The Wisdom Wall

“And so here is not just you committing to this life. If I give you the job, I expect you or I would like you that everything equal, you stay with us for the next two, three, four years, right? Otherwise I'm not going to bet on you. So go and talk to your wife. She has seen how hard you work and you guys, both of you…”

“So a lot of companies, they will tell you, oh, okay, I don't know, my gross margin is, uh, 30% and then I spend 40% because then I have a subscription and in 12 months I get the payback. That most of the times doesn't work. And the reason is, substantially, you need to have enough cash for 12 months to cover that delta…”

“Probably in health in general, I, I think really 95% of the value is just to be consistent and do the right things without going too crazy in terms of I don't know, products that you can take and supplements and all that. If you just have a very balanced life, uh, in terms of eating well, training and sleeping, then…”

“your job as an executive is not to be loved. It's to help your people achieve more than what they believe it was possible.”

“You need to be naive and you need to believe that it's a hundred X easier, and then you need to have the stamina while shit comes to handle it.”

“So if you want to build trillion dollar businesses, hardware works.”

“And so, okay, what is your gross margin, which comes after the bomb and the cogs, right? And what is included? And after that, that needs to be Really be above 50%. Yeah. And probably the best is 55, 60.”

“Yeah, I think for great companies, I know our CAC is really, really good. It needs to be below 20% of the, of the price.”

“And the reason why I think is wrong to just be obsessed with price reduction and time is often your CAC will not change linearly with the price. Meaning if you reduce the price of our product by 20%, the CAC is not going to go down 20%.”

“when I want to talk about pricing, I talk to Italian, very successful companies that have been profitable since day one. I don't talk to many Silicon Valley guys.”

“Fixing unit economics is possible, it's human. It's just hard work of an operational excellence. And so you just need to hire the best people and you will do that.”

“I never like to see one option. I want to see multiple options, and you tell me why we are not pursuing the others, and we are pursuing this. I want a picture, a portfolio, and then we pick one based on impact and effort.”

“So I want the 80%.”

“The key usually with senior executives where You really need to push them because, in particular, if they come from big companies, they are more skewed towards quality and reliability, while instead you want to be bold and just ship something, 80%, take the risk and move on, and you need to create a culture.”

“The biggest thing is what I told them is they need to stop being too rigid on Bi-weekly or monthly goals, because if they're too rigid on that, when things happen and in a startup things happen every day, they are not agile enough to fix them.”

“A hundred percent disagree. I think we overthink because the whole point is you're a startup. How many people really know your brand? Even if you're big, if you're growing well, you know, you're not Apple, right? And so don't fool yourself thinking that you are that big brand. You adjust.”

“If you find people that were able to scale a business from a hundred million to a billion, but at the time where it was growth at all costs, and they join your company, your company is designed around CAC efficiency, it will be really hard for them, right? They have already been successful, probably they already made…”

“If they come from very large companies, the requirements compared to a startup are very different. We are pirates. They are the Navy, right? These people need to be able to launch a new product in two days, just because they want to test it and be fine with the customer reaction.”

“I think even though you want to see a pattern, I see sometimes people that have been part of three RIFs. But you know what, what you need to think there is, let's say there is a RIF after a year, or even six months, sometimes you see it, and you see this happening multiple times in their career, like three, four times.…”

“If you spoke to the person, if you gave them the time to adjust, and if that didn't happen, Now you pull the plug.”

“In my mind, if people talk to me and they don't set a deadline, it's the same day.”

“The speed at which I can read an agenda is indicative of how good is the agenda, because I, I can go through it really quickly.”

“this is a mistake a lot of executives do because they want to be loved. They want to be sometimes soft or too nice. You know, they don't want to stretch you.”

“The best players, the A players, think of Djokovic, the tennis player, right? What he wants from his coach is to get the most out of him, to improve every single detail.”

“It's really the word honoring your customers that I really love. It's not customer obsession, not Jeff Bezos mentioning a call said customer obsession to me. It's honor your customer.”

“So, usually four days is more than enough. We almost see no incremental value after that.”

“That probably the funders in the first year of the company or in the first probably, let's say three months, they don't fully understand what the cost of producing that device will be. They don't understand the return rate. And so everything they tell you about BOM and COGS will probably be off by at least, uh, uh,…”

“I think in Silicon Valley we understand really well building the best product, but I think we underestimate the importance of brand. Then, a great brand with a shitty product goes nowhere. So first is product, but then you need to be able to build a brand that is aspirational and can command a certain price.”

