The Wisdom Wall

“I think you have to inject some misery in your kids' lives so they have that hunger. It can be fake because they know it, but you can't give them everything because otherwise they won't be hungry.”

“A term sheet is not worth the paper it's written on, but once you sign it, Both sides, I think you have to honor it. You know, many times, uh, we're out, we're, I'm on the board of a company, and we signed a term sheet with an investor, and then three days later, someone's interested in a much higher price. There's no…”

“the way I think about it is an operator who's running a company is a, if they're good, is a grandmaster of chess. The VC, and by the way, that grandmaster of chess, this operator, entrepreneur, Is playing this chess match somewhere between 60 and 80 hours a week. And is like, really knows this thing. And it's like,…”

“Like if an antelope limps in the Serengeti, the lion will take it down even if it's not hungry. Can't even fucking help it. Uh, it's just what is, what he does. And that's kind of the nature of most VCs. This, the, the nature of it is they will, if the, if you are on the Serengeti and limping, you will, you will be…”

“I never believed in saving cash for a rainy day. I feel like I'm a big believer in what we're building. I believe in where we're going. So if I believe in the future, and we're a really high cash-generated business, We should always be buying back our shares.”

“we see at Silicon Valley where, you know, kind of there, these guys get under pressure and, you know, they kind of feel anxious or whatever, and they decide that, you know, somebody tells them about psychedelics and they try it and, and they kind of come out the other end as a changed person. And, and they kind of come…”

“you gotta get off the ground, and you gotta break free of, of gravity, but then there's a point where you actually just want to sit in orbit and sort of maintain. You want to be within a certain range and fluctuate a little bit up, a little bit down, but be in this comfortable place where you're just orbiting. You're…”

“the moment they go raise money, they've cut off almost every option. They think they've expanded their experience and their opportunities, but they've cut off almost every possible off-ramp outcome because now they have to be in big business or they fail. That's it. That's one option. I mean, some people become very…”

“Well, to be really brilliant, I call it, there has to be a bend in the pipe. You know, whether it's through trauma or through your, your interpretation of, of yourself, of how that could happen... It's usually trauma from when they were younger... you put that trauma, compare with an innate talent, And it makes…”

“I always tell young entrepreneurs, don't give up control of your business to the VCs. They may talk a good game, but they're not fundamentally aligned with you.”

“The older you get, the more you try to apply your experience. And if you've come from an existing company, we may have picked up bad habits. I'm not saying we don't have bad habits at Dyson, but I'm saying you picked up the habits of that company, which may not be the right sort of attitude that we want. This attitude…”

“And I feel like the second part is always, uh, frequently, uh, missed was like first, okay, if these are, you know, doing effectively a lot of the, the, the, the hard integration work to solve the problem, but if you don't do the second step of how you actually learn the expertise and bring it back to the product, then…”

“they're fundamentally constrained really by, by two things. One is interconnection capacity, so there's not enough places on the grid to go put these big shipping containers, and the second is transmission congestion.”

“there's no financial incentive for them to come with new technology. Their only financial incentive is to go increase the size of the rate base.”

“every venture investor has made the mistake of selling to early their winners, every single venture investors, because if you look at the, at the great companies, they've compounded 20 years after the IPO.”

“And what the trick is, is to retain that founder in a company forever if you can, and for as long as possible. Because once you lose that founder, you do lose the soul of the company.”

“The way you do things is to put things out into the world, get feedback from real customers, see where they break, see where they don't break. That is the way you make a good product. That is also the way you make a safe product.”

“And the only way to get progress In a democracy is for that, for that politician who seeks to be popular when he's under threat. When there is a threat of disruption or instability is the only time you'll get progress in Western democracy.”

“Anybody who's a small player in a market, Has a natural advantage if they're well-funded is that you can gain market share very quickly and you can force the big guy to burn money.”

“the other way where there's asymmetric going the other way is, uh, recruiting drivers. So for instance, I could give subsidies to drivers. If I'm the big guy, I can give subsidies to drivers that are like, uh, they're like, uh, thousand dollars. If you join Uber and you're, you know, you do a hundred trips in that…”

“If you just go take the first term sheet, Getting around done will actually take longer because there's no alternatives. You don't have alternatives. And then it gets weird. And then the VC will just keep pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing, getting more, more, more, more, and it gets weird to a point where it actually…”

“When it's average, it's super important To tell a beautiful story that's woven, like that, that, that's, that's like a story that numbers are woven through. It's a, it's a, it's a beautiful, entertaining, interesting story with analytical numbers woven through it. And you basically get to what I would call QED, which…”

“The right way to do it is to start with a low price... So a lot of entrepreneurs, they go and they say, they really have a, remember I said, attached to a process, not a price. So a lot of entrepreneurs will get attached to the price and not the process. And you have to be careful. It's very easy to get sucked into…”

“The problem was that I ran too close to the line in too many situations that it, it, when you are big and important, The scrutiny and the expectation is that you don't run that close to line, even if it's correct.”

“pricing in the transportation space is the sum of all strategy.”

“if I'm telling you that you are potentially going to lose status, purpose, income, and security. And I seem just fine, and I'm smiling as I say it, automatically there's no trust between us. You don't even think of me as, barely as like the same species, but you don't think of me as being on your side, and you don't…”

“When you use a template, you are giving up on the possibility that you could be better. And I say this sometimes about AI writing. Your AI is a wonderful tool. I use it all the time. But if you are relying on AI to write for you and to generate ideas for you, you are putting yourself at sea level, or you're putting…”

“my thesis about all these companies, if you don't have someone that understands talent running the company, because you can always get an operator, if you don't have someone who understands talent, that company's gonna die”

“If you have unlimited time, unlimited money and unlimited people, you're going to build a blob.”

“All the best ideas that actually turn out to have an impact on something, they sound stupid at first. They're not intuitive because that's where all the Value has been locked up. It's been locked up in this misconception about what people actually want, because most people don't know what they want.”

“If you want to tell me ill-considered, uh, feedback on anything I make, you gotta pay me. And you can do that with Basecamp, and you can tell me.”

“the truth is that restaurants can't be successful serving lunch.”

“If you, if you tell me, is this an interesting city to open a restaurant in? All I say is, you know, find me two or three restaurants doing twenty million dollars or more. And then it's an interesting city. There's not that many cities in the world that have restaurants doing 20 plus million dollars a year, fine dining…”

“The most effective person in the world is no longer, uh, 10 times as effective or a hundred times effective. It could be a thousand times as effective in a particular area.”

“what we've observed is about six months after the latest and greatest model comes out, you'll have an open weight model that is just as good, um, and maybe costs, right, one 100th to go and use it”

“And so when you are leading groups of people, if you want to reduce the amount of politics and people going off and, and, you know, forming side cliques and all this, stop having one-on-ones, have big meetings with everyone who you want to tell something and tell them all at once. And don't allow anyone to send you an…”

“What's changed though is that unlike the Keynesian beauty contest where the winner is the one with the most money, in reality, there's a point at which you get enough money and you don't need more. And for the first time in history, the, the startups are not starved for cash. They have all they need and more. So now…”

“What we realized was, and this is what most people get wrong when they're trying to, to do this themselves. They'll, they'll take the reading of tokens or what's called, um, um, pre-fill, and they'll do that on one piece of hardware, and then they'll put the generation of tokens on another piece of hardware. But the…”

“Now bring in the LPU, and you can go deeper, faster, you can search faster, and so you can actually make a model smarter by making it faster. And so the realization is, and now that you've got this ability to reflect, think deeply, and change the outcome based on your thinking, being able to think faster makes you…”

“The biggest flip in my hiring was when I went from looking for positives, which is what you do when you're trying to grow talent, to looking for negatives, which is what you do when you're trying to select talent.”

