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bigbrainbizness

Big Brain Business

Verifiedactive
@bigbrainbizness

Learn to not suck at business

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21,112 followers · 6 following · Last polled 3h ago
Perf. Score
53.6
Rank #200
Value Score
26.3
#205 of 273 priced
Median views
4.4K
p25 2.3K · trailing 7d
Followers
21K
+0.9% 7d
ER (impr.)
1.43%
eng ÷ impressions
ER (foll.)
1.60%
eng ÷ followers
Est. CPM
$101.61
QT-rate basis
WoW views
+253.3%
▲ rising

Rates & value · est. from 4.4K median organic views

overpriced
Quote tweetbasis
$450
$101.61 / 1K views
Post
—
no CPM
Thread
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no CPM
Retweet
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no CPM
Value Score 26.3 · rank #205 of 273 priced$4838.71 / 1K engagementsrate age unknown (pre-audit import)

Trends

Follower growth
Median views / day
Engagement rate
View distribution · trailing-7d posts

Each blue dot is one organic post. The Performance Score ranks by the median (4.4K), not the mean (24K) — so a single viral post doesn't inflate a creator's reach. The p25 floor (2.3K) is the level 75% of posts clear.

Recent posts · ranked by views

PostPostedViewsLikesRepostsRepliesQuotesBookmarksER
Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was asked by Charlie Munger, in front of a whole golf club, why he held his Microsoft stock when his partners sold. Then Munger added: "I know you're not that smart." Ballmer's comeback: "No, but I'm that loyal." https://t.co/UyuCFIQM0Xfrozen27d ago460K1.8K11029195790.56%
Steve Jobs took 19 seconds to name the biggest lesson Apple taught him: “When I see something not being done right, my first reaction isn’t to go fix it.” https://t.co/hx2qG1LpVd3d ago403K3.1K21933192.5K1.45%
Meta Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang on why your product can be better and still lose, because perception is more real than reality: Most founders assume the best product wins. Build something that works, prove it with data, and customers will see it. Wang says that assumption breaks down when you sell to large organisations. "Probably a lot of the companies that you all have worked with, they're very data-driven companies. It feels like the truth makes its way... everybody serves a shared sense of reality and whatnot. That's not true at most large companies and also not true within the government, unfortunately." So what do they run on instead? Perception. "At a lot of large customers, perception is more real than reality. The reality is just so ugly most of the time that very rarely do people actually confront reality, and most of the time they just sort of choose to believe the perceptions that they live in." That is how a better product loses. If buyers aren't judging reality, being better in reality isn't enough. The deal goes to whoever owns the perception. Wang spells out what this means for anyone building or selling to enterprises: "If you end up doing enterprise sales or you end up building enterprise products... just as much as your job is to improve the reality, it is to shape the perception." The product still matters, but by his reckoning, it's only half the job. One company he singles out for mastering the other half is Palantir: "One of Palantir's superpowers is that they shape the perception better than most other technology companies do, because I think they view themselves... it's like a combination of a sort of acting troupe combined with a software company." And @alexandr_wang means it literally: "They literally give an acting book to all of the new hires, or they did for a very long time." A software company that trained its people in performance. That tells you how seriously Palantir took the perception half of the job.
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JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon runs a $5 trillion bank, and his day still starts with 5 newspapers at 4:30am, no social media, and a phone he keeps out of reach: https://t.co/p1kYjKm4oCfrozen25d ago233K3.5K35862362.5K2.76%
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt on the controversial hiring rules that built Google, and the beloved "glue people" he says you don't need at all: Schmidt admits the early rules were unpopular, even inside the company. "One of the rules is that we didn't want to hire your friends, which always was upsetting. We also didn't want to hire anybody from what were considered to be lesser universities. And so we also wanted to hire people who had very high GPAs." That meant saying no to people who, by most measures, deserved a yes: "So the constant problem was that somebody was a good employee, had someone they had worked with, who was very loyal, very hard working, who was not from a great university, did not have a very good GPA and we would not hire them." He concedes the policy has since been softened. But he doesn't apologise for it: "So that was controversial and we've relaxed that a little bit now. But the fact of the matter is it got us to where we were today because it produced these high IQ generalists from prestigious universities." Then there was the second rule, built on a lesson Schmidt learned before Google, at Novell. He calls them "glue people": "The glue people are incredibly nice people who sit at interstitial boundaries between groups and they assist in activity. They are glue and they're very, very loyal and people love them and you don't need them at all." The problem wasn't that they were bad people. It was that they cost speed: "At Novell, I kept trying to get rid of these glue people because they were getting in the way because they slowed everything down." And once inside, they were almost impossible to remove: "And every time I'd get rid of in one group, they'd show up in another group and they'd transfer and get rehired and all that." When @ericschmidt raised this with Larry and Sergey, Larry's answer was to stop glue people before they ever got in: "And Larry said, yeah, let's just review all the hiring." "So guess what? From that moment on, we reviewed every offer packet. Literally everyone." The review was strict enough that even Schmidt's own preferred candidates got caught: "And anybody who smelled or looked like a glue person, plus the people that Larry and Sergey thought had backgrounds that I liked that they didn't, would all be flagged. And so anybody who sort of met the original profile, they'd go right through."frozen16d ago126K1.5K104113221.8K2.77%
Jeff Bezos on raising Amazon's first $1M in 1995: 60 meetings ~40 rejections 22 angel investors at ~$50K each 20% of the company at a $5M valuation He calls it "the hardest thing I've ever done." https://t.co/lVfDDb8dW1frozen28d ago111K55879482770.83%
Meta Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang on why his college friends, not experienced engineers, were the right people to build Scale AI's early team: When Alexandr started Scale AI, his first hires didn't come from the San Francisco talent market. "I mostly hired people I knew from school." When Shawn Ryan suggests that was because he could trust them, Alexandr turns it around. It was about whether they could trust him: "I think more that they could trust me." Experienced engineers had no reason to. He explains: "If I went to like a, a 25 year old engineer in San Francisco, I was like, hey, we should, we should work together. I had no credibility." @alexandr_wang describes how those pitches usually ended: "I would get coffee with these people and I would say like, yeah, this is what we're working on. Super cool. You should join us. And then they would all just be like, okay, cool, I guess I'm going to go back to my job now." His college friends were different. They already knew him, and that relationship gave him the credibility that strangers wouldn't: "So early on, I had no credibility, except for with people I went to college with who we were just like friends and we liked each other. And so I managed to recruit a bunch of them over." Some of those friends dropped out to join him. Others were seniors who finished school first and then came on board. "It was a mix. And that was like the early nucleus of the team." That group of college friends carried Scale AI until the company had something stronger than a coffee pitch to offer: real customers. "Then we started picking up momentum because we're starting to work with large automotive companies, were starting to work with, you know, these very futuristic autonomous driving companies." Only then did the team expand beyond that first circle: "And then as momentum started to pick up, like, you know, we were able to grow and build up the team over time." The lesson is that your earliest hires are rarely the most experienced people you can find. They are the people who already believe in you. Before you have traction, a relationship can do the work that a track record can't. If you're building something new with no credibility yet, look first at the people who already know you. They may be the only ones willing to bet on you before anyone else will.frozen14d ago84K722511055351.57%
Jeff Bezos, asked what America's real moat is, doesn't say banks or English or natural resources. He says this: "You can raise $50 million of seed capital to do something that only has a 10% chance of working. That's crazy. But the people who are giving you that seed capital know that their expected value is still positive." That's the whole argument in two sentences. Everyone nods at "venture capital" like it's a line item. Bezos is saying it's the line item. The deregulation pitch around it is weaker. "I'm very optimistic... he seems to have a lot of energy around reducing regulation" is the kind of thing a guy with a rocket company awaiting FAA approval says out loud on a stage. He's literally talking about New Glenn sitting on the pad 20 minutes later. The optimism has a return address. And he never connects the two machines. Permitting reform helps you build a bridge. It doesn't help a seed fund underwrite a 10% bet. He glides between them like they're the same argument. The part worth stealing: expected value positive on a 10% hit rate is the actual job description of early-stage investing, and most founders pitching still don't price their odds that honestly. @JeffBezos told his own angels in '95 there was a 70% chance they'd lose it all. He raised the million anyway.1d ago75K33757731930.80%
Meta's Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang says Y Combinator felt like the Hunger Games, except nobody dies on day one. "You could already be dead, but you might only find out in 3 years." https://t.co/AvPI0GmGs8frozen20d ago51K41224541491.16%
"He called me one weekend in August of 11 and he said, I'd like to talk. And I said, okay. And I go, when? And he goes, now, so I'll be right over." That's Tim Cook on the weekend Steve Jobs handed him Apple. What Jobs told him once he arrived: https://t.co/WLtyBBH0EB5d ago50K2372431950.71%
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon learned a communication rule from Warren Buffett as a student. Today, it keeps his $4.4 trillion bank aligned: "I say the same thing to you that I say to my board, I say to my shareholder, I say to my employee, I say to my customer. There is no difference."frozen27d ago43K32441431621.24%
Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky on the biggest flaw in one-on-one meetings, and why Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang won't do them either: Chesky doesn't do recurring one-on-ones. As he puts it, "I don't believe in one on ones. And almost no great CEO in history has ever done them." According to Chesky, most CEOs once ran them: "Almost every CEO did one on ones and they realized that the one on one model is flawed." He's precise about the format he's rejecting: "It's a recurring one hour, one on one meeting where the employee owns the agenda." That format causes two problems right away. The conversation drifts: "they often don't talk about the things you want to talk about." And the leader's role changes: "You become like their therapist." But for Chesky, the real flaw goes deeper: "They're bringing you problems, but oftentimes they're bringing you problems that you want other people in the room to hear." So a problem that affects the whole team gets raised privately, to one person, and stays there. Chesky still sees a place for private conversations, but a narrow one: "There's very few times employees should come to you one on one without other people. If they're concerned about something, if they're having a difficult time in their personal life, if they want to confide in something they don't feel safe, like telling a group. But that should be like, infrequent." And if those conversations aren't rare, he says leaders should pay attention: "If that's happening frequently, that is a very ominous sign for your organization." This is where Jensen Huang comes in. Chesky points to the Nvidia CEO's reasoning: "Jensen Huang says, I don't do one on ones because I want everyone to be part of the solution and get the wisdom." Chesky explains what goes wrong when decisions are made one-on-one instead: "When you make lots of one on one decisions… They don't feel like they had a voice they didn't have buy in. So generally you do group meetings." That doesn't mean @bchesky never talks to people individually. The difference is who drives the conversation: "I do a lot of one on one calls and emails and I'll call someone, say, hey, what's the status of this?... But it's not a recurring meeting with them owning the agenda. It's me, when I need something, I'll call somebody." His recurring meetings are group meetings, set up for transparency: "Everyone hears, there's notes taken. It's like very transparent what the topic was, what the decision made, who was in the room, who had input." The payoff is accountability for how decisions get made: "So if the process was unfair in some way, I don't want to say unfair, inadequate. There's at least a record of the process and people can weigh in."frozen9d ago38K17926411911.06%
Alexandr Wang, Meta's Chief AI Officer, dropped out of MIT at 19 to start Scale AI and became the world's youngest self-made billionaire at 24. Fittingly, he seeks advice from people just as unconventional: The ones who seem strange and don't care what others think. https://t.co/fSAsrE40pCfrozen21d ago37K379481022451.86%
JPMorganChase CEO Jamie Dimon on the boss who made him work all weekend for a deadline that didn't exist: "That was just bullying me. And it was completely unnecessary." https://t.co/nJGvrrz0jafrozen4d ago34K2922441901.19%
AlterCall CEO Ryan Blair on what it takes to work inside Elon Musk's companies: "You're accountable for every 15 minutes of your day." https://t.co/gSzjNQifv1frozen23d ago29K536671743933.56%
Apple Executive Chairman Tim Cook on why competitors can copy Apple's products but never the culture that creates them: Cook says imitators eventually realise the product isn't the hard part to copy: "People that have tried to copy our products, they would first try to copy the culture that produces the products. But it's not so simple." The problem, he explains, is that the things that make Apple's culture work can't be ordered into existence: "You can't tell people that to all of a sudden magically want to change the world. You can't tell people how to feel. You can't instill passion." You can hire a team, set a mission, and fund the whole operation, but you can't make people care. According to Cook, that kind of commitment comes from a culture that keeps itself going: "These things develop out of a culture that's sort of self sustaining in some ways, and we're very fortunate to have that." He is then challenged on the mission itself. Apple makes phones and iPads, so how is that changing the world? Cook says the device isn't the point. What matters is what the device makes possible: "But look what this phone did. This phone created an app ecosystem that now has one and a half million apps in it. And you can do literally everything with these apps." He lists what that has made possible: "They can improve your health, they can improve others health, they can improve your learning. They can help a kid learn who has autism. They can help you write music, they can help you create art." His point is that a great product gives people abilities they didn't have before: "They do things that give you the tool to do things that you would not otherwise be able to do." @tim_cook ends by asking the listener to look at their own life: "Just think about your day and what you've been able to do because that ecosystem exists and because that product exists. I don't know about you, but I look at my life and I can't imagine it without these things."frozen10d ago27K38752622022.45%
Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky on sitting through long presentations: “It’s just a very inefficient way to run a company.” Here’s what he does instead: https://t.co/zrF9IUogBVfrozen7d ago26K1392431890.99%
