The Wisdom Wall, every show

“investing in technology, uh, you really have to be in deep in the tech to be good at it. And I think that it's very possible as, you know, people get older, you know, they get less into it sometimes. And so, you know, at that point we got to make a change.”

“You can't, you're not going to solve the prison problem by not enforcing the law. Like, that's just, you just make the, you punish the victims on behalf of the criminals at that point, which is, I think that's a very dangerous thing for a society to do.”

“All the knowledge in a company is with the individual contributors are doing the work and the customers that like, there's no There's no knowledge with the people who are talking to you as CEO who are on your staff.”

“Don't try and fix them. They can't be fixed. It's not going to happen.”

“all the things that you perceive that are happening to you that are bad, you know, be it like the systems against you or somebody undercut you or racism or sexism or this or that or the other is very small compared to like, it means a lot if you believe it, you know, if you believe what people say about you, if you…”

“maybe the single best, uh, thing that you can do to improve the world is to build a company that, you know, Deliver some product or something that, that improves the world. Like that is actually, that's the thing. It's actually better than, um, has a better impact than any kind of activism or, uh, political activity or…”

“So every piece of network infrastructure you need to make AI work, Is, is in this new technology that's invented”

“probably the, the one thing we could do to lose to China is try and use policy to beat China.”

“the way around that for America is highly automated factories, which are almost impossible to build if you have union labor.”

“we want to do well and do good is probably a pretty dangerous phrase in retrospect in that, um, You know, you kind of want those things aligned. So whatever the company produces is going to make the world a better place like that. And you kind of want to stop it there. If it's like, okay, we're going to go get the…”

“I think there are like a few kind of important issues around that. One is, you know, really arrogance in that, um, I think, you know, we in tech and a lot of the people who went in are like, oh, we're the good guys. We're for the good and everybody will love us when we get there and we can just push our agenda on, you…”

“AI is what communism actually is a massive concentration of power and blockchain is what communism is advertised to be, which is power to the people.”

“So if you hire somebody on race and gender through the urban talent department, instead of through the normal talent department, through the fucking side door instead of through the front door, because you can't see the talent, then you're never going to be good at inclusion.”

“look, I believe in artificial deadlines. I believe in playing one against the other. And I believe that you have to do anything and everything possible short of Immoral or illegal to get the damn deal done.”

“My experience with engineering has always been that if you freeze engineering hiring for a year, engineering gets way better.”

“It does get down to, look, there are times when you need so much precision that, like, if you're gonna lose somebody in the whatever war for talent because they got their feelings hurt, well, that's just gonna be how it's gotta be, because you need to Teach that Sun Tzu object lesson, like, somebody's getting their…”

“And a lot of people come out of Stanford or, you know, uh, Berkeley Computer Center don't understand what that means, um, and don't understand what it means to do something bigger than yourself. But if somebody's been in the Marines, um, or, you know, and decided to do that, like, you really know what that means, and…”

“Any problem that you have can be solved with enough infrastructure and money. And so until we run out of problems, we're not going to run out of demand.”

“the one thing we all knew in startup world is that if I have a two-year lead on you, and you try and cast me by hiring a thousand engineers, you're gonna wreck your company. Like, that never works. It's a mythical man month. Nine women can't have a baby in a month. Like, that's it. Like, that never works. Ok, now that…”

“When AI becomes the interface for everything, every tool we have, every technology we use is going to be built on these models, and the models are not objective. They have opinions. They have strong opinions on things like history, on culture, on values, and those are very different depending where you are.”

“if you kind of lock that up, lock that capability to understand vulnerabilities, then the only people who will be able to understand vulnerabilities are the bad actors who jailbreak the system.”

“you really want people to hate you and you want people to love you, but you don't want to be neutral. You don't want to be lukewarm. Um, because then you're uninteresting.”

“If you have enough money, uh, and some good data, you can buy enough GPUs and solve basically anything in software.”

“So it's very easy to replicate the code. It's very easy to move the data, and then it's not even going to be a human talking to your software. It's going to be an AI, and, you know, AIs are really flexible on how they use user interfaces, so That mode is gone.”

“AIs are really good at programming humans. Much better than humans are at programming AIs.”

“the whole motion of the old world Will kill you in the new world. And, and vice versa.”

“in the old world of software, the one thing you knew is you couldn't throw money at a problem and now you can throw money at a problem.”

“By the way, like technology solutions Work much better than policy solutions. That's it. That's the other thing. Like policy solutions, it's very hard to make anything work.”

“Now, if you have, uh, the data and you have enough GPUs, you can solve damn near anything.”

“If you haven't been at like Google or Facebook or open AI or anthropic and like somebody gave you hundreds of millions of dollars to try and build a giant model and you weren't like one of the main people, then you probably don't know how to do it because you can't learn it in school.”

“The best entrepreneurs will only work with the top tier firms because that's how you're going to recruit great engineers. That's how you're going to get follow on money. Like everything comes out of that. So you'd never take money from a tier two if you could get it from tier one. And so that's why the tier ones always…”

“And it turns out that the best time to raise money is when nobody has money.”

“With AI, if you have proprietary data and you have enough GPUs, you can solve, like, almost any problem.”

“with AI, if you have data, you know, particularly proprietary data, and you have enough GPUs, you can solve, like, almost any problem. It is magic. But it means that you can throw money at the problem. And we've never had that in tech.”

“the biggest mistake we make is we get too wrapped around the axle about some weakness that a company has, as opposed to focusing on what they're great at, um, and how great they are.”

“an investing team, like, shouldn't be too much bigger than a basketball team. You know, a basketball team is like five people who start, uh, And the reason for that is the conversation around the investments really needs to be a conversation.”

“investing is hard enough without like introducing other criteria other than is this thing gonna be a giant company and make a lot of money.”

“right now, currently, I would say that, uh, the complexity of the application itself is very high and is not subsumed in the foundation model. And so I think these things are not as, uh, straightforward as they appear and the benchmarks can be misleading.”

“the level of like, you know, I was completely wrong about everything, and now I'm going to fire half of you because I, of the mistakes I made will just cause you to hesitate in a way that could cost you the company itself.”

“the ones who truly Don't understand people are, don't actually turn out to be good CEOs. Like they, they don't get to that level. Like you can, you know, you can make fun of Larry Page or Elon or Zuck or so forth, but they are actually very smart about people.”

“It's not like making the old thing more efficient. It's a new medium. It's an actual new thing in the same ways that like movies weren't plays. Uh, you know, AI video is not video. The stories that you can tell are completely different because you can do things that you just, you know, without a. Million dollar budget,…”

“a great Investing strategy is to, if you see a company with a five-year plan, short it, um, and it works every time, and yet they still do it, and I, it just comes, it really has no basis in anything.”