“The music business taught me that The idea that people listen to certain records had nothing to do with their ethnicity. DMX was selling in Iowa. The radio station in Iowa didn't play DMX. Where Eminem was being played, was being purchased in Harlem. It had nothing to do with white and black.”

“because we have a single experience strategy, our strategy is literally a super app. We try to build first music, then podcasts, and books, and more things into a single product. I think our biggest risk is to ship the org chart. So if we divide it and say, everyone just run in parallel, I think it will feel very good…”

“The only answer I've come to as I've spoken to people there is that it actually has to do with tenure of leadership, which is one of the principles I've also tried to internalize Spotify. So they have very long tenure at the, at the senior leadership, which means that these functional leads have found a way to work…”

“The fact that I didn't know what I was doing allowed it to be true to what hip hop was. Whereas all of the records that were coming out, the few and far between, 12 inch singles every few weeks, they were made by professionals who made other kinds of music. They weren't made by hip hop people. So an outsider with…”

“A boutique system is generally bad and a studio system is generally good or can be good. The studio system was long gone. And studio system means your creative talent. All your talent is on the payroll. Boutique system is they're not on your payroll. They can auction their services. And obviously talented people are…”

“Clones don't sell. All hits are by their very nature unexpected. That's the most important thing to take away. Things that are data driven in their entirety can't be unexpected.”

“And so I always looked for people on the team that had some reason to have a grudge or a chip on their shoulder or something that would motivate them. If they didn't have that in life was really easy. Those were not people that I was going to introduce to the company.”

“A lot of people get complacent with the leaders that they have, and those leaders, if they're not at that moment as good for the role of someone underneath, that person underneath is going to leave and start a new business. So like you owe it to every single person and you owe it to your company to make sure the best…”

“Too low a float makes you more volatile, and if the valuation is lower and you can do a 10 to 15% float, you end up attracting better investors who can end up being long-term with you. If you push the valuation where you can't fill a bigger round, you end up with more volatility and less blue chip investors, and you're…”

“Your best people know how to use AI better than your mediocre people. And it's Not by some sort of linear function. It's, it's much greater than that.”

“You know, you look at the last 15 years, we learned very, very early on that there's no moat in software, which was an incredibly powerful lesson, right? All of our ideas, the things that we invent, people just try to copy right away, and it's easy to do that with software.”

“So actually, you know, what reflects the value of the network is, you know, are the people that you actually talk to and communicate with, especially the ones you communicate more frequently, are they a part of your network? And if they are, Then you can accrue the vast majority of the value in that network very, very…”

“And then over time, they work with that really passionate group of enthusiasts to, you know, grow into the mass market while preserving their premium positioning, which means high gross margins. Then they take those high gross margins and they reinvest in R&D, which widens their lead. And like, that is the story I…”

“almost all ad platforms start with that because you can grow very quickly and then you use that to invest in building out much more sophisticated systems.”

“There are no metrics in what we report, you know, to, to as a public company that customers know about probably or care about, frankly. And that always is quite bothersome to me because it's because of our ability to serve customers that can hopefully achieve, you know, strong financial metrics that investors care…”

“Those edges of the distribution are almost always where the anecdotes are that are the most valuable, um, that you have to pay the most attention to because they almost always will disagree with the data, and they are probably worth the most in terms of improving your product.”

“And it's hard to just scrape it. And it's one of the things I love the most about it. It's hard to just, you know, scrape all that information, say job is finished, and then put it through some LLM or something. Well, A, that data is always changing. B, it's not organized at all. And C, it's not just an, it's not like…”

“this maybe is like the core thesis behind our firm, which is it's, you're much more likely to build something important in the 21st century if you start with the founder and train them on management than you are to start with the manager and try to train them on being a founder, on creating new things.”

“our theory of it was what we call death of the middle, or we sometimes, the negative way to frame it is death of the middle. The positive way is the barbell, uh, which is what's happened in all these other industries, which is basically the, the industry gets stretched apart like taffy. Um, and, and, and what you, what…”

“the idea of a, like, partnership of equals or even a hierarchical partnership, like, it just breaks at some point because there's just too much internal dissension. It is too hard to coordinate, and then everybody's fighting for slices of what was viewed at the time to be a fixed size pie. Um, and so none of the, none…”

“Silicon Valley between, call it, 1950 to 2010, was primarily just in the tools business, right? Primarily the companies that, you know, starting with Hewlett Packard, the companies that we all backed and built were basically just building tools, and you'd build a tool like an operating system or a disk drive or…”

“Because the winning AI companies are raising, you know, 1,000,000,010 of billions, in some cases, hundreds of billions of dollars. Right. The old world of ten million or thirty million dollar, fifty million dollar checks, you know, where VCs tap out, it's just not a relevant, a relevant thing anymore.”

“And in fact, the people who invent the technology are often like the least qualified people to understand the long-term implications because they're just, they're too, they're too buried in the specifics of the here and now.”

“keep your costs low, keep your company as small as you possibly can and make great stuff. And then you don't have to find as many people just like you, but the ones you find really love what you do. And that's like, that's enough.”

“Well, like, a business is very simple. You gotta make more than you spend. That's a business, basically. Like, I mean, you can keep borrowing money, and then you can, you know, borrow more than you spend, and eventually you got to make more than you spend. So if you're making more than you spend, then your competition…”

“In software, you don't get that. Software can be anything. It's infinitely malleable. And what ends up happening is because there's nothing pushing back, it just expands forever and gets worse. Software slides downhill. It gets better for a while than slides downhill.”

“the reason I don't like the postmortems in business, and I know a lot of businesses do this, they do, they launch something, they spend all this time and energy looking back on it, trying to figure out why it did what it did, and my, my general sense is you'll have no F an idea why it did what it did. You're gonna find…”

“So it became more important at one point to be famous than to be great, because as a currency, you had to be great at one time to get a record deal, to do all that stuff. And then that sort of dwindled as, as time went on, which is just fine. But It is absolutely replaced. Great. And what you can do on the internet and…”

“Instagram does. TikTok does. MTV did. Constantly, the music, the streaming services do. For some reason, the music industry is allergic to a customer. Okay. And I don't know why, but they don't have a end user.”

“you can make a seven out of 10 solution to everything by copying the seven out of 10 that already outside in the market. But if you make from tabular erasers, um, axions, your own version of it, you have mastery over, even if this is a six out of 10, you can iterate on this. You can take this past the seven afterwards.…”

“So the, um, consequences of, uh, bad decisions in software engineering are an externality that doesn't accrue back to the engineers who cost it in almost all instances. So it's like a little bit like factories polluting the environment. It's just like, it doesn't cost back to them.”

