The Ledger, every show

“The whole organization was a stepchild for whatever reason, you know, there was cultural mismatch. There was, you know, probably a business mismatch.”

“Well that doesn't work from a venture perspective. Like with those kinds of, you'd never get the venture returns. You can't invest in things. When the valuations are already nine digits or 10 digits, and you think you're gonna, a small portfolio that's got lik…”

“Two in, especially now in a financial disaster that we have on our hands, who's going to be the first one to get fired? The ones who don't come into work are the ones who do come into work and have some face time and show value beyond just coming to a meeting.”

“We're going to sell the iPod. It's going to be so awesome that people will buy Macs so they could use their iPod. We're going to sell more Macs because they're going to need to buy one to use an iPod that they're going to have to have. Well, guess what? The fi…”

“Recycling is basically a bunch of bullshit, especially when it comes to single-use or low-use plastics versus durable-use plastics.”

“And guess who wins at the end of the day? Steve jobs, opinion. And he was like, if you're not going to get on board, get out of this room and you can go work on another project, but you're not going to work on this.”

“When you're doing a one point O of anything, When you're doing, if you're doing anything that matters, and it's a one point on, it's a new category, or it's a new device the world hasn't seen before. You have very few analogs that you can use to make data driv…”

“Because if you try to do data-driven decisions all the way along, You're either not doing a differentiated product because you're taking data from another thing, or you're just getting just bullshit data, right?”

“Oh, for sure. For sure. People keep asking me, what are we going to get? It's like, no, absolutely. It's now's the, I now's the time. If it isn't already happening, I'm actually getting business plans of people who are like, Hey, you know, is this interesting?…”

“And that's how iPhone was able to be created because without the iPod there, I'm pretty sure there would have been no iPhone. There would have probably been no Apple because it was close to bankruptcy.”

“We got fast software, but software, if you're going to build a real company, can't be throwaway. Maybe it can, but I don't think it can be, if you're really going to do this because you get just technical debt and you've got to start over again.”

“Because an opinion based thing on highly innovative, differentiated stuff, it doesn't have a model for that. There's not that stuff in there. You gotta, you still need the very version one to be done.”

“When we can trust the models and when they have memory and when they do this stuff, then we're still going to need a display. Cause sorry, people, unless we're plugging it into our brain, like a BCI brain computer, or there's some laser thing going into our re…”

“We need to flip it. We need to absolutely flip it, and we have to say, and this is what I always wanted to do at Nest, which is, I want to remove displays, and we need to have voice as the number one primary feature, and you build around voice. Then we have ke…”

“You need a co-founder. Because there's, one, they should be complimentary with your skills. Two, you need a partner who you can share all the things you can't talk to the board about, or you can't talk to the management team about. You can't go talk to your si…”

“I don't like any, I don't like companies with more than three co-founders. I prefer it with two. Three can get as long as people, but four above forget. I don't want to go there.”

“Everybody else wants data. And the only way to get data is when everybody's there, Getting those hard numbers and saying, okay, now I'm convinced to go in there because everyone else is there. But guess what? Everyone else is there already. You got to trust yo…”

“Some companies make it so coddled, but you get so coddled in companies that you, they never want you to leave. They just want you to work all the time. You get all your food there, your laundry done, whatever else.”

“I've never seen anyone be successful with this. You know, with this, ah, let's say fair, whatever happens, I'm going to be, no, that's not how the world works because everybody's competing.”

“These kinds of things are big money. And you know what? What's even better is once you build them, They are one of these blue, they will be a blue chip in 20 years, in 30 years, because they're gonna be the new standard oils and the, you know, what have you, r…”

“And sometimes we'll like go, it's a third. I'm like, well, then we're going to try to please everyone and please no one. So pick one. There's always got to be a one priority path. If not, you probably not structured your product right. So you pick that primary…”

“Typically, yeah, it might be more expensive today for that material, but as soon as that volume hits, And we get, it takes off. Actually, it's going to be cheaper than the petroleum based product because it's built with plants and it's easier to make the plant…”

“Steve said the best marketing, Steve Jobs, the best marketing is just truth telling. As long as the product meets the expectations you set for it, the best marketing is just telling the truth.”

