The Ledger, every show

“As a leader, you have to understand that the most consequential decisions that will affect any organization's life are almost by definition made when no manager is present.”

“Fact checking a long document is still well outside the capabilities of most AI systems because, you know, for the attention reasons, but if you're working in sections, it's really easy to be like, while I'm here,”

“I'm working on a new book. It's not announced yet. So don't look too, too closely what this is, but the book is called the incorruptible. It'll come out next year.”

“You see a lot more involvement of corporate venture firms which You didn't see before.”

“And especially for younger indie hackers, I know a lot of like, a lot of these projects are run by college students, by recent graduates, people trying to break into the industry, and their career equity upside in having done a cool thing is so much more valua…”

“Once you know the technology well enough to be able to predict the effects it will have on a given business, then it's just very clear that we're living in a time of tremendous arbitrage where tech non-enabled businesses can become quickly AI-enabled. Skip, in…”

“What you cannot buy is understanding of the customer. So all of these roll-up strategies all depend on somebody somewhere in the management of the new thing, actually understanding the business at the level of the customer and what they actually need.”

“This kind of thing is going to be a huge category as the AI gets better.”

“And it turns out that those questions have just become like really acute for AI companies. So, so because of my work on governance, I wound up meeting with and getting to work with some of the top AI companies.”

“We at IMV, we ship product 50 times a day on average at a time when people were like lucky to be doing it monthly if they were really advanced.”

“That is what it's called when you change the strategy, but try to have Fidelity to the vision that we, it needs a name because we do it all the time.”

“It's a scientific theory, which means that, that whatever works is lean startup. So if someone comes up with something new and it works, we can't be threatened and upset about it. We have to adopt it.”

“Top misconceptions about lean startup. And it was like, number one, lean means cheap. So you're doing lean startup. It means you're not raising money. It's like, that's not true.”

“It took us 10 years to build the MVP for LTSC.”

“First time founders especially are usually very stubborn about this and they don't want to do it. It's like, look, you tell me what you believe. I don't have to be right. And I want to just double check that you're right. What, by however we do it.”

“The thing I learned is that if people are having trouble coming with MVP, the problem is usually upstream in the chain of deductive reasoning from the vision down to the MVP. It's like usually people are just not super clear on what do I want to learn, and it'…”

“The number one lesson of the scientific method is if you can't fail, you can't learn. And so if you set yourself up in a position where psychologically you can't admit that something didn't work, you can't learn.”

“Where people get into trouble, I think, is when they want to use craft as an excuse to not get any feedback.”

“Far worse is to be in a company that won't die, a zombie undead company that you hate, but you can't leave.”

“Oftentimes the vision is discovered more than chosen in these stories.”

“If it was truly a complete shutdown, start over again, nobody and nothing in common. I was like, that is not a pivot. But that's just actually quite rare. Usually there's some critical insight or element of the first thing that is carried over into the second …”

“The thing that makes sense is to pick actions today that make ethical sense in a wide variety of future scenarios. And do those.”

“All of our communication channels are about to be super saturated with AI generated experimentation, you know, like whether we want it to or not. And so if you think, if you just extrapolate a little bit, if this technology holds the way we think it will, it's…”

“We've established hierarchical gatekeeping, like structures, because that was the only way to manage the volume of information that had to be processed for that thing to happen.”

“If you want your organization to be trustworthy, the promises it makes, if you want to win the public's trust by making promises they can believe, you have to embody those promises in the structure of the organization itself, so that even if you weren't there,…”

“In, in, in certain European countries, it's actually like, 20 or 25% of the companies like public companies are all structured that way.”

“My favorite interview question of all time is to ask people to describe a best practice that they learned in their career, and to really get into it. Like, tell me the story of how you learned the best practice, like how, you know, whatever, whatever, and you …”

“The most important thing you have to do in a product is make trade off decisions. And if you just let people make their own trade off decisions, it's totally different. It's really difficult to have any kind of coherent design like thrust. And so the idea is l…”

“And it's actually, there's not that many things it can be. Like, it might be because you gave them a synthetic notification, like, hey, please come back to my product, and they did. It could be because some kind of organic notification took place, like, that i…”

“One of the most successful customer emails of all time is PayPal's You've Got Money. Click here to take the money. It's like, it has a very high click-through rate, maybe second only to Facebook. Someone has tagged you in a photo.”

“It's not about low cost. It's about efficient use of proceeds.”

“All growth companies, the average time to becoming public has gone way, way, way up. That means that the great public has been blocked out of the ability to invest in growth, and everyone, I'm sure your listeners know this phenomenon very well, but it's a trav…”

“Because we're a stock exchange, we're integrated with the financial system to such a degree that companies that list with us can be guaranteed the same access to the full liquidity of the public markets.”

“But like, let's say you build a total return swap, or you loan the shares out for shorts, or you do any activity that builds a derivative out of the economic ownership of the share, that automatically deregisters you from the ledger that we maintain on behalf …”

“So we have principles around certain compensation instruments that companies can't do. And generally require companies to disclose how they've created interest alignment between executives and their long-term investors.”

“The reason that incumbent exchanges want listings so badly is not actually for the listing fees, but for the extra trades that it generates on their platform.”

“We think of our business as a high margin, low volume business. We're happy to make money by selling services, data, technology, directly to companies and their long term investors.”

“I tried for almost five years to give this idea away for free to the incumbent exchanges. I didn't want to build a stock exchange. It's a real pain. You know, it's a lot of work. That's not what I want to do with my time, but I couldn't get any of the incumben…”

“If you get the real story with actual entrepreneurs, what you discover is that even if the vision is right on and they see the future, the specifics of the strategy often have fatal flaws.”

“We are now living through a time where you can rent the means of production, which means that if you want to test an idea, if you want to start something in your dorm room at Harvard, You know, just because you started small doesn't necessarily mean it can't s…”

“If you make those tools available to other people so that you don't have complete control, if you turn it into a platform, if you give people open access, the sum total of the creative power that you unleash when you do that means that you have a smaller piece…”

“A forecast is accurate only to the extent that it is an extrapolation from a long and stable operating history.”

“These companies can spend through their technology readiness level, you know, analysis and portfolio, like they can do the smart research to spend five, 10, 15, fifty million dollars To have a breakthrough. And then they often are not able to spend the like tw…”

“I know that five or 10 years from now, the person who provides me this service, it's going to be technology enabled. It's going to be developed and According to these principles, it's going to be rapidly evolved to suit my needs.”

“If you want to have a new successful disruption every couple of years, you need to have hundreds of experiments going at any one time.”

“That system of managing work is not a good one for our time. Maybe it was a good, maybe it made sense in a different era, but it really doesn't make sense now, and there is a better way.”

“Lean startup has created a neutral terrain where different functions can come together to do this, and I think there's just a natural resistance to doing a methodology from someone else's function.”

“This, before it is anything else, is a management issue. It is not a technology issue. It is not a process or tools issue. It is really about how do we manage people. Most companies have all the raw material they need to work in this more entrepreneurial way”