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has a surprising theory about the "confidence" behind great founders: it might not be confidence at all. When the idea of confidence comes up, Bezos offers a different explanation: "You say it's confidence, but maybe it's just trying to compensate for that... accepting that that's a human bias and trying to compensate against it." So what is the bias? "I think it's generally human nature to overestimate risk and underestimate opportunity." Your instincts don't just make the risks look bigger than they are. They also make the opportunities look smaller than they are. Both errors push you in the same direction: toward doing less. Bezos's correction: "The risks are probably not as big as you perceive and the opportunities may be bigger than you perceive." This is why he says entrepreneurs "would be well advised to try and bias against that piece of human nature." Seen this way, the founder who looks fearless may not have a different personality from you. They may simply have accepted that their instincts are tilted and learned to adjust for it on purpose. That's not a trait you're born with. It's a correction you can choose to make. And if you don't make it, @JeffBezos warns there's a cost: "Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy." Let the bias set your ambitions, and you'll get small results that seem to prove small was all that was possible.frozen25d ago26K21156801691.74%
Jeff Bezos was asked if Elon Musk's proximity to Trump concerns him: "I take it at face value, what has been said, which is that he is not going to use his political power to advantage his own companies or to disadvantage his competitors." Then the hedge doing all the work: "I could be wrong about that."2d ago25K1061330370.64%
Meta Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang on why "weird" startup ideas win: "You want to try doing something that's a little bit fringe." https://t.co/ephx4Jo54Afrozen19d ago25K448571931722.83%
Amazon founder and Executive Chairman Jeff Bezos ran a trillion-dollar company on a ~$80K salary. And never took a single extra share. Here's why: https://t.co/mMMprzCitifrozen26d ago20K31935531522.60%
Jensen Huang returns to the Denny's booth where he and his two cofounders decided to start NVIDIA in 1993: "Frankly, I had no idea how to do it, and nor did they." https://t.co/xKMnOb9D8ffrozen22d ago19K1672642431.25%
Eric Schmidt explains how Google scaled while Larry and Sergey stayed focused on the technical work: When Larry Page and Sergey Brin brought Eric in, they were honest about the timing. "Larry said to me, well, we don't need you now, but we'll need you in the future. And I think that was roughly right." Google was doing fine as a small company. The challenge was what came next: "In order to scale, you needed somebody who understood replication and you could basically put the systems in place." So the work was split. Eric took on everything outside of engineering: "I set out to hire the non essential executives, which was everyone else, all the other functions that you need, and deal with all the other kinds of things. While Larry and Sergey as founders were working on the technical things." The split worked because of how Eric understood his role. He compares Google's key engineering talent to a university faculty: "They know what they're doing, they're incredibly professional, they're very, very driven." People like that, he says, "sort of put up with the management." So he set out to make their work possible: "My job was to sort of organize the world around them." Even with Eric running the business side, the founders kept control of the company. Eric is clear about that: "Mark's not going to give up control over Facebook. And by the way, Larry and Sergey didn't either. It doesn't matter whether you're called CEO or not." @ericschmidt points to Facebook as a similar model. A technical founder keeps control but lets trusted people run large parts of the business: "Mark allows the key stakeholders, in his case the CFO and [Sheryl], to run large parts of the company. And of course they do a great job." The pattern is the same in both companies. The founders keep authority and stay close to the product. Someone else builds the systems, hires the functions, and handles everything else that comes with scale.frozen10d ago19K962552611.00%
Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi tears up and asks to pause his interview as his mother revisits the hardest years of his childhood: https://t.co/5pXlWM9Unbfrozen11d ago16K1011711591.12%
Khosla Ventures founder Vinod Khosla on how a one-McDonald's-meal-a-week budget bought him the freedom to start a company: "When I first came to the country, even eating at McDonald's was a luxury. I had myself budgeted for one McDonald's meal a week. That's all I could afford." The rest of the week ran on frozen food: "Otherwise, it was Swanson chicken pot pies that cost 39 cents back then." That was the life he was living when he decided to make one of the highest-variance bets available to a person: "I've always been a risk taker. I left India in 1976. Came to this country, didn't know a soul, didn't have any support, just said I want to get to Silicon Valley and go start a company. That was a big risk." No network, no safety net, no capital. Just a destination and an intention. And here's the connection most people miss between those two facts. The pot pies weren't a hardship he endured on the way to the risk. They were what made the risk takeable. "So, I had very low minimum standards that I needed to survive." Because his floor was so low, he could run the worst case in his head and find it survivable: "I always assumed if I start a company, it fails. I can still feed myself McDonald's." He never talked himself into believing the company would work. He assumed it wouldn't, checked whether he could live through that, and found he could, which turned the decision from a bet on his survival into a bet on his upside alone. Gunjan Banerji names it correctly: that gave him operating leverage to go for it. Khosla's own word for what it bought him is freedom. Which is why @vkhosla reduces the whole thing to five words: "It's attitude that matters and not resources."frozen8d ago16K821830611.05%
Weeks into his job at Microsoft, Steve Ballmer got into his first big clash with Bill Gates, one that left them not speaking for 3 days. The company had 30 people and more customer work than it could handle, so Ballmer asked for 18 new hires. Gates feared it would bankrupt the company:frozen25d ago14K40820260.56%
Amazon founder and Executive Chairman Jeff Bezos on why messy meetings get you closer to the truth than polished ones: Bezos describes sitting in a meeting where everything looked a little too smooth: "I could tell in the meeting that the team had rehearsed the meeting. That happens... I could just feel it like you can tell the little tiny cues." So he asked them directly: "Did you guys rehearse this meeting?" They said yes. His response: "Don't do that again. You don't need to." To Bezos, polish belongs in front of a customer, not in front of your own leadership: "Maybe you would rehearse a sales meeting, right? If you're going, you know, if you're going to go visit, you know, a customer and you're trying to sell them a new product or something, maybe you want to have all your ducks in a row and you want to put your best foot forward." Internally, the goal is completely different: "Internally, you're seeking truth. Not, not a pitch. I don't want to be pitched. And you don't want any of your senior executives to be pitched." A rehearsed meeting is built to persuade. A messy one exposes what's actually going on. As Bezos puts it, "that's why messy is good." Getting to the truth also means showing up before everything has been neatly resolved: "You also want to be early. It's like you don't want, want the whole thing to be figured out and then presented to you, right? Like you want to be part of the sausage making, like, show me the ugly bits." And the truth usually lives in the disagreements, so @JeffBezos goes looking for them: "And I always ask, you know, are there any dissenting opinions on the team? You know, who, what, you know, I want to try to get to the controversy." He ends by asking the team to work with him, not perform for him: "Let's make this meeting messy. Help me. Help me make it messy."frozen28d ago13K1322730851.83%
Late Berkshire Hathaway Vice Chairman Charlie Munger explains how he conquered envy, and why young people should skip "pretentious expenditure" altogether: Munger begins with a claim few people could honestly make about themselves: "I have conquered envy in my own life. I don't envy anybody. I don't give a damn what somebody else has." That freedom matters more because, as he saw it, most people haven't managed it: "But other people are driven crazy by it." Worse, some people deliberately exploit that weakness: "And other people play to the envy in order to advance their own political careers. And we have whole networks now that are... that they want to pour gasoline on the flames of envy." Munger was clear about whose side he was on: "I like the religion of the old Jews. I like the people who are against envy, not the people who are trying to profit from it." He then turns to the place envy shows up most plainly: the things people buy so others will see them. "But if you stop, think of the pretentious expenditures of the rich. Who in the hell needs a real Rolex watch so you can get mugged for it?" The status symbol doesn't just fail to serve you. It makes you a target. Still, he admits almost everyone feels the pull, and that the pull keeps the economy moving: "Yet everybody wants to have a pretentious expenditure. And that helps drive demand in our modern capitalist society." That is why his advice to young people is so blunt: "My advice to the young people is don't go there. The hell with a pretentious expenditure. I don't think there's much happiness in it, but it does drive the civilization we actually have." Munger doesn't pretend status spending is going away. He accepts that it drives the civilization we actually have. His point is that you don't have to be one of the people driving it. It will cost you money, and by his account it won't buy you happiness.frozen4d ago13K14134531002.12%
Y Combinator Partner Emeritus Michael Seibel explains how Slack got 80% of employees using it before executives even knew it existed: When Slack went up against Microsoft, it faced an opponent with a well-known playbook. Michael describes it bluntly: "Microsoft's number one way of competing against a startup is literally just copying the product and, or buying a shittier competitor and then giving it away for free. It's such a great strategic way to compete." The obvious response would have been to build a big sales team and go after enterprise deals. Slack saw that this was a trap: "If you look at how Slack played the game, right, they knew, well, if we hire a bunch of salespeople and try to compete against Microsoft salespeople, we're fighting on Microsoft's terms. We're not going to win that battle." So Slack skipped the executives completely and went straight to the people doing the work: "So instead they thought, well, if we can distribute through the employee base. So by the time the executive team even knows that Slack exists... 80% of their employees are daily active users. And it'll be super painful to rip it out." By the time leadership noticed, Slack wasn't a vendor waiting for approval. It was already part of how the company ran. Removing it would mean disrupting most of the workforce. Michael says this worked because it targeted the exact point where Microsoft was weakest: "That's kind of how you attack where your opponent's the weakest. Most people don't voluntarily use Microsoft software. It is hoisted upon them at some point. And Slack could attack the different way." Microsoft won by selling to the people who make purchasing decisions. Slack won by appealing to the people who actually use the product, the group Microsoft had never needed to win over. @mwseibel then turns this into a lesson for every founder raising money: "So what investors really want to understand is what's your understanding of the competitive landscape? Slash the big incumbents, and where are they weak? So when they ask your secret sauce, your competitive advantage, those are all just like, identify the weak point that you're going to exploit." He points out that this is exactly where many founders come up short: "What's so interesting is that oftentimes founders obsess about their idea and they think that's super important, and they kind of leave this thing behind." And he ends by stating plainly what building a meaningful company requires: "In some fundamental way, the world is a certain way and you want to change it. That usually means you have to disrupt someone or something or some company, which means you have to kill them."frozen18d ago13K26729722594.24%
Billionaire Mark Cuban says if he were 20 today, he'd skip venture capital and take the $100K-a-month consulting business instead. Here's why: Cuban was given two paths a 20-year-old could take today. Path one: build an AI coaching and workflow business for small and medium-sized businesses. It's an agency-style consulting model that could bring in $100,000 a month. Path two: what many young founders are choosing now. Build a product, raise venture capital, blitzscale, and take a big swing. Cuban didn't hesitate: "I'm taking the money. I'm taking the hundred thousand dollars a month... And using that and just learning everything I could so when the opportunity comes along, I can afford to do it myself." The consulting business isn't the end goal. It pays you to learn, and it builds the capital you'll need when the right opportunity shows up, so you don't have to give away your company to chase it. That's exactly how @mcuban got rich: "I'm a billionaire because I didn't give up a big chunk of my company. When we sold, I still owned a third of it." Venture capital works the other way. Every round you raise sells part of the company: "If you're raising a ton of money, just remember raising money is not an accomplishment, it's an obligation. And it's dilution." The real danger is when founders start treating each round as the win: "Particularly if you get caught in that trap of okay, I'm going to do I did my seed, I did my angel, I did my seed, now I do my series A, then I'm going to go to a series B. And you think that's the accomplishment. You've already failed." He has seen how that story ends, even when the company becomes a massive success: "Like I've seen huge multi billion dollar exits where the original founder, I mean it's not nothing to make $10, $20, $30 million, but out of a multi billion dollar exit to make $30 million." And what that means for the founder: "That means you're working forever for somebody else."frozen14d ago13K1171752961.83%
Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky explains why autonomy is a fallacy in modern corporate America: Chesky is blunt about it: "I don't believe in autonomy." His target is the widely held belief that employees want to be fully autonomous, which he considers a misconception: "I don't think employees want autonomy. I think that is a giant misnomer. Do they want to have some element of autonomy of how they do their jobs? Yes. But I do not think that the vast majority of people are actually happier in a truly autonomous environment." To show why, he walks through a scenario. Picture yourself with total autonomy: your own budget, your own team, freedom to do whatever you want. You still can't act alone: "You need collaboration. You need legal to sign off and everything, and you need the finance team to sign off in your budget. So you need to actually go through the planning process. You need to integrate with the technology." That's where the idea falls apart. Autonomy inside a company is close to impossible by definition: "In other words, this notion of autonomy is such a fallacy in modern corporate America because companies are organizations. Organization quite literally means we organize people to work together to do something. Rowing in a boat." So what are people actually asking for when they say they want autonomy? Chesky believes the real issue is empowerment: "What people don't want is a lack of empowerment and they want to be able to make decisions on their own. But I don't think people for the most part want to be disintegrated. They want to be integrated." He also argues that what people say doesn't match how they behave: "I challenge the notion that people want autonomy. I think they say they want autonomy. I think their actions don't say the same thing." The proof, in his view, is in retention and engagement. He finds both are often highest when people "really love the people they're working with and they're collaborating and working well." @bchesky does recognize that some people truly don't fit inside an organization, and he counts himself among them: "Now there are some people like me that probably shouldn't be an organization. We should start companies. And I also think if you don't want to work in an organization, start a company. We could use more entrepreneurs in the world as well." For everyone else, independence comes gradually. He describes how he steps back from new hires over time: "Let's say somebody's new, I'll meet with them weekly at some point, maybe by the 20th week. We don't need to meet every week now we can go every other week, but it's only after three or four in a row where yeah, this seems like a slightly unnecessary frequency." In his words: "Eventually one day you check in less and less frequently."frozen6d ago13K24023352353.94%
Charlie Munger cornered Steve Ballmer at a golf club panel in LA and asked why he held his Microsoft stock when his partners were selling. Munger: "I know you're not that smart." Ballmer: "No, but I'm that loyal." The stock went up roughly 10x. Diversification is correct advice that produces correct, mediocre outcomes.2d ago12K832041261.08%