“ideas that we thought would for sure get subsumed by the big models are becoming amazingly differentiated businesses, um, just because the fat tail of the universe is very fat and you need really kind of specific understanding of certain scenarios to build an effective model.”

“a bubble is a psychological phenomenon, um, as much as anything, and in order to get to a bubble, everybody has to believe it's not a bubble.”

“generally, like you, if you're a CEO, and you don't fly low and fast, It's going to be a mess because you don't, you never get the truth because the truth never makes it to you, like through your people.”

“Look, you got to get them to put enough, they're such a big company that they're going to lose interest many times. So if you don't have them write you such a big check that somebody in there is going to get fired if it doesn't go well, you're, it doesn't matter if you get the deal, you're going to lose the deal.”

“Usually founders, usually only one of the co-founders contributes long-term.”

“If everybody agrees with the decision, then you didn't add any value because they would have done that without you. So the only value you ever add is when you make a decision that most people don't like, um, and that's where leadership comes in.”

“the idea that you're going to take somebody who doesn't, who isn't world-class at marketing and make them world-class, and you don't know anything about marketing is a dumb idea. It just doesn't work.”

“founders, Can get to the next product. And that's something that, you know, almost no professional CEO is able to do. Like there have been rare cases, but very rare.”

“So the, the first idea that was wrong was like, okay, build a team of like senior executives, you know, as soon as you get product market fit as fast as possible and they can scale the thing. And I think that you got to build that team slowly and deliberately kind of pace to your ability to man integrate and then…”

“The job is fundamentally a leadership job, and it's a tricky leadership job because nobody is actually reporting to you. So, it's like this influence, how do I get people to do what I want, you know, even though I'm not paying them, I can't fire them, I can't promote them, and so forth. And, which is kind of the…”

“And one of the things we emphasize inside the firm is to look like we're investing in strength. Not lack of weakness. Like, I want to know, like, how good, like, are they world-class? Do they have a world-class strength? And, you know, can that beat anybody? And, like, everybody's flawed. And so, like, let's help them…”

“the one thing about bubbles is anytime everybody thinks it's a bubble, it's not a bubble because in order for it to bubble, you need capitulation in that you need kind of everybody to believe it's not a bubble because then the prices really go out of control. But as long as there's people who think it's a bubble, then…”

“there's this kind of thing in venture capital that a lot of venture capital will say, well, spend all your time with your winners. Um, like we don't believe in that at all. Now, like if you look at a spreadsheet, that's the exact right thing, right? Like because the, the, whatever, three winners are going to produce…”

“we're in this phase where it's such a profound change that anything you do like will work at least for a while. And so it's kind of hard to pass on any deal in, in that way.”

“It's pretty impossible to do drug to fund drug development if there's no M&A market.”

“if I was running the democratic party, I would say, okay, look, we either have to, we gotta go full rebel and like, then we can't be like, we, we actually have to be against CNN as well as Fox news and all this shit. And the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and every single one of them. And we got to be like…”

“I would never, like, I think there's no reason to like tell your primary story through the press. I think that's very dangerous.”

“politics, Um, would be the number one thing I would say don't try at home, uh, in that, uh, it's so, it's almost always, you know, and I'm saying this as a kind of firm that's gotten very involved in politics, um, but it was, unless it's necessary, uh, It's, it's very tough.”

“when we started the firm, um, we had shared economics like every firm does, but we didn't have shared control, and that gave us a giant advantage over every other VC that had shared control, Because if you share control, you can't scale, because if you share control, you can't reorganize.”

“philosophically, very kind of early on in the firm, always felt that what we're looking for is great strength. And like every person has a weakness, um, or has weaknesses. And some of them show up in like crazy ways. Um, but that doesn't even matter because everybody's got that. What matters is, are you world-class or…”

“if you're truly gonna have a breakthrough, you have to, Kind of get to something that the world doesn't understand, um, that, that, that you see. And like, if we can see it, you know, like that, it's not a breakthrough.”

“So the, the thing that Mark and I, um, knew from like our experience in starting companies was It is just as hard to start a small boutique thing that means nothing in the world and build it as it is to build the world-dominating monster. Like it's no more amount of work to do the latter.”

“in venture capital, the top firms often remain the top firms for a very, very long time. And the reason is the best entrepreneurs will only take money from the best venture capital firms.”

“the great thing about venture capital is picking is a small part of the game. Um, it's who gets to pick, uh, is as important.”

“the worst solution is less police. The right solution is better intelligence, you know, which gets you better policing.”

“the companies are very big, but the, uh, moats aren't very wide. Uh, so the way to think about it, it's like we're basically at search in the, on the internet circa, 1997, when there were 37 search companies, none of them called Google.”

“particularly if we get, um, better blockchain crypto regulation, that we actually have a very good technological approach, um, particularly for politicians, um, and people in, you know, public figures, um, to basically digitally sign content they're in, put it on, Uh, the blockchain, have those blockchains be…”

“if somebody's super dismissive about something, that's a great thing to study, because it's almost surely not a dead zero, right? Like, it may not work, but there's no way it's as bad as they're, you know, saying it. If somebody says something is like A scam, or a Ponzi scheme, or a bullshit, or this, then that's…”

“Like in our business, we look at companies this way. You know, if a company has nothing wrong with it, you know, that's not a reason to invest. Um, it has to have something truly great about it”

“which is also why I think that for CEOs, you can't do consensus hiring because you end up with lack of weakness.”

“The problem with that model is when you get to succession, that person, uh, does not have the qualifications to run it. And, you know, like people, it's hard to get people, uh, who are good at running the company enthusiastic about working for a person like that, because they're not kind of setting the direction in…”

“And as a shareholder, I'd rather have somebody on the board who owns a lot of the company and has skin in the game with me and is representing me than somebody who owns no shares. Uh, and it's like literally a professional board member that, you know, sits on eight of these things and it's, you know, kind of yappity…”

“you can't just, you know, build things, you know, fat and happy the Silicon Valley way. You can't have, you know, like you can't focus on free lunches and organic juice and all that stuff. You really have to focus on cost.”

“because like in order to actually, if you're really gonna replace actual work and people, you need to start a new company basically. I mean, it's very, very hard to go in and re-engineer the way, you know, Good luck re-engineering the way Boeing works, given it's run by an accountant.”

“I think if you were a startup, And you were like, okay, in two years I can get as good as GPT-IV. You shouldn't do that. That would be a bad mistake.”

“if you incentivize, if you pay the CEO based on earnings per share and particularly quarterly earnings per share, which I think we did at HP or at least annually. Um, you know, if you optimize for that, you can do things that would undermine long-term productivity”

“That's how the spreadsheet's not actually the business, you know, despite what you may learn in business school.”

