The Ledger, every show

“Having a respect for craft, for design, for perfection, that increases the need for experimentation and testing for all the other stuff.”

“Like, there's nothing that was a faster career accelerator than being known in the industry as the person who stands for that principle so much that you got fired over it.”

“Like, one of the genius things about it is, like, at the end of the day, you do run out of money. The thing, you're forced to declare bankruptcy, that's actually a really positive feature of the system.”

“Philip Morris has actually great ESG scores. It's absurd.”

“One of my main takeaways of that entire process is that it's always too early until it's too late.”

“And people are like, well, Jeff Bezos thinks long-term. I'm like, ok, but then you study the history of Amazon. That's a very unusual, singular situation that's unlikely to ever be repeated in history.”

“If companies are not governed for the long term, then they're worth less money. They're distracted. People are playing the beat and raise game. They are distracted from their fundamental mission of serving customers. Therefore, they're worth less money. Theref…”

“Stock surveillance can tell you approximately who your investors probably were 90 days ago. It's time delayed. It's not very accurate. It's not what is needed.”

“So we have a mechanism that allows the long-term and certified long-term investors of a company to bid directly to the company, purchase stock directly from them, and we can consummate that transaction after market close for more like 50 basis points rather th…”

“In the short term, I don't expect that most passive investors will do this registration that we're talking about, because they don't care about the governance side of companies.”

“We will have very strict limits on guidance.”

“We also require, or we will require, companies to disclose their, for example, EPS, net of buybacks. You can still do the buybacks, but you have to disclose how much of your improvement on an earnings basis is being driven by buybacks versus actual fundamental…”

“Our allies, the people we spend the most time with, are asset owners, even more than asset managers, who are absolutely left out of the roadshow process, the IPO. I mean, I, the people we talk to, who I think are the best investors on the planet, the most long…”

“Since my definition of entrepreneurship is trying to create something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty, then you are an entrepreneur no matter what it says on your business card.”

“There are real honest to God entrepreneurs just as visionary, just as exciting to work with inside some of these large organizations as you walk down the street here in Silicon Valley.”

“The idea that you're going to act like a startup or have internal startups is like almost to the point of cliche here. And yet most of the companies that I meet that have that as a plan, there's no plan. They don't actually know how to make it happen.”

“Most big companies are terrible partners. They don't understand how to pilot things. They don't understand how to work with startups in a way that don't kill them. They spend way too much time on contract negotiations, and they just, they're unreliable.”

“So people talk about lean startup for startups and then lean startup for the enterprise, which I think is really silly. I, you know, I understand why people do it, but it doesn't make sense to me.”

“For the people inside their company, they're the VC. They're the source of funding and political capital that everybody needs to sustain what they do.”

“A small number of extremely passionate customers is way better than a large number of people who kind of are indifferent about your product”

“They sent a lean startup team in, I think, from the United States Digital Service at the White House, and You know, they partnered. It wasn't just IT people coming and telling everybody what to do, but they had real partnership, real user centered design, real…”

“And they eventually got to a place where they can show, they can iterate on this so quickly now, they can build a new version of that device every week. Used to take them three to six years to build a new model. Now they can do a new version every week.”

“Work that is monotonous and routine should be automated because every human being has a right to use their creativity in their job.”

“The core mistake I think people make is they think that it's a minimum product, right? Like if you're trying to do something small in this world, you don't need to do an MVP. You just do it. Like if it's, if the thing itself is cheap and easy and has an obviou…”

“And I think every ounce of energy we force visionaries to put into success theater is an ounce of energy they didn't put in to making their vision a reality. They didn't put into serving customers.”

“My view is that entrepreneurship itself is very chaotic and unpredictable and confusing, but entrepreneurship as a portfolio activity, you know, like what VCs do is totally manageable.”

“I met the Anthropik team when they first left OpenAI, and they, you know, they left over a dispute With OpenAI over you know, exactly how to pursue the question of AI safety.”

“Huge chunks of Anthropic stock were sold at auction to any investor who wanted them, including people who are super, super unaligned.”

“I think that that courageous stand that they took, again, leaving aside the politics of it, just looking at it from a pure business perspective, Is an example of a very savvy business strategy that sees trustworthiness as an asset, like a business asset that c…”

“Most founders are hopelessly naive about this point. They think that they're in control of the company, and they're always so betrayed when they find out that their own founding documents basically say that they can be removed at any time. And they don't reali…”

“And what's cool about LLMs I think is not that they're artifact generating machines. They're okay at that, but like take them out of their distribution and all of a sudden you're in big trouble, but they're incredibly good teaching machines. There may be the b…”

“When the AI says it's 10 of 10, now our work, now the work begins. See people stop there, but no, now we have reached the limits of its training data. Now it's time to actually do the creative act of writing”

“And that has to do with the mechanics of the attention mechanism. As the contracts gets larger, you're literally spreading the attention over more and more and more data. But also, it's learning from all the bad examples it gave. So it's actually much more lik…”

“What's really held up, like, a lot of the techniques and the specific tactics from Lean Startup are a little dated now. I mean, you know, Groupon is a case study. Like, it's old now. It came out in 2011. But I think the principles have held up really well, and…”

“I think fundamentally like using resources well is an eternal entrepreneurial virtue. So even the people that are overfunded, a lot of them run into trouble because now you don't have that that reality kind of barking at you all the time to make sure that you'…”

“We've built an economy where people are routinely rewarded for cutting costs, but never held accountable for the downstream brand and quality consequences of that.”

“And the thing you gotta know is, is Long Term Stock Exchange, the company that I founded is the one who filed the petition last year. To the SEC to switch from quarterly.”

“All PBC does is give the CEO and the board the legal cover To pursue long-term value creation in the face of hostile investors.”

“When the founders of Anthropic left OpenAI, so what is that, like three or four OpenAI crises ago? I can't track. But anyway, it's like hard for me to keep track, but anyways, like it's been a rough, you know, it's been a rocky road. When they left, like I was…”

“The point that I was trying to make in this book is not so much that we need to copy Mondragon or any particular company, but rather collectively, these are called alternative structures. Control something like five percent of world GDP.”

“The durability of these so-called best practices is so short, like the prompting tools and guidelines and context management, like stuff, stuff that we were writing about six months ago, 12 months ago, 18 months ago is now completely wrong.”

“On the contrary, LTSC is still going strong, and they made, we actually made money last year.”

“So I feel like Lean Startup, we created so many companies worth protecting, but we didn't give them the tools they needed to actually stay in control, to actually protect the trustworthiness of the thing that they made.”

“If you look at the 19th century, like companies that were created and you read their charter, none of them say maximize shareholder value. That would have been considered a crime.”

“I think it was a series C when they finally established this thing called the long-term benefit trust, which is not a nonprofit foundation. It's actually what's called a perpetual purpose trust, which is a different legal category, but the same idea outside tr…”

“These specific products that have taken the world by storm, you can really tell that the AI labs themselves did not know they were going to be as popular as they turned out to be. Obviously, ChatGPT, they had no idea. Cloud code, co-work, like these were small…”

“People used to tell me Costco was an example that wasn't protected so much so that like, I was surprised to learn that it was embodied in a governance fortress.”

“Steve Jobs very famously would host, have skip level meetings. He wanted to meet not with his direct subordinates. He didn't care. He wanted to meet with the torch bearers throughout the organization.”