“Like moment zero, zero interest rate phenomena, um, they're, they're, they're gone. People actually wrote better code all of a sudden. Like, it's, it's like amazing how much, like how consequential, like, um, the zero interest rate, uh, um, absence of zero, uh, um, percent interest rates actually ended up being, you…”

“I never begrudge anyone being an intelligent actor in the local incentive system. That is just, like, everyone's allowed. That's pretty much my morality at this point... You get too much out of the incentive system, or the incentive system tells you to behave in a way that is not congruent with the company, uh, the…”

“The people who read it are the people who are very, very good at following lists. So, um, the people that you probably described, not the people who go look for the cheat sheet, the people you are Trying to, uh, avoid hiring other people who would study the cheat sheet very well. So you just gave everyone a, uh, uh,…”

“the reason why they are my customers is because they have someone who responds to these questions in 24 hours. It's the other way around. It's causal.”

“The game VCs are playing is, is that it's kind of a blockbuster model. They're looking for exponential growth, and when they hit, when you get an Apple, or you get a Nvidia, or an Intuitive Surgical, or you get one of these Companies that just compound and compounds and compounds, you can get a hundred extra, your…”

“The real thing I learned is that, um, it's much better to put your own money in. I didn't have any money, I borrowed it, but I was, it was money that had been given to me by a bank, so it was my money, even though I was on the line for it, and my wife had to sign the house away and all our possessions and all that sort…”

“don't waste your time with lawsuits. He's like, anytime I got screwed over by people, he's like, I didn't sue him. I just realized that you can't do a good deal with a bad person, and I just moved on. He's like, the lawyers are going to suck you dry. It's a distraction from your main business. You just have to keep…”

“They were selling them at a loss for a complicated reason. Car manufacturers' emissions, which are controlled by law, are based on their overall emissions from their range of cars. So if they had- ... So if they had a, um, a model which didn't emit anything, they could go on making big gas guzzling vehicles in which…”

“marketing would get on selling things, not decide what product should be or how much it should be sold for.”

“not everything is always perfect about something which makes progress, um, and eventually you overcome the problem, but, uh, so not everything is better. Sometimes not everything is better, but the good overcomes the bad. It's much better than the bad.”

“every business is the same. Now, the details are different, right, but the business is. The blocking and tackling is all the same. And it's always about momentum and focus and loyalty and aggressive, ah, control of marketplace and monopoly. Monopoly. I'm a monopolist. If we were gonna build a business, you have to be…”

“if you start cutting a little bit here to save a penny, and you start cutting a little bit here and a little bit here, it's death by a thousand cuts. Then your food one day is not craveable. That's what's happened to so many quick service chains over the years. They've, they've messed with their quality so much. Then…”

“So, I say you don't delegate, you hire great people, you help them and do it, and if they do it better than you, then you can back off, and you make sure all those components of the business, look, I'm not great at IT, I have an exceptional IT team. They do it better than me, but I'm still into the details to make sure…”

“If it's special to you, hold on to your equity. Take the risk, get more financing, but keep it yours because you'll always be able to protect your baby. You know what makes it work better than anybody else.”

“If you're private, you give people these phantom shares or whatever the compensation plan is, they don't really know the value of it until they sell it someday, and it may be very different than what they thought it was all along. So from a, a compensation point of view, which is a big element of success in these high…”

“You look at the great CEOs. The CEOs have created a lot of alpha, a lot of shareholder value. They've been in each one of those 20 or so things. You talk to a Dave Cody, you talk to an Ed Breen, you talk to a Larry Culp. You can talk about any of those 20 things, and they haven't, they have things to say, and you can…”

“I say, when you bring a management team in, you need to ask them, what's your stock price going to be five years from now? And what are the levers that I have to believe that's going to get you there? And if that CEO tells you, I'll get, that's a great question, I'll get back to you, short that stock, or at least don't…”

“And, and if you hire the people from the adjacent, you know, industry companies And ask them to go do it. Well, they're just going to go do what they were doing before, right? And so that's not going to work. So you need a lot of creativity, and you need to sort of intuit your way to the answer by experimenting.”

“I also believe in this idea that, uh, if you don't have a crisis, make one, right? You know, you get people excited, motivated, and To drive the necessary change.”

“It's the number one thing why most organizations break down and why you need processes and all the other bureaucracies ultimately because there's no trust. If you had a hundred percent trust, you wouldn't need any of this stuff, and you would move much faster.”

“the truly greatest people, um, financially, if that's the only yardstick you use, typically do completely the opposite of that, which is they have oftentimes only one assets. Uh, maybe they'll have two or three, but they certainly don't have more than that. And they just go for that.”

“On audio, we think a lot of the problems that still exist are on the architecture side. We want to be solely focused on solving those architecture problems so you can actually get the best quality out there.”

“It's only important if you're playing a cost focused game, right? Like it's not vertical integration because it's fun or because it's cool. It's because we're trying to compete on cost. And vertical integration is a great strategy to win on cost, right? Electricity is a commodity. The best form of commodity is the…”

“One of them is, would I put my kids money into it? Second, if I only make 20 investments in my life, Is this one of the 20? Third, can I return the whole fund with this investment? And, uh, if I don't pass those three, I'm not gonna make the investment.”

“No one that's establishing great is going to join you as a startup. That means you have to have an eye for these up and comer people in sales and marketing, because the made people are going to play it a little safer.”

“Choose to architect your board the same way you architect your product.”

“If you, if you really want scale drone usage, they have to fly autonomously. You want to have a human Uh, surveying them, looking at what they're doing, and being on or in the loop, but the drones themselves need to be AI controlled and autonomous. It's the only way to get to true mass, and it's the only way also to…”

“I, I think it's 95% of a company's success is that. Everything else, like I said, is excuses. So regulation doesn't matter.”

“I do think it's in human nature to, um, have at least parts of the population that want to have conflict, that enjoy conflict, that want to, uh, you know, increase their, um, sphere of influence, uh, sometimes You know, that is political. Sometimes it's geographical. Sometimes you just literally want to have more land…”

“having done both, I think I can say it's like much, much, much harder to run a company than being an investor.”

“So I think we've focused Correctly. So much on model intelligence that on the product side, we have not yet thought enough about what it means to give a model more context than any person could have and help advise that person on, on their big decisions.”

“You learned some lessons from failure, but I think you learned way more from success.”

“We also learned the incredible power of external demos, uh, for like an eminent person that the researchers really wanted to impress. And then we learned a bunch of things that like didn't work like fake deadlines.”

“what you learn when you go and do what we did in China is you learn that when you go and take your business and go to China, you have to start over. So many people think that you can take your business and take it somewhere, which by the way, Uber kind of like trademarked that if there's such a thing... but China was…”

“being anti-competitive is illegal in the United States, unless you get a government official or regulator to do it for you, then it's legal.”

“You have to be careful of the ease at which you walk through it, because there is an extra power in being bothered by something that is wrong. You can get too used to wrong things happening.”

“humanoids have their place, which is let's call it low scale tasks in human design environments designed for humans.”

“the same amount of seriousness that you apply to the product or the code or the hiring You have to be applying to your story, and you're the only person who can say it. You're the only person who can do it that effectively, because you have, at the beginning especially, not a lot of evidence to back you up. You have…”

“The tech is the thing people focus on, but the utopian stories about tech, when you make tech the thing people focus on, they write it off as PR, and so I think what we want is for the utopian stories about tech, or the optimistic stories about tech, To have it in the background just be ambient.”

“It's the space in between the facts that ties them into a story that is our responsibility to fill in, because if you let people fill it in haphazardly, they might end up with any conclusion that you don't control.”

