Manager

“Some of the best founders, best managers, they're just teachers. They have this unique philosophy, which we've, you and I've been talking about, you know, for quite some time now, and then they just spend their time teaching their entire organization the way t…”

“Your manager clearly matters more than pretty much anything else when it comes to how you feel about work, protect that relationship, invest in that relationship, build up good communication lines with your manager, learn to manage up better.”

“The personal financial situation of a manager is an incredibly underrated thing to ask about, right? Like if you have a couple hundred million dollars in the bank account, in your bank account, and you're raising a thirty million dollar fund, that's very diffe…”

“The thing a manager never does unless they're under duress is, is, is reconsider fundamental assumptions. Like they hate that, like that, like, That's not the whole point of running something big is you don't have to do that. You get to run the big thing at sc…”

“AI progress is pacing way ahead of public expectations, and most managers are months behind when it comes to understanding frontier capabilities.”

“Your only goal as a manager, if you do nothing else, is clear roles and clear expectations. That's it.”

“Your job is not to be one of those buffers. Your job is to preserve that intensity at its highest possible level and let the buffering happen somewhere else.”

“People don't like conflict. People don't like to deal with issues directly. They like to beat around the bush and then leave saying, I think I gave the person the message.”

“We find that as these managers grow, they hire an hour person, suddenly you're being intermediated. You're not getting the same perspective. You're not able to read the temperament of the manager, understand what they're thinking about. It becomes more difficu…”

“And so it becomes this collaborative relationship much more so than this It's like adversarial. Like I'm trying to get you to give me a promotion and you're trying to get me to like work harder. Like it's, yeah, like that is not a very good vibe.”

“And they're not defensive because it's the AI telling you. It's not your manager telling you where you're like, okay, is this going to bet my job? This is the AI saying like, make a left turn or right turn. And you're like, okay, totally makes sense. I'm not e…”

“By and large, managers have never been good at understanding the LPs. And by the way, I would say LPs have never been good at understanding the demands placed on managers. There's just a knowledge gap between the two.”

“When you were an allocator meeting hundreds of funds a year, you've seen everything more than once. But every manager thinks their story is unique. They think their edge is unique.”

“It always really bugged me when managers would take a risk, and then the risks blew up in their face, and they'd act like it was some act of God that they couldn't possibly have foreseen and so shouldn't be punished as it were for.”

“If you, as a boss, as you know, a supervisor, as a manager, feel like you have to provide all the motivation, you're leaving tremendously valuable resources on the table. They could be doing the work instead of you doing it all.”

“As agents are rolled out, you'll actually start to see you know, people that are really good at prompting, really good at defining a process, be the best managers, and actually be the best at extending whatever their agenda is in the organization, or making th…”

“Historically in private equity, just on the principal investing side, managers had sold their best companies very early and got stuck with their worst companies. They cut their flowers and watered their weeds.”

“It's much easier for most leaders to react to something you're putting in front of them to correct you basically to say, yes, that no, not that. Then it is to say, you know, teach me ways to be strategic or define what that means for me. Your leader Hasn't don…”

“Great people are self-managing mostly, right? They don't need good managers. They're just going to be amazing no matter what.”

“Also, one thing that I think is very interesting is that a lot of people are in the mindset of AI being really good as an independent contributor when actually it may soon become much better at being a manager, right? And like taking a large problem, breaking …”

“My working theory is that the way that you work with AI is basically like a manager. So if you think of what do you do as a manager, you set a vision, you delegate the task, you say, hey, do this, you expect it's not gonna be good enough, you're giving feedbac…”

“For many introverts, we like to be able to process our thoughts before we articulate them. So you've now given Bob advance notice, and he has more time to pro, to do the processing before speaking.”

“They're looking to add endowment and foundation, which tends to be sticky, and particularly organizations that have an in-house team. Because then you're building the relationship directly with the client as opposed to going through an intermediary.”

“I think as alternative assets have institutionalized, managers have been asked to take on narrower and narrower strategies with very strong financial incentives, but the nature of investing is such that opportunity sets are transient.”

“And I think it's really important to get in the habit of pointing out what your people are doing well, as carefully as you need to prepare for pointing out what they need to improve.”

“It's much harder to find very senior ICs who have, you know, superpowers on different topics than to find managers, right?”

“For every coder, there are 16 managers, right?”

“When you're trying to manage managers, you're really trying to live at the top of the pyramid. You are responsible, managers responsible for basically owning that pyramid for all of the areas that they operate, but they need to be able to live at the top of th…”

“And the better you are at individual sales, the worse you tend to be as a manager. Your teams actually achieve poorer performance.”

“All around a million. You should have like managers at five million. You should have managers of managers at ten million. You should have your exact team.”