Pershing Square CEO Bill Ackman explains how one conversation with Charlie Munger shaped the structure of his entire business: One night, Ackman asked Munger what the most underrated part of Berkshire Hathaway's success was, "the one part that people don't talk about the most." Munger's answer: "We were almost never forced to make decisions by circumstances so we always had options." @BillAckman says Pershing Square has "designed our business around that." Here's what that structure looks like. First, every public vehicle Pershing Square runs has an anchor stake owned by the people who manage it. Pershing Square Holdings, an offshore entity: "employees own 28% of that company." Howard Hughes: "It's owned directly and indirectly about the same by employees plus the Pershing Square funds." Pershing Square USA, which the firm just took public: "employees invested 500 and something million dollars in the entity." Second, each one is a permanent capital vehicle. This is where Munger's principle becomes real: "If there's a panic in the market and people want liquidity they can [trade] the stock of each of these various companies, but the capital stays in the vehicle which enable us to buy stock during the COVID crash or to buy stock during the financial crisis." Investors who want out sell their shares to someone else. The capital stays put. So when a crash forces everyone else's hand, Pershing Square still has options. Ackman then points to Munger's partner, Warren Buffett, as someone who made the same choice early: "I think one of the very smart things Buffett did is he decided at a certain age that he knew how he wanted to live his life, and he didn't want to live a life dealing with constantly raising money, which is what you have to do if you're in the hedge fund business." The traditional hedge fund is the opposite of what Munger described. Its circumstances force its decisions all the time, because capital leaves no matter how the fund performs: "When you do really well, institutional allocators take money away from you because you become too big a percentage of their portfolio. When you have a bad period, people take money away from you because you're having a bad period." If you win, you get redeemed. If you lose, you get redeemed. And you can't escape the problem by closing the fund to new money: "So you really can't close because if you're not open, people don't do diligence on you. So that the next time you need to raise capital, it's a many month process for people to learn about your business again."frozen20d ago12K962440781.64%
Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on how Microsoft spent 15 years preparing Satya Nadella to become its next CEO: When it came time to find his replacement, Ballmer says there wasn't much deliberation left to do. Microsoft had been preparing its successor for years: "When it came time to to find my replacement, I kind of kind of knew up front, look, we've been grooming this guy for about 10 years, 15 years. This guy is really talented, so he he gets the job obviously." So how do you spend 10 to 15 years preparing a future CEO? According to Ballmer, you start with someone who is "a very technical person," and then you keep moving him into areas he doesn't know. Ballmer says one of the things that mattered to Satya, to the company, and later to the board was that Microsoft gave him many different experiences, and "he did well at all of them." The first stretch was a business that had nothing to do with his technical background: "So we said hey you don't really know anything about an area called general ledger and accounting but why don't you go run this thing called dynamics." Ballmer adds that the business was "probably called great plains at the time," admitting he can't remember for sure. Then Microsoft sped up the process: "We moved him quite rapidly. We said, 'We got to get this search thing together. This is the high potential guy. This is a guy who can learn new things. He's technically minded.' Boom. Throw him a new problem. And he's building new skill sets along the way." Each move added a new skill set. One was machine learning, which Ballmer describes as a fundamentally different style of software: "Old programs were supposed to generate the right answer." By contrast, he explains, many newer programs aim for the "statistically best answer," and you only find out afterwards whether it was precisely right. Over the years, a pattern appeared. Assignment after assignment, the same strengths kept showing up: "He clearly had good people skills. He clearly had an affinity for product." He also "clearly had a knack … for understanding how to think about particularly our enterprise selling operation." That track record prompted Ballmer to give him even more responsibility, and it led Ballmer and his senior leadership team to an explicit agreement: "This is a guy we should be thinking about for the future of the company." By the time @Steven_Ballmer stepped aside, the succession decision had effectively been made years earlier.frozen26d ago11K801833251.13%
Amazon founder and Executive Chair Jeff Bezos on why he built Amazon to eventually run without him: Most founders build companies that depend on them. Bezos set out to do the opposite, and he made that decision long before Amazon was a giant. "Even when Amazon was a tiny company, for whatever reason, I always had in my mind that I wanted to build a company that would outlast me." That ambition shaped how he thought about Amazon from the very beginning. He compares the company to a child being raised to leave home: "And so I've always been thinking about it in that framework and how it could kind of grow up into a young adult and be set off into the world successfully and independently." Bezos is careful to say this isn't the only valid way to build a company. He names the alternative directly: "You can build companies in different ways. You don't have to do that... Be the genius with a thousand helpers." And he doesn't knock it: "And that's also. Can be very successful. There's nothing wrong with it. It's just, it wasn't what I wanted to do." That's the choice every founder faces, whether they realise it or not. In one model, the company is an extension of one person's judgment, with everyone else there to support it. In the other, the company is built to develop its own judgment and stand on its own, so that one day the founder can step away. @JeffBezos chose the second path, and he chose it when Amazon was still small.frozen18d ago10K2971080.44%
Amazon founder and executive chairman Jeff Bezos on why "I'm scared" became one of his most effective things to say in a meeting: Bezos says that in the family he grew up in, most negative emotions were quietly off-limits. "The only negative emotion that was kind of tolerated in that unspoken family dynamic, and only occasionally, was anger. Sadness, fear, anxiety. These things were looked down on." He believes that conditioning probably served him well as an entrepreneur: "That's probably, in the scheme of things, kind of probably pretty helpful for founding a company." His reasoning is that founders need to project something: "You need optimism. Without optimism and energy, I don't know how some glum Eeyore type founder could ever lead a company to success. I mean, you got to have some optimism. You've got to have some energy. It's got to be a little contagious. There's going to be a lot of bad days. You got to lift people up." But he found the limits of that approach at home first, with his children, his brother and sister, and his parents: "I realized I'm not really being intimate with them if I'm not sharing when I'm sad or sharing when I'm scared or these kinds of things. And so I started working on that with them and found it very meaningful. It deepened those relationships very significantly." Then came the realization that changed how he operates professionally: "And then I realized those were valid emotions at work, too." @JeffBezos now treats every emotion as useful information: "All of your emotions are sort of an early warning system. If you're stressed, for me, that's a kind of an early radar that is detecting that there's something I'm not taking action on. It's an important indicator." The problem with running everything through anger is that it's a blunt instrument. It tells people something is wrong without telling them what: "If you're channeling all of your negative emotions into occasional frustration or anger or something like that, you're not being very precise." Here's what it looks like in practice for him now: "I'll have a meeting and I listened for a while, and when it's my turn to talk I'll say, 'I'm scared.' And that's more effective. People are like, 'You're what? What are you scared of?' And then you are talking about, okay, what's making you scared." Anger in a meeting puts a room on the defensive. Fear, stated plainly, starts an investigation. The conversation moves from managing the leader's mood to finding the actual risk the leader has picked up on. His conclusion: "You get more in touch. It actually help[s] you, probably not just your family relationships, your close intimate relationships, but I think it helps you at work too."frozen27d ago10K1121953952.30%
Steve Jobs explains how to resolve conflict by getting the right people in a room and talking until you agree: Jobs frames the problem simply: "How do we resolve conflict?" He starts with what doesn't work. Many leaders handle disagreement by making the call and then asking everyone to get behind it. Jobs rejects that outright: "I've never believed in the theory that if we're on the same management team and a decision has to be made and I decide in a way that you don't like and I say come on, buy into the decision, buy into it. We're all on the same team. You don't agree, but buy into it, let's go make it happen." The flaw, as he sees it, is a contradiction at the core of the arrangement: "Because what happens is sooner or later you're paying somebody to do what they think is right, but then you're trying to get them to do what they think isn't right." Overruling someone doesn't end the disagreement, it only delays it: "And sooner or later it outs, and you end up having that conflict." So Jobs takes the opposite route and settles conflict through conversation: "So I've always felt that the best way is to get everybody in a room and talk it through until you agree." This doesn't mean polling the whole company. He limits the room to the people who matter for that decision: "Now, that's not everybody in the company, but that's everybody that's really involved in that decision that needs to execute it. So that's how we try to run NeXT." Broken into steps, the method looks like this: 1. Pick the right people: only those involved in the decision who will carry it out. 2. Put them in one room and air the disagreement openly, so every objection gets heard and answered. 3. Keep talking until you agree. The meeting ends only when the people who have to execute the decision genuinely agree with it, even if that takes far longer than a quick call from the top. The logic underneath is straightforward. If you pay people for their judgment, asking them to act against it wastes what you're paying for. And conflict you suppress today comes back later, which Jobs says happens "sooner or later." The method costs time and argument up front. In return, the people executing the decision believe in it, rather than quietly working against it.3d ago10K15827221313.17%
Apple CEO John Ternus spent a decade working under Steve Jobs. When he addressed Penn Engineering's Class of 2024, he closed by handing them Jobs' mission: "Go out there and make a dent in the universe." https://t.co/zm8LLIBxIYfrozen22d ago9.9K1413024512.31%
Tim Cook (Apple’s Executive Chairman, ex-CEO) explains the entire Apple playbook in one line: If someone else can do it as good, we’re not doing it. https://t.co/LdAnXYx7ewfrozen9d ago9.5K22433441123.98%
Jeff Bezos on what his daily workday actually looks like: Meetings from 9 to 7. Documents to read on top of that. And he says it gives him energy. https://t.co/8nt98PeaVt2d ago8.8K1122221472.10%
Billionaire Mark Cuban says almost nobody succeeds in business without this one trait. Unless they got really, really lucky: https://t.co/Apqq4BMgZcfrozen18d ago8.2K1182510742.66%
Mark Zuckerberg's advice to 19-year-olds who want to change the world: "Pick something they care about, work on it, but don't actually commit to turning it into a company until it's working." https://t.co/WzTjxSoX9Vfrozen27d ago7.9K2023342854.15%
Every generation thinks it found a new way to get rich. Charlie Munger lived to 99 and watched them all come and go. Here's the one rule he said will never die: https://t.co/sazbzNdOrCfrozen16d ago7.8K1222711983.21%
Apple CEO John Ternus and SVP of Worldwide Marketing Greg Joswiak on the three engineering breakthroughs Apple needed before the iPhone Air could exist: Ternus, who led Apple's hardware engineering while the iPhone Air was being built, says there was no single invention that made the phone possible. Three separate advances had to come together. Breakthrough #1: Materials "We needed advancements in, you know, our materials development, right? Ceramic Shield on the back to be able to create that hollow plateau where we can put so many of the components." Breakthrough #2: Miniaturization "We needed to really push the state-of-the-art in miniaturization. If you look at the inside of the iPhone Air, almost the entire phone is living right up there in that top… in that plateau." Breakthrough #3: Apple silicon "And we need the efficiency of Apple silicon." @johnternus is clear that thinness alone was never the goal: "So, it was all these pieces that had to come together to be able to build a product that yes, is incredibly thin, but also is every bit the iPhone experience that you'd want to have." @gregjoz says the engineering team went beyond what leadership had set out to achieve: "The team really amazed us because we had some pretty lofty goals that John just talked about for this product and they didn't just meet them all. They exceeded them all. They made a better product than we even thought they could make." On competitors, he declined to comment on their products, then made his point anyway: "Look, I'm not going to speak to competitors. They should speak to their product. I don't know what their goals are, but I'd be shocked if they exceeded their expectations. Put it that way."frozen21d ago7.6K531620241.25%
NVIDIA Founder & CEO Jensen Huang on his potential $8 billion tax bill: “I’m not afraid of paying taxes. I’m just afraid of being poor.” https://t.co/xvpW4ztAVnfrozen9d ago7.4K1531661312.81%
Jamie Dimon's diagnosis of why leaders rot once they get promoted: "I've seen people, when they get a big job, their insecurity comes out, they start to cover up. Don't embarrass the boss." His counter: "The job of no one at this company is to make me happy. The job of this company is to do the right thing for the company, the clients, the community and the country."1d ago7.3K862232301.95%
Apple co-founder Steve Jobs said this in 1994, before his comeback rescued Apple from near bankruptcy: "Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you." https://t.co/5Aq4H4bBxOfrozen20d ago7.0K1433553553.43%
Apple's new CEO John Ternus at the Emmys, asked about 89 nominations and 20 wins: "Seven years to have come this far, and we're still just getting going." https://t.co/BJ1cU25GX0frozen29d ago6.8K641610171.43%
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates on why his kids get less than 1% of his wealth: “It’s not a dynasty. I’m not asking them to run Microsoft.” https://t.co/FDfJFogAIIfrozen10d ago6.6K571311151.32%
Late Berkshire Hathaway Vice Chairman Charlie Munger on the luxury spending that fuels modern capitalism, and why it won't make you happy: "Who in the hell needs a Rolex watch so you can get mugged for it?" https://t.co/wm2NeEsuFUfrozen19d ago6.3K902832202.27%
Ron Johnson, Apple’s former SVP of Retail, says Steve Jobs was never in a hurry. He did one thing at a time. He held Pixar to one film a year. He didn’t even carry a cell phone until the iPhone came out. Slow was the strategy. https://t.co/YFYt7scDUxfrozen7d ago5.9K1152371533.38%
Lucy Guo, Founder & CEO of Passes and co-founder of Scale AI, explains how founders can recruit people who are better than them: When she evaluates a founder for investment, Lucy looks for two skills: "talent detection and sales." Her reason for the first is simple: "the people in a company make the company." The danger is that hiring quality can quietly decline over time: "There's a saying that A players hire A players, but B players hire C players. You never want to get to that point." So how do you keep hiring A players, including people who know more than you? Lucy's answer has four parts. Step 1: Be good at something yourself. Lucy says "being talented yourself is really, really important." You can't judge talent if you have no real skill of your own to measure it against. Step 2: Know what you're not good at. Being talented is only half of it. The other half is "knowing what you're not talented at." @lucy_guo applies this to herself. She trained as an engineer, but she doesn't inflate it: "I'll be the first one to say like I am not the best engineer. Like I went to Carnegie Mellon Number 1 CS School, but I wasn't the best at Carnegie Mellon. I would say I was like very average at Carnegie Mellon, but I was very good at design and product that I'd be willing to say I'm like one of the best at." Step 3: Use your network to cover the gaps. When you can't judge a role yourself, find someone who can and get them on your side: "Like, okay, I don't know anything about finance, but this person does and I'm gonna sell to them to help me hire the best finance person and the tech talent." She notes that tech talent is especially hard to assess "if you're not a good engineer," and at the end of the day, "your engineers are the most important thing." Step 4: Sell, constantly. This is where her second founder skill comes in. Recruiting is selling, and so is almost everything else a founder does: "You're always going to be selling to your employees to stay at the company. You're always going to be selling to new hires to join the company. You're going to be selling to your customers to continue to gain new contracts." And: "You need to sell to investors to invest in your company." Her conclusion: "Sales is by far the most important."frozen5d ago5.5K521310401.93%
