The last time I interviewed Alfred Lin we discussed, among other things, contradictions.
Lin—famed as the thoughtful backer of companies like DoorDash, Airbnb, and Citadel Securities—said something I’ve thought about many times since: That it’s important to be able to hold ideas in “extreme tension,” because that’s, in effect, the only path to truth, to knowing what your options truly are.
“The thing about holding things in tension, in extreme tension, is that the right answer is almost definitely somewhere in the middle,” Lin told me in an interview in 2024 about how he thinks about founders. “If you start in the middle and radiate out from there, you think ‘Oh, this is obvious, it makes sense.’ Then you limit the number of solutions you look at. If you look at the extreme and work towards the center, you traverse almost every single possibility. That’s why when people hold things in tension, they tend to come up with more options.”
Lin has lon
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