“Today, there's no such thing. Today, you have to be a generalist. You have to know a little bit about everything, and then, unless you're a deep scientist, and you're founding Palantir, or Anthropic, or one of these businesses that require extraordinary brain compute power, Then you are a specialist.”

“First of all, he shouldn't have been in the editing room. It's okay for Marty's agents to be in the editing room, but not the producer, unless the producer is someone incredibly close to him where they've done multiple movies together.”

“Every single art movement in history starts with portraits. They always involve the portrait.”

“if you're a builder and you get interrupted just a handful of times in a single day, that day is a waste, because you will never get into the flow. You will never get into this long stretch of uninterrupted time, and therefore you will not feel in the, not just mood, but moment to solve the deep problems you got to…”

“And the mouse is an incredible tool for learnability. Anyone who has just a rough conception of, like, how I move this thing around, they can use almost any app, because everything is sort of explained. But, If you're interested in productivity, it's a terrible tool.”

“And the misconception that I had, and I think a lot of people in the Linux world have had, if we just make it as close to Windows or Mac as possible, then they'll come. But no, they won't. Why would you want, again, the Timo version of Mac or of Windows? I don't need a cheaper version.”

“What's broken now on the social platforms is that my followers don't see anything I post unless it goes medium viral because everyone is now in the algorithmic feed. So I follow someone. It's just like this little drop in the signal and it kind of breaks that reciprocal exchange, at least on those social platforms.”

“if anyone, just so you understand, without even that much culinary training, could make you four or five dishes if they make the same exact dishes every single night, and probably get them to a point that is acceptable, right? Obviously, you need to be great for it to be great, but the whole difficulty of a restaurant…”

“even if you have a really intensive interview process, and you, you, you have, like, 10 rounds of interviews, right, and, uh, you interview someone for 15 hours, it turns out in two business days of working with someone, you're gonna have more information about working with that person, so we rely a lot on referrals.”

“I agree with, with Elon's philosophy of trying to find really smart people, in part because it allows you to find maybe something like a mispricing in the market by their junior summer, or after they've been working for five years, it's priced in. You're competing straight up with, ah, quant firms, AI labs, whoever you…”

“I think one of the most damaging things you can do to an organization, uh, is if there are folks who are getting paid similarly, have similar ownership, and are just not pulling their weight, because I think it leads to this, like, very tough, like, question and, and fair one for folks of, like, if I'm busting my ass…”

“The, the LPU and GPU, as mentioned, they, they're better at different parts of what's, what's called the decoder layer of an LLM. Um, the GPU is better at the attention portion, and the LPU is better at sort of applying the weights, which is the, the thing that gets trained as opposed to the memory.”

“That when an industry is booming, sometimes when it's booming because of the business model itself, mediocre gets rewarded. And like, and then over time it catches up. But in the beginning, mediocrity is applauded and financially awarded.”

“The SMBs that used to be flower shops and bodegas and this, that, and the third are now streamers, independent artists, influencers, podcasters, vloggers, and writers on Substack, they're the new SMBs.”

“Now, ah, it was to replace what Tom Schumacher was doing. It didn't work. The problem was, they weren't outside. They're in the building, they're all the time, and they're always know what's going on. Ah, so the notion of them being on the outside isn't, isn't true. However, what we discovered was they had this immense…”

“There's another reason why you didn't go to the brain trust meetings, is that in order to get the dynamics right, that the people with power, either real or perceived power, need to shut the hell up for the first 10 to 15 minutes. David Senra: And he couldn't do that? Ed Catmull: It wasn't that. Ed Catmull: The, the…”

“So paying attention to the dynamics of those rooms is the job. They're the ones that are making the movies. I'm not making the movie. I'm just trying to make sure they work well together.”

“the one thing that the director can't do, they can screw up in all sorts of ways, but they can't lose the team. That was, that was our guiding line.”

“a mission statement is an answer when typically we should always be asking questions.”

“If somebody violates a rule of common sense, People do once in a while. You call them on the carpet, you tell them you can't do it, but you don't make a rule so that nobody else makes the same mistake. Um, because as soon as you make more rules, then people are worried about what are all these rules? Who do I have to…”

“I believe that technology is a necessary ingredient for change. But not sufficient. I think you can cause havoc with technology, like piracy, but when things really change is when you take a new technology and marry it with a new, often contrarian business model.”

“You can't expect someone to come in, especially if they come from corporate America and expect them to like stand up to you, because usually there are consequences. You just get fired.”

“When things are stable, market share stays stable. You don't eat market share. So when there's change, there's risk. You can lose market share, but that is also when you have the most opportunity to, to eat market share. If you adopt the change.”

“if you're stacking a lot of things on top of each other, each one of those things becomes less important. So if you have 10 things, Each one of them is one 10th as important as one by itself. So if you're making something and you want the least amount involved, those things have to be really critically curated because…”

“a lot of recordings are made where the guitarist plays and then they double it and triple it and they create this like wall of guitars. And when you, when there's a wall of guitars, you hear guitar, but you don't hear someone playing guitar. You just hear guitar. It becomes more generic. When one person plays it and…”

“Sometimes for the sake of the whole work, removing things about it that you really love is part of the process. And instead of If you have, if you have a hundred percent and you know at the end you want to have 70% of what you have, like you have 30% too much, instead of whittling down that 30 to get to the 70, I would…”

“I'm doing a, a passion and belief. And he's doing a bottom line, what's gonna work? What's gonna be good for business? And it's just two different things, two different mentalities.”

“as soon as I liked it enough to share it with one person, chances are, it's ready for everybody.”

“if you were to Move into a house on the top of a mountain that no one could ever come and visit. And you made that the place that you most wanted to spend your time and you really create, curated it to your taste. That's the job. It's not about I'm making this to show off to someone else. I'm making this because I want…”

“I never say the word that executives use something like we're a big family here. We're not a big family here. This is an enterprise. Like my family's at home. Um, so we don't have all the angst around being a family.”

“you don't ever edit a fight. You let the fight play out and the fans determine whether the fight is good or bad and you can't control that. You, you, I call it the bells and whistles. We do all the bells and whistles And the fighters, we hand the torch off to them and they go in and they have to, they have to deliver.”

“The greatest line of all time is, you know, I want to start my own thing because I want to set my own hours and I want to, you know, take days off and I want, oh Jesus Christ, you should just stay where you're at and keep working for somebody else because that is not how it works.”

“You show up to any of my events. I give you full access, film what you want, create what you want. The other thing is, is most people that, uh, that deal with content creators, they try to tell them you have to do this, this, that, what the fuck do you know about creating content, right? Let these young, talented…”

“The features our creators need are boring and purely performance-based, and, uh, we, we have a saying in the company, like, um, performance is a, is a growth feature, and, you know, we put an enormous amount of work on raw performance features, scale features, those kind of things.”

