CEO

“If you're a CEO of a company, if you're running a company right now, which I think a lot of people listening to this are, there's a good chance you're not being hardcore enough”

“CEOs need to do two things well to be successful, run their operations efficiently and deploy the cash generated by those operations.”

“I've got them like an AI that argues back. I think this is a really important thing that every like leader needs to build. I think there's a lot of CEOs out there, a lot of leaders out there that are talking to an AI that just agrees with them all the time. An…”

“I would say at the end of the day, I would say the CEO is the harder role primarily because they're carrying the risk, right? It's their business. It's their company. At the end of the day, they're responsible for the growth, the scale, the vision. They own th…”

“Your CEO, as a CEO, your real job is really three things, which is give a vision so big other people see their dream is bigger underneath you. Create systems inside of your business so that the business runs without you, and be so delusional optimistic that ot…”

“Is, is AI going to be able to do this job, like even the CEO job or jobs where the leadership is? And the answer honestly is probably yes. Like in 2035 with a rate of improvement, it will be able to do so.”

“The CEO being a good salesperson and being a real entrepreneur is actually more important because the CTO role can be fungible depending on how complicated it is.”

“I am never going to be smarter. Then the sum of all the directors, that's never going to happen mathematically.”

“If you start talking to someone in the working level or talks with you in the first calls and you throw out too much that you came in through the CEO, this will not end well for you”

“A lot of the times I've seen the CPO CEO relationship go badly and ends up with like the CPO is competing with the CEO for vision and they end up at like loggerheads. And I think, you know, that's not your job.”

“If nobody's got data, it's just two opinions. The CEO's opinion is going to win. And like, that's okay. Check your ego at the door, get to the answer.”

“You need to discover who are the speakers of truth and get them in a room alone so that you can discover things. Otherwise you will die.”

“Founders are lonely. I, you know, I could tell you as a former CEO, it's a lonely, punishing job.”

“When wealthy folks, especially VCs want to be a CEO, but they're not working at The insane rate of a traditional founder CEO. I just find those run out of energy.”

“There are studies after studies, but there's this one by Gallup That found that the CEOs who delegate best pull in 33% more revenue than the ones who don't.”

“When I hear people giving talks about culture, especially when they're currently a CEO, my fake CEO meter goes up, my alarm bells go off, because I'm like, okay, if you're out lecturing about culture to people, I kind of doubt that you're actually doing things…”

“The number one metric that every finance leader or CEO cares about is just more cash in hand.”

“I mean, I think the thing that you cannot have is them being like union representatives of your employees. They're not. They're there to represent the company, and therefore the CEO, and so if there's, if you don't have that as a CEO, like a trusted HR Leader …”

“And a lot of CEOs in those days, and by the way, still, they rank their success in, in, in doing an interview or giving a speech based on minimum, minimum controversy, right? So they come off stage. I, I've worked with lots of CEOs. Like, they come off stage. …”

“And so many CEOs that we know, so many operators are like, well, I've got a board meeting to prepare for. I've got a weekly meeting. I've got a status update. I've got to do this. I've got to do that. And they're sort of caught in the like minutia and maintena…”

“I think the CEO needs to be the chief AI officer. Like it's not a engineering team thing. It's not like a product team thing. It's like, you have to understand the bounds of the technology better than anyone.”

“I think it's 10 X easier for the CEO to break glass than an executive. And 10 X easier for an executive than an employee.”

“From CEO to CTO, like, the way I think about it is your CEO needs to be able to sell anything your CTO can build. Your CTO needs to be able to build anything your CEO can sell. And as long as those two things are true, there's a really good match, and you can …”

“You know, so the bad, bad governance I've seen is when, from a number of things. One, they let their loyalty or relationship to a CEO who's not up to the job overshadow their duty to shareholders. That's probably the main thing”

“My job as a CEO, and people may not like this answer, but my job as a CEO is to make sure that this company goes on for the next 1015, 20, a hundred years, and to drive shareholder value. Take the emotions out of it. Right? That's gonna hurt some feelings, but…”

“My experience is that your company is only going to go as far as your CEO goes in AI, and it's not something you can delegate.”

“Also, I think the, I mean, there's a million things, like the CEO should be doing it, not like five founders speaking over each other.”

“The vast majority of the time, if you talk to a CEO and she can tell you what the career aspirations of her five or six direct reports are, the likelihood that she's a really good manager of those people is quite high.”

“When you're like a 50 person company, And the CEO is stressed about something, right? Everyone kind of knows each other. And so they all kind of like know how to react to that stress and they can kind of absorb it and we all move on. When you're an 800 person …”

“I grew up, You know, and the seventies and eighties where I used to see CEOs reading canned statements from lawyers and things like that, and just fake phony bullshit that I was never into.”

