Straight Answers, every show

“There are publications which have paywalls, but their names are great. How do you think about that?”

answered: “Now, going to your question, which was?”

“How much does it cost you for the equipment?”

answered: “The medicine three point approach would be to take a more systemic whole body approach”

“There are publications which have paywalls, but their names are great. How do you think about that?”

answered: “Now, going to your question, which was?”

“What did your family think of this? Like?”

answered: “It was pretty heady stuff, because I wound up being on the cover”

“Can you share the story of when you personally got kicked out of the U.S. track and field Olympic trials?”

answered: “And then there's the sport, which is so fun, um, to be at”

“How do you, how do you solve fine tuning and custom inference? Um, that would be a very different transformation or pull away from the sort of core product that we're building than I think what we're experiencing.”

answered: “Is there anything else that has gone on that has allowed you to so closely associate”

“What will bending spoons do with it? Do you think?”

answered: “If anything, this is the right way to go about things”

“Well, someone still has to take it and apply it to that business, right? And it may just be the one, you know, the one tech person in that business.”

answered: “But I digress. Let's move on to the.”

“It seems to use AESCBC encryption to encode and decode data based on a key and an initialization vector. Ivy.”

answered: “let's talk about what ChatGPT for Omni And Google Astra gave us this week.”

“We had Mackenzie from, uh, Ambrook, uh, on here, which is, um, SaaS for, um, financial infrastructure for farms, but she was saying one of the big trends in agriculture right now is direct-to-consumer stuff, where, you know, you're actually transacting directly with your farmer, and I'm sure a lot of them are running on, on Shopify as well. What have you learned on the Coinbase board?”

answered: “I never had another job, really, in my apprenticeship”

“So you were mentioning earlier that you've had a few mentors that have really helped you. What is the most important thing that you've learned from them?”

answered: “I'm self-taught, as I said, so if, if I go way back”

“Were you aware that earlier today, the U S increased the tariffs by another hundred percent on China?”

answered: “There's challenges all the time. I started this business in 2008”

“How many people do you have in that position?”

answered: “I believe that you hire people because you believe that they're smart.”

“How many people do you have in that position?”

answered: “I believe that you hire people because you believe that they're smart.”

“Um, and sometimes we say and do things without realizing it, and that was a huge lesson for me, and, and ever since then, I've, I've been a lot happier thinking about, like, the way I communicate with other people. Um, so what's, what's the last time you felt shame?”

answered: “That's a great story and a great example, and I love how you shared”

“What did you expect about the race? That you had totally wrong that you discovered on the day of.”

answered: “I had for the first time in my life this last week, then my perfect race”

“And then, so after that, you bounce back again, and how did you introduce Lady Gaga to the world? Tell us about that.”

answered: “managing Eve, You know, we were able to build this cool company”

“You went on Al Sharpton's show and called for a corporate boycott of Facebook for not censoring pro-Trump ads, and then briefly tried to pause advertising on Twitter a couple years later as well. It seems like you've moved back from those positions now, or what do you think about, about calling for boycotts, you know, for people who, for not censoring Trump and that sort of thing?”

answered: “Well, let's step back. So So a couple things. So number one, um, I don't think I'm partisan.”

“And like, what do you see as the most important relationship for the U S next decade? And what gives you hope for America's role in the world going forward?”

answered: “Well, I think the biggest crisis that we have facing us... is education”

“That was a long time ago. What were you flying?”

answered: “we became like the hottest ticket in town. So we're doing loops and rolls”

“Well, and they're wrong because why exactly? What, what are they wrong about?”

answered: “Okay, here I'm going to, um, I'm going to call on William James.”

“You're not the personality type that can build a very valuable company. Is not the kind that can sit around and do nothing.”

answered: “It's also, I think, incredibly difficult to simplify things.”

“Like, I feel like a lot of creators can also package up what, They say into these courses, but maybe not a lot of them do because it's hard to price yourself in many ways. How have you thought about that?”

answered: “I think there's two reasons people don't do info products.”

“Your coffee is so bad. It is a, but yeah, no, I'm with you, so.”

answered: “two hundred million dollar project that is basically a glorified strip center residential unit”

“And at some point in time, did something happen that caused you to believe that it was all made up and there was no right and wrong. And then there's some other behaviors that, you know, might interact to lean you in one direction or another.”

answered: “so do you think that means that we're creating more psychopaths today?”

“Yeah. I mean, how many years did you not pay yourself in order to just invest in deals instead?”

answered: “every dollar you spend on yourself is a dollar you have less to invest”

“I'm not going to cut it. I'm not going to make it.”

answered: “If so, always listen to your guts.”

“Do you ever get pushback from saying this stuff online by people who are like, I'm a victim?”

answered: “By no means am I pardoning the wrongdoing and, and horrific behavior of others.”

“uh, I've never built a billion dollar company, so I really have no idea, but one of our, our, uh, I think our differentiators is like, yeah, we're gonna grow a little bit slower than other people, perhaps, but, um, you're gonna probably make less money, but you're gonna have less volatility. How have you thought about layoffs in your companies and growth, and how do you think about that?”

answered: “I don't think it's ever a good pitch that someone's gonna make less money”

“You didn't lay your voting card on the Can you walk me through each decision, please?”

answered: “what was clear early on was that we did have some different stances on things”

“Um, but I'd like to, I've never gone further with you into that question. How do you think about speed and moving fast, and how do you know if you're moving fast enough on the decisions you want to make in life?”

answered: “the money is easy. It's having an idea that you can execute on.”