“Well, now that's happening incredibly quickly because designers can ship code with, you know, all these new AI tools. The whole world of design is changing, I think, very rapidly, because now, you know, many of our designers are just empowered. If, if they've got something, we think it's cool. Let's, you know, let's…”

“The hardware business at its core is just so different than the internet service business that we operate with, with Snapchat, and, you know, even requires a different execution style, you know, with hardware, like, you cannot make a mistake, right? Like, the things that we are doing today will show up in two years…”

“A lot of what's difficult about DoorDash is we're trying to build a structured data set in a world that is chaos. That's the physical world. One of the reasons why there's all these sources for mistakes, for delays, for costs that ultimately, you know, yield into costs and good or bad, um, you know, experiences for…”

“within something like coding, the things that you could do today, um, where anyone actually, frankly, it doesn't have to be anyone of any function. Anyone can come up with an idea, run the prototype, run the experimentation and the analysis, and then actually ship to a small group of people all by themselves. Um, that…”

“Most of the information to run, you know, DoorDash to be a great service, um, you know, are things that we use for ourselves. And the reason why we use them for ourselves is because it's not just that simple like, oh, we just give away information, and then somehow someone's going to be able to do something positive…”

“Just because, like I said, I don't think an external impact is enough to keep people going, or at least I've seen way too many people who had a high level of external impact, and then at some point they just stopped.”

“we just have this, like, fundamental view that technology is, like, on balance an enormously powerful force in the world, and, uh, basically that the big problem with the world is that there's, you know, there's not enough technology, there's not enough information, there's not enough intelligence.”

“The problem with his argument is that assumes the managers are going to do a good job. Right. And I think if there's like one dominant theme that we're seeing in the last, you know, 30 years, you know, in the West, for sure, it's like managers generally, you know, writ large are not doing a great job. Or another way to…”

“the thing a manager never does unless they're under duress is, is, is reconsider fundamental assumptions. Like they hate that, like that, like, That's not the whole point of running something big is you don't have to do that. You get to run the big thing at scale. You don't have to like go in and like reinvent it from…”

“To get kind of the holy grail of the large scale organization that's still innovating, either you need two people involved who are able to balance each other. And by the way, you could say this is like Steve Jobs and Tim Cook, you know, would be a canonical example. Or by the way, early on, Zuckerberg and Sheryl…”

“Every company is a media company now. You should be publishing your own content direct to your own blog, social media. Some companies have their own podcast. Um, I don't, you never should be going, like, through, I, I, I really don't like this idea of putting information out of the company through, um, a traditional…”

“make stuff for yourself. There's probably other people out there like you who want what you want, and make it available to sell. So you are the customer, you are the audience, it's you, you, you, and then there'll be other people just like you. We're not all that unique. There's plenty of people who like what we like”

“the more massive an object, the more energy it takes to change its direction, right? This is just like, this is getting back to basic physics. A thick, when I think of this stuff, and sometimes these metaphors don't perfectly line up, but in my head, I think of like a thick business. It's, it's hard to change. It's…”

“I just think this idea of like, well, you're done at two 30 is healthy. I think the business lasts longer because of that. I think, like, if you think about, like, you don't probably get bored of a business like that. There's something about that versus this idea of a business that you have to maximize and fully fill…”

“Everyone follows everybody else because when you're paying so much attention to what everyone else is doing, you tend to just, that's the way you think it has to be done or can be done. You're not open to like alternatives because you don't see them anywhere. And then you get a people, people then build out of fear.…”

“a lot of people don't know what they like. They like what other people like. They like what they're supposed to like. Um, they live up to other people's expectations. They kind of run someone else's business in a sense. Not like an executive running their business, but People grow businesses that they think they have…”

“And, and, and, and it's not arrogance. It's just like belief, like, oh, I can do that again. And some people can't. Most people cannot. Or if they can, they don't reach the same height.”

“What you don't want are a bunch of outlier companies that you cannot afford to lose. You don't want customers that you cannot afford to lose. And so by equalizing our pricing and not letting anyone pay us more than anybody else, we create a bunch of small units, which are individual customers. And if you take one out,…”

“Look, there's a certain amount of feigned humility that's good, and it works. If you practice it long enough, you actually become somewhat humble.”

“What I realized when I met a lot of other people in the tech business, all, all the companies and everything, they're engineering societies fundamentally. And I find, you can't generalize it, but there are people that aren't like that, but for the most part, why software companies don't make hardware is they don't…”

“A lot of, like, companies are social technology in, in the sense that they allow us to go all in. Like, the only time you're really allowed to, uh, spend, I don't know, eight, I'm gonna say eight because that's the right number to say, really, like, fucking 14 hours a day, right? Um, just singularly pursuing a thing is…”

“It was a time we didn't have a lot of competition, so which is also, um, really, really hard for businesses. It's not a good thing at all because, um, again, you, you don't get, you don't have good rivalry, and you can't, you can't sort of Like, even if something seems really good, you don't know, because there's no…”

“Trust your gut is sometimes good advice, but it really depends on your gut. So it's like, um, no one, no one, uh, is born with intuition for building businesses because first of all, building businesses are completely, every decade is different.”

“They often, policies and processes are, um, sort of downside protection. Um, um, you're trying very hard to make, um, Uh, to, to avoid the people who do things wrong to be of, uh, you know, causing so much damage. That's like, like the downside protection, but you're also really limiting what the best people can do,…”

“I think there's just too much cross, um, pollination. You, you, you kind of have to sync the companies towards, like, um, entropy creates equilibrium, and so you end up, like, with the companies just being very recognizably similar to each other, and the activation energy for being very different is super high”

“Shopify loves the five person team. We increased to eight. Sometimes, but we think, um, the, the best team size is one, um, because like a single offer can do things that is impossible to do for teams and hit high notes that are unreachable.”

“they were hypnotized by Walmart. They were so scared about Walmart that they ignored us.”

“You could always, almost say nobody hardly invents anything, because they're always taking some other ideas and putting them together in interesting new combinations.”

“one of the reasons I don't like goals is I think very talented people, when they set a goal, they tend to do it. And that's why goals are interesting to lots of people is it's a great way to make progress. But I find it unexciting because the second you set some big goal, you kind of know what you're, what's going to…”

“I think, like, screw base rates. I don't care what the, I never care what the base rate is. Like, the whole, the most interesting stuff is outliers by definition. So I don't care what happened to everybody else. I don't care if, you know, there's common pitfalls. Like, I think it's important that people take their,…”

“If, if you're experienced, you know how, why not to do something, or how not to do something. Whereas if you're naive, and you're a young engineer, you're disqualified, or you're still training, you, you don't have that negativity towards certain things. And often it's, um, something that hasn't worked previously that…”

“So you, you've got to employ people during the winter when you don't need them, and then the summer you need more people. It, it's just a horror, seasonal business is a horrible business. Avoid seasonal business.”

“At that point, you're right to focus in on that moment because ideas are so fragile. And they're easily knocked away by anybody. Everybody. It's why experts are dangerous.”

“Because if you're doing enough experiments, um, you're trying to be logical what you're doing, but sometimes, uh, something occurs that's not logical. And it works. So you've just got to keep trying. Luck will happen to you.”

“It's partly intuition, but I, I don't believe in intuition is, uh, feeling or guesswork. Oh. I think. The intuition is much more interesting because it's all sorts of influences. It could be, it could be history. It could be all sorts of things that, um, form an opinion. That, that, um, you define as intuition, but…”

“because it gave me a, a sense of drive, ambition, and a goal-oriented thinking that any of my friends that didn't Grow up like that, sort of, either, it was binary, they either had it, or they didn't have it, and most of the time they didn't have it.”

“if you're sales driven, you're going to do exceptional customer service. You're gonna have more people on shift, right? And then cutting it shorter to try to save labor. You're going to, ah, you need highest quality products to do craveable, all those things that you do that do that, then you end up making more profit…”

“this is how you get weeded out of Keynes corporate is the people that Can't take constant, constant coaching, and it's coaching, right? You know, it's like, well, no, we should, we should meet every six months on a eval, and how we're doing, and blah, blah, blah, and all that stuff. It's like, no, every day is an eval.”

