The Ledger, every show

“The startup ecosystem is actually, and I mean it half facetiously, a giant Ponzi scheme.”

“But of all the things that are probably going to destroy a democracy, it happens to be Facebook.”

“On a good day, China operates like Silicon Valley, and if we're really lucky on that same day, the DOD is operating like General Motors.”

“The data says the world-class ones, at least the ones that make it in Silicon Valley and the ones that get funded are completely antisocial and probably come from usually dysfunctional families.”

“That's probably the cruelest, but most effective training ground to make high functioning entrepreneurs and probably ill functioning human beings.”

“What they really need is a good therapist. Unfortunately, it makes them, if they get good therapy, it makes them an ineffective founder for their next one because you beat that. That intensity out of them.”

“Business people who use that analogy. I'm not sure too many of them have been in the fight. If you lose in a wartime, it's measured and killed in action. And if you lose in business, it's maybe you lose your corner office. So I'm not sure that's the right anal…”

“Your job is to have your company survive, and if taking that money will do that, then for gosh sake, take the money and have the other discussions later after you're a successful company.”

“The goal ought to be that 10% of the MDAP major defense acquisition programs ought to have new entrants on them in, in the next three years, and if they don't, we're simply not rebuilding the national industrial base.”

“When the company finds product market fit and you need to build repeatability and scalability in the company, these same founders throw organizational hand grenades into their own organization and culture, trying to keep that chaos going on inside their compan…”

“Jobs was still insane, but the second coming of Steve Jobs had an organizational level of world-class executors. Tim Cook, John Rubinstein, Avi, et cetera, were all people who could take that craziness and filter it down to an organization that provided a leve…”

“The mistake that people used to make was only replace the founder in the 20th century to take a company public. We forgot that that innovation cycle might be every, you know, two to three years and you could get liquidity for the investors, but then the compan…”

“I invented customer discovery for me, which was to inform my vision, not to create a goddamn focus group.”

“They were world-class number twos and almost never are world-class number ones.”

“He basically took Microsoft operating system share from 98% to probably two percent today, right? If you now count mobile devices, right? They're just irrelevant. Because he was so focused on extending the windows ecosystem. They missed mobile. They missed sea…”

“The entire lean method. Is going to be end to end enabled by AI.”

“So I sure hope OpenAI, Google and Facebook, and even Apple continue to slug it out at some point. Because if they don't, innovation will die in the browser or like the browser did, it will die in generative AI.”

“If I'm in sales, there is no possible way, or if I'm the VP of sales or CEO, if there's no possible way, I'm ever going to let a salesperson again do a first meeting in person.”

“The biggest mistake that I've seen time and again that people make is not making the cuts, but basically cutting a bit at a time, and while that seems well, we'll see how it's going, and we'll cut five percent, and then three weeks later, you realize, ah, we o…”

“The invisible hand is actually today the invisible hand of the people who have their hands in everybody else's pockets.”

“Because all research universities in the United States during the Cold War worked on military weapons systems, but it was only Stanford where back by then the term was the provost Who pointed the university outwards. All other universities were focused inwards…”

“And today I label Stanford as an incubator with dorms, which Most of the professors don't like to hear, but as you know, is, is probably the most accurate description of the school.”

“The largest satellite manufacturer is not Northrop Grumman or Lockheed or Boeing. It's SpaceX, right? Have a factory that makes this at scale at a scale unimaginable”

“And so where did VCs put their money in social media? Was that in the national interest? We could argue possibly not. In fact, I would argue from vehemently not”

“Google deep mind figured out how to do protein folding in a way that basically, you know, accelerated You know molecular biology probably by 30 years. we solve, you know, the three D structures of two hundred million proteins.”

“So there's another model where the founder goes into, well, I was a genius in the first one. Therefore, I don't need to do all this stuff again. It was obviously my insight when in fact, What they didn't realize it was their customer insight that they had been…”

“Well, J.B. And I and Scott Andrews started a car company, which eventually became Tesla. And I did that for six weeks with him until I realized I couldn't get it up again. There was no way I wanted to jump on red eyes like I used to. I had a family, I had kids…”

“You want irrational people. And if you're not going to be irrational, You ought to consider you're competing with irrational people.”

“And I think the Cybertruck will be another Model X”

“It created essentially modern entrepreneurship where it says there are no facts inside the building. So get the hell outside. And the other version of this is there's no way you could be smarter than the collective intelligence of your potential customers as s…”

“Large companies, existing companies Execute known business models, which is a fancy word for saying they know their customers, know their competitors, no pricing, no channel. They know all this stuff, but startups were doing something quite different. Startups…”

“There's never been a period where the economy and the stock market have been so out of sync.”

“Then OSR and D is, as some of your listeners and viewers know, basically was a brilliant move by the U.S., the only country who did this in World War II, that outsourced advanced technology to professors.”

“The only economists we have in the DOD are the ones working at the Cape. You know, the, with green eye shades and whatever. It took two random guys, Jason Rathke and Eric Vollmer to come up with a billion dollar loan authority at the Office of Strategic Capita…”

“The DOD is built around execution. Execution of processes and PBE and whatever. Silicon Valley is built around innovators who create new things that never existed before. And here's the rub. The executors never come up with innovation processes. I mean, they'l…”

“You could teach startups this as a process because the other mistake that goes on in Silicon Valley is thinking sales to the DOD is just simply complicated enterprise sales in the commercial market. And I laugh hysterically when I hear that having done both.”

“Now, to be fair, we ended up building a dam across half the river because while we put export controls on the U S companies, Tokyo electron and ASML, who provide the other parts of the machinery, don't have export controls.”

“I did eight of those and never thought once that like, this is a risky thing. I always thought the risk was on the investors.”

“Great entrepreneurs who call it instinct. There is no such thing. Meaning what you're actually doing is I, at least I believe, let me be clear. I believe you're consciously or unconsciously ingesting a whole ton of data and running in the background, the equiv…”

“If you're in an existing market, but you're going after a niche, well, your sales curve is going to have a little hump. Because you'll get all the early adopters of that niche, but if you're right, it'll take a while, but then again, it'll grow, but it'll have…”

“If you're in an existing market, you're spending marketing dollars for demand creation, whether it's web or mobile or healthcare, it doesn't matter to create share. If you took those exact same dollars in a new market and did it, in fact, we ran this experimen…”

“My test, actually, I get it down to a test that investors should think about. Is you want to ask the founder from a successful company, how many red eyes were you on? That is to be able to jump on a plane for, in fact, just to be clear, you know, here we are i…”

“If he said, I was just building a giant moon Mars rocket, I think he'd be out of business.”

“No, a hundred percent of customer discovery doesn't need to be done on purpose in person. That at least the first level is if you could see someone's pupils dilate via zoom, at least the first level of discovery, it's in fact, much more effective to do. You co…”

“If they were enforced in a board meeting of like, not only do we want to see your Engineering status and whatever, but we want to hear about your customer discovery journey or your validation journey and tell us about the MVPs you're building and show it to us…”

“At least half, if not more, of most meetings are based on nonverbal cues that you pick up from facial expressions, from body language, from other cues that video conferencing apps just currently don't have.”

“What I've seen is that the companies that are going to survive and then thrive in the recovery are driven by CEOs who could assess rapidly, come up with rapid strategies, and then take action and seize the opportunities, or else you just kind of have what's go…”

“The board's role, I think, is, besides hiring and firing the CEO, is validating strategic direction for the company And providing some insights to the CEO that they might be missing.”