“And it's also like, it's a way to do, uh, A reduction in force in a way that's not as, um, or doesn't feel as draconian as you go. Well, like your job's still here. It's just move to Singapore. So if you'd like to live in Singapore, we'd be happy to have you. Um, and then, you know, all of a sudden you have fewer…”

“companies don't know where that second level is, and they often think it's way, way, way lower percentage than it really is. So like what's a 50% cut might get you into, they think happens at 12%.”

“the model, um, that seems to work the best in the U S anyway, is the model we used in the space program, um, which kind of created the chip industry, which was okay. If you can build this chip, then we will, uh, become a giant customer. And that's sort of what they did with warp speed. They said, look, if you can make…”

“inflation is probably the single biggest transfer of wealth from, uh, the, the regular person who kind of has their assets in cash and the wealthy person who has their assets in stocks, real estate, you know, kind of things that, uh, inflate”

“So I think that if your ambition is to be a world leader or like a billionaire or something like that, that is really not a good path trade school. I don't think for those kinds of ambitions.”

“I think if you lose the student, you're done. That's the end of the whole thing. Like, it doesn't matter what the faculty think. It doesn't matter what the alumni think. It doesn't matter what the donors think. It doesn't matter what anybody thinks. If you're not attracting and developing, um, the brightest minds in…”

“if you can come from sort of outer space and network your way all the way to venture capital, that's also, that's more impressive than if you have a Stanford MBA or something like that.”

“when we evaluate deals, what we always find is like the most impossible thing to evaluate is the size of the market, particularly if the product is gonna create the market.”

“I don't think so because, um, you know, like, look, if you don't have a new novel way to do something or, um, or create art, then, then sure, that's going to be better than what you do. But like, if you look at hip hop, You know, they kind of brought James Brown back to life, um, you know, with samples, and, but the…”

“humans are obsessed with humans. Absolutely fucking, like, totally obsessed with humans. So, like, a cheetah's been able to run faster than a human forever, but we only watch humans run against humans. We never watch cheetahs run. The AI can destroy humans in chess. We never watch AI play AI in chess. We only watch…”

“AI Causes you as an artist to really rethink and say, okay, my independence now is far more valuable. Because what I create can then be remixed, and in order for me to get an interest in that remix, and that recreate, and that, you know, further use, I actually have to be independent.”

“when you think about the responsibilities of AI, I think, um, you know, the, the model is actually more analogous to physics. Like literally the study of physics itself than the weapon.”

“The one thing that's always true is if the team doesn't believe in the executive anymore, it doesn't even matter. Like, they can, like, say whatever you want to me, Ali. I still have to fire you because nobody's following you.”

“The other thing I'd say is, I think a mistake a lot of companies make is, You know, in engineering and in product and so forth, the knowledge of how your company works is really, really valuable. But in sales and marketing, the knowledge of how, like, other people's companies work is actually the more valuable thing.”

“And the actual truth, when you fire somebody, is mistakes were made. If you're being objective, it's It's always partially your fault, usually more than half your fault, if you're, if you're honest.”

“if you have a, uh, founder who's, like, say, telling you, like, some pretty aggressive, not true things in the pitch, then, you know, that's gonna be a tricky founder to work for, because it's very rare to have a person who, you know, lies only to investors and not to their employees and that kind of thing”

“And we thought there was a reason for that because it was much harder for a professional CEO to learn to be an innovator than for an innovator to learn to be a CEO.”

“A lot of times you'll see rules in early stage companies where, okay, everybody's got to vote thumbs up in order for us to hire this person, or everybody's got to score them eight out of 10 or better or whatever. Um, but with an executive, that kind of policy can get destructive very fast because typically the head of…”

“It's very rare that somebody goes, just like, whiteboards out like a market and goes, oh, this is a good blank space in the market, I'll go build that company. But those almost never work. The ones that work are some kind of earned secret.”

“venture capital works very much like that in that you hear people complain a lot, well, I don't know any VCs, so I can't get my company funded. Well, if you're going to be an entrepreneur and build a company, you know, Scrape and get customers and figure out how to build a product and hire people. You better be able to…”

“you hire for the strength, not the lack of weakness. And very few people do that, but it's a huge advantage if you can, because that's how you get greatness. You never get greatness if you look for, like, does the person not have any holes?”

“So running a company, you try to be more structured in how you do this in some ways in that speed is really important. So if you're running a company, you're kind of, your output is decisions and you rate it on quality and speed. And if you have to make the trade, which you always have to, you generally go towards…”

“CEOs only listen to leading indicators of good news, never leading indicators of bad news, only lagging indicators of bad news.”

“What Amazon is doing, I think, is a lot the right approach, which is, you get, you have one business. And you get it working, and it generates money, and then it can generate enough money for you to add another business, but you don't, like, have one business, and it's not making money, and you add a second business,…”

“In Silicon Valley, there's this thing, all that matters is product. Whoever's the best product wins, and this and that and the other. If you're short on product, um, and you, it's going to take you some time to get there, the thing that actually can make the company survive and get a good outcome ends up being…”

“the truth of this kind of decision is, you know, you make this one all alone because you're the only one in the position to synthesize the knowledge. And so if you ask somebody, should I take like a crazy risk and, uh, decommit everything I've committed to this point? Nobody's going to advise you to do that. So you…”

“we're much more interested in the magnitude of the strength than the number of the weaknesses.”

“If you're rich and you have 90 days to exercise, that's fine because you can buy your stock options. But if you're not rich, then you can't. And so now we've created this class thing.”

“And that's just a way of saying, look, if you're here, that fourth year is just more valuable to us. And, and I think objectively it is, but that's not reflected either in the current compensation scheme.”

“if you go in and say, well, my philosophy is that you as a salesperson can't have commissions because other people don't, then if I'm the very best, best of the best salespeople and I can make a million dollars by delivering real value to the company at Company A and at your company, I can make 200,000 dollars. Which…”

“if, as a leader, everybody likes what you do, you're not, you're a politician. Like, you're running for president at that point. You get paid to make the decision that's unpopular, right? Like, like, if everybody knows the direction the organization should go in, then they don't need you, right? It's when you do…”

“if you set it too low, then It's going to hurt your executive recruiting because, you know, with Google offering people like a hundred million dollars to stay at Google, uh, you know, if you're offering, if you say, okay, the threshold is ten million bucks, then are you going to be able to recruit executives?”

“I think that people often think of big companies can't innovate, little companies can, but the real truth is Uh, new companies can innovate, and companies that are so old that the original inventors are gone have a lot of trouble doing it.”

“I think that people expect, uh, kind of, sort of expected that, oh, well, if we just focus on building software companies like Silicon Valley, we can be like Silicon Valley, and that's been Uh, largely a mistake in that you can apply, you know, policy and tax breaks and even have a good university, but Silicon Valley…”

“Leadership is when the group thinks one thing, and you think something else, and you're not sure, but you're Pretty sure you know more than they do. And you make, and you have the courage to stand up and make that decision.”