“People are like, oh, that doesn't scale, you can't do that. Bullshit, it's gonna scale because you're gonna do this for the rest of your life.”

“So first, I find the right industry. I find something that's large. I find something that's growing. I find something where it's fragmented. I find something where we can buy things at reasonable prices. I find things where technology is, would, would, could be used. It's not very tech forward industry. I find stuff…”

“But if when I visualize that person quitting, My reaction to that is pure terror and absolute panic, and like somebody took a baseball bat and just whacked me in the stomach and then punched me in the face. I'm like, oh my god, like I'm never going to find someone as good as her. No way, or I'm never going to have…”

“you buy a company, it's doing very well, and then three or four years later, you've doubled the profit. What did you do? You went in with a toolkit, and you went into the, attacked the pricing using algorithms and elasticity analysis. You've attacked the compensation, so you've got the salespeople made partners rather…”

“If I buy companies at significant lower multiples of profit than I trade at, So Monday morning at seven o'clock after we announced the acquisition, I've already created alpha for my shareholders. That's a nice way to start the week. Number two, if I then double the, the profit over the next three to five years, then…”

“I think there's a human instinct to, to say, hey, look at me. I'm doing this great thing. Isn't this cool? Right? But actually in business, it's better if the competitor doesn't understand or doesn't see you.”

“actually that sort of drive, that intensity, um, is, is actually something that can be taught. It's not entirely innate”

“I do believe that, um, Focusing all your time and effort on this one thing, um, and obsess about it, and almost to the point where you're not even aware of the rest of the world that goes on is what creates greatness.”

“I think that we also talk about this like in the long, long term, that advantage that we have today will hopefully still be there, but it might not be as big on just the pure research. That's why the other components, that's why the product is so important. And that's why the ecosystem is so important that we build…”

“And I think we are seeing that everywhere across AI companies of like, you know, the, the model becomes a platform, becomes application.”

“In that step, the, the, the hardest thing in any voice agent, uh, work is actual deployment of how you actually test that it works.”

“Blend will be increasingly important, and everybody talks about taste now, how, like, taste will be the finding front of, of AI, and, um, behind the buzzword, I think there is, there is a lot of truth to that, where, yes, increasingly everybody will be able to create everything, and, um, and what defines above good…”

“We, we initially, we are trying to create a perfect voice agent that doesn't do any, any imperfections. It doesn't sound human. And then of course the obvious thing that, that, that, that was the clearest is like the ums, the ums, the pauses, and suddenly the performance of working with that voice agent, like…”

“Um, so like even doing benchmarks for text to speech is extremely hard. Because usually different models will have different voices. That already makes them uncomparable.”

“deliberately allocating time in the day towards working on the business versus in the business, it helps you and like actually physically having a different notebook that was like a different color. And I opened the black notebook and I'm like, it's time to get creative like that. And I'm not in the office. I'm like at…”

“Starting with the why, I think it's a deep and secure need to remain relevant and prove to yourself that you're not getting old and you're not going to be out of date. I mean, if I look back on my career, uh, each time I remade myself, it wasn't really done out of vision or greatness. It was done out of fear of just…”

“When a company's working, there is no, there's nothing to do.”

“If they have to rely on me to help shape the product 10, 20%, we're in big trouble.”

“In order for that not to dominate everything else, you need to make sure that the rest of the population is, is sufficiently protected so that it's too expensive to try And, you know, use force to take what you want. That's basically what it boils down to. And if you could eliminate, um, you know, the outliers, let's…”

“You know, like that is an example that has stuck in my head of like force of habit and the way people do things and changing behavior. It's just much harder than like the tech nerds realize.”

“the most important thing that we can do is to create smart models and to be able to run them efficiently and abundantly for a lot of people. If we can get that right, I believe that everything else will follow.”

“So I used to be a startup investor, and the thing in my career that I have found closest to startup investing is managing a research program.”

“you get this unbelievable set of learnings and pattern matching if you really study and watch companies as an investor that has been super helpful to me running openai but it's it's like it's the opposite normal direction so it's just like a very rare thing and i strongly recommend it”

“Imagine if you have this equation, which is, uh, the derivative of problem solving DT. Uh, must always be greater than or equal to the derivative of problem creation DT. And if that's ever not true, you have a real problem. I call that the meta problem. So what's happening is, is that if you are creating problems…”

“Your network gives you efficiency, which then means you can get to a lower price point without subsidies that the competitor still has to subsidize.”

“if you are building something like, we've talked about Andrel, it's sort of easy to talk about because it's such a perfect case study from the past, but we've talked about RAMP or General Matter, these, you, you need to build a movement of people to believe something counterintuitive because you are Essentially…”

“The purpose of a manifesto is to make concrete that intensity and paint for people a vision of what the world could be, such that when they see it, They are willing to leave their jobs, families, security, everything, to go and make that happen.”

“it works better with that kind of founder, but you don't have to have traditional personal charisma. You can be more quiet, more introverted. You can, you can have a whole range of personality types, but you have to have intensity of belief in the idea. So the idea has to be fleshed out and coherent, and then your…”

“in my opinion, the greatest and most underestimated barrier between technology existing and actually having an impact is people understanding it, welcoming it into their lives, and wanting to go work on it.”

“And sometimes when you see repeat entrepreneurs who are successful, it is a version of that company. So William Hockey, who did plaid now doing column feels like a natural evolution of one Big mission for his life. I think that it's possible to have multiple companies, but one meta company, if you will.”

“the reality of business, which very few people really grasp, is that the basics of business, no matter what the field is, are exactly the same. The blocking and tackling parts are the same.”

“A film or a television show or a book or a song is packaged around talent. Talent, creator, engineer, same thing. Talent needs someone to help execute. Engineer needs people around them to help get the business in line and organize, coded, whatever they need done. The creative person making the entertainment then has…”

“business is a competitive cutthroat sport. Now, I'm not saying you do anything immoral or illegal, and you have to have guidelines, but if you're not willing to get out there and do what Magic Johnson did on the court, or Michael Jordan, or any of the greats, I learned it from Irvin.”

“You can't look back. I am so upset when friends of mine that try to do deals that I consult on, and they make a mistake or they lose it, and then they dwell on it. It's dumb. It's not going to change. So what are you looking back for? I don't like to look backwards. I think you have to always look forward.”

“the more you walk through life allowing things to have label, the more difficult life is because then you cannot see through it. You just see what you've been told to see. So I think it's part of my rebel cause to never accept labels.”

“what you learn from it is not the decisions he makes, it's how in any environment he repeats the same pattern of decision-making process. And that's the most important thing that you get from Reddit.”

“If you're too orderly, you don't innovate. If you're too chaotic, you don't communicate, and you break. So chaotic is the right place to be.”

“It's very difficult to convince customers to part with their money. I try very hard to do so. We as a business try very hard to be, everyone tries to do that. And it's outside of your control to a large degree. What I can control is my inputs. I can put out the best damn software product. I know how I can talk about…”

“The restaurant has to tell a complete story, and if it doesn't tell a complete story, then it doesn't work. And right behind that is that it's got to be fun.”