In 1995, before he was the world's richest person, SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk lived inside his startup's office. Leaky roof. No income. Showers at the YMCA. He called it "the nastiest place you can imagine." https://t.co/kDysPZfqAhfrozen29d ago5.4K1192330393.42%
For years, Google was famous for its "chaotic" culture: lava lamps, wild office tours, and engineers free to do whatever they wanted. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt now admits that image was deliberate marketing. The real company ran on strict goals: https://t.co/gJ6ABr0ABmfrozen16d ago5.3K481730261.78%
Charlie Munger, The late Berkshire Hathaway Vice Chairman for 45 years, explained capitalism in one sentence: People manage their own property better than anyone else’s. https://t.co/xFqn4OJ29rfrozen4d ago5.2K952531252.86%
Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post for $250M in 2013 and turned it around. It made money for 6 or 7 years, then it started losing money again. Now he wants to save it a second time: https://t.co/ss6YHqE6uEfrozen22d ago5.1K35102010.94%
NVIDIA Founder & CEO Jensen Huang started out as a teenage dishwasher and busboy at Denny's. Decades later, he runs one of the most powerful companies in tech. His explanation? No luck, no shortcuts. Just "61 years of hard work every single day." https://t.co/AhTN6aboCofrozen23d ago5.0K481741121.63%
Years before he became a billionaire, Mark Cuban got brutal feedback from his business partner Todd Wagner: "You're a d*ck. People are afraid of you, and we don't get as much done because people are afraid of you." https://t.co/PA9PKAiH9qfrozen20d ago4.8K531250181.83%
Pershing Square Founder and CEO Bill Ackman on why he sold Netflix after management reversed course on advertising, and why he later bought it back: Netflix was not a new idea for Ackman's team. "Netflix is one of the companies, if you will, in the library that we had done a lot of work on over time." Their first buy came after a bad quarter: "They had missed subscriber growth guidance, the stock got crushed, and we think Netflix is an amazing business with a very dominant position, so we bought a meaningful stake in the company." After buying, Pershing Square met with Netflix's leadership: "We then met with management and we shared our detailed deck with them, and they completely agree with our thesis on the company. So we felt we were kind of super aligned with management." In that meeting, Ackman's team asked about one strategic option: "Why don't you have an advertising model, lower cost advertising model?" The answer was firm: "We're never going to do it." Weeks later, that answer changed: "About 3 or 4 weeks later, they announced earnings, and if you go back and review the earnings call, management seemed like shell shocked. They missed the subscriber numbers again. They seemed very surprised by this. They said, 'But we're going to have to adapt; we're going to have to launch an advertising model.' You know, literally 3 weeks before, they said they would never do it." Ackman explains the choice an investor faces at a moment like this: "You make an investment in a company, and then you learn new information that's inconsistent with the original thesis. You either have to buy a lot more because the stock's gotten cheap and you believe that the new information is not material, or you have to exit because the thesis is broken." Pershing Square chose to exit. In the letter to investors, they wrote: "Look, we're selling for this reason: we think management is going to be able to work through this problem, but Pershing Square invests in the highest certainty companies in the world, and we think the dispersion of outcomes here has widened dramatically." Ackman's concern came down to predictability. The sudden reversal had made Netflix's future much harder to forecast: "They may get it right and maybe it's a home run, but there's also a much greater probability that they don't get it right. They don't know anything about advertising models and whether that's going to be successful or not. And so with a wide dispersion of outcomes, we have a better place to deploy the capital." The money went straight into another company: "We took the money and we bought Google Alphabet, because again, for us, we don't need to make it back the same way we lost the money. We can always take a tax loss, which has some value to us, and redeploy it in something else which is higher certainty." @BillAckman sums up the logic: "If you look at the Pershing Square portfolio, we own the highest certainty, predictable companies in the world; this lost its certainty element, at least in our mind." Then the advertising pivot that drove Pershing Square out ended up working: "They executed extremely well, they built a very successful advertising model, they became an even more dominant company, they became a much more cash flow generative business, and the streaming wars they won. You know the Disneys of the world, the Paramounts of the world, have kind of been pushed aside." Ackman describes how strong Netflix's position became: "Netflix, you probably turn off the lights practically before you turn off your Netflix. And they're incredibly well positioned to innovate. They're the place you go for any creative person to sell your content or to produce your content." But Netflix's success alone was not enough to bring Ackman back. The price had to make sense too: "Because they executed really well, the stock went back to a very high multiple and was not interesting." Then the chance came: "And then relatively recently, the stock got cut in half again. So now we had the high certainty business we thought we owned, they proved themselves at a price that made sense, so we bought it back."frozen19d ago4.8K381420141.42%
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk with the simplest explanation of inflation vs deflation you'll hear: https://t.co/A3wIxSh1oOfrozen28d ago4.7K622020302.44%
Former U.S. President Barack Obama on why expecting your job to give you everything is a mistake: Obama argues that we often put too much on our careers, the same way we sometimes put too much on our closest relationships: "We put sometimes maybe too much pressure on ourselves that we should get everything out of our work in the same way that sometimes we put too much pressure to say we should get everything out of our marriage or our relationships." In his view, no single part of life can carry all of it. Even the best job leaves needs unmet: "You know, no matter how good your job is, you still need to sometimes have some fun and be silly and just have friends that you can leave that behind." The same goes for purpose. @BarackObama says your job doesn't have to be the place where you serve others: "And in terms of being of service, you know, not everybody's going to have a job that, quote, unquote, is serving humanity. And then you can go to the local church and work, you know, helping people in a food pantry or start a community garden or anything else you enjoy." He says he is "less dogmatic" about the idea that there is only one way of doing things. Asked for his advice to someone named Simon, he reduces it to one essential: "I think the most important thing I would say to Simon is just recognize that you do need that thing in your life that connects you to other people and connects you to something larger than yourself."frozen13d ago4.6K24121270.99%
Khosla Ventures Founder Vinod Khosla left India in 1976 for Silicon Valley with no contacts and no money. His framing was simple. "It's attitude that matters and not resources. So I always assumed if I start a company, it fails. I can still feed myself McDonald's." The math underneath the mindset: one McDonald's meal a week was the luxury budget. The floor was Swanson's chicken pot pies at 39 cents. When your downside is a 39-cent pot pie, "going for it" stops being brave and starts being obvious. Your appetite for risk is mostly a function of how cheaply you can live while you're wrong.2d ago4.6K582162292.50%
Apple Executive Chair Tim Cook reveals the side of Steve Jobs that shaped him and many others at Apple, and that almost no one writes about: Most people know Jobs for his vision and his relentless perfectionism. Cook says that misses the most important part of who he was. It starts with how people misunderstand him: "They don't know him, and they don't know his vision... They see things in the traditional way, which Steve never did." Jobs, Cook says, was always looking well beyond what was in front of him, "looking at things with beginner's eyes." "He clearly had a gift for that. And he took that gift and embedded it in the company. It wasn't a gift that he kept to himself." That's the part Cook wants people to understand: Jobs passed his gift on to the people around him. "I loved many things about him. He's a dear friend, but he was also a great mentor. He was a great teacher." And Cook speaks from personal experience: "This is something that's never written about him, but what he left in not just me, but many of us is what he taught us is he was one of the best mentors in the world." When the conversation turns to whether this is just another way of describing Jobs' perfectionism, Cook pushes back hard: "No, it's much more than that, because that's just... That's holding the bar so high that it's very hard to hit. But no, it's teaching and it's teaching and making sure people are learning." That's the difference. Perfectionism sets the standard. Mentorship makes sure people can actually reach it. According to Cook, Jobs made a deliberate habit of this and kept it up for years: "And him taking such an interest. He's going out of his way to do this. And I saw him do that over many years with not just me, but many people." @tim_cook ends with a blunt verdict on how Jobs' story is usually told: "It's a huge, huge part of what he did that's missed in most of the things that I've read."frozen11d ago4.5K411031241.75%
Jeff Bezos on killing the Washington Post's presidential endorsement, after 250,000 subscribers canceled: "You can't do the wrong thing because you're worried about bad PR." His only concession to the timing critique: "If I had had the prescience to think about this topic at all two years before, that would have been better for perception reasons."3d ago4.4K28132041.06%
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt on the two most interesting rules he found at Google: "Don't be evil" and 20% time Asked what kept Google innovating intelligently as it scaled, Schmidt goes back to when he first joined: "When I started there, there were two actually interesting [rules]. One was don't be evil. And the second one was 20% time." Rule #1: Don't be evil Schmidt didn't take it seriously at first: "Don't be evil I thought was a joke because I mean, nobody here is evil. I don't want to be evil. You don't want to be evil." Then he watched it work. He was in the original conference room, in the small building where they started, while the team discussed a change involving ad targeting on a particular ad click. One of the engineers, Ron, "pounds the table and said that would be evil." "And I'm like, oh, okay, what just happened? And the whole mood of the room changes and there's this huge debate over whether that's evil or not." In the end, they didn't make the change. Schmidt's explanation for what he saw: "The analogy was it's the Kanban system, right? In Japan, the notion that any employee can stop the line if they see a poor quality thing and it works because of shared values, strong shared values, a strong buy in to principles takes you far." He's candid that he can't vouch for that culture now: "it may or may not be true today that the company has that feeling." Rule #2: 20% time "The idea was that we could ask you as an employee to do everything you can in 80% of your time. And the other 20% time you could do whatever you wanted." @ericschmidt dismisses the obvious worry: "Don't be too worried here. These are engineers, they're not exactly going to run off and do something wild." The payoff, in Schmidt's words: "many of the features that we offer today began as 20% explorations." But the rule didn't run itself. Managers had a job to do: "Part of the management job was to sort of listen for those 20% time things and then sort of aggregate them." He points to Marissa, whom he calls "a superb executive," as someone who "would watch for these things": "So Marissa maintained a top 100 list which had 300 things on it. And she was constantly, constantly culling that list and trying to identify these little ideas and trying to get them to talk to each other."5d ago4.4K341520151.50%
Nvidia co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang was asked whether Nvidia's dominance came from luck or vision. His answer is more honest than most founders would dare give: "That was luck, founded by vision." https://t.co/06ljyrsn1Gfrozen18d ago4.4K641140132.10%
Alibaba founder Jack Ma on where fear of the future really comes from: "When you worry about the future, that is because you are lack of confidence. You lack of imagination." https://t.co/OJhqHFYrg6frozen23d ago4.3K1062011594.37%
The late Charlie Munger, Berkshire Hathaway's Vice Chairman, exposed that he and Warren Buffett never used advanced math to build their fortune: "I never used calculus for any practical work in my whole damn life." https://t.co/0ZxeH1HpVgfrozen25d ago4.3K771940212.84%
Mark Cuban on why the biggest insurance company in America has 2,600 subsidiaries: "They do $160 billion in intercompany transfers. They get to game the whole system. They're too big to care. Definition of a monopoly." You don't need 2,600 subsidiaries to sell insurance. You need them to move money around in ways nobody can audit.frozen5d ago4.1K491910111.94%
JPMorgan Chase Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon on the biggest killers of companies, and why CEOs keep allowing them: Dimon doesn't hedge on what destroys companies: "I think the things that destroy companies, folks, are bureaucracy and politics." He points to history as the evidence: "If you look at what's killed companies over the years, it was bureaucracy. And if you look at the Fortune 500 and you did a 1950, 1960, 1978 look at the companies who failed, it was because they were dumb, bureaucratic, backward and political." So how exactly does bureaucracy do the damage? Dimon lays it out: "Bureaucracy kills. Bureaucracy drives out good people, it drives out innovation. It makes the person in the office next to you a competitor and not a collaborator. And that's a really bad idea inside a company." That last point is where the second killer, politics, comes from. Dimon draws a clear line between healthy and unhealthy competition: "It's okay to compete with ideas, but it's a really bad idea when you're competing with the person next to you. It creates politics." If the danger is this obvious, why does it keep happening? Dimon's answer is blunt. Leadership lets it: "CEOs should never allow that stuff. And yet they do. I mean, it's a normal course. They allow it. And you've seen a lot of public companies and boards allow. Boards can create it, by the way." Part of the problem is that bureaucracy comes with ready-made excuses. Dimon admits his own firm leans on one of them: "Our meetings are too long and we stand behind regulations. Sometimes the regulators make us do it." Another surfaced at a summer off-site, in a pre-read claiming bureaucracy is simply the price of complex businesses operating in complex global environments. Dimon rejected it outright: "It's just not true." Instead, he told his team to start from scratch: "We're going to reimagine all these things the way they should be, not the way they are today. And let's take a crack at killing some of those bureaucracies." It starts with meetings. No chart flipping, only pre-reads, with the real work done beforehand: "I expect you to do your homework, get the analysis and part it up with people beforehand so you don't walk in and say, well, I want to do A, B and C, but I haven't spoken to this person yet." If that groundwork hasn't been done, the meeting doesn't happen: "I would say, why don't you speak to this person? The meeting is canceled. Go do that first and then come back with a joint recommendation or that you disagree and then we'll talk about specifically why you disagree about something." But killing bureaucracy doesn't mean replacing it with forced harmony. Dimon is explicit that collaboration and agreement are not the same thing: "Collaboration does not mean everyone has to agree. Collaboration does not mean you go along to get along, because that's very often what people mean by it." And he is openly suspicious of anyone who pledges loyalty to him personally: "If you walk into me and say, I'm going to be loyal to you, I would question what that means, because you should be loyal to the institution, you should be loyal to the customers. You can be loyal to the principles for which I stand. But being loyal to me usually means you can defend my decision whether or not you agree, which I just think is a mistake."frozen28d ago4.0K632040312.93%
