The Ledger, every show

“Technically you almost have to replace near everyone and rebuild the culture up to be able to deal with the world as it is today, but that's not really possible for most companies. And so there's no clear answer for how those companies can get there.”

“I never believed in saving cash for a rainy day. I feel like I'm a big believer in what we're building. I believe in where we're going. So if I believe in the future, and we're a really high cash-generated business, We should always be buying back our shares.”

“We believe there's a path to a trillion dollar outcome, and we don't set time, it's just that this business can be as big as what you would need to be a trillion dollar business, and we actually just did a comp plan to some of the key people that, is built on,…”

“The business grew nearly a hundred percent year over year, and we fired about 40% of the team because I wanted to distill it down to these eight players.”

“And therefore to then say the CEO should take less pay is something that's quite unjust because it's not understanding of the role that the CEO has to absorb.”

“And the reason I did that then is a belief that if the role was going to get automated, Or that AI was not being adopted fast enough in those departments. It's time to let those people go and rebuild the organization as if we were building it knowing what tech…”

“The only way to fix a culture like that is to go and fire 99% of people and just rebuild it from the ground up.”

“If people on my team, if they directly report to me, I never do one-on-ones, I don't do reviews.”

“The other thing I found is when we go out and we drink and we start shooting the shit, really good ideas can come of that too. It's not that we're going out and with a bunch of coworkers and talking about baseball. We're going out with a bunch of coworkers and…”

“And at the beginning of their short report, they'll say, We've most likely covered our short report by our short position by the time you're reading this report. And so there is not only this massive financial incentive to make the post much more dramatic than…”

“So probably I'd say like based on where we're trading today, roughly a third of the company's value came from that buyback. So you said a hundred and fifty billion roughly, so let's call it fifty billion around.”

“And so I do think the role of product should end up looking a lot like it does at our company over time is that either your product people become engineers or your engineers become product people, but you don't need both.”

“My guess is you're going to see a lot more tech layoffs over the next couple of years as companies really start understanding that not laying people off creates A blockade to actually getting to this AI native state.”

“If you avoid utilizing these technologies, you're not, and you're gonna get fired, and that's life, and so we demand that the people who are at the company are adopting these technologies rapidly to create more output, but we don't shy away from different diff…”

“The second you care about that KPI and you chase it, you're selling from your own core business to go diversify. You're not focused on your day job.”

“Like if you just to size it, that's Facebook, Google one, two, or in whichever order I'd have to check, but that's the third biggest digital marketplace for advertising in terms of scale that will exist.”

“It's not at a place where you're just going to get a massive amount of inflow of advertisements that are diverse and creatively inspired and going to create lifts and campaigns, but their tools are available now so that humans can create ads much faster and mu…”

“We actually didn't do any investor relations for well over a year at the bottom, because what were we going to convey to investors is we're rebuilding our technology stock is dirt cheap, but nobody buys something that's dirt cheap.”

“We get questions like, well, isn't the chatbot going to tell everyone what to buy and just complete the transaction and no one will ever do e-commerce off of an ad again. And what that leaves a sight of is that people actually like to shop and people want to l…”

“Until people start understanding what the average person can have as positive use cases that are incremental to search, they're not going to be proponents of AI, and there's no reason to expect them to be.”

“And so for the following 18 months, we ended up deploying somewhere around six billion dollars of buybacks of our own capital, and we leveraged some to buy back shares in the company. And over time, that ended up creating somewhere in the neighborhood of 50, s…”

“And so I always looked for people on the team that had some reason to have a grudge or a chip on their shoulder or something that would motivate them. If they didn't have that in life was really easy. Those were not people that I was going to introduce to the …”

“We ended up doing it so that instead of their billion dollars being an equity investment for 70% where they would get control, which is what triggers this scrutiny, we ended up pivoting it to a billion dollar convertible note that if on conversion we pay them …”

“A lot of people get complacent with the leaders that they have, and those leaders, if they're not at that moment as good for the role of someone underneath, that person underneath is going to leave and start a new business. So like you owe it to every single p…”

“Too low a float makes you more volatile, and if the valuation is lower and you can do a 10 to 15% float, you end up attracting better investors who can end up being long-term with you. If you push the valuation where you can't fill a bigger round, you end up w…”

“Probably, I don't know how big, but maybe even almost the over 50% of the marketing dollars in the space go back to our platform because the developers on the other side are seeing the best returns that they've ever seen in their existence on the dollars that …”

“And so we took it down to a little over a hundred people that we give equity to in the business.”

“Your best people know how to use AI better than your mediocre people. And it's Not by some sort of linear function. It's much greater than that.”

“And if you do that, and what I call performance marketing is that make the advertiser an arbitrage. Very few people define performance marketing as that, and very few companies have executed. Facebook's done a fantastic job of it. Google, part of their busines…”

“Over, I think it was about a year and a half ago, over 80% of our code was LLM written, and now it's much higher than that”

“I don't know many founders who have had that kind of success, That have fantastic personal lives. Yet you end up distracted from your kids because you're always focused on work. It consumes you.”

“Mostly in 24, we had a year where we probably grew near double digits. Sorry, near triple digits. But we ended up cutting the team's staff by 40, 50% in most departments.”

“We felt like AI is going to get to the point where creatives are going to be automatically produced. You still need humans to innovate, but you can have less humans because a lot of the design work can be handed off.”

“In engineering, you have your best engineers can use these tools to really accelerate themselves. And your weaker engineers might not understand how to use these tools or might only get a two X instead of a 10 X or a hundred X increase in output.”

“So if I just went to the core business, Our core advertising products are about 400 people. So call it some very, very high percentage of all the companies EBITDA comes from the core business. So if you then calculate the EBITDA per employee over 400, it's a r…”

“But HR, for example, like that I touched on earlier, we went and took a pretty large HR organization, one that I think had 70, 80 people on it, and now might have 15.”

“If you look at our exec team, we have CEO, CTO, CFO, and general counsel. We don't have a CRO. We don't have a COO. Go down the list of other C levels that people might have. We don't have a CMO. We don't have a chief people officer. We don't have any of these…”

“You can judge us on cashflow minus SBC, which I generally think is the right way to judge companies.”

“And we used to believe that every single person should have equity granted by the company. Instead, we went to a place where we said the top 10 to 15% of the company will get equity, and the rest won't.”

“We don't have a product organization. Our engineers are meant to be product managers.”

“If you think about what's happening with AI native or engineers today, they have to be really imaginative. They have to be product people. They don't have to know how to write code, but they have to be able to audit code”

“You can't just go defer to the large language model and say, hey, based on what you know about this user and the data I have available, what's the next ad to see? That wouldn't work as well as a custom model built for this purpose.”

“I would be very, very nervous if I was building a business as an interface on top of those companies.”

“One of my beliefs is that really good people figure out a way. They don't need a whole lot of mentorship,”

“So when we fell in 2022 one of the things we did on the investor relations side, you fall 92%, no one's buying your stock. We said, we're gonna buy our own shares, and we're gonna shut down investor relations, because what's the point? Why do I need to go to a…”

“So in a way, I would say not only is it fair because of the risks that exist, I'm not sure it's actually done yet. You know, again, I'm not a trader of businesses, but I do think we're going to go through material changes in the market, especially when it come…”

“If you're too kind and not as direct, not as aggressive, you're wasting time. And in a world where time is limited and you can't quantify the loss from sugarcoating things, I'd much rather be aggressive and rub some people the wrong way and surround myself wit…”

“By increasing the frequency and the pace, I'm able to process more. Therefore, my odds are better than someone who's overthinking, overanalyzing, or over communicating and strategizing about a thought process or decision.”