.
Nicholas Moryl retweeted
DSA Supervisor @JackieFielder_ is back on her bullshit. She wants to ban all R&D in the Mission, and it looks like she's going to get away with it bc the rest of the BoS isn't paying attention.
Sorry this has to be a thread, but it's fucking insane and you need to know details.
Nicholas Moryl retweeted
"In medical research, there’s a practice of ending a study early when the results are too striking to ignore. ... When an intervention works this clearly, you change what you do."
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