In 1985, Steve Jobs was forced out of the company he co-founded. In 1992, while running NeXT, he was asked what Apple could have become if he'd stayed. His answer was unusually raw: "I think everybody lost. I think I lost and I wanted to spend my life there." https://t.co/Iua8A3K1gxfrozen16d ago3.9K841911393.65%
Apple CEO John Ternus on why design sits at the center of everything Apple builds: https://t.co/J2lHUbUOCP1d ago3.9K491430142.04%
Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma tells himself the same thing every day: Today is tough. Tomorrow is tougher. The day after tomorrow is beautiful. Most people quit tomorrow evening. Don't be most people. https://t.co/Z4Ro9DgtR8frozen19d ago3.8K862034323.79%
Former Apple SVP of Retail Ron Johnson on the Steve Jobs philosophy that runs directly against Facebook's "get stuff out there and test it" playbook: Ron Johnson built the Apple Store alongside Steve Jobs. He describes a lesson from Jobs that turns the modern tech approach to launching products upside down. Most companies today treat launch as the start of the thinking. Ship early, watch how customers react, then iterate. Johnson describes it this way: "Super counterintuitive to what companies like Facebook do today where let's just get stuff out there and test it and the customer will tell, we'll evolve." Jobs worked from the opposite premise. He believed the answer could be found before launch, through thinking alone: "Steve used to say, if you think through any problem hard enough, you'll come to the inevitable only answer and everyone will agree with you." The test-and-iterate model relies on customer feedback. Jobs relied on deep reflection inside a tight circle: "Steve believed in thinking things through with a small group of people and putting your best, best foot forward. That's how he designed products, that's how he created movies, that's how he created the store." The two models also treat time differently. Ship-fast companies are built around speed. Jobs refused to let the calendar decide when something was ready: "And Steve was never in a hurry. Now, he wasn't driven by product timelines." That patience came at a cost, and the people around him felt it, even on Apple's most important product: "Now there were a lot of products, we thought, is it ever going to come out? The phone was actually quite a bit beyond when we initially thought we could bring out a phone at Apple." The deeper difference is about what a launch means. The test-and-iterate model treats a launch as one draft among many. Jobs treated it as a single, unrepeatable moment. Johnson sums up what he took from it: "So the lesson I learned from that was you get one chance to launch a store, you get one chance to launch a product. Do it great. If you have a better idea, have the courage to make a change." The two philosophies don't just differ in tactics. They make opposite bets. The ship-fast model bets that customers will forgive a weak first version and come back for the improved one. Jobs bet that you only get one first impression, so it has to be right. The ship-fast model treats a deadline as the point where you stop and release. Jobs treated a better idea as a reason to change course, even late in the process and even when it meant the product arrived well after everyone expected.frozen9d ago3.7K501514252.55%
Peter Thiel built his fortune on bets that went against conventional wisdom: PayPal, Palantir, and a $500K check into Facebook in 2004. So people assume his strategy is to disagree with everyone. He says that’s exactly the wrong lesson: https://t.co/EBbHAUbfk9frozen13d ago3.7K521430262.60%
Tim Cook admits Apple has never once tried to beat competitors to market: “The philosophy has always been to be the best, not the first.” https://t.co/QE5I6p1SCUfrozen11d ago3.5K861630253.72%
NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang on the job at Denny's that built his work ethic: “I was the best busboy of any busboy that ever bused tables.” https://t.co/SmHpsmmwXZfrozen10d ago3.4K681630173.05%
In 2016, SoftBank Chairman & CEO Masayoshi Son met Mohammed bin Salman, then Saudi Arabia’s Deputy Crown Prince, on his first trip to Tokyo. 45 minutes later, Son had a $45 billion commitment to his Vision Fund. That’s $1 billion per minute: https://t.co/mkoVPyjCmrfrozen6d ago3.4K22121031.11%
The late Charlie Munger went 80 years without trying to time the market: "In my whole adult life, I've never hoarded cash waiting for better conditions." https://t.co/n87A6eqPVNfrozen18d ago3.4K421411112.06%
Jack Ma on how a man who openly admits "I don't think I'm a smart person" built a $250+ billion empire by working with a lot of smart people: The Alibaba co-founder looks back on nearly two decades of building the company and doesn't take the credit for himself. "I never thought I could be today. After 18 years, Alibaba become today's size. Not because I'm smart. I don't think I'm a smart person, but I have I work with a lot of smart people." For @JackMa, the smart people around him are the reason Alibaba became what it is. But he also sees a trap that talented people tend to fall into: "Most smart people, they always want to do successful things, quick, easy things. And I think it's not easy to be successful quickly." So Alibaba set its sights a decade ahead: "Every time everything we do, we prepare for 10 years." He then lays out his formula, starting again from his own limits: "I know I'm not smart. If we want to be successful, we have to win 10 years later. If we want to be successful, we have to work with smart people. If we want to be successful, we should make a lot of mistakes and never give up." The last part is the one he stresses most. Everyone makes mistakes. What sets Alibaba apart is what happens next: "A lot of people they make mistake, they have problem, they give up. We never give up. We learn from mistakes." Take his formula to heart and the path becomes clear. Bet on the smart people around you instead of your own brilliance. Let others chase the quick, easy wins while you prepare for the one that comes 10 years later. And when the mistakes pile up, as they will, learn from every one and refuse to quit. By Ma's own account, that's what it took to build one of the world's most valuable companies: smart people, a decade of preparation at a time, and a refusal to ever give up.frozen22d ago3.2K301310141.79%
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt makes a blunt admission: After running one of the world's most powerful companies, he still can't make decisions fast enough. Asked what he'd tell his younger, pre-Google self, Schmidt doesn't name a missed bet or a bad strategy. His answer comes down to speed. "I think all answers of that category in our industry are to do things that you did sooner and to make fewer mistakes. So in hindsight, I would always have made the right decision faster." Then comes the admission most leaders at his level wouldn't make out loud: "And I wonder what is it that causes me to not make the decisions quickly? And by the way, I continue to have this problem." Even after a decade as Google's CEO, he hasn't solved it. His best explanation is that it may come down to wiring: "So it may just be that some people are quicker decision makers than others." But he's careful not to turn this into a simple "always move faster" rule. Hindsight, he points out, makes every hesitation look like a mistake: "And it's not obvious that you have to make all the decisions as quickly, but in hindsight, you would judge them all that way." According to Schmidt, he's far from alone: "And every executive in every business class and every management class will say the same thing, which is, I should have fixed this earlier. I should have fired this person sooner. I should have cleaned that up earlier and so forth." @ericschmidt ends with a pointed jab: "And that's why businesses are not like the government, where none of that ever happens or very little."frozen17d ago3.2K371440192.32%
JPMorganChase Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon on what he looks for in people, and what gets them permanently written off: Dimon is asked about the leadership characteristics he looks for, and he starts with a caveat: "Well, when you're young, it's hard to say leadership characteristics." Still, there are a few basics he watches for. What he looks for #1: people who know a lot He describes the people who haven't done the work: "There's some people walk into your office and say, 'Yeah, I'd like to know about the strategy of the company.' And they didn't bother to read the chairman's letter I wrote, which is like 30 or 40 pages long." And another version of the same mistake: "There people walk in and say, you know, you really should be thinking about doing better digital services, but they didn't look at the ones we do do." Then he describes the people who stand out: "There other people walk in and they know everything. And so, when they have a conversation, they're actually enhancing your life as opposed to other way around." What he looks for #2: character "Character is a sine qua non. And by character, I also mean that they tell the whole truth, nothing but the truth. They don't shave the truth." What he looks for #3: relating to people "People who are good, you know, relate well to people." What gets you written off: saying different things to different people Dimon is clear that honesty also means consistency. People should say the same thing to him that they say to everyone else. Once he sees someone break that, he's done with them: "The second I see people doing something different than that, you just go on a list to me. I'm just I have no interest. I don't have time for that."frozen29d ago3.1K331411252.39%
Y Combinator Partner Emeritus Michael Seibel explains the two depressing realities every founder should understand before starting a company: Seibel says many people go into startups with the wrong mental model: "A lot of people think startups are like universities, and, you know, the startup community is here to support everyone. And the reality is startups are a lot more like sports teams." To make his case, he points to what he calls "two depressing realities about sports teams." Reality #1: Most people don't make the team. "If you're on a 15 person basketball team and you're not one of the top 15 people at tryouts, you're not even on the team." Reality #2: Making the team doesn't mean you get to play. "And if you're team member 10 through 15, you're on the team, but you don't play." His verdict: "That's a lot more like startups." @mwseibel then explains what it takes for the few who do succeed: "There are many, many, many people who want to be a professional athlete. There are very few who are successful, and often times they have to sacrifice a lot in order to get that success." That sacrifice, he says, is part of the deal, and he applies it directly to the work-life balance debate: "People talk about work life balance a lot. And if you're choosing the startup world, you're choosing to give up some life and absorb a lot of work."frozen21d ago3.0K211012131.55%
Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma on why your first boss matters more than your first company, and his five-stage plan for every decade of your life: Most graduates chase the most impressive company name they can get. Jack Ma argues they're optimizing for the wrong thing. "When you graduate, find a company. Most important, find a good boss that can train you, discipline you, and tell you what is good and right is more important than a good company, right?" That's the underrated move: pick your boss before you pick your brand. "Of course, a good company, a good boss, even better. And then continue your life." But if you have to choose, the person who trains you wins. @JackMa also warns students against chasing the dropout-billionaire story: "When you're a graduate, when you just in the university, don't think about I want resign from the school and be another Bill Gates because Bill Gates left Harvard. There's only one Bill Gates in the world." Instead, he lays out a five-stage plan, one stage for each decade of your working life. Stage 1 (20 to 30): Learn from a good boss. "For those young people, if you uh 20 to 30 years old, please find a good boss, not not necessarily good company. Learn from the boss. Learn how to do it." Stage 2 (30 to 40): Try building something yourself. "When you are 30 to 40 years old, try to do something yourself if you really want to try." Notice the condition. This isn't a mandate to start a company. It's permission to try, if you really want to. Stage 3 (40 to 50): Focus on what you're good at. "When you're 40 to 50, 50 years old, do things that you are good at. After 20 years of learning, you should do something you're good at." Two decades of learning and experimenting should have revealed your strengths. This is when you commit to them. Stage 4 (50 to 60): Support young people. "When you are 50 to 60 years old, spend a time supporting young people." Stage 5 (60 and over): Spend time with family. "When you are six over 60 years old, spend time with your grandchildren." Each decade builds on the one before: learn, try, focus, give back, then step back. And it all starts with the boss you choose in your twenties.frozen23d ago3.0K432142273.22%
Billionaire investor Mark Cuban brought his boss a $15,000 check and got fired for it. All because he was supposed to be sweeping the floor. https://t.co/ARtkYnXHDkfrozen4d ago3.0K30132051.69%
Warren Buffett’s definition of success has nothing to do with money: “If you get to be 65 or 70 and later and the people that you want to have love you, actually do love you, you’re a success.” https://t.co/X1GOiGp2Ze3d ago2.9K631821223.59%
Passes founder and CEO Lucy Guo on why the CEO’s hours set the ceiling for the whole company: “If you’re the CEO getting to the office at noon, your best employees might be getting there at 11:30.” https://t.co/IoxmwUFStefrozen5d ago2.8K34121061.86%
Citadel Founder and CEO Ken Griffin on nearly losing everything in 2008: "We are going to fight to survive knowing we might fail, but we are not going to give up." https://t.co/22XJIjASmqfrozen8d ago2.7K381730102.50%
Most companies would never hire a CFO who’s been through a bankruptcy. Eric Schmidt, who ran Google for a decade, says that’s exactly who you want: https://t.co/frdNGhXiOGfrozen11d ago2.6K441230192.95%
In 1776, Adam Smith showed that 10 workers could make 48,000 pins a day if each did just one or two steps. That idea shaped the modern economy. It's also why most of us only see our tiny piece of it. Peter Thiel on why we still need generalists: https://t.co/rL9aYftD0Gfrozen15d ago2.6K371110192.59%
Everyone thinks bad ideas kill startups. YC Partner Emeritus Michael Seibel, who has worked with over 1,000 of them, says that's wrong: "Often times a lot of people think startups fail because they have a bad idea. They even think they know what a bad idea is and they think they can read an idea and tell whether it's good or bad." His verdict: "In my experience working with over a thousand startups in my time at YC, bad ideas are not the thing that kills startups." His proof is his own company: "I started my company with my three co-founders and it started as an online reality TV show and it sold in 2014 for almost a billion dollars. So, bad ideas don't kill startups." So if it isn't the idea, what is it? "One thing that often kills startups is the founders lose the faith." @mwseibel points out that fast traction is the exception: "Sometimes startups start working quickly, but more often than not, they don't." He has also noticed when founders tend to break: "Somewhere between a year and 18 months in, if a founder doesn't see something really exploding, they start losing faith in their idea, in their hypothesis." That is the real risk. Founders who quit early never learn what their idea could have become: "Sometimes it takes longer than 18 months to figure something out. And if you lose the faith, you'll never find out the actual thing you could have built." His advice for holding on is to anchor yourself to the problem, not the payoff: "One thing that I challenge founders to do is to spend more time thinking about the problem they want to solve. It's a lot rare[r] to lose the faith if you really like your users and you really like the problem you're solving for them." The founders most likely to quit are the ones chasing the wrong rewards: "It's a lot more common to lose the faith if you're in the game to make money or to give speeches or to be in the press or to be famous." And his closing point: "This is a game that almost everyone fails at and so sometimes just sticking it out is the thing that separates you from your competitors."frozen26d ago2.5K271141152.35%
Charlie Munger, late Vice Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, on the biggest myth in professional investing, and why four good assets is all you need: Business schools teach diversification as the definition of doing investing properly: spread your bets, own a bit of everything, minimise the damage from any one mistake. Munger rejected that idea outright. He names the people behind it: the finance professors who sell the idea "that perfect diversification is professional investment." His counter: "If you're trying to do better than average, you're lucky if you have four things to buy. And to ask for 20 is really asking for egg in your beer." And the reason, in his words: "Very few people... have enough brains to get 20 good investments." Then he uses his own family's money as the example. The Mungers own Berkshire stock, Costco stock, Chinese stock through Li Lu, a little bit of Daily Journal stock, and a bunch of apartment houses. That's the whole list. No sprawling index of hundreds of names, just a handful of concentrated positions. He doesn't pretend it's flawless: "Do I think that's perfect? No. Do I think it's okay? Yes." He explains why "okay" is the right standard: "It may be that you have to choose the least bad of a bunch of options. That frequently happens in human decision making." And his conclusion: "I think the great lesson from the Mungers is you don't need all this damn diversification... You're lucky if you've got four good assets." The myth isn't that diversification exists or has a purpose. The myth is that it's what makes investing "professional." If your goal is to beat the average, the real limit is how many good opportunities you can actually recognise, and by Munger's account, that number is small for almost everyone. Demanding twenty great investments means demanding something very few people can deliver. Owning four good ones, even if they're the least bad options available, is enough.frozen19d ago2.4K38151192.64%