“as CEO, you kind of, like, your output is the speed and quality of decisions, and speed is actually more important than quality in a lot of ways, because you have to keep it moving. You've got to keep the company going, because if you wait on a decision, everybody who works for you is waiting, um, and that's CEO…”

“So everything out of academia is going into open source, um, and then everything out of Google is being open sourced, and Facebook, and so forth. So it's really hard, uh, To do a proprietary breakthrough, like, you know, in, like, ok, I've got something that's, whatever, better than CNNs or better than, like, what's…”

“battery technology is probably the most exciting thing going on, and if, you know, if I were to say, okay, why am I confident that we're not going to melt the earth, um, probably the, the, the biggest thing is, You know, if we could just have batteries like in power grids, um, and not run them at peak capacity, that's…”

“those are the only things, things that you believe, That everybody around you doesn't believe, when you're right, That create real value in the world. Everything else people already know. There's no value created.”

“And I think the government is particularly Ill suited to do the latter, particularly over time. It's just not a good government function, but they're very good at setting the rules because they can enforce the rules. So I think that that's kind of a combination you want that the government sets and enforces the rules…”

“Well, the first principle is if you're trained in old media, it's very, very, very hard to do new media. Um, so you have to be a very exceptional person to make that transition because It's like, if you spent 10 years doing old media, there are laws of physics, there are rules of the game, there's things that you do…”

“My, my old mentor, Andy Grove said to me, he said, Ben, when you're a leader in an industry, then the whole industry, um, the size of it, the ethics of it, the morality of it kind of depends on you.”

“In the new kind of world, there's unlimited channels, there's unlimited formats, um, and so the key to winning isn't not making a mistake, it's being interesting. Like, if you don't say anything that's interesting, it's not going to get any pick-up, Because there's too many other interesting things out there.”

“The things that people got in trouble for, uh, canceled for, fired for, et cetera, in the past that they said in the press, were all just misinterpretations. So they, you know, with somebody saying something, and because it was so narrow, and because you could never erase it, and because you could never come back and…”

“this whole new world is much better for founder CEOs, because to be a founder, you have to have an original idea, and original ideas are interesting by nature.”

“The internet is here, so if you want to use AI, if you want to apply it to your business, you just do it. Like, there is no infrastructure that needs to be built to adopt the thing.”

“And the problem is if you create a system that tries to correct that, it doesn't make things more fair. It just, Transfers all the power to the person running the system. And that's what happened with Stalin. That's what happened with Ceausescu. That's what happened with Pol Pot. That's what happened with Mao.”

“Only the leaders got the context. So even if they're smarter than you, you still likely can have better judgment because you have all the knowledge.”

“most CEOs, Aren't as interested in investing as they think they are. Uh, and then also most CEOs aren't as good at helping somebody else learn the job.”

“So you need an investing team of like four or five people, but you, you have to, you can't address the whole technology market with five people. So you have to have multiple teams.”

“And that really, uh, Is a confidence game, for, for lack of a better word, in that, you know, it's very difficult to run an organization when you don't know what you're doing, uh, which nobody does when they're an inventor, and you get tremendous amount of advice, and advice that's often extremely bad, uh, and almost…”

“So like, I think it's dangerous to in VC kind of wait for the outputs because they're so far up, um, you know, to kind of wait and see, okay, does somebody have a great portfolio after 10 years or 15 years before kind of deciding what to do with them? Uh, it's just such a long time, and, you know, you can make a lot of…”

“and so by reducing law enforcement, you create a crime career path, and it Kind of lets us avoid creating real career paths for people in that situation, and so it's a cascading effect of just badness.”

“you're not giving them a shit sandwich. You're the greatest person in the world, but this is all fucked up. And I love you like that, that like people are onto that, like it's just too simple.”

“There's a big difference between taste and creativity and being a virtuoso violinist, right? Like those, those don't necessarily have to be the same thing. And it's great that, you know, people You know, whatever. Practice violin for three hours a day and like get amazing at it and all that kind of thing. But it, it's…”

“They hadn't been customers of the VC product, so they weren't looking at it through that lens. They were looking at it, you know, from the provider.”

“Because you can't market a company if you don't have a character.”

“That's probably the number one mistake is you just go, okay, well, like I'm an engineer, so I want a sales guy who can talk to me and understands engineering, and that's like, well, that's not a really good criteria for sales.”

“if you're in some kind of weird three-legged race that the CEO has constructed where everybody's got dependencies on everybody else, It, it just doesn't matter. You know, like you'll, you'll just have a lot of people go like, I know if I work hard, it's not going to make a difference. So like, why would I do that? And…”

“If I have the ideas about what your department should do next, if I, you know, am kind of pushing you to kind of move your organization forward, then that's no leverage. What's leverage is if you're telling me what you should do and how you can push the company forward, that's leverage.”

“And I thought Paul's genius was the ideas weren't his. Um, and that's was the difference between an incubator and an accelerator. Uh, and that I think, you know, just proved to be the right model. And the reason it's the right model is because whoever's building the company, it better be their idea.”

“There never eventually became a small number of software companies, despite what Larry Ellison and all those guys said, that there were only going to be three software companies and all that thing. Because it's kind of like, it'd be like there's only going to be three novelists. It's a creative art form. It's got a…”

“The, the collective bargaining, um, agreements tend to be very incompatible with technological change, um, which is kind of a very orthogonal, but salient issue to the general idea of collective bargaining, um, that it kind of assumes a fixed technology set, which is highly untrue in today's world, so there probably…”

“It's just as hard to build a small, inconsequential thing as it is to build a giant, world-changing thing. You work the same amount of hours, and so you might as well go for doing something important.”

“Unless you learn how to be A great employee, like some way, somehow, it's hard to be a great CEO.”

“It's always very dangerous when you get the feeling the entrepreneur is telling you something that you want to hear, but they don't believe. Um, so when that kind of distance comes in, you know, you, it very reliably is not going to work.”

“There's no way those same six people are going to know everything about crypto. It's not even possible. It like these fields are too deep and not only the technology, but also the whole entrepreneurial ecosystem. And so you need separate teams to address these separate, very large markets. Uh, whereas before you just…”

“they told themselves other things like we're very humble, so we don't market in this kind of nonsense, um, which is always a rationalization for laziness.”

“If we can't contain crime, we're never getting to, you know, recidivism. We're never getting to mental health. We're never getting to addiction. We got to, you know, get ahead of the curve on the most urgent thing, which is, you know, people are getting robbed and murdered, and we get a handle on that, then, then, then…”

“Because that is what makes you continue as a criminal, is that you can't reenter life”

“The, the right solve is technological. It's not actually policy, um, but policy can destroy the technological answers.”