“There is a huge difference between getting to goals and accomplishing things on your own Which is what entrepreneurs have to do. And I don't care if it's, you know, five people or even, I think even 40, 50 people, you're still very much wearing that entreprene…”

“And also if you're stuck under a manager who doesn't have a lot of respect in the org, you're not even going to get to see a lot of the interesting shit that goes on. Or even if you do stuff, it's going to be buried under however much clout that manager has.”

“So when we actually evaluate managers, we have two different axes, role and conviction.”

“Lots of managers have great intentions to help their employees, but they get busy with their own lives, their own work, all the things they're focused on, and also their own career. The manager is often busy thinking about Their own needs. And so they just, th…”

“Managers often fall into the trap. They chose to become managers. So they assume one of two things about you. They either assume that you want to keep doing exactly what you're doing forever. Just maybe make a little more money. So you're an artist. You want t…”

“Doing product management is a product manager's job, but getting better at product management. It's the manager's job. It's the coach's job.”

“I have a tremendous amount of respect for people who do the CIO job because every day you're relearning things that you thought that you had figured out about a manager disappointing you, manager surprising you, things you missed”

“I think one of the really important things that all managers can do for their direct reports to show that they care is to have real meaningful career conversations where you talk about sort of their life story, sort of their past, whatever part of it they're c…”

“However, that's the number one predictor of how stressed out somebody is, not how responsive their customers are that week, not how many deals they're closing that week. It's the health of their relationship with their manager.”

“It is amazing to me how often managers say, oh, I can't tell you that because that is a trade secret or that's our secret. It is not a secret from anyone. All of your competitors know it. Let's say that Apollo told me that. I could call Carlisle and they'd be …”

“I don't, I'm not going to pretend like if you're just great at your job quietly that you're going to get what you want, right? You're not just, if you're toiling in the background, doing a great job, getting results, if you have a great manager, maybe you'll b…”

“I'm having more conversations with more managers who are like, hey, we're just going to try to find some soft landing for these companies. It's just not going to work, which we've been expecting for years to my point about loss ratio. So that doesn't wildly su…”

“There are always going to be some managers that have that kind of LP pull that people will just keep working with. But I think that list is getting smaller, and I think the names are switching around.”

“You have to be ready to have those conversations and get your managers ready to have a conversation on why actually this is a level above you and you can progress into it. But that's not where you're at right now. And that's a hard conversation.”

“When it comes to yourself, you should turn yourself into a person who can do really good work, even without having a great manager. Even if you have an okay or absentee manager, you should turn yourself into a person who can do really great work.”

“We modified it to actually really gauge not only where managers stand in terms of their diversity, but also what we call the faucet, because that's where we feel the biggest impact's going to be.”

“When you're letting somebody go, they should never be surprised. If they, if they're surprised, that means you failed, or your manager failed, because you didn't set expectations that were clear for them.”

“If you haven't, if somebody has never let somebody go, they're not a good manager. At scale. Like, if you haven't, haven't had the hard conversation, that's a problem.”

“As soon as you hit seven AEs on one manager, it drops significantly.”

“You've got to police yourself because no one else will do it, because no matter how accessible. You think you are. Other people know that you're the boss. They're not gonna necessarily speak over you or challenge you directly.”

“Managers need to not just be focused on how do I act in service of the employee, but also how do I ensure that the employee's work is being directed in service of the company, and that balance is new.”

“In, you know, in a hundred years, when the archaeologists look back and they see tech in the sort of early years of tech, the first 3034 years, they'll say that the biggest surprise was how much we thought it was okay to not train managers.”

“What I find is that you're more like the vampire knocking on the door of someone you have to be invited in. You just can't walk through the threshold. And I think that no matter how senior the person that is the manager, you have to earn the right to be the pe…”

“I think you'll see broken auctions. So managers will bring an asset to market, you know, when they're holding it at a certain multiple and they have certain price expectations. When those price expectations aren't met, they'll sit on it.”

“We've seen managers essentially fully equitize their companies today. With the view that they're just going to refinance out in a better market instead of taking it as much or at the same level of debt that they've used.”

“One of the things that, you know, It comes into play a lot when managers are figuring out promotions and doing those things. It's like they'll sit in a room off on calibrations and, you know, with a bunch of people, and it makes it a lot easier when those peop…”

“Because the record is very clear that investment committees tend to fire managers at the wrong time and to hire managers at the wrong time, creating a drag on investment results they could otherwise have had.”

“You should know within 30 days about whether someone's going to be a fit or not.”

“So I talk a lot about how managers should really be reserving all of their energy, not for just communicating metrics from one person to the next, which asynchronous organizations do automatically because the platform is really the manager. Instead, focus on t…”

“That's why I always advise managers to like put in place deadlines that are not like tomorrow or next week, but like two to three weeks out, because if they're not going to make a three week out deadline, they're not going to do it.”