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt on how Google went from a Stanford dorm room to a garage to a baby's nursery: Google started as something the founders built for their university, and for themselves. "Larry and Sergey built Google for Stanford and particular for themselves." The whole operation ran on one server in Larry's dorm room. When they needed a second one, the room couldn't supply enough electricity, so they improvised: "They didn't have enough power, so they ran the cord over the room into the gentleman next door's dorm room." Then they opened the server up to the entire campus: "They opened up the server for the entire campus here, and the usage was phenomenal." That usage soon turned into money. Andy Bechtolsheim heard about the project through David Cheriton and wrote a $100,000 check. "He wrote the check, he gave it to Sergey." According to Schmidt, Sergey carried the check in his wallet for a month before the company was ready to use it. With funding in hand, the founders left the dorm for the house of Sergey's girlfriend's sister. The girlfriend later became his wife, and later his ex-wife. Google owns that house today. The servers went into the garage, but Google quickly outgrew it: "They set up these servers in the garage and they slowly took over each of the bedrooms." One room was supposed to stay off-limits. The homeowner was pregnant at the time, Schmidt says, and kept warning them, "the baby's coming, the baby's coming." The founders moved in anyway: "They put Google world headquarters in the baby's room." @ericschmidt sums up everything after that in four words: "The rest happened."frozen12d ago2.4K341631162.92%
Pershing Square Founder & CEO Bill Ackman lived every parent's nightmare in February. His 26-year-old daughter Lucy was found unconscious after a massive brain bleed. Now he's building a brain institute so everything learned from her case can help others: https://t.co/LnxtEhXQFrfrozen21d ago2.4K30143032.09%
Apple CEO John Ternus is leaving the door open to an Apple TV movie shot on iPhone. The entire Apple Launch last September was shot on the iPhone 18 Pro. https://t.co/bz4hrIuy1rfrozen17d ago2.3K25131031.82%
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk on the 2008 decision that nearly killed both of his companies: "SpaceX is alive by the skin of its teeth. So is Tesla. If things had just gone a little bit the other way, both companies would be dead." Elon calls it one of the most difficult choices he has ever faced in life. In 2008, he had maybe $30 million left, or $30 to $40 million. And he had to decide what to do with it: "I had two choices. I could put it all into one company and then the other company would definitely die, or split it between the two companies. But if I split it between two companies, then both might die." Neither option was safe. Concentrating the money meant certain death for one company. Splitting it meant risking both. What decided it for him was how he saw the two companies: "When you put your blood, sweat, and tears into creating something and building something, it's like a child. And so it's like, which one am I going to let starve to death? I couldn't bring myself to do it." So @elonmusk split the money between the two. "Fortunately, thank goodness, they both came through." Nearly two decades later, the two companies he refused to choose between are both still standing, and still growing. SpaceX went public in June 2026 in the largest IPO in history, raising $86 billion. Tesla has begun rolling its first high-volume Semi trucks off the production line and now runs its robotaxi service in cities including Austin, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Orlando and Tampa. Neither would exist if Elon had made the "safe" choice in 2008.frozen29d ago2.3K27173082.38%
Y Combinator co-founder Jessica Livingston on the company that helped launch Airbnb, Stripe, and Dropbox: Self-funded, unprofitable for years, and driven by one goal: treat founders better. "I think it's still part of our DNA." https://t.co/WgQ1BIYu7Yfrozen29d ago2.3K291320102.37%
Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi on inheriting what was called one of the worst cleanup jobs in the history of American capitalism: In 2017, investors pushed out co-founder Travis Kalanick amid sexism claims, Greyball, and a self-driving lawsuit. Dara was brought in to fix it. https://t.co/F2Vay61cHmfrozen13d ago2.3K23101041.68%
Oscar-winning screenwriter Aaron Sorkin wrote 88 episodes of The West Wing and tried to quit 87 times. Before that? He lost his 30s to cocaine. https://t.co/zufNEDCnTQfrozen21d ago2.2K25102051.88%
Elon Musk on the brutal lesson Zip2 taught him before PayPal and Tesla: "If you've got great technology, you want to go all the way to the end consumer. Don't sell it to some bonehead legacy company that doesn't understand how to use it." https://t.co/anUC5Qrmtzfrozen24d ago2.2K26122162.12%
Mark Cuban on why Amazon, JP Morgan and Warren Buffett couldn't fix healthcare, and what he's doing differently: Cuban's company is the only business he has ever put his own name on. When asked why, he pointed to a pattern: "Every time a rich guy comes into healthcare, they always fail." The biggest example he gives is Haven: "So literally, JP Morgan, Warren Buffett and Amazon got together, created a company, I think it was called Haven about five years ago, where they said they were going to change healthcare. Within three years, they were dust." On paper, Haven had everything: three of the most powerful names in business, enormous capital, and millions of employees and customers to bring to the table. @mcuban says the ambition wasn't what separated them from him: "The goal was the same... The approach was completely different." Haven's plan was to use its size as leverage, pooling its employees and customer base to negotiate better prices from the existing players: "They thought by creating scale, they can get better pricing... by using their own employees and their, their customer base... But they worked inside the system." That last line is his whole diagnosis. When asked why rich people keep failing in healthcare, his answer is just as short: "Because they try to work inside the system." However big you are, if your strategy depends on getting a better deal from the incumbents, you're still playing their game. So what is Cuban doing differently? He refuses to work with the incumbents at all: "I don't work with the big PBMs, I don't work with the big insurance companies. We work to try to, you know, diminish them... And disintermediate them." Haven tried to negotiate with the middlemen. Cuban is trying to make them unnecessary. The second difference is personal. Haven was a corporate joint venture. Cuban put his name on the door so nobody could doubt his commitment: "I wanted people to understand that I was serious about this because it was my very first company I ever put my name on and that I was fully committed to doing this." And he's made peace with the fallout: "When it's all said and done on my tombstone in 50 years, if they say, he fucked up healthcare and he had a good time, I'll be smiling."frozen20d ago2.2K21111061.78%
Carl Pei, co-founder & CEO of Nothing, has built two phone brands. His warning to aspiring founders: “It’s not a cool lifestyle.” https://t.co/uuvixUp2V9frozen12d ago2.2K461310103.24%
Michael Seibel, YC Partner Emeritus and Twitch co-founder, on the investor cliché he always hated as a founder: "We don't invest in the idea, we invest in the founder." https://t.co/zYntvBrEjwfrozen24d ago2.1K311340112.80%
Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer explains how Microsoft went from "nothing" in enterprise software to taking on IBM and Oracle, and why it took 15 years: "We were nothing, as you know, in the enterprise business." IBM, Oracle and others already owned the market. Microsoft's way in started with customers, whose feedback gave Ballmer and many others a clear view of the offering: "It was product, the way they go together. It was service, it was support, it was pricing. It wasn't one thing." With that model in hand, Microsoft went after the category with conviction: "But we had a model and we had irrational confidence. With the presence of IBM and Oracle and others, we were going to be the enterprise software company. And guess what? It may have taken us 15 years." Ballmer names three ingredients behind it: "So it takes us realism. It took irrational confidence, and it took a hell of a lot of persistence." On confidence, he says leaders need the kind that holds up when things look bad: "Irrational confidence that says, yeah, everything's a mess right now, but it's gonna be okay. We are smart enough, I'm smart enough, we're gonna fix this." He has seen the same pattern in basketball: "You have to have a level of irrational confidence to be great. Some people, sometimes you can call it cocky, but it doesn't have to manifest itself that way." But confidence without realism breaks down: "If you're not realistic about where you are, your irrational confidence cannot carry you through." @Steven_Ballmer is clear that the formula isn't guaranteed: "Does that always work? I've learned it doesn't. It doesn't always, but it can work in many instances." His counterexample is search. He says Microsoft has a good search business today and that he's proud of it, but the original goal was far bigger: "We had an irrational confidence that we were going to have over 50% share." The difference was where the confidence came from. In search, it rested on the old playbook: give the product "a little bit of Windows flare and a little bit of synergies with Windows, which is kind of where the company was coming from at the time." Ballmer's verdict: "The irrational confidence can't come from we're just going to follow our model and it always works... Just saying our model succeeds with everything gets the realism part of it out of the equation." The lesson: in enterprise, Microsoft's confidence was built on what customers said they needed. In search, it was built on the assumption that the Windows playbook would work again. Ballmer's closing formula: "Irrational confidence and realism, I think, are sort of the distinguishing factors. Oh, and persistence."frozen23d ago2.1K281610112.67%
Everyone remembers Apple's Super Bowl ad as great advertising. Nothing CEO Carl Pei says what really made it work was efficiency, and that edge is now gone: Pei looks at marketing through a single lens: "I think about marketing purely from an efficiency perspective. I only think about it from an efficiency perspective." That lens changes how you see one of the most celebrated ads ever made: "A lot of people think, remember the Apple super bowl commercial as a case study for great advertising. But actually it was very high efficiency." The reason was timing: "Why? Because at that time nobody had created a beautiful, thought provoking super bowl ad. They were the first. So they got so much free publicity, people were sharing it with their friends or talking about it." Apple paid for one ad slot. The far bigger payoff was everything it didn't pay for: people sharing the ad and talking about it. But being first is an advantage you can't repeat. Once everyone copies the move, the advantage is gone: "But now there's no efficiency there anymore because every brand is trying to do something creative at Super Bowl." Why does this matter so much? Because for a smaller brand, efficiency is the only way to win. Pei explains: "I think every consumer brand that's grown from a small brand to a big brand has had to fight unfair. You've had to find a way to be way more efficient than everybody else, because the logic is very simple." The math is unforgiving: "If everybody spends 10% of their revenue on marketing and you're a small company, your revenue is small, your budget is going to be very small. So if your efficiency is the same as a big company, if your tactic is the same, you're always going to be a small company and they're always going to be a big company." That's why @getpeid sees creativity as a tool for getting more out of every marketing dollar: "Creativity, if done right, that drives efficiency up." "So for me, marketing is only about efficiency." Which means the work never ends: "So you got to find the high efficiency opportunities of today. That's what we're working on every day in terms of our marketing."frozen11d ago2.1K251220102.34%
Michael Seibel, Partner Emeritus at Y Combinator, on why founders picking between two ideas are asking the wrong question: "There's too much emphasis put on ideas, period." @mwseibel argues that when founders agonise over which of two ideas to pursue, they ignore the factors that matter much more: "There are many other factors other than the two ideas that are probably going to have a much stronger impact on your likelihood of success." He names three. 1. Your co-founders. "Way more likely to have an impact. Would you actually like spending time with them? Because you're gonna spend a f*ck ton of time with them." 2. Your commitment. "How much are you hedging your bets? You know, are you pursuing two startup ideas and applying to Google? Well, okay, you're hedging your bets." 3. Your passion. "I don't believe that you have equal passion about two ideas." Then he points to the flaw in how most founders frame the decision: "More often than not, when I see founders competing between two ideas, what they're trying to figure out is what's the better business. What I love about that is, like, why do you think you're qualified to know? Like, this is extreme luck." His analogy: "That's like going to a high school basketball game and saying, oh, that person definitely the next Jordan. I can see it from right here, right? Like, impossible." He applies the same humility to YC itself: "The reason why YC accepts so many companies isn't because we're nice. It's because we have no idea who's going to succeed." If one of the world's best-known startup accelerators can't reliably predict winners, a founder looking at two ideas on a whiteboard can't either. So Seibel suggests changing the question: "What I'd be trying to gauge is not which is the better business. What I'd be trying to gauge is which of those things is your team gonna fully commit itself to when things are not looking good?"frozen4d ago2.1K25133082.38%
The thing you've spent years building on your résumé? Bridgewater founder Ray Dalio says it's the least important thing about you: https://t.co/lW0xu7R8sVfrozen14d ago2.0K421920234.27%
Amazon Executive Chairman Jeff Bezos on Blue Origin becoming his best business ever: Bigger than Amazon? "Yeah." https://t.co/MwWIwtgI74frozen24d ago2.0K23124022.04%
Sequoia Capital Chairman Doug Leone on the fastest way to "scare the sh*t out of" him as an investor: Tell him you found your startup idea in a conference room. https://t.co/auaNVQHXNZfrozen17d ago2.0K26121072.32%
Aaron Sorkin, Oscar-winning screenwriter of The Social Network, on how Facebook went from one student's answer to Harvard's social scene to a platform that's "gone completely out of control": Sorkin wrote the film about Facebook's founding. Here he traces the platform from its origins to what it has become, and explains why he doesn't think the damage was ever part of the plan. By his account, it started with exclusion: "He was somebody who, like a lot of people, had difficulty fitting into the social structure of college life. He badly wanted to get into a final club at Harvard, their version of a fraternity. And he wasn't able to." So Zuckerberg built one he couldn't be shut out of: "He invented his own final club. He invented his own social structure and he got to be the mayor of it. And he couldn't be excluded from it." Sorkin is clear that the motive wasn't malicious: "Let me be clear. I don't think that Mark Zuckerberg ever intended for it to have a corrosive effect. I think his intentions were always good." And he credits the man behind it: "His brilliance is undeniable." But the social structure one student built for himself didn't stay small. Sorkin describes what it looks like now: "About a third of American adults get their news from Facebook. That is very dangerous." The result, in his view, is a breakdown in shared reality: "We're no longer agreeing that the sky is blue and 2 plus 2 equals 4. And people are living their lives online." When the interviewer suggests this has "a corrosive effect on everything," Sorkin agrees: "It does." His verdict on how things got here is short: "It got way out of hand. It's gone completely out of control." That's the arc Sorkin describes: a platform that began as one student's workaround for being left out, built with good intentions by someone he calls brilliant, and grown into the place where a third of American adults get their news and where basic facts are no longer agreed upon.frozen25d ago2.0K18113021.74%