“Anthropomorphize the machine in this fucked up way, you know, like in a way that's just not realistic. I mean, when we do that with everything, you know, as humans, we like think of everything as us. But yeah, it's a big giant. I mean, you know, like it's literally a gigantic equation that searches through the space of…”

“memes are, you know, can have value and meme coins can definitely have value in the sense that, you know, that it's sort of a virtual good. Um, it's a little different, you know, it's a different, it's a new kind of virtual good in that, uh, you know, they're very fungible. There are many of them. Um, but you know,…”

“The original inalienable right was to the pursuit of property, um, right? Not the pursuit of happiness. And that just sounded a little too capitalistic, but I think property is more accurate because it's an expression of freedom.”

“when it's just a ton of humans doing stuff, like it's naturally corrupt. Uh, you know, oh, you want to build a house? Well, guess what? I'm in charge of the permit, you know, and I, you know, I need to eat too. You know, of course that's going to happen. Um, but you know, if these things become automated, then, then…”

“general management, the way you describe it, is fake, and I don't think that In my view, like, if you can manage a soup company, you cannot manage, you know, meta.”

“the CEO, um, has to be, as one of the things that they do, has to be like a world-class fundraiser. Like, they can't be, you can't be, you know, like, I don't like to raise money. You know, like, look, we have a lot of software CEOs who are like, I don't like to raise money. I don't want to talk to investors. Like, F…”

“The test for whether your idea is good is how much can you charge for it? Can you charge the value? Or are you just charging the amount of work it's gonna take the customer to put their own wrapper on top of OpenAI? Like, that's the, the, that's the real test to me of, like, how deep and how important is what you've…”

“Like you have a plan. Now let's go execute it. Um, and we're all executing to the plan, and we're not really planning to change the plan much. That can be done more effectively, probably remotely than putting everybody in the same office, because you're not, you know, whatever, um, talking about random stuff, you know,…”

“the older you are, the less productive that is. The younger you are, the kind of being in the office actually helps a lot.”

“Anything that lasts long enough in particular, I think, um, any institution that outlives the people who started it, um, can very quickly run into this problem because the more successors you have, the more they tend to mimic the old way of doing things without necessarily knowing why.”

“if you wanted to change it and you were hiring the president, you would want a president who was capable of basically tearing down and redesigning the entire system because it's not just good leadership that, that will not get it done.”

“to give up on the need for consistency. Like, once you let go of that, you become much, much smarter, I think, um, which is, uh, you know, quite a big, uh, quite, quite a big advance in life is to, you know, at that point when you say, you know what, I believed that yesterday, and, uh, I no longer believe it today,…”

“If chat GPT can write it, you know, without you prompting it not to write something obvious, then you shouldn't use it.”

“Um, like for every one creative, there are now like nine billion critics.”

“if, if you don't get strong enough conviction to be almost uninfluencible, it's very hard to build a company”

“by concentrating power, a hundred percent in the government, you remove and following the communist philosophy, you remove the carrot from society. There is no incentive to work hard, to earn more money, to have a better life for your family. That's gone. And so you're left with Only the stick.”

“if you have somebody who's really doing the job, what you always find as CEO is they're kind of teaching you about how the function should expand, how should, how should it grow, and if you're giving them a lot of ideas, like more ideas than you're getting out, then that's probably not going to work.”

“Like go buy the knowledge, go buy the acceleration as opposed to, and I don't really care how much potential your internal smart MBA who doesn't have any experience has like, you know, the, the idea that they're going to run worldwide sales for you if you've got a killer product and get that done fast, it's, it's…”

“you have to take his job. You do not have to take his dignity. That's not, that is not necessary. And I think that, that just goes a long way also for the people who are still in the company.”

“I once had an executive came and he had read like the Stephen Covey, Seven Habits, a highly effective people. And he's like, well, what I'm going to do is first I'm going to seek to understand and then be understood. And I'm going to spend like a month, like just talking to everybody. I was like, you're going to be…”

“That's not how you move culture through an annual performance review. Like, this is a daily thing. People have to face it daily.”

“you can't say, okay, people are going to behave according to the values on the wall. They're going to go, oh, that person who just got promoted, lobbied the CEO for six months, took credit for her work, did those things. That's your culture. That's how that gets set, because when I'm coming in, that's what I have to do…”

“I was like, Stuart, we have to pay commissions. Like, we're not, like, this is sales. It's a prize fight. No prize, no fight.”

“whatever your culture is should support your business strategy. It shouldn't be what you borrowed from Jeff Bezos, because he built a different company than you're building.”

“there's nothing more unpredictable than macroeconomics. Like, it is a very, very complex Complex system. You know, it's path dependent. It's not analyzable. You know, everybody's always making predictions, and they're always wrong until they're right, like a broken clock.”

“Well, look, I think in order to accomplish that, you really have to be the board member that controls the board. So if you're like a board member and you're the third strongest person on the board and you have a trust relationship with the CEO, that's not going to get it done for obvious reasons.”

“getting to that next product after you get the first product, getting to the next product market fit required an innovator, and so if you wanted subsequent product cycles, you needed the founder”

“a firm shouldn't be just a group of independent people who all had their own isolated networks. The network should be kind of owned and run by the entity itself.”

“But that's now changed both kind of in market size and then also in strategic value because the developers are the people who decide what cloud you're going to use. And cloud is probably the biggest business to business market there is. So, you know, as a market, as something to invest in or something to work on, the…”

“I think if you're very young, then you have mostly disadvantages in starting a company in that you don't have that big a network. It's gonna be harder for you to hire really great people. It's gonna be harder for you to raise money.”

“There are VCs who are like, well, I'm gonna focus all my energy on the winners. Well, the winners don't even need your help.”

“So if you get to the investor through somebody that they trust, that shows them something. Do you have a connect that's like real, that VC trusts, and I would try and go in that way, because that's going to mean something. They're going to take you more seriously. Than somebody just, like, shooting a business plan to…”

“the logic of management is not very complicated, and you can understand all the management theory. It's just not that hard, but the emotional, psychological complexity of doing it Is incredibly difficult.”

“the four-year education, general education, doesn't work that well in the modern economy because people are switching careers very, very often every, you know, two, three years sometimes. And, you know, like four years and then you never go back to school for the rest of your life doesn't make any sense at all because…”

“And the dangerous thing about that is you don't actually own your strategy till you're generating money.”

“budgeting is very much like a two pass compile. So what you want to do is have like a very constrained Thing with, like, the goals that you want, and run everybody through it, and then, like, see how much they burst into tears, and like, where their problems really are, and then do the second pass, saying, okay team,…”

“keep in mind that more money doesn't necessarily mean bigger and better vision. It can actually mean smaller and worse vision and bankruptcy.”