“I think people that join a startup, they should be driven, and it's important that they are motivated by, you know, potential financial success, and, and, and I agree, but that success will come by, you know, increasing the, the, the, the equity value from X to X. That is also why, to me, it's so important, right? You…”

“So we call it the rule of the seven touch points. So it's another rule I came up with, which is substantially you want to surround your customers and you want them to see your brand seven times before they pull the trigger.”

“Once you get in a price war, prior with the physical good, you're in real trouble, because then the, the business will not work.”

“mattresses, they have incredible unit economics. The main problem of mattresses are two. One is a commodity. And so what happened with some of the D to C brands, it became a price war because anyone could sell the same product and unit economics didn't work.”

“the best way to develop clarity of thinking is writing, right? You need to write, because once you start writing your thoughts, you understand there are many things that are not clear, or that You still don't know you didn't develop.”

“I think you play, for aspirational, you use images, right, and you try to position very premium, something that you really dream of, but in terms of words and the value proposition and the benefit, You need to be very simple.”

“output usually is a function of how many barrels you have. Barrels are people in your company that can get everything done from zero to completion, right? And you have barrels and ammunition. Barrels can lead anything from zero to completion. Ammunition supports them. Usually the output is a function of this. You can…”

“we are a default and no hire. The default is if you come to a sleep, we don't hire you, unless you really blow our mind.”

“And so, what we learn is the pain that you go through If you hire the wrong person, is probably the next bigger than delaying the hire by a couple of months.”

“With the great people in 20, 25 minutes, I can go through five jobs there. Fast. There are some people where you go through two jobs in 30 minutes, and that is another red flag because you can't.”

“Some of the best people, they don't really care about title.”

“But it makes the difference. I can guarantee you that is time that is well spent.”

“The point of the agenda is not about being long. No one wants to read long documents.”

“And at the beginning, you will write something that is long, that is not clear, is not data-driven, and the executive will help you. But it's trial and error.”

“The board deck, the biggest value of doing a really good board deck is not for my board, it's for me. It pushes me to think about creating a story of why this quarter was so good. What were the reasons? What really happened, right? Preparing for questions. 90% of the value of the board meeting is in creating the board…”

“If this is a thing that can kill the company and has, I don't know, a legal background, I used to be a lawyer, I'm not gonna delegate the thing, right? And probably if it can kill the company, I'm not gonna delegate that thing, right? I wanna be very, very involved. But if this is a thing that has very minor impact,…”

“The best minds, they wanted to feel empowered, but they also sometimes want to feel the pressure to say, I'm fine. I'll follow you. But this is your call.”

“If you just let them be, and they just do a repetitive job, these people will leave.”

“If I call person X that reports to you, do they know if you rate them incredibly good, good, or meh? Yes or no? And if the answer is, I don't know, then you're doing a poor job as an executive. The most important thing is people should always know what you think of their performance, because this is how you avoid…”

“If I have a problem, I tell you immediately. It's also my character. I learned that if I don't do it, then I, I almost keep the thing inside for too long and it's actually negative.”

“You need to start controlling yourself, and so even in, in measure, you know, how you share things. But I think if people understand first that you have always the best intention, and if they see the point, it's way easier for them to understand it. Then sometimes they might not, and, but I think it's an area where I…”

“In general, the rule of thumb is you shouldn't because I, it takes around eight hours For the coffee to really leave your body, right? So usually I don't have a lot of coffee, um, but if you have coffee, you should stop drinking coffee at least eight hours before bed. As a rule of thumb.”

“But so you don't want to do exercise or it's not recommended to do exercise in the second part of the day because you accelerate your heart rate. You accelerate your body temperature, right? So you, you create a bunch of changes inside your body, and then your body needs to go back to baseline, And then needs to get…”

“you shouldn't be perfect every day. This is something I, I learned from, uh, from a video of Tom Brady, but what you want is the consistency. It's less about cheating one day or another day, but if, if, if you zoom out and you look at how you manage your things, are you consistently enough in all these different…”

“The amount of learnings that you get from being an investor is insane, because it's essentially you build your own intelligence. As you receive investor updates, you understand how the market is moving. What are the valuations? What are the multiples? What kind of profiles they're hiring? What channels might be…”

“Because they didn't think enough. They believe, they, they know, they believe they have a thought, but they didn't develop it properly, and they don't have enough data to support it, so they're confused. At the end of the day, the opposite of clarity of thinking is confusion, and so you have a blurred concept that…”

“your circadian cycle can substantially be trained.”

“playing with your own body temperature before bed is, uh, is really impactful.”

“There is a couple of metrics that few people know, but they are very helpful. That is heart rate recovery. I don't know if you ever heard it, uh, but substantially you, you can use a, an app called Zones. That gets the data from your Apple Watch. You want to see how much your heart rate drops after a spike if you rest.…”