“And in my business, the only thing that's even relevant is the most important thing, which is, are they coming back? I always tell everyone that works for us, it's not a matter of if they come, because anywhere we would open, you know, everyone's going to come and try a new restaurant. All that matters is that a…”

“There's very few examples of this food that went viral that, you know, that went for years. Right? It might go for six months, might go for four months, might go for a year, but it's very rare that that happens.”

“restaurants became another form of cultural currency. It was something that if you were a cultured, sophisticated person, you need to know about restaurants. You need to talk about it.”

“So what happened was I learned watching Joe and other restauranteurs, the biggest reason why restaurants don't work out if it's, you know, on the restauranteur owner's part is because there's always been this classic tension between the restauranteur and the chef.”

“you want to get to the top of your profession, it's going to be really hard fighting against your own innate, like, desires, stuff you're interested in. Uh, you should just go with whatever, like, is natural, even if it's low status”

“The most difficult part of any property, any hospitality property, is the food and beverage. It's the most complex, no matter what.”

“there's always something to look at in our businesses and take something that generally people already like. And make a much better version of it, right?”

“the greatest thing is when you can find something that already has the bones, because where people get stuck all the time is you invest so much money into build-outs that you can never catch up.”

“one of the big problems, right, in enterprise software, in a lot of B to B software, is it starts out clean and elegant. There's a bunch of businesses who love the product, and they start serving more customers, and they have more requirements, and they have more ideas. And before you know it, you end up with these,…”

“And so GPUs and LPUs combined ended up giving better performance across the performance curves.”

“AI is really good at using AI. And that's really what agentic is, right? So humans benefit from using AI. So does AI. Just like you would do research about me before I show up on your show, AI is going to kick off a job doing research on different tools it's going to use while it's using this other tool. And so it…”

“Yeah, and, and this also goes towards a shift of going, people are moving from being ICs or individual contributors to all being leaders, but leaders of AI.”

“And the basic idea in intentional leadership is if I ask someone, should I do something? Oh, they have opinions. Most people will be pessimistic and give you negative opinions. On the other hand, if you express intentional leadership, you say, I intend to do this. People don't tend to offer their opinion, but if it's…”

“When you create homework or a test for kids, if they can look up the answer online, or if they can ask AI to solve it, you haven't taught them what they need for the next stage. But if you give them a problem where they have to ask the questions and get AI to solve it, then you have.”

“It's the, the way even building a company, it feels the same. It's just like you're calculating the moves. You're thinking about, okay, if you do this and then this happens and then you do that and here are the different moves and you're like calculating out what comes out to success. You know, it's like a, it's like a…”

“when you're talking about seconds, you're literally talking about just like a specific command, right? When you're talking about hours, you're talking about giving it a task and having it do the task, right? And I agree with you. Obviously bulk email is not, you know, for, for years, what you're talking about is like,…”

“If things are going well, you like a bigger group because you're training other people to feel comfortable. In this way of working. But the problem is really serious when you go to a small group where they're for past that stuff and they can focus on the problem.”

“if I know that I'm wrong half the time, that I catch it earlier. I special, I spend less time on the wrong decision. So it looks like the ratio is different. The reality is, I'm just wrong half the time. I think it's important to think that way, and that allows you to, to say, ok, maybe this is one of those times, and…”

“asking the question might have been a natural thing, to ask. But trying to answer it is an act of separation. That's the problem with it. Because I'm trying to say, how am I separate from others? And really, I never was. It's like none of this would have happened without a lot of things coming together, and the notion…”

“To some extent, the, uh, the entertainment industry is, is a different kind of competitive landscape. If you've got a movie out in the theaters, then you would actually like all the other films not to be there because you want everybody to come to yours. But if you don't have a film out there, Then you want people to…”

“What you pay for when you vote with your wallet every month, you're not going to pay for your engagement or time spent. You're going to pay for the value you feel, right? If you feel that this was time well spent, if you feel that this was high value, you're going to say, I want to pay for this. So I think when you pay…”

“So one benefit of tenure is the trust. People keep you honest, unless you, you know, you become too full of yourself, which is always a risk with success. Um, but the other benefit is this efficiency. Of like, people know. You don't have to give as much context.”

“So if you're optimized for tenure, you have to mitigate for the risk that you don't get fresh blood, that your career ladder is slow. So maybe people who are talented feel like, well, that's going to take 10 years to get up the career ladder. So then you have to create programs for that to give them exposure.”

“Naval, who is a friend of mine and of Jared's, he always says, escape competition through authenticity. If you're competing, it's because you're copying. You know, build something that fully comes from you, and that will feel most right, and it's also the thing that's least replicable.”

“Once you're aware of it, it's harder to protect. Like, in the, in the process of it happening, if you realize this is it, it's like, it's like, um, what is it in golf? The yips. You know, like when you're playing golf, if you like, if you start thinking about it instead of just being in it, you can't do it anymore. So…”

“That happens by coming up with like, ah, a series of rules that only apply to this project. Those are the constraints.”

“And as you learn more of what you can do, you tend to do that. You tend to, they tend to get bigger.”

“It's helpful for an artist to think that way, because usually, especially when we're younger, we think the thing that we make is, this is my, this is my magnum, magnum opus, and this is going to define me for the rest of my life, and it's a, it's a daunting hill to climb. But when you realize it's like, this is just…”

“The mask of overconfidence and ego, which is hiding insecurity, or there's the insecurity, but they're, they're really the same. You know, they're just presenting in two different ways. Two different people have the same overnight success. One of them gets really boastful and I'm the greatest that ever lived. And the…”

“if there's a house that exists, I might be able to see, well, what's the best version of this thing that already exists? And that's what same, same with music. It's like, I hear what's there and now what's the best version of this? What can we do to make it better? What can we do to make it better? Same thing as James…”

“You can never have a competitive advantage in the entertainment business through distribution only. That's why Netflix produces content. You can start with distribution only if you're a pioneer, but you got to immediately go into production and productions.”

“And if you back down, if you didn't argue, you were done. I understood it wasn't personal. Just wasn't personal.”

“When your product is human beings and you have almost a thousand of them, not even including your employees, they have personal problems, they have injuries, they have things going on. There's always something wrong and always something that needs to be fixed every minute of every day.”

“So when you think about those two shows, I can go watch the whole season tonight, or I can watch it three years from now. It's always gonna be there. Sports, live sports is a destination. You have to watch it now. Yep. Exactly. So it always made sense for streaming platforms to go after the sports.”

“So at about a year in, I had a bit of a, it's almost like a vision where I was saying, well, you can't be logical on this. You have to be intuitive and go back to some of the roots of knowledge revolution, which was all about fun and about play and about Building something very innovative.”

“I would say video games have historically been more about how they look. I was pulled to not just how they look, but how they function as well. And what's like, how much fidelity can we get out of it?”

“someone is going to be in charge of the whole social graph, user facing components, a web component infra. And all of a sudden we got a lot of acceleration because they could load balance between all of those pieces.”

“If everyone needs to spend money to have fun, your game isn't viral.”

“computers, I think, you know, Whether it was the mainframe or the desktop, you know, have, have sort of pulled us away from one another, away from society, brought us indoors right into this very like single player, uh, experience.”

