The Ledger, every show

“I was reading a research paper the other day that studied some of these, I think it was in Denmark, foundation controlled companies versus a level matched public companies that are not foundation controlled. And they found the foundation controlled companies o…”

“So we require companies to, at the board level, identify a committee of the board who has a fiduciary obligation to identify who the company's key stakeholders are. Identify what are the effects that you want to have on those stakeholders, then have the compan…”

“I have become a believer that even that the bureau, that the bureaucracy and slowness and kind of ossification that we take for granted as a result of scale is not an inevitable development, but it's a choice about the systems of management that we use.”

“I ask these CEOs that I meet with all the time, who's in charge of making sure that that happens? And they don't know. There's not, there's nobody in the organization they can point to for accountability on that score.”

“Most companies don't have entrepreneurship as a function, and they're in trouble.”

“Facebook recently famously was revealed that they bought a VPN company so that they could watch The traffic to emerging apps and figure out who to copy.”

“We say that we're a meritocracy. We say that good ideas can come from anywhere, but we don't mean it. We don't mean that good ideas can come from anywhere because we don't have a process for capturing them and for testing them rigorously. We just hope that the…”

“Their company is governed by something called the long-term benefit trust, which is an outside set of trustees that are not like a vague advisory board or like remember the trust And safety counsel that that Facebook famously had and The totally ignored. The L…”

“And if you look at the coauthors of that paper has a ton of coauthors, not a single one commercialized the transformer at Google. They all, every single one had to leave and do it elsewhere.”

“And I basically think today's best practices are a value destroying mess.”

“And in fact, in the 19th century, to convert a company from a mission of doing any specific thing to just, I'm just going to enrich my shareholders, would have been seen as a crime. And your corporate charter would be voided.”

“When you're using cloud code to create artifacts, you are actually causing skill atrophy in yourself. You have gone from the flow state of building stuff into what we call dark flow, which is the state you get into when you're using a slot machine.”

“Speaking of someone who's in the training data without any of us being compensated, by the way, which I think is atrocious.”

“Investor dominated companies really underperform. Precisely because we have this financial system that pull, has this gravitational force that pulls companies down into mediocrity or worse.”

“If you don't get the governance of a company right, no other decision you make will matter in the long run because you won't be the one making it.”

“There was a big meta study of like 55,000 companies with various levels of employee ownership, and they found that employee ownership exhibits dose response. Like, 10% ownership is better than 50% is better than 10, a hundred percent is better than 50. Not jus…”

“So I think you're going to see a lot of companies who actually sincerely believe in this possibility, realize that we have to enlist our employees in it. It's essential for our business. We're going out of business. If we don't do it, we need to be allies with…”

“I actually think we've been misled by a whole package of what are today called best practices about how companies are to be built, structured, and governed. That are frankly value destroying.”

“Costco is so big that its house brand, Kirkland Signature, if that was a standalone company, it would be bigger than United Airlines, Procter & Gamble, or Coca-Cola.”

“There are actually choices we can make as founders, and especially choices we make early that can change the trajectory of the company so that, as you say, its longevity could be measured in decades and centuries, not quarters.”

“So at the time he was fired, the stock was down like 80% from the peak. And it's like, oh, well case closed. But if you measure from the IPO or even from the pandemic peak, revenue was up. It's like, did the business go down? Was revenue down? Was there some k…”

“Polaroid used to be an R&D powerhouse, had like, 1500 research scientists on staff. Steve Jobs, like, loved that company, admired them so much. When Edwin Land was fired, he called it the dumbest thing he'd ever heard. Yeah. And like, they never invented anoth…”

“Everyone who's ever studied this and looked at it seriously understands that shareholder value is like the exhaust that comes out of the engine. When you take the exhaust pipe and put it in the intake and make that your explicit goal, now you don't stand for a…”

“Costco came under attack in the early 2000 for having these non-standard governance practices. In fact, Costco routinely gets the worst possible governance rating from governance rating people.”