“There's a dynamic where people, I think, want to be in the same room as like the person, the CEO, the leader, the whatever, like that, that those meetings are an opportunity for FaceTime probably in some ways that are like more about the political game than th…”

“I think people are basically born good founders or said differently. It's innate. You don't have to learn how to be a good founder. No one is born a good CEO, and the job of CEO is completely counterintuitive, and almost all of your intuition about what to do …”

“You do not want to learn on the job how to be a CEO. In other words, trial and error is bad for a CEO. You know why trial and error is really bad? Because you hire somebody, they build an empire, they leave, and now you get to unwind their empire, and it takes…”

“The thing to do was you got up early in the morning and you started calling the office of the CEO because typically the person supporting them Wasn't in the office till like eight 30 or nine. And so if you got up at seven, most of these people were in the offi…”

“I sit in these boards too. So the board goes to the CEO. What does the board say? We need more AI. And what does the CEO said? Oh, okay. I'll get like a consultant to do more AI. And then they have some centralized project that nobody knows how it works. They …”

“Cause I think most CEOs I work with are not up for it is the truth. Cause most pre AI CEOs are not, they're not up. You guys know this too, from your portfolio, not all, but most are not actually up for the massive amount of, what's more than nine, nine, six, …”

“On the thing where you're unique and different, you know, where you're changing the world, do it as different as you like, but all the boring stuff, just give the market what it wants.”

“And whatever, if any VPs get this far on the pod, whatever you do, do not reach out to your VCs to say there's problems with their CEO. You will, you're losing your job. And not only are you losing your job, it doesn't matter if you're right. You're your, at s…”

“There are professional accent coaches who you can hire for 200 dollars an hour to help you improve your pronunciation. It's very expensive. And there are a lot of C-level executives that do this and, you know, silence because there is, let's be real about it. …”

“As a CEO, you have only a few levers of how you can create a lot of value over time. I personally believe number one is who you surround yourself with, who's on the team, how does the team work with you together. Number two is capital allocation, where you hav…”

“The more success you have, the more complacent the organization tends to get in the single role for the CEO is offsetting that complacency. So, to the point, the more success you have, the better you're doing, the more complacency naturally kicks in. And unles…”

“The thing executives, if you're talking to a CEO, the most precious commodity that CEO has is time, and it's, Information inbound absorption time, information processing time, decision time, and so if you can get super efficient in communicating to a CEO and s…”

“I will say the best CEOs and the worst CEOs have something very deep in common. You know what that is? The organization can run without them.”

“I think it's a craft that like requires Like fitness and mental health and like a whole structure around it, you know, figure skating is a craft, being a chess player is a craft, but I also think being a CEO is a craft.”

“If you're a thirty-person hardware startup, like, the CEO better be coding, right, so.”

“If you want to figure out what the job of a CEO is, it's communicate well, get other people to buy into your dream, and understand how to solve complex problems using a series of unrelated disciplines or networks.”

“I think CEOs need to know, you know, about 80% of what their executives know about their function, I think, over time. So really kind of learn that discipline. Not enough to be good Add it, but enough to be, to know what good is and know if it's going well.”

“There are companies that are starting to do this where they're pitching their agent stacks for CEOs. Bordy is sort of one version of that.”

“One of my co-founders is still the CEO today and he's cut out for it. He's a great entrepreneur. He was originally our CTO. He's technical. He's commercial. He's, You know, builds the right culture. And I really admire that. And, you know, in all honesty, and …”

“The other thing people don't do is they don't control the time of which they have a conversation. CEO wants to hop on at six o'clock in the morning, get your ass up, get that presentation and go. You need to say, I'm not available at that time. I'm in, and you…”

“Although I actually do think PM is a mini CEO. Like I think people keep saying you're not, but I think you are.”

“Some CEOs are... I wouldn't say ignoring the problem, but don't understand the magnitude of what needs to change. And I think some are more kind of advanced in how they think about it and understand the magnitude of what needs to be changed.”

“I place a lot of weight, rightly or wrongly, on clarity of thought and the ability to communicate as a CEO, like, what you want to achieve and how you're gonna achieve it, and especially in written form, because taking the time to write something down, you act…”

“Your job as a CEO, as a founder, is to train emotional control under pressure. Most founders and CEOs are on an emotional rollercoaster.”

“So I spend most of my time these days coaching very fast growth CEOs. They all are kind of like that. They're all in kind of a state of perfection, perpetual, Dissatisfaction, but in a positive way. One of the things, by the way, I like about the current crop …”

“And I've been surprised at how humble this generation is of CEOs. And I think of my generation of CEOs as being, I don't know, I wouldn't, humble wasn't the first word that would come out of your mouth when you describe kind of my generation, but this generati…”

“I think CEOs and everyone dramatically overrates their ability to interview and overrates their gut feeling and underrates a really high quality blind reference.”

“Like wanting to be liked, I don't think is a good feature of a CEO and wanting to be the best place to work probably isn't the right way to go.”

“CEOs can do a hundred hours of podcasts and tell you a lot. About what they're doing without telling you the one or two things that are actually important, and it's very easy for somebody to come in and try to fast follow. And ultimately just, like, kind of ge…”

“CEOs have been putting up some great quarters, and then, you know, they're trading down between seven and 20%.”