NYU Stern Professor Suzy Welch on "Lanager," the "very unattractive word" she invented to end the leader-versus-manager debate: When she teaches managerial skills, Welch won't use the words "leader" or "manager": "When I teach managerial skills, I refuse to use the word manager or leader. And I've created this very unattractive word, 'Lanager,' which of course, is a blend of those two words, because it's only academics who debate what leaders do versus what managers do." Her reason is that in practice the two jobs can't be separated: "And I actually believe from living in the real world of business that there's really a blend of those two jobs in real life." To show what goes wrong when you pick only one, @SuzyWelch describes both failure modes. The pure leader: "If you're a manager or a leader and all you do is dream big dreams and think and talk about the future in lofty, visionary terms, and you don't actually get anything done, everyone is going to hate you." The pure manager: "And meanwhile, if you're a person who's in the trenches and all you do is sort of the logistical, tactical, this is what we do tomorrow, grunty stuff. And you never go up to the mountaintop and say, here's our vision. Everybody is going to hate you." Opposite habits, same result. The visionary who never delivers and the operator who never explains where the work is going both lose the team. The "Lanager" avoids both by doing some of each, and Welch says this applies at every level: "And it doesn't make any difference if you're managing three people or 300,000 people, the very best people at the top of teams or organizations are doing a little bit of managing and a little bit of leading." The title on your door matters far less than your range. The best people at the top keep moving between the mountaintop and the trenches, and they never settle in either one.frozen27d ago1.9K21121072.11%
Sequoia Capital Chairman Doug Leone on the cap table mistake founders only discover when they're desperate for cash: Picture this. Your company is scaling. Then you hit a rough patch, and you need a few million dollars from your existing investors to bridge to the next big round. You turn to the people already on your cap table, and they can't write the check. Doug describes exactly this scenario: "When you're reaching scale and you bump a little and you need 2 million to raise 20 or 30. Or you need 5 million. The investors don't have that." This isn't a knock on seed investors. "I love seed investors. We have a seed fund," he says. The problem is that founders often don't think about this tradeoff until it's too late, because they never treated the cap table as something to design. His prescription: "I would tell you to architect your cap table the same way you architect a product." That means deciding upfront what you need from your investors, rather than taking whoever shows up: "Architect it. Look for certain skill sets even from day one." It also means not getting carried away by interest alone: "Don't give this bullsh*t of I got two term sheets, you know, oh, I met a firm, I got a term sheet. Who cares? It's like going to a bar and said, this girl, this guy talked to me, I'm going to get married. It's irrelevant." A term sheet tells you someone wants in. It tells you nothing about whether they can carry you through a stumble. @dougleone doesn't say seed is wrong. He says choose deliberately: "So figure out if you want to go with a seed investor, many good reasons to go with seed investors, or if you want a bigger firm early on." His closing warning: "So be very, very, very careful of how you architect the first few steps. All negotiations are lost in the first few steps."frozen17d ago1.9K25114182.56%
Pershing Square CEO Bill Ackman on the moment his whole career suddenly made sense: Every skill, relationship, and resource he’d built turned out to be exactly what he needed to help his daughter recover from a near-fatal brain hemorrhage. https://t.co/fKeUihTOLVfrozen13d ago1.9K21111152.05%
Founders Fund partner Peter Thiel recalls Elon Musk's 2010 metaphor for American aerospace: fat cows behind a fence, waiting for the bloodbath. https://t.co/3gbhQYj2uRfrozen8d ago1.9K291310102.79%
In 2000, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs officially dropped "interim" after spending over 2 years as "iCEO" on a $1 salary. But he kept the "iCEO" title anyway. Peak dot-com era branding: https://t.co/GvHiiS4Ijffrozen28d ago1.9K24101072.23%
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk compares the future of work to growing vegetables in your backyard: https://t.co/IKUCQRiVPGfrozen12d ago1.9K19123042.02%
In 1998, the 27-year-old Elon Musk called the internet "the first two-way communication medium that is intelligent." Back then, only about 1 in 4 US households was even online. https://t.co/DkBqpnsNACfrozen26d ago1.8K38101073.06%
Steve Jobs on the most important difference between a consultant and an operator: one has a picture of the banana, the other has tasted it. Jobs didn't hold back when asked about consultants. He opened with a joke: "The only consultants I've seen that I think are truly useful are the ones that help us sell our computers." Then he clarified that he had no quarrel with the profession itself: "No, seriously, I don't think there's anything inherently evil in consulting." What concerned him was that consultants rarely stay long enough to own anything. To explain why that matters, he reached for a metaphor (after ruling out steak): "I'm a vegetarian, so I won't use steak, but it's like a picture of a banana. You might get a very accurate picture, but it's only two dimensional. And without the experience of actually doing it, you never get three dimensional." The consultant gets the picture. They see many companies and can describe each one accurately. As Jobs put it: "And so you do get a broad cut at companies, but it's very thin." And the more companies they advise, the bigger the collection grows: "So you might have a lot of pictures on your walls. You can show it off to your friends, you can say, look, I've worked in bananas, I've worked in peaches, I've worked in grapes, but you never really taste it." So what does it take to actually taste the banana? For Jobs, the answer was ownership: sticking around for years, carrying your own ideas through execution, and living with the consequences: "Without owning something over an extended period of time, like a few years, where one has a chance to take responsibility for one's recommendations, where one has to see one's recommendations through all action stages and accumulate scar tissue for the mistakes and pick oneself up off the ground and dust oneself off. One learns a fraction of what one can." Advice without that ownership leaves most of the lesson on the table: "Coming in and making recommendations and not owning the results, not owning the implementation, I think is a fraction of the value and a fraction of the opportunity to learn and get better."frozen15d ago1.8K29142092.98%
Sequoia Capital Chairman Doug Leone was among the first to back Nvidia, Google, and Apple. His biggest regret is that he still bet too small in his head: "My number one mistake was not to dream enough." Most investors would count backing three of the defining companies of their era as a career-defining win. Leone sees a lesson in what he failed to imagine. At the earliest stage, he explains, an investor has nothing to go on but a story: "Founders dream. And when you come to us with these tales, and I use the word tales, because that's all they are at the beginning. There's no proof, the courage to ask yourself what happens if everything goes right." That courage didn't come naturally to him: "We've learned to do that over the years. But I've always been a person that likes to see a little bit of order. And I've learned over the years that entropy, chaos is really what you need in the early days." Here's why it matters. The companies that work don't land where you expect. They overshoot: "When the companies work, they surprise you on the upside. The companies become far more than you could ever imagine." Even with Sequoia's best bets, the imagination fell short of reality: "We were the first investor in Nvidia. Would I ever imagine that a graphics chip company would become an AI company? Would I have imagined that a search engine company where we didn't know what it was good for turned out to be Google?" @dougleone puts Apple, which he describes as a little company with a processor, in the same category. "Those were all companies where we had the pleasure of being the first institutional investors. And yet we didn't dare to dream as much as the founders." His verdict: "So that's the biggest mistake I think I've made over my career."frozen15d ago1.8K291420153.32%
Back when coffee cost 15 cents, Dara Khosrowshahi’s mom wouldn’t buy a cup. Decades later, her son is Uber’s CEO, Starbucks is an Uber Eats client, and she still won’t pay for one. She’s found a better solution: https://t.co/hh7bamdOiUfrozen12d ago1.8K18111031.86%
In 2001, Google brought in Eric Schmidt, a seasoned tech executive, to lead a startup founded by two Stanford PhD students. His first meeting felt like grad school: great conversations, no deadlines, no deliverables. Here's how he got them to plan: https://t.co/2zUMns754kfrozen15d ago1.8K17511142.16%
Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer admits basketball taught him accountability lessons that might have helped him run Microsoft: After leaving Microsoft, Ballmer bought the LA Clippers. What he found in the NBA was a level of accountability he says business simply can't match: "Basketball teams and players are far more accountable than any business I've ever known about or run." His reason is the shot clock: "Every 24 seconds you're getting a report card. We either scored, we didn't score. The other team scored or didn't score. Every 24 seconds you get a report card. Then the game's over. You either won or lost." Then he compares it to how companies explain away bad results: "It's not like even a business. Hey, we're going to get it back next quarter... we got stuff in the lab to fix the situation. No, you can't pretend. You can't hide." In basketball, everything is measured: how fast players were running, what they were doing, how they played. "You're not going to find a place of higher accountability." @Steven_Ballmer says he's "not bashing business." But he admits the lessons he learned on the court "might have been useful for me actually... when I was running Microsoft." The second lesson applies to players and companies alike: "I think both basketball players and companies have to get in the weight room. Now, what do I mean about that? By that, you need to develop new skills... You have to be developing new skills before you know you need them necessarily." His example is Microsoft's own history. Much of what the company does today, he argues, depends on years of hardware investment "through a variety of lenses," from "the old mouse" to Xbox. "The core capabilities and people and talent building that muscle started with people who worked on things like Xbox." He isn't certain of the details. But he believes the silicon team now working on "things that will be important for AI and Azure" started on Xbox, "because there was an ability to develop skills... to grow in context." The people building a gaming console had no idea their skills would one day matter for AI and cloud. That is exactly his point: "You have to be constantly building new skills and reinventing yourself even before you know what the ultimate application [is]. Otherwise you can't jump into new areas."frozen24d ago1.7K20122062.32%
Former Apple SVP of Retail Ron Johnson explains how Apple turned the fear of technology into one of the most popular stores in the mall: When Apple set out to design its stores, Ron says the team identified one main obstacle: "Because that was the enemy. The reason people didn't have computers, they were too complicated. They were scared they'd buy this and never use it." People weren't avoiding computers because of price or features. They were afraid of buying something they would never be able to use. So Apple built its stores to deal with that fear directly. It started with how Apple wanted to be seen. Ron recalls: "Steve agreed that how you present yourself has a big impact on how people perceive you." Steve's ambition for the brand was explicit: "We wanted to be a brand that was like a Gap because he said we're much bigger than the Gap. And that enabled us to have the space to create experiences." With that space, the team made one simple rule. Half of the store would go to the people Apple was trying to attract: "First rule, half goes to new customers, the ones we're trying to attract. That'd be the front of the store. And everyone could try every product." That was new. Ron explains: "Up until then. You couldn't try products in a physical store. Yeah. They were just things on display." Letting people use the products themselves took real effort: "We had to connect them to the Internet to figure out how to keep them current with software, et cetera, et cetera." The other half of the store was for owners, and it was designed around the question at the center of Apple's strategy: "Assuming people buy, how do we help them get over? Overcome their fear of technology?" Apple's answer was to build help into the store itself: "So we put it in theaters where you could take classes and tables where you could get training one to one eventually. And a Genius Bar where you could get face to face help." The front half let people try the product before they bought it. The back half made sure they could use it after they bought it. Both halves were aimed at the same fear. And it worked right away: "So we put in all of these services along with the thing and the stores became immediately one of the most popular stores in the mall." The lesson: Apple didn't win by talking customers out of their fear. It designed the store so the fear had nothing to hold on to. People could try every product before buying, and get classes, training, and face-to-face help after buying. Every business has a version of this. There is usually one fear that stops a customer from saying yes: the product is too complicated, too risky, or something they'll never use. The best move is often not to sell harder, but to build that fear out of the experience.frozen6d ago1.7K20122042.22%
Tim Cook reveals the one question Steve Jobs banned at Apple: “What would Steve do?” https://t.co/d1vyr0YqaTfrozen7d ago1.7K23110162.43%
Ogilvy UK Vice Chairman Rory Sutherland on the most misleading trick in modern journalism: making a handful of fringe voices look like public opinion. Every week there's a new "backlash" against a brand, an ad, or a campaign. Rory argues that many of these scandals are built on almost nothing, and he explains exactly how the trick works. First, he sets out the line between a real problem and a fake one: "If there are thousands of people misunderstanding your advertisement, willfully or not, you've got a problem." But that's not usually what's going on: "What actually happens instead is that 10 people misunderstand it, express their outrage." Ten people. Not thousands. So how does that become a story? Rory says the answer lies in how much easier reporting has become. In the past, finding out what the public thought took real legwork: "In the old days, newspaper reporting actually involved getting out of the office and going and visiting people to canvas their opinions. And therefore mad people with extreme opinions were difficult to find because there weren't very many of them." That effort kept extreme views in proportion. If you had to go out and talk to people, you'd quickly see how rare the fringe really was. Now the fringe is just a search away: "On Twitter, if you want to create a scandal, all you do is go, there'll be some mad people here. Oh look, here they are. Hashtag blah, blah blah, cut and paste, put it in the newspaper. Too easy. Too easy." That's the trick. Find the angriest posts, lift them, and print them as if they represent the public. Which is why @rorysutherland doesn't put most of the blame where people usually do: "It's the mainstream media, not the social media, that are most to blame because they take what is a totally minority whack job opinion and they make it seem a mainstream opinion." Social media is where the fringe opinion lives. The newspaper is what makes it look like everyone agrees. So how should organisations respond? Not by building their strategy around whichever platform is causing the noise: "What we need to do is stop trying to actually create solutions around media. Instead we want to actually go back to basics, understand human psychology, motivation, and what causes people to act as they do, think as they do, and decide as they do." Only once you understand people does the question of channels come in: "We've got to go back to the basics of human psychology and then once we've understood that, we can decide which, if any, of these new media might be appropriate to solving the problem." "Which, if any." Rory isn't assuming any platform is the answer. Sometimes none of them are.frozen12d ago1.7K16111041.94%