“I think PBC is an absolute must do and kind of like an utter no brainer of all the things in the book. It's by far the easiest thing. If you want to pick one thing to do, it's the easiest thing to do. It's a two page legal filing in Delaware.”

“Dual class is defeated all the time. I give a bunch of examples in the book, like, you know, the stock price drops. Everyone panics. Founders forced out anyway, because at the end of the day, like having the votes is not the only thing that matters. There's a …”

“Apparently the stake that the bankruptcy has of those shares is worth more than the whole, than all of the entire fraud by a lot.”

“All kinds of famous companies where the thing that destroyed them was not competition. It was not someone else came up with a better product. No. Their very success became a liability, because the more gold in the goose, the greater the temptation to butcher.”

“There's a whole branch of academic research that has shown, for example, companies with that structure like Novo and Zeiss, they are six times more likely to live to year 50 compared to their conventional counterparts.”

“We, they have superior return on invested capital. They make more money for investors.”

“Philip Morris spent 1.1 billion pounds to buy Vectora. Within three years, they had taken a nine hundred million dollar write down and disposed of the company for peace parts. It doesn't exist anymore”

“If you're serious about being mission driven, you have to show me that you cannot profit except by achieving the mission. That's the audit we have to do.”

“Google has been sued twice now for breaking the don't be evil pledge and they've had to settle both lawsuits.”

“Anthropic has directors on its for-profit board who are appointed by and are accountable to an outside group of trustees who are AI safety experts who do not have equity in Anthropic. So they do not have a financial incentive in its growth.”

“Corporations, organizations are the oldest form of artificial intelligence on the planet. They are an example of this emergent intelligence, the same scientific principle that makes the transformer architecture work and appear intelligent. That same principle …”

“So you see like a number of the leading AI firms are not funded by the leading venture firms from the SaaS or social media eras.”

“And you also see just, it's a difference in the kind of founders that are doing this. They tend to be older. They tend to be a little bit more sophisticated.”

“Many of these rapper startups are dimes in front of the steamroller type businesses. And the key to the parable is it's not bad. People are acting like rapper startups are bad. It's not bad. Just, you have to really understand the strategic situation that you …”

“It's why we called minimum viable product a product, not an experiment or a test or hypothesis. Like we wanted to remind people that although we are removing features and we are de-scoping in order to get learning, we're still trying to build something that is…”

“Like, so many of these companies collapse, first they collapse morally, and then they collapse you know, financially, and it's actually worse for investors in the end.”

“I don't think we're gonna have an uncanny valley problem here. I think these things are actually gonna feel very good when it praises you. You're actually gonna feel good. You're gonna want to get it right.”

“Getting early adopters for this is gonna be easy stuff. There's early adopters who are gonna love it. The issue to cross the chasm here is how can I build something that, that normal people would feel is trustworthy to have such an intimate relationship with m…”

“We charge onto the field, and no other army ever came to charge us back. Like, it just, we won by default because the people who were doing it the old way didn't really like it or want, like, it was very few defenders of the old way. Like, very few people came…”

“When you make something put out into the world, on the one hand, you don't have any control about what happens next. And yet I do think we bear a certain responsibility about was it in fact net positive, but was it helpful to people?”

“Lean is opposed to having a vision. You know, if you have, if you were really visionary, you wouldn't do experimentation. Experimentation leads to local maxima and, you know, it, whatever. It's just like, I'm, I read it in somebody's book that, that they're li…”

“When I was a consumer of books, I hated it when authors would come out with a second edition that would destroy what was beautiful about the first edition, including the mistakes. Because like in their attempt to put disclaimers on everything and make everythi…”

“Quality is defined by the customer. And if we don't know who our customer is, we literally don't know what the word quality means.”

“Compromising that in the name of going fast is stupid, right? Like write crappy code. You spend more time firefighting than you do writing code in the future. So a certain amount of craft is just about keeping your options open. And actually it's very much lik…”