“I don't like any team swimming in money. I saw that too many times at other companies I've worked with or for. And it does not set up for good constraints to make sure you're making great decisions because the market moves on.”

“And the culture they created was one that was born out of abundance. And the abundance has not stopped. It started and it continued. It was always up and to the right. They've never had a near-death moment.”

“Cannabis is actually medicinal, and it's a vice. It's both. And so when you can have those two dynamics together, when you can actually help people, whether that's recreationally or medically, and you can have all of the uplift of the recreational side for the…”

“Almost every piece of infrastructure around us is going to change in a dramatic way with atoms over the next 10 to 20 years.”

“The first trillionaire in the world is someone who's going to fix climate change. It's true, because it's going to be all about atoms, and it's going to be about changing the infrastructure around us.”

“And when I mean micromanage, it means micromanage the decision, not necessarily the operations of doing it, making sure you're getting the data.”

“If it was invested in, I think it would have been a critical piece of the next generation AI assistant in your home.”

“AI needs context. AI needs a lot of context. And in a home, you want to make everything very seamless. And the way you get best context is by having sensors properly placed around the home that don't necessarily invade privacy, but allow you to pick up a lot o…”

“Three generations. I've learned you make the product, you fix the product, then you fix the business. So you ha there's no, I I've never seen anyone get it all right. The first time, like you want to, you would like to, but you get close, but make the product,…”

“But at the time, Dario was saying, you know, 90 to a hundred percent of all our code's written by, you know, our, you know Claude. And, you know, we just monitor it and watch it.”

“When we did the two and a half years with the iPhone, he was honing the story of the iPhone every day. He didn't give it to marketing. He knew what that thing was, and what those key features were, like we talked about, like, and micromanaged those features, b…”

“Today, people are like, yeah, I'm gonna try chat GPT or whatever. It's 20 dollars a month or 200 dollars a month. That is unsustainable for if you think consumers are gonna pay that. There's just no way. Unless it's incredible, but they're not gonna, you know …”

“I still think that the platform companies like Google and Apple could be doing a lot more around digital consumption tools and information to help people make better decisions for themselves, for their families, and what have you, because, you know, you could …”

“I think any kids that are doted upon too much, who do not have the benefit to find their way, the struggle, the productive struggle to find their way in the world, and their parents are always like yeah, no, they don't. These kids either are, you know, they're…”

“Second thing is that the leader is in it, and they are not just delegating. They're in the details. They'll talk to different people at different levels. They can see that if they're the leader can see problems and they'll go and address them right away too.”

“Every single, almost every single thing I've ever done, the first thing is the incumbents laugh at you. So whether it was an iPod, what happens? Microsoft laughs, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. IPhone, iPhone comes out. Nokia, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Nest, Honeywell, ha, ha,…”

“There's very few times when the direction was wrong. It was that this team wasn't up to the challenge that they had, the mission they went on. The mission was right, but the team was not up to the challenge and they could not, you know, be mature enough or bec…”

“You have to remember that you can't crush it 24 hours a day, or you're gonna crush yourself. You're gonna become socially unhealthy, mentally unhealthy, and you're gonna have no perspective on the outside world.”

“And this whole hybrid work week thing, and everyone's like, I don't need to be in the office anymore. I think it's just a backlash to how leaders are trying to bring workers back into the office. It's exactly the wrong way. They're not even thinking about the …”

“Because we only have 20 years, 30 years tops to get out and make this thing and fix it.”

“There's actually more money to be made with green industries because it's easier and more cost effective to actually do green materials and things like that. I just think it's actually better for business.”

“So you can't always just trust what the customer says because What happens is our framing of it, you know, when we're asking them, we're asking the questions come with all the other, oh, well, if you bought it would be like this, and this, and then here's the …”

“So you have to start when you start a new project. Is you have to start early days in, and what I always say is build the mock press release. What is that page, page and a half press release that you're going to, you know, send out six months, nine months, a y…”

“The iPod Was a critical success, but it didn't really turn into a successful business till the third generation. And the reason being was it didn't work with Windows based PCs. It only worked with Macs, which were a fraction of the market, less than a percent,…”

“When you start growing past your, you know, 20 people, There is so much work to do product management, right? You need a person who's at least one person who's the voice of customer watching over all of this because as a founder, CEO, leader, you have so many …”