“Well, it's who you are, it's how you behave, it's your way of doing things, you know, it's not free lunches and yoga and dogs at work and all that other stuff, right?”

“it's hard to rewrite the world if you're too steeped in the world.”

“If we're just talking pure compensation, then I think cash is actually a better vehicle than stock, because one, like, stock is variant, and you may not get paid not because you can't invest, but because the thing goes to zero. And is that really your fault as an employee? Probably not. It's probably the CEO. It's…”

“if you have a 10 year exercise, there is potentially an incentive for people to leave in the sense that I can walk out with my stock that I have, and I can get a brand new offer from a new company.”

“So, you know, it really probably needs to not be one size fits all. I think that if every company had a different scheme, You do get into a weird thing for potential employees and recruiting, so I think we might do a disservice to the industry by doing that, but there might need to be, say, four or five standard…”

“And so they ended up, although they started out with an inside motion, more of a bottoms up motion being much more of a top down motion generally as it went on. And that channel strategy actually is, I think in retrospect, what won them the market against the other startups in the field.”

“In fact, in a way, it's the most important part of your company to have great culture in because it's the part that represents you.”

“Speeches don't do anything, but like an object lesson like that, cut his head off. They're like, okay, like everybody learned that, and nobody's ever going to forget it. You give an all-hand speech, nobody's going to remember it tomorrow”

“management books are written almost entirely from the perspective of peacetime, and so that, that was the thing that I was trying to get out. They're designed to make it look simple, and so then a lot of the things stylistically that come out of it, like one of the things that you always get in management books, um, is…”

“people who are super successful go, yeah, I'm totally passionate about my work, but it didn't start that way, right? They, they're passionate because they're successful. Like, they're, they're great at it. They love doing it, you know, like, if they sucked at it, they wouldn't be passionate about it”

“It's better if most people aren't entrepreneurs than too many generals, not enough soldiers.”

“it's amazing that how weak that correlation is between what people get when they're hired and how well they do, you know, once they get there and how hard they work and how much effort they put in.”

“So the challenge isn't kind of the absolute number of jobs, but rather the transition from one kind of, you know, one set of jobs to another.”

“if software doesn't eat the things that the government pays for, then we run into trouble.”

“recruiters from a personality standpoint, to be a world-class recruiter, you have to be kind of a world-class salesperson, and generally, world-class salespeople, uh, tend to have a fairly self-centric view of the world, like that's what makes them good, uh, and, you know, that kind of charisma and attitude, and HR, on…”

“oftentimes if you have a super pronounced culture and you all live in a house together and, um, kind of have a unique style that, that can undermine your diversity efforts and can, and you can create an environment that doesn't feel inclusive to somebody who either didn't live in the house and isn't part of that group.”

“one of the things that, uh, I, I think nobody ever believes that their company is not inclusive. Like, I've never spoken to a founder. Oh, no, you know, we're exclusive. We don't let anybody in who's a woman. Like, that never actually gets said, and nobody ever thinks that. Um, but then when you talk to, to women, you…”

“there are times in a company when developing The people is the priority, and like taking the time to kind of enable everybody to kind of, to, to learn on their own and, and develop their own judgment and so forth is the right thing to do, but there are times, um, when the speed and quality of decision making is the…”

“the people who I knew kind of over-engineered their future at this point tended not to have the most success, because you just can't ever know enough to do it, so there's a lot to be said by kind of figuring out what you're good at, um, and Trying to just make a contribution anywhere in that field and getting to know…”

“So, like, if you can put skills together, that's also a big thing. Like, it's really hard to be, um, LeBron James. That's really hard. Like, you have to be the best basketball player in the world. Like, that's super tough. It's a lot easier to be me.”

“And it turns out that the best way to understand culture is through a significant revolution.”

“You've got low trust. You've got no long-term planning. The population's generally ignorant and superstitious, and there's very low loyalty. And none of this, none of this is conducive to winning a war.”

“The second is he created very shocking roles that caused people to change their behavior.”

“what you take out of the world over time, be it, you know, whatever money, cars, stuff, accolades, is much less important than what you put into the world. And so my recommendation would be follow your contribution. Find the thing that you're great at, put that into the world, contribute to others, help the world be…”

“we've seen it so many times where somebody gets to the penthouse, and they're like, oh, I want to do a new thing. But they don't want to go all the way down to the ground floor, and start at the bottom, fucking putting the building together. Okay, now you're in a fucking shotgun house. They want to jump all the way to…”

“The best thing on new media is have you done it? Have you kind of built some brand on something and some audience? Do you know how to build an audience? Um, because that's the core, core thing. Uh, and if you can't do that, then, you know, it doesn't matter if you've got this skill and that skill and the other skill…”

“power is sort of a feature of our offering is the way I think about it.”

“If you have shared control, it's very hard to reorganize, um, because, and you know this, David, as a, as a CEO, to reorganize, you need a single decision maker. There is no way to reorganize, um, if everybody gets a vote.”

“If you're the leader in the industry, then the growth of the industry is dependent on you. Um, like you, it's up to you to expand the market. Like, nobody else is gonna do it.”

“the concepts of management are easy. Like, The, you need an eighth grade education maybe to kind of understand management. It's not like physics. It's, it's pretty simple. Uh, but the psychological part of it is extremely difficult, particularly for a young person to be able to do.”

“one mistake is much more powerful than, you know, one good deed. Um, so, you know, one person being obnoxious, uh, who's in the firm or lying to an entrepreneur or doing something like that is causes much more damage than you can do by doing that correctly, uh, you know, five or 10 times.”

“What you're really trying to find is, are they literally the best in the world at a thing? And that's always the thing that's worth investing in, as opposed to, um, they're pretty good at a lot of things and, and I can't figure out what they're not good at.”

“The CTO has got to marshal the resources of the whole company to get what he needs to get the job done. And if you go to like a junior person, you're like five levels below you and make her cry. You know, you're probably right, but like, you're never going to get what you want out of her. So like, you can't even be…”

“And if you lose your confidence, you hesitate. And if you hesitate as CEO, then somebody's got to step into that vacuum. And then that's when it becomes very like. Political and dysfunctional.”

“as you grow, like communication becomes your biggest challenge. And so it's just a way to go like, okay, I'm gonna Manually unscalably fixed communication in this organization right now. And the, the amazing thing about it is does tend to be very long lasting where like once they get that, um, then, you know, it…”

“if he's doing a bad job, like no job is better than a bad job.”

“whereas like only Elon could have financed Tesla, normal people can start to finance these things now because Elon has shown that it's possible. So it's a little bit like the four minute mile on that way, I would say.”

“integrity only matters when it's tested. Everybody has integrity. Everybody's honest until it's tested. And then when it's tested, very few people are, right? Like when it costs you money, when it costs you a deal, when it costs you your marriage, are you honest then?”

