The Ledger, every show

“If you want to hire a 10 Xer, that person will almost certainly have glaring faults. Anyone that you could hire without glaring faults will be at best good. They will not be great.”

“Instead, delegate things that you're good at. This sounds really strange, so let me explain. The things that are the easiest to delegate are the things that you're already good at. You know how to do these things really well. You might already be an expert in …”

“The reason that most VCs give you a no is lies, and especially the reason of total addressable market in your TAM.”

“Almost everything in running a company has changed over the last seven years. So if you sold your company 10 years ago, you don't know anything about how customer success works, how new types of sales works, how product led growth works, how even like all the …”

“Well, most good founders have low EQ.”

“Founder CEOs are very undercompensated. Like the go forward comp for a founder CEO today, once you, let's say you're there for over four years, your go forward comp is probably five X lower than if they hired an outside CEO.”

“I would say really any time a CEO is not spending on their company, it's bad for the business. But that's true. If you're dating, it's true. If you're being a spouse, if you're parenting kids, if you're working out, You're spending time with friends. If you're…”

“Well, I do think there were a lot of VCs with subpar returns that were still raising their third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh funds. That is very unlikely going to happen in the future. So I think you're the, sorry, VCs that were doing that from LPs. And so …”

“The number one skill to have over the next 20 years is the ability to select and manage vendors.”

“Never do things to gain optionality. Optionality is bad. You need to really have a purpose-driven life.”

“And the number one reason why a VC will pass on your business is that they don't like your team. This is especially true for seed and series A deals.”

“The most non-obvious clause to negotiate is the amount that you're supposed to reimburse the investor's legal counsel. You're actually doing your investors a favor by negotiating this. This is an actual win-win to negotiate. The time it takes you to go from te…”

“In that world, even the most advanced models, deep learning, and machine learning frameworks can't beat them because they have access to this kind of core underlying data.”

“You're going to start to see different firms start splitting the stack a bit, and they're going to have certain people who are going to be good... You're going to start to see that much more so with investing, where if you're going to have a team anyway, and i…”

“It is actually, they're generally not happy when someone in the fund is like also a CEO, but they should be because that fund's going to end up doing so much better. You're going to get into better deals, et cetera.”

“The people I've worked with who have been the most impactful people, it is extremely high, highly correlated that they also put in the most hours.”

“Most companies are not getting anywhere close to 40.”

“Just because everyone's leaving, like in Facebook's case, where so many of the first 25 people left early doesn't mean that's a bad company. It turned out to be an amazing company. Just because everyone's staying doesn't mean it's a good company.”

“Venture is just like, is incredibly competitive. It's way more competitive than any type of SAS business that's out there. It's one of the most competitive, you're basically selling a commodity. You're selling money.”

“I also don't, I don't know how much oversight matters in the, if it's really power law driven, like the bad ones are bad. And, you know, so yeah, maybe you could have got a one X and you get a .5 X or something out of this thing. If you, if you're really in it…”

“The winners don't really need you. So spending time with them doesn't really change the outcome. The losers don't really need you either. Cause they're going to lose. So it's actually kind of the people in the middle that probably need you the most”

“If you ever see a scenario where a founder is putting more than a hundred percent in, I have never seen that company do less than a one X ever. That company has always been successful.”

“Well, my simple heuristic Is that if the opportunity has very few downsides, it's almost certainly not a great opportunity. All great opportunities have very big and very obvious downsides.”

“They rarely get great at the things that are not the traits of their founders.”

“Almost every company today has more vendors than employees.”

“Many, most smart people optimized for the midterm. They delay gratification in the short term. They're experts at passing the marshmallow test, but while they think they're optimizing for the longterm, they're actually usually optimizing for the midterm.”

“Smart people are always thinking 10 years out. The smartest people are always thinking 10 days out and 30 years out.”

“The better the person, the less time it takes to manage them. That's the obvious thing, but that's only up to a point. The true 10 Xers actually take more time to manage than the average performers.”

“Great data usually beats great algorithms.”

“And of course, keeping that data secure is, is a huge issue, and you're going to build a security team, run penetration tests, you know, or of course you're going to be out of business if you have some sort of breach.”

“Companies like Google have great access to this data because they have 70% of the phones in the U.S. That they have data on, and probably even a higher percentage of phones worldwide that they get to see all this great location data on.”

“There are very few data companies out there. Most companies that are quote-unquote data companies are actually application companies.”

“If you really wanna know, like, where is innovation going to happen in the future, I think you can really look at innovation as to where we have data today.”

“On the flip side, if you think about nutrition, likely, 20 years from now, we'll still have fad diets. Just be, it's just incredibly difficult to collect all the data of, you know, everything that goes into your body, you know, your eventual outcome, which cou…”

“And so we could see, it's very possible we could see more machine learning innovations, or at least in certain areas, Like maybe in healthcare, for instance. We might see more machine learning innovations that happen in China than happen in, in other places.”

“Every VC today is founder friendly, right? It's pretty rare nowadays for a founder to get fired. Whereas like in the eighties and nineties, that was commonplace for a founder to get fired.”

“I think 22 out of the first 25 people at Facebook left after, within the first three or four years.”

“If you think of like an insight which is one of the more successful late stage. Like they have like a 20 person team evaluate a deal. They don't just have like one person do the whole thing.”

“If you're saying, are they all up? I would say, I will say no. I say the chance that they're all up would be very, very would be very low.”

“This advice comes with a warning, which is never take advice from somebody who's more than 10 years older than you, and that's probably me.”

“VCs will happily invest in businesses with small TAMs if they think the team is good enough to move to an adjacent TAM once they're no longer growing at a hundred percent year over year.”

“Planning is really important at larger companies because larger companies can really only effectively do one or two new things per year.”

“So now, you know, you have these great machine learning engineers, and they thought they were going to be spending You know, all their time predicting the future, but it turns out they're spending 95 to 99% of their time organizing the past.”

“As a machine learning engineer, now you can spend 95% of your time predicting the future, which is what you want to do as a machine learning engineer.”

“So this is the course, the core struggle for almost every single company, except for maybe Google, Facebook, Amazon, Tencent, that has to deal with all these types of issues.”

“In my opinion, it's one of the top 10 innovations in, in the last 10 years.”

“And the price, because of things like containers, et cetera, the price of access and compute power has gone down every single month.”

“Most companies out there, their own data represents, like, point oh one percent of the world. It's, unless you're Google, Facebook, Amazon, Tencent, a couple of others, you have a very small sliver of what's happening in the world.”