The Ledger, every show

“Well, then you don't know what the bar is because the bar of where you should be letting people go is here. And the bar that you've let people go is here. So until you get close to that line, You don't know what that line is.”

“If someone is meeting expectation, we let them go. We've already let all those folks go. So on our team, it's Only outperformers.”

“Even if it's handled incredibly poorly, the company ends up performing better. It just takes a little longer for people to recover who the state team to recover emotionally, but the worst case scenario, it's handled terribly. Within two months, the company wil…”

“I don't think it matters at all. I think that what really motivates people is building shit that gets used in the world. I think people will say, and they'll fight for equity in money, but in the end, that's not what actually motivates them. Because I've seen …”

“First of all, know that boards are the death of every great investor. So Be wary. If you sell to founders that when they take your money, you will join their board and be on their board forever. Know that you have just ended your career eventually.”

“Every additional human you have in your organization. Causes extra overhead and geometrically so because now that you have to keep all those people informed, give them all context, make them all feel heard”

“I think if you actually tell them, tell your investors, the exact opposite of what we think is gonna happen is gonna happen. You think you're gonna lose their trust. I think you're gonna gain their trust.”

“With fewer people in the organization, things work better. That's the big Realization that most people never discover. So they hit product market fit, they get tons of money from investors, not just hire, hire, hire, hire, hire. But every additional human you …”

“The key is, in my opinion, you become their agent. Like a, you know, like Michael Ovitz, a CAA agent. You help them find their next job actively.”

“And so all you do is you read it and you follow the script and letting someone go or making someone feel heard. My positive is once you do it one time, like, oh my God, that worked so well. That's the only motivation you need. And you've got the script. So you…”

“So that's why it has to be a small team that reports to outside of EPD. It can't report to the head of engineering, head of product or head of design. Can't. It's gotta go outside, usually directly to the CEO.”

“And one of the easiest ways is to simply have their anger named and their thoughts named. So I will simply say, hey, I sense that you're feeling a lot of anger right now, and my guess is that some of the thoughts you're having are blank, and then I'll really g…”

“She shared with me her framework for making decisions, which is she separates the decision from the implementation. Meaning she thinks about who is the stakeholder here that I'm solving for. And almost always in a company you're solving for the customer. So wh…”

“So what you're doing is you're giving me the feedback, but you're couching it. You're polishing it. You're rounding the edges. You're making it softer. It's not really what you're thinking. But it's what you're willing to say. And so if I want to make you real…”

“What we realized coaching Naval is that Naval did not want to be CEO. And he just didn't know how to get out.”

“If I have to act immediately, I outsource my thinking to someone else. Someone who's not in fear or anger. So I share the situation with someone who's not part of the situation, and their brain, therefore, is not triggered because it doesn't matter to them, an…”

“The master of this is Peter Fenton at Benchmark. He, within five minutes of any conversation, he will tell you a weakness that he has, and it's not, he's not joking about it. He tells you a real weakness, and my God, it makes me love him, but I'm not unique in…”

“And usually it's not strategic thinking because you have very little information about the company. They're at the company, 30 days a month, 12 hours a day. They have so much more information than you do. But what you have that they don't is you have a network…”

“If the feedback is something that does not resonate with you, Then no, you do not need to accept it. I think you do need to say thank you, and you do need to reflect back what it is that they said so that they know that you've heard them, but you don't then ne…”

“The best way to train chief of staff is to give them full access. They have complete access to your email, to your calendar, to every meeting that you're in. So they literally sit beside you, listen in on every call and sit in every meeting. And that lasts for…”

“What I found is, is that the way the amygdala gets triggered is often because of surprise. And so if you give someone just a few seconds to mentally prepare, then the amygdala often doesn't get triggered nearly as hard”

“I've made this bet hundreds of times, and so far I've never lost.”

“When someone's in fear, they're gripped. They can't see reality. Their brain is making very exaggerated predictions.”

“And then finally she said, I perceive you to be in anger. So it's an I statement and it's simply what she's perceiving. There's no judgment. And that was able to punch through my anger. And then I woke up and went, oh, and then I stopped and just didn't act un…”

“Anger is actually a cover. It's a cover for when we feel pain. And so our brain doesn't want to feel the pain. So instead it externalizes it. But the problem is it shoves that pain onto everybody else around us. And so the real answer here is not to have peopl…”

“We dang from clipboard health. She's the most compassionate. She's the most.”

“And what I found is, is that the way the amygdala gets triggered is often because of surprise. And so if you give someone just a few seconds to mentally prepare, then the amygdala often doesn't get triggered nearly as hard because if they're aware that they're…”

“80% of costs in any tech company. It's payroll. It's humans.”

“It's all based on interest rates. So it's likely that growth stocks will be at these valuations for until interest rates come back down again, which could be two to three years.”

“The reason that a big company is, has a hard time innovating is because once a product is scaled, it's now got millions of users. So you have two things that you need to make sure stay true every day. The site is up and running and there's no security breach. …”

“Your zone of excellence. This is something that you're uniquely good at, but you don't love it. This is the danger zone. This is likely what you're getting paid for. And you're likely to getting paid a lot of money for it. Other people want you to do it. You a…”

“How do you move into the zone of genius? It's not that you figure out what it is and do more of that. It's that you figure out what it isn't. And eliminate that. And then naturally you'll be drawn toward what it is that you love.”

“They were students, and YC wouldn't even accept them into their class.”

“Fear is an incredible motivator, and I think that most people, including myself in my earlier days, that was my main motivation. Now, in my later years, I've learned to replace that with joy, which is an even greater motivator and certainly much more pleasant,…”

“There has to be, you can't force this upon someone in the middle of them being stressed about another situation or being in the middle of another task. So the key is to simply reach out and say, Hey, I'd like to clear something with you is now an okay time for…”

“What you'll find is usually by month three, once you've done this three times, your calendar will be mostly green, mostly energy raising, and you will find yourself, I believe, feeling tremendous amounts of joy, and that fear will likely have dissipated a lot,…”

“Now, typically, if they're bad at something, it's because they hate it, and therefore it They don't want to do it. They don't want to invest in studying how to do it. They don't want to practice it. So they do it just the bare minimum required, which of course…”

“If you wait till you get your shit together, it'll never happen. So no, you start with them, and they'll help you get your shit together.”

“They couldn't get into YC cause YC doesn't accept students.”

“The easiest thing is just to check with somebody else who's not in fear because they will be able to see clearly when you can't.”

“I did it with Enrique and Pedro from Brex, and it was revolutionary for them. And it caused them to change how the two of them operated together. They realized one really enjoyed the internal meetings and the other really enjoyed the external meetings. They're…”

“In every single interaction that I have, whether it's one-on-one with someone or in a group at the end, I always ask for written feedback, not just verbal feedback, ask everyone to write down on a doc.”