“So how do you actually find your intuition?”

answered: “if we take it back to the medical establishment, we can go down another money”

“And by not involved, you mean that they weren't funding you?”

answered: “so I had zero insight into the inner workings of the Democratic Party machine”

“You've got to be Directing that time and deploying that capital that things have the greatest returns. Otherwise, it's Watt Watt.”

answered: “There's another thing that Fred Smith said, um, that again, like when I'm reading”

“Apart from who was on the board, how was it, how did Steve manage the board differently than other CEOs?”

answered: “we had a, a few of the critical issues out of the company.”

“You're going to live to survive the next day. So what are you like, how do you compare like the hours you're working now compared to when you started this thing?”

answered: “So when I started up and I give young entrepreneurs this advice”

“I should steer the car. So I don't, you probably want to remove that.”

answered: “We have a diversified bet strategy internally.”

“They're going on Google shopping and looking at the, the wall of items. How do you collaborate internally to figure out where AI goes?”

answered: “when I meant like shopping, I, I sort of tried to boil down”

“Achieving the value, achieving the scaling, um, goals that the company had. So it's really about helping them focus on what they were hired for.”

answered: “So what's your biggest pitch to a product manager starting to hear about product ops”

“What does Paul Graham do all day? Okay.”

answered: “if I can create some kind of like viral video, put it on Hacker News”

“It's hard to do that within a company. Is there anything you do with meetings, with leadership, with the way you operate that kind of spreads this way of thinking within the org?”

answered: “when I go to Kyoto, I like to go to some of these amazing Zen”

“Is that something you advise against? Is that strategy that you've seen work?”

answered: “Product market fit is a huge thing. Um, we've run into some of this”

“Is it peers? What helps somebody get better at the quality and, and, um, yeah, the quality of these sorts of documents?”

answered: “What you bring to the table is one of the most misunderstood attributes”

“Do you have an Apple vision pro strategy? Amazing.”

answered: “my other one, which is very self-serving because they are a client... is perplexity”

“And when is it too early? Do you have any insights into that phase?”

answered: “understanding and being intentional about your early acquisition growth loops, I think is an essential”

“And then is there like an example of a feature or product that went through this that you could share? If nothing comes to mind, that's okay.”

answered: “The inflection points are The kickoff, which is that going broad”

“What went wrong there? Do you think there was a path to Quibi having worked out any big lessons that you took away from that experience that you bring with you?”

answered: “The kind of miraculous thing about Quibi for me was it relit my enthusiasm”

“What have you found as impact that comes from doing this like a before and after? What kind of difference do you see having done this on a team?”

answered: “one of the things that has shifted and has caught some people by surprise”

“Speaking of difficult and squishy, uh, I'm guessing that one of the biggest challenges that people you work with face and one of those recurring themes is imposter syndrome, people having imposter syndrome, something definitely I went through and it comes up a lot on this podcast. What do you, what do you really advise your clients, uh, to, to do when they're feeling imposter syndrome?”

answered: “as I'm interrogating my, my own inner Emotional state right now. I'm feeling”

“You know, they're just going to get upset and defensive or like, you know, they're not going to hear it because it's too soft and it's like, well, yeah, like Ben kind of doesn't like that, but he doesn't really care. Um, so, you know, how do you get into that like meaningful place where people can hear what you're talking about?”

answered: “what is it that that stereotype is just wrong?”

“You take, like, Waymo, which is a lot of people think of as in, like, Phoenix or San Francisco. I just read an article the other day saying that Waymo's are already taking up 20% of Uber rides in Austin, and so this stuff can, like, move pretty quickly.”

answered: “I had like this thought the other day, because I had to send someone a letter”

“What, like, what if you design storage to be specific for AI data centers? What if you, like you could do cooling systems for, like there are, if you just reimagine the entire data center around like big AI In France, I think you end up with like totally different needs.”

answered: “The, uh, the New York Times had this article the other day”

“Do you want nuts or no nuts on the banana?”

answered: “This one little shop that's like, 300 square feet is doing like, seven million”

“And how, how much better is this PDF than just, uh, if I went to somebody's Tinder profile and right click, save as PDF, what would I be getting that's different in this?”

answered: “the next piece of advice for listeners is you need to delete your dating apps.”

“How did you track that? Like you, you know, for a fact you put them in their home.”

answered: “Another example of a project we worked on is the world's most popular coronavirus tracking”

“Can you tell us more about that? Like what is China doing that India can also, you know, uh, start working on like what India can learn from China?”

answered: “I think the biggest evil that India adopted ever was socialism.”

“Yeah, it has a lot of companies, like around 50 to a hundred companies. How do you build a differentiator mode?”

answered: “But I think the market is so large... space for a lot of people to succeed.”

“Is it just one time, 1200 dollars. What is your cost that you have to incur, like, in terms of parts, majorly?”

answered: “we would be gross margin positive if it wasn't for tariffs.”

“When building today has become cheap, what has become valuable now?”

answered: “when you say building has become cheap... I want to question that”

“So you are coming to another home. This is your place, right?”

answered: “So that shows that you went out of your way. And many of those founders”