“Well, if you, um, if you see something below standard, uh, and you don't correct it, you set a new standard. And that's, uh, that's very true. And that's why they have to be specific because if they're not specific, you can't enforce it.”

“I see young people wreck themselves so much because they have an expectation that something about life is going to be fair. Like nothing about life is fair. It's not fair where you're born. It's not fair. What race you are. It's not fair. Like what your parents did. It's not fair. Like the job interviews aren't fair.…”

“one of the very interesting things, uh, that we've learned as a firm is how unusual it is for a company that's been around a long time, um, and where the founders are no longer there to change anything.”

“Is, it's actually, it's more useful for me. Um, and you know, when I talk to like Ted Sarandos or somebody like that, they're like, oh yeah, that's a book I like. But you have to run a very large organization. And you, you have to have gotten beyond the things, the hard thing about hard things to start to think about,…”

“he's paranoid enough that he knew that that could be an issue, and then he trusted himself enough to go get deep enough to decide whether to do it or not, as opposed to, you know, ignore it. Like these guys are trying to kill me. I don't want to see it. Um, which is what a lot of CEOs do.”

“I think the mistake a lot of, particularly engineers make, is they just don't say what they think when they think it, because they're afraid of hurting someone's feelings, but that's how you save their feelings, because they're used to you.”

“if you've got multiple product architectures, that's gonna mean multiple SE forces, multiple post sales things, and your entire sales efficiency is gonna go through the floor.”

“you just don't get this good a market opportunity with this good an entrepreneur. Like that, that's the rarest of rare things. Like we, we see great entrepreneurs, but their market opportunity is limited, and then we see, you know, Companies that have a great market opportunity, but the entrepreneur is not big enough…”

“I always say the best cure for starting your own company fever is to start your own company and that'll teach you. It's not that easy.”

“the hard thing about a reorg is you're redistributing power. So you're going to have people really fricking mad at you. Cause somebody's losing power if you do it correctly. Uh, and that person may be like a really good employee. Dealing with that is the hard thing, like knowing how the organization should work to make…”

“If you find yourself yelling at people, like, you probably haven't explained what you want.”

“there, no, from this day on, no credit will be given for predicting rain, only credit for building an arc. And I think that's more true for CEOs than anybody. You know, you have to build an arc. Like, it doesn't matter, like, if you predict you're gonna fail, you still fail. It doesn't, it gets you nothing. Um, so what…”

“if you just have a couple of smart investors, um, but no culture to speak of, uh, Then you're probably not going to do a great generational handoff, and, you know, that's probably 10 years. It's a kind of, 10 years is a pretty good run for investors”

“so, like, culture, and, and just to define it, um, you know, first of all, it's, it's not a set of beliefs. It's a set of actions, and those actions kind of determine how we, uh, show up to work, how we treat each other, what we're like to do business with, what we're like to invest in, um, all those things”

“If you look at Apple kind of, and what Steve Jobs did in particular when he built the product line, there was no piece of software. There was no piece of hardware. There was no nothing that wasn't already done. Like, like all these ideas were done. It was the integrated, um, product line that, you know, with a design…”

“anybody who's ever had a great success, um, knows that the margin between that and a total failure, uh, is very, very thin. And the bigger the success, the thinner the margin.”

“where basically I see CEOs fail all the time, is in that hesitation between, ok, I see it, but I can't act on it, um, because there's just too much scary stuff between me and that.”

“I think people don't understand, uh, You know, you have an operation up and going and the way, uh, public budgets work, you know, you've got, you can handle today, but investing in anything in the future, even something as simple as coffee is, is just much more difficult. Like that, that process is gonna be a long…”

“one of the things that's almost impossible to do from a venture capital standpoint is cure rare disease, because it costs a billion dollars to bring a drug to market, and then they don't all work, so, you know, multiply that. Uh, and there just aren't that many, if rare disease, there's not that many people with it, so…”

“this, this is probably one of the most dangerous things in business is when personal incentives start to override, um, the goal of the organization”

“there's this whole, uh, field of distillation where, you know, Sam can go build the biggest, smartest model in the world, and then you can walk up as a startup and, uh, kind of do a distilled version of it and get a model very, very smart at a lot less cost.”

“So if you're trying to go head to head full frontal assault, you probably have a real problem, uh, just cause they have so much money.”

“this is one thing where AI is really good is, you know, medical diagnosis because it's a super high dimensional problem.”

“historically, um, companies have been pretty bad at, uh, kind of retaining knowledge systematically. So like there's what's in your people's heads and then there's, you know, what's in your systems and the kind of former is much bigger than the latter in terms of just a total body of knowledge.”

“if you do any cut, then you've broken trust with the employees, so you've kind of created a cultural problem in the sense that Okay. I gave you a job. I told you this was going to be great. And then like, I let you go. So I broke a promise. I broke trust. Trust is very important. See, if you do any life, you have to…”

“a lot of the kind of examples are always on very, very well-defined problems. Right. Um, but most, almost no interesting engineering problems are like really well-defined.”

“even a one-on-one meeting on the phone is much more intimate than a, uh, group Zoom. Uh, like a group Zoom is the most impersonal thing.”

“I think it's very clear to us, and we try to make clear to everybody in the firm, and I think everybody in the firm is very clear on it, that if we don't attract the best entrepreneurs in the world, um, that none of the other things matter.”

“getting the introduction to the VC Is a little bit of a test of entrepreneurship because a big part of being a successful entrepreneur is being able to kind of network your way to the right person.”

“if you invent somebody and then you need to hire a bunch of people to work for you, that's where love runs out. They're not all going to join on that.”

“it's always easy to see how it shrinks employment. It's very hard to, you know, predict how it's going to grow employment.”

“You know, there aren't, there should be more great movies. There definitely should, you know, given the, given the talent of humanity, but the, the bar to make a movie is so high, um, and requires, you know, so much money and, and so much coordination, uh, and, and lawyers, um, that, that is quite difficult.”

“So what a blockchain, um, would do in particular, I think for the royalties is you could just have these contracts be open. Published on the blockchain. Have the money come into a smart contract and then get sent out to all the participants automatically. No third party involved.”

“And that is like having watched executives fail, that's the number one thing they fail on is they don't have the context.”

“And like, what I always find if you ask an executive what they're going to do tomorrow, and they're new, they'll always say at least one thing that makes no fucking sense at all.”

“You know, when executives come in and they are good, sometimes they'll want to bring like a small piece of culture that is just incompatible. And I think that, that can be very insidious if you're not careful.”

“tell me what you did at your last company exactly. How was it built? How was it constructed to, okay, now imagine, like, you're here. How would you write this playbook? That'll screw people up if they've not done it, right? Like, if they only saw it It's a, it's a very tough question for them.”