Sequoia Capital Chairman Doug Leone on why he'd still back a founder after the market has said "quit" 15 times: Conventional startup wisdom says to listen to the market. If customers aren't buying, pivot or move on. Doug Leone admits the market is sometimes right, and he still prefers founders who refuse to quit: "Sometimes like navigate up to a fault when the market has spoken 15 times, we should give up, go do something else. But we prefer the founder doesn't give up." He openly concedes that persistence can go "to a fault," and he backs it anyway. To understand why, you have to understand how Doug sees founders in the first place: "To me, the founder is the core of the company. It's both the heart and the soul. When you lose the founder, you lose a lot." In his view, a founder who walks away takes the heart and soul of the company with them. That role, however, has nothing to do with the job title: "Now it doesn't mean the founder has to be the CEO. In B2B it's a tougher company to run and you see a number of founders not running B2B. A lot more founders seem to run these B2C companies." The CEO seat can go to someone else, especially in B2B, which he sees as tougher to run. What the founder must hold onto is product: "B2C companies are easy to run, but the founder should control product because that's the soul of the company." The founder can hand over the CEO role, keep control of product, and stay with the company even when the market says it's time to stop. "So first one, it starts with that." Then comes the bar for who that founder has to be: "That founder has to be not only an outlier, tremendous outlier, but he or she has to have tremendous grit, just never giving up." @dougleone wants both: a tremendous outlier with the grit to keep going long after most people would have stopped.frozen16d ago1.6K231221113.00%
On Shark Tank, Banana Loca looked like a simple kitchen gadget, but it was engineered with help from a design firm experienced in heart valves and stents. The Sharks called it "genius" and "oddly satisfying," and Mark Cuban and Kevin O'Leary invested $250K: https://t.co/E8gLoqs2xUfrozen26d ago1.6K13101031.66%
Nothing co-founder and CEO Carl Pei on the fundraise that had him waking up at 4am, sweating, from the same nightmare every day: It started with two months of pitching investors, where every meeting turned into an interrogation: "Oh, what's your vision? Why would this work? Why would this not work? Have you thought about this? Have you thought about that? It's okay for a few weeks, but for like two months, just getting challenged every single day and you're not sure you have the right answer." Then the pressure followed him to bed: "After, like two months, I started having nightmares every day. Like in the dream, it was me standing in front of the company just saying sorry to everybody, like, it's not going to work. And then, you know, I would wake up at like 4am and just sweating and just, you know, can't, can't get back to sleep." It became a vicious cycle. The stress wrecked his sleep, and the lack of sleep wrecked the fundraise: "That went on for a long time. And the fundraising went even worse because I couldn't get enough rest." So @getpeid did the opposite of what most founders would do. Instead of grinding harder, he walked away from it all: "I'm like, okay, we got to change something. At that time, I was still in Shenzhen and I called up a lot of my friends. I was like, hey, we're going to go party this weekend in Shanghai. A lot of friends all flew to Shanghai and we partied for two nights. We just forgot about work, forgot about everything else." What happened next: "And then my mood changed. And then when I got back, the funding came." Carl doesn't pretend it's a universal formula: "I don't know if it's going to work for other people, but I think the getting stuck in a negative mindset, you just have to break out of it." His bigger lesson is about perspective. Moments like these feel like the end, but rarely are: "The biggest lesson is just to push through. Every time I felt the world was falling apart or I couldn't take it anymore, I just pushed through. And then looking back like half a year later to what happened half a year ago, it doesn't matter. It's something small, you know. But at the time, a lot of things felt almost like fatal for the company."frozen13d ago1.6K19102062.28%
The name “Genius Bar” didn’t come from a branding agency or a brainstorm. Ron Johnson, the man who built the Apple Store, found it a few days after pitching the idea, while rewatching a famous Apple video: https://t.co/lX9vqmcnG7frozen10d ago1.6K24103052.66%
Sequoia Capital Chairman Doug Leone watched an IPO he was on the board for price at $30 and open at $299. Now on pricing calls: "I am the bank's worst nightmare." https://t.co/3i5Em70Naifrozen14d ago1.6K24131042.70%
Harvard Senior Fellow Arthur Brooks on the strangest wealth finding in his 25 years of research: The more you give away, the richer you get. When his data showed that people who give money to charity earn more in the years that follow, he didn't celebrate. He assumed he'd made a mistake. "Now, I was thinking when I first saw this, got to be the hand of God. No, it doesn't make sense. I didn't believe it. Actually, I thought there was something wrong with my data." The data wasn't wrong. A psychologist he was working with told him the pattern was already well known in his field: "No, we've been seeing this for years and years. People who give more money away, they get richer and they make way more money back than that which they give away." So what's going on? @arthurbrooks rules out the mystical explanation first: "This isn't like a karma thing like you get what you give what you get. It's not one of those." The real answer is psychological. Giving money away changes how you see yourself: "What happens is when you give money away, you become a problem solver and your mind changes. You become a more effective person." And people who see themselves as effective act like it, and earn like it: "People who solve problems and give their money away are people who feel more effective and they earn more money."frozen24d ago1.5K29131073.28%
Carl Pei, co-founder and CEO of Nothing, wants to erase the line between company and community: So he let fans design a phone, market it, and invest in the business behind it. https://t.co/61yRuqPHiMfrozen9d ago1.5K20112022.30%
Harvard Senior Fellow Arthur Brooks on the strangest wealth finding in his 25 years of research: The more you give away, the richer you get. When his data showed that people who give money to charity earn more in the years that follow, he didn't celebrate. He assumed he'd made a mistake. "Now, I was thinking when I first saw this, got to be the hand of God. No, it doesn't make sense. I didn't believe it. Actually, I thought there was something wrong with my data." The data wasn't wrong. A psychologist he was working with told him the pattern was already well known in his field: "No, we've been seeing this for years and years. People who give more money away, they get richer and they make way more money back than that which they give away." So what's going on? @arthurbrooks rules out the mystical explanation first: "This isn't like a karma thing like you get what you give what you get. It's not one of those." The real answer is psychological. Giving money away changes how you see yourself: "What happens is when you give money away, you become a problem solver and your mind changes. You become a more effective person." And people who see themselves as effective act like it, and earn like it: "People who solve problems and give their money away are people who feel more effective and they earn more money."frozen8d ago1.4K21131042.78%
NYU Stern professor Suzy Welch on the 3 sentences that earn leaders unbelievable respect: "I made that mistake. I own it. This is what we learned." https://t.co/VCBPM4pCXafrozen14d ago1.4K291210113.79%
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky makes a bold claim: many CEOs believe almost every business book and MBA program gets leadership advice backwards. https://t.co/0SOqvDEMSFfrozen6d ago1.4K25131043.14%
Scale AI co-founder and Passes CEO Lucy Guo held one of the rarest titles in business: world’s youngest self-made female billionaire. She never felt attached to it. When Kalshi’s Luana Lopes Lara took it, Guo’s reaction was “thank God it’s no longer me.” https://t.co/B9rIlSPnqlfrozen6d ago1.4K14101042.15%
Kalshi co-founder and CEO Tarek Mansour offers a contrarian view: Prediction markets have more in common with the New York Stock Exchange than with a casino: Critics often dismiss prediction markets as gambling dressed up as finance. Mansour argues the comparison breaks down once you look at how the two actually work. He starts by pointing out that this debate isn't new: "The question of whether prediction markets are betting or gambling is very similar to the question of whether financial derivatives are gambling or betting and that has always been a question … historically that has happened in financial markets." He admits the resemblance is real on the surface: "The reason this question exists is because there is speculation in financial market and speculation can look in some cases like a bet. It's like you're putting money to make more money on something you don't control. But there are key differences." The first difference is the nature of the risk. In a casino, the risk is manufactured. Mansour compares it to "rolling a dice," which he calls "an artificial thing that you're creating for the purpose of … betting." Prediction markets, by contrast, trade on risks that already exist outside the platform: "Are you participating in something that is a natural risk? It exists in the real world. It is tangible. You know people care about about it." The second difference, and the more important one, is who profits when you lose. In a casino, the house is on the other side of every wager: "You walk into a casino or a house the house's revenue is equal to the customer losses. There's an inherent conflict of interest in the business model because the company benefits when their customers lose." Prediction markets, he argues, are structured like traditional exchanges: "Prediction markets just like traditional financial markets like the New York Stock Exchange or other places. Yes, the underlying is different like what you're trading on is different. But how you're trading or how you're participating is the same." @mansourtarek_ explains what that looks like in practice: "It's an open marketplace. It's fair and people are trading against each other. So the market is neutral. The market doesn't make more or less money if their customers lose." That neutrality, he says, is what makes it "a financial market" and places it "in a very different way than traditional, you know, betting or gambling places."3d ago1.3K16103012.23%
John Ternus spent 25 years building Apple's hardware before taking over, so how he thinks about engineering will shape what Apple makes next. His core belief: great inventions come from constraints. https://t.co/UjimrigAWhfrozen15d ago1.3K19121022.55%
In 1998, two Yale Law grads started GLG to publish industry guidebooks for investors. A year later they shut the publishing business down. Their clients kept asking to get the people who wrote the guides on the phone. That request became the expert network, and the hourly expert call with it. Qualitate’s AI now runs those interviews itself, thousands a month. Insight Partners was a customer before it led the $25M round. The report was always a summary of a conversation someone else got to have.2d ago1.1K17121042.98%
Cost Plus Drugs co-founder Mark Cuban's entire early customer strategy was asking clients which cheek they wanted kissed first, right or left: https://t.co/6JETs7j4tXfrozen8d ago1.1K19111053.16%
Kalshi co-founders Tarek Mansour (CEO) and Luana Lopes Lara (COO) explain how they risked four years of regulatory progress to bring election markets to the US: It took Kalshi four years to get regulated. Then its founders put all of it on the line. When talks with their regulator stalled, Tarek says they had to make a call: "We realized that I think working with the regulators or trying to convince them wasn't going to work. But we didn't decide to list it like competitors. We stayed committed to the regulatory first principle." Staying regulated and refusing to back down left only one option: "So as a company, the only choice we had if we believed that we were right on the law, if we believe that this should exist in society, is to sue our own regulator, which is what we did." Luana explains what was at stake: "It is a very hard decision because four years for us to get regulated and we're kind of putting that in jeopardy in a way by suing them." @mansourtarek_ explains why the move was so dangerous: "It's very hard for a company, especially a startup, a small company, to sue the part of the government that oversees you because they have all the power over you." So why do it? @luanalopeslara gives two reasons. The first was how much these markets mattered: "These markets are the holy grail of prediction markets. They should be legal, they should be regulated, they should be in the US. They're very important." The second was the strength of their case: "We knew we were right on the law. We ended up winning actually every judge that looked into our case." Winning didn't end the risk. The day after the victory, the government announced it would appeal, and the stress came back. The appeal created a new danger. With about two months until the election, a legal win could still turn into a practical loss: "Maybe there was a chance that we're going to run out the clock and we would lose the 2024 elections even if we won the lawsuit." For the next month, everything hinged on one appeals court hearing. The founders tried to keep the company building in case they won, but their minds were somewhere else: "In our heads, we were like, 'This is the most important thing ever.' We weren't being able to focus on anything else or sleep or eat or anything like that." Then they won again, at around 1 p.m. The reward for putting four years on the line wasn't rest. It was the most intense stretch the company had ever faced: "It's four weeks for us to go from a small niche website that not a lot of people know about, what are prediction markets, to hopefully one of the most important things in the 2024 election and one of the most important data sources."frozen7d ago1.1K1392122.40%
CFR Senior Fellow Sebastian Mallaby on the merger that should have destroyed Google’s AI ambitions: Two rival labs. 8 time zones apart. Years of bad blood over compute. Instead, it built the model that knocked OpenAI off the top of the leaderboards. https://t.co/s7S2Xy0qYQ1d ago1.1K13111022.46%
Warren Buffett on the three investments that matter more than any stock you'll ever buy: When asked for three pieces of advice for people looking to succeed in business, the most famous investor alive didn't mention stocks, valuations, or markets. Instead, he talked about where to put your time and attention: your skills, your health, and the people you choose to surround yourself with. Investment #1: Yourself @WarrenBuffett starts with a clear statement: "By far the best investment you can make is in yourself." The specific skill he highlights is communication. He tells students heading into graduate schools and business programs that while they're learning "all these complicated formulas," they're overlooking something with a far bigger payoff: "If they just learn to communicate better, both in writing and in person, they increase their value at least 50%." He explains why with an analogy: "If you can't communicate, somebody says, you know, it's like winking at a girl in the dark. Nothing happens." Brilliant ideas are worthless if nobody can understand them. The good news, he says, is that this skill can be learned: "You have to be able to get forth your ideas, and that's relatively easy. I did it myself with the Dale Carnegie course." He then pokes fun at himself: "Some people wish I'd taken a shorter course now in terms of my talking later on, but it's just hugely important." What makes this investment unique is its durability: "If you invest in yourself, nobody can take it away from you." Investment #2: Your mind and body Buffett admits he'll get "a certain criticism for not living it," but he still gives students this thought experiment: "If I gave you a car, and it'd be the only car you get in the rest of your life, you'd take care of it like you can't believe any scratch. You'd fix that moment. You'd read the owner's manual. You'd keep a garage and do all these things." Then he makes the point: "And you get exactly one mind and one body in this world, and you can't start taking care of it when you're 50." Like any asset, it needs to be maintained early. If you wait until 50, the damage has already been done. His reminder is that you "just got one mind and body to get through life with and to do the most with it." Investment #3: The people you associate with When asked for life advice, Buffett says that, aside from what he has already covered, the most important thing is who you associate with: "You want to associate with people that are better than you are… you'll go in the direction of the people that you associate with." That means choosing your role models deliberately: "If you want to emulate somebody, you better pick very carefully who you want to emulate and when." Some influences are outside your control: "Obviously you can't pick your parents, they're going to have enormous influence on you. But you don't get a choice on that. But you get choices as you go down the line and who you admire, who you want to copy." And one choice outweighs all the others: "The most important for most people in terms of that decision is their spouse. It's also important in terms of a partner in business, but the partner in life is the most important one." His advice for making that choice: "You want to pick a spouse that's better than you are… And you hope they don't figure it out too fast."2d ago1.0K1621092.79%