“a culture is not a set of beliefs. It's a set of actions.”

“and I call that, um, that type of rule a shocking rule, which is a rule that you have that everybody wants to know why do we have that rule.”

“If you say, is this a good culture? Nobody's gonna say that the culture is bad if they're trying to hire you, um, so you kind of have to get into specific behaviors that you might think are indicative, or that you have experience in a bad culture, uh, and just see if they have those there.”

“I think the mistake board members make is they say things because they want to, like, sound smart and impress the other board members as opposed to saying things because they They know what the reaction might be, and how it might affect how the company operates going forward, and, and, and that's where you get a lot…”

“Probably the key thing on a shocking rule is that it has to surprise people. People have to ask themselves, why in the world do we have that rule? That seems crazy. And one of my favorite rules like that, of course, is Tom Coughlin's, if you're on time, you're late. That rule even sounds crazy. And the reason it's…”

“just because you've been a CEO doesn't mean you know how to teach somebody how to be a CEO.”

“somebody who's that perceptive on people plus a systems thinker is really the, those are the people who are gifted.”

“That is the one thing that is so dangerous when you're a CEO. You have to be in this mindset that you're making decisions. You're hard-nosed. You have high expectations of everybody. Your standard has to be very high, or it'll slip for everyone. You take that attitude home. It's not good. That's not the way you need to…”

“But as soon as you get into a formula or a set of principles or something you can just run, then you're not listening. And that's death in a deal.”

“So one of the traps on career advice is when you get it, you're not getting career advice for you. You're getting career advice for the person giving you the advice, and that may not be for you.”

“There has to be enough tension in the relationship that you're learning from each other, but not so much tension that you actually hate each other, and that's tricky. Like, if you're too friendly, then you never actually Ask, you know, a hard question to the other one, or say, well, I don't think you're thinking about…”

“when everything goes great, you don't actually need it. Anybody can be okay, like any investor will be okay, and you know, it's the same with executives. The real question is when things go wrong, and they always go wrong, who's gonna, one, not hide under their desk, and who's gonna help me get out of this problem?”

“Entrepreneurship is kind of like a mini-scientific discovery, so if you look at the history of science, like, most of the big discoveries weren't looking for what they found. They were trying to solve some hard problem, and then they stumbled into something else.”

“Well, like, building a company is not fucking fair. That's not what it's gonna be. It's gonna be unfair. It's gonna be gnarly. It's gonna suck at times.”

“there's no real generic advice that works. You can't say it, you know, it's for that person in that situation based on what they're feeling, and so much of that job is so emotional, and so much of when they screw it up, they're so afraid of the dark place that they put themselves in a dark place.”

“look, it's a relationship, and it's got to be a relationship where there's value going in both directions, where, you know, you're actually interested in that person, not in what you can get out of them.”

“If you more than double engineering in a year, that gets pretty hard, depending on what you're doing, because the communication overhead, the coordination is so intense in engineering.”

“It sends actually the wrong message to the team when you give them an unconstrained, like, resource to do whatever they want.”

“And what most CEOs do is they never actually kind of fully articulate out the updated strategy. So a very important discipline is to at least once a quarter just take whatever your old strategy is and re-articulate it with all the new things that you've added in your mind.”

“What happens with most finance people is they back down at that point because they're like, well, fuck, he does know more than I do, even if he's wrong. Whereas going, okay, like, let's just draw out, like, here's all the things you want to do. Like, this is what it means. Like, look at this. That, I totally agree.…”

“I think as soon as you start spending significant money or getting, like, significant revenue, it's, gets to be dangerous not to have a CFO. So, like, if you're increasing headcount at any kind of, like, fast rate, or if you're generating revenue, particularly if it's something where there's real, like, illegal…”

“you can't over focus on margin, and that's why we talk a lot about like cash flow break even as a big thing, just because it means you don't have to raise money, but margin against incremental revenue is more complicated.”

“The decision isn't actually that hard. It's the courage to actually make the decision that's nearly impossible and why nobody ever does it, because you're basically, if you continue going on your current route, you know, particularly if the company has got some heft and momentum to it, nobody's going to blame you,…”

“there are no local technology companies, right? There's nobody who sells, you know, internet search to Wyoming. That's not like a viable thing.”

“One of the things that you're trying to value with tenure is knowledge and not actually kind of the value of the work in a single point in time.”

“What I'm saying is because the vesting is back and loaded and the stock is going to go disproportionately to the people who stay longer that I can then afford to give out bigger packages because of the people who leave after a year are not going to walk away with that much stock.”

“And we've seen many founders have theoretical models for how they would like sales to work. And those have tend to be been like extremely unsuccessful.”

“there's no local technology business. Like, you never compete with the guys in California. You're competing with the people in China, India, New York, everywhere.”

“it'd be nice if, ah, it wasn't so important to entrepreneurs what their peers' valuations were. Like that, that is probably the most meaningless thing to focus your mind on as an entrepreneur imaginable.”

“The hard thing isn't setting the big goal. That's easy. The hard thing is when you miss a goal, and, like, there's, like, economic consequences to it, and you have to lay people off. That's the hard thing.”

“Um, you need to hire the person who is great At the thing you need him to be great at. The thing you need her to be great at. And may have some real other issues.”

“there were two big mistakes, uh, by the clean tech entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, um, of the last era. Uh, one was, um, there was a lot of investment in fuels, alternative fuels to oil. Um, and the challenge with that is, one, only one was going to work, and then distribution was going to be incredibly hard,…”

“So dogs at work, yoga, organic food, that's not culture. It's perks.”

“you create corporate values, and you put them on a wall, like that's not going to get you a culture”

“It's what your people do when you're not giving them a direction, which is, guess what? Anybody who's run anything, 99% of the time, you're not telling people what to do. They're doing it on their own.”

“if you don't make that explicit, it will just create itself. It'll just grow that way. It'll just do those things. People want to harass each other, they'll harass each other. You know, people want to lie to customers, they'll lie to customers. Unless you set it, it'll just be what it is.”

“the best way to know is actually to talk to a bunch of CFOs Ask them how they know what's good. What's the difference between a good CFO and a great CFO? How do you know that? How do you interview for that? Like all those kinds of things, that knowledge you only get from, you know, you learn a lot from interviewing…”

“Under no circumstances do I want to work with somebody who doesn't tell me the truth, like, consistently.”

“You kind of get the environment that you create. You get the people who will behave the way you do. And so, like, your flaws get magnified in a really horrifying way if, uh, if you don't work on them. So, like, I, I think one of the most important things to get loyalty is, like, you gotta really work on yourself and…”

“culture in a company is, is basically, it's like, how do people behave When you're not, like, looking. Like, what do they do left to their own devices?”