“even basic things like opening into the camera, right? It opens into your experience of the world, right? Not, you know, a feed of content from other people, not a messaging feed alerting you to what other people are sending you. It literally opens into your experience. And so from the very beginning, we've thought…”

“They didn't have these likes and comments, which opened up this whole new world of self-expression, right? Because instead of just trying to post what would look pretty or popular or perfect, people were sharing this whole range of human emotions.”

“as part of starting to work on camera glasses, not only do we realize, first of all, that the market for camera glasses is very small. Right. Uh, that ultimately your phone is very good for taking photos, even if you're on a jet ski, or even if you're rock climbing, people still use their phone, uh, you know, to, to…”

“I think a 100,000 units in hardware is kind of like the first threshold of like, okay, you've got a product people are interested in and want to buy.”

“If you look at calendars today, not only are they kind of really entrenched into like the, the business world, but because they are, it makes it almost impossible to easily share calendars with friends, right? And it's all, and calendars are all today oriented around email, right? Rather than your phone number and…”

“Most of the time, we have no idea. We start with these experiments, and that's why most experiments fail. When you get enough goodness out of it, if you can get the five percent out of tens of thousands of experiments to work, you know, in one year, that has the benefit on all of your audience for the next year, and…”

“the most important thing is actually building systems and building a system that, you know, at DoorDash really starts with Testing things in a very operational, hacky, do things that don't scale kind of way, and to then taking the things that ultimately work, the ideas, and actually building products around them, and…”

“I think the greatest killer of a business is usually silence, and here, they're actually, they care enough to actually let me know something went wrong in their experience.”

“Another thing that reappears throughout the history of entrepreneurship, maybe my favorite maximum of all time from the history of entrepreneurship is that excellence is the capacity to take pain.”

“if you truly are putting your back against the wall and not giving yourself any options, like, you will come up with ideas or, like, push yourself to, in a manner, into an extreme manner in which you just can't if you, if you're optimizing for, like, optionality or it's like, oh, if this doesn't work out, I have, like,…”

“the maxim here is like repetition is persuasive. It's like you have to repeat one thing that's, that's, that, that is reoccurring throughout a lot of these founders. It's like they have, they identify a handful of principles. If we go through all the notes, all the books, everything we have in front of us, it's not 25…”

“he talks about the fact that finance and engineering is in the same head. In most companies, it's separated. It's him. So he wants to make something. They went under the cost or the potential growth in revenue. It's like, no, that, that discussion is taking place with me. So then there, again, I can move faster because…”

“Two things define manufacturing competitors, economies of scale and technology. If you maximize your level of technology and maximize your level of scale, That is obviously going to be the most competitive situation.”

“a lot of the best founders are, you know, I think Like, zero percent neuroticism. Like, they just don't get emotionally phased by things that happen, which is a superpower when you're an entrepreneur. But having said that, some of the great entrepreneurs are, in fact, very neurotic.”

“So it basically turns out every new technology is greeted with what they call a moral panic, right? So and a moral panic basically is whatever this new technology is or this new form of media is, it's going to ruin everything. It's going to ruin everything. It's going to ruin society. It's going to ruin morality. And…”

“calling people, I think it's faster if you have access to them, especially. Earlier in my career, I didn't have access, but now I feel like I can get access to more people, and it's often just a shortcut. Like, if you know the right person to call who's been thinking about that or working on that for 10 years, they can…”

“So the question we ask after the first year with any new employee is, knowing what I know now, would I hire them again? And that answers pretty much every question.”

“there's this two sides of business. Basically there's the envelope and there's the letter. The envelope is the outside, the shell, the business, the vehicle that holds the letter and the letter is the product or products. I'm a product guy. I love product. That's all I care about. The business side just has to exist to…”

“Make things small, tiny little units that you can throw them away. It doesn't matter. It's like, what you basically want then is enough good things, enough good units in a year. Right? Not like one great year, one great plan, but enough good little things, because you know you're going to miss a few things. So who…”

“if you want to find great colors, look at a bird. Don't look at a book. Like, look, look, look at a leaf, right? Look at the ocean. Look, look, look, look, go to a tide pool, and just look at the colors in that tide pool.”

“if you identify as an entrepreneur and you sell your business, like if your identity is tied up into entrepreneurship, like you have to go start another business because you have to, there's continuity there that you have to be that person again. And then if you can't, again, can't achieve the heights, like you just,…”

“Would I want to do this, whatever I just did again? If so, it's successful. And I think that that's enough of a definition for me. It's not about money. It's not about, it's not about any of those things. It's like, would I want to do it again?”

“the more decisions you make, um, the more time you have, the more intuition you're refining, but you don't like actively refine it. It's not like you're, you don't practice intuition. You just make decisions. And the more you make, the more you make, the more it sharpens everything up.”

“What I'm saying is that I really deal with a lot of people that are very defensive and aggressive. Because they think people don't like them, and you know that.”

“What a company fundamentally allows you to do is like, just run the counterfactual to the world you see around you, right? Like you, you, you get to, um, try to build a thing that you think ought to be there, and, um, then you means test it against the market, and if, if the market, um, agrees with you that this thing…”

“Whereas if you treat someone, uh, like, uh, other companies in your space as rivals, much easier to have a positive sum, uh, outcome there, because Rivalries inspire you to be best.”

“If any variable along this way is invalidated, what you should be doing is re-derive the entire thing on top, right? Like you should always prune back the decision tree all the way there and go forward.”

“the brain is a, um, Uh, retrospective narrative alignment mechanism, not, uh, it's, it's actually terrible record keeping, but it, it mostly attempts to, uh, take the most salient, uh, version of our self-identity and reconcile the history with it. And, um, it sort of rewards you for actions that are directly, uh, uh,…”

“Very few teams can move forward by subtraction. That is like, does not exist in industry usually. Very, very, very rare.”

“most of people spend their entire life, sadly, um, in a, in a, in a vitocracy, right? Like where, um, you need Um, everyone to agree to do something, but you only need one person to vote against it to not do something. And, um, uh, again, good companies overcome this in, in, in important ways. And so, similarly, um,…”

“my job is to make a company worthy for the best and brightest to work for. Like, um, this is the part everyone skips. Everyone's like, oh, we need to hire a better recruiting team. Well, maybe you need to also just, like, uh, be worthy of a kind of talent that you would like to have.”

“I think of everyone as an entrepreneur, really. Your capabilities, like you are the entrepreneur of your own work output. Your product is what you can do and what you can accomplish. Um, your market is the companies that exist, and, um, um, you are selling a, uh, exclusive subscription, um, uh, in a, uh, that's the…”

“product is not a thing. Product is an abstraction. Product is a name, like a handle that you put on some, on some totality of a body of work. From the perspective of the people creating product, product doesn't exist. It's what other people call your work. A product is just details. It's millions and millions of little…”

“attacking other people's attention is much more profitable very often in a game of Starcraft than it is, um, uh, to actually attack the base. Because if you overtax their ability to pay attention to things, They will make mistakes.”

“I'm obsessed with people that do things for a long time because time is the only filter that I trust. I have no idea, no predictive ability that this entrepreneur that started a company today is going to be successful.”

“For them, the fun part is creating the business, and then as you start to staff it up and you build a bureaucracy, they're, they feel trapped by their own creations in a way. They're just, they're not wired to They fit within that kind of corporate structure that they're creating, and all businesses eventually evolve…”

“The acquisitions were key because they created a platform, a geographical platform for us. To go into a new geography and create a team of people is very expensive.”

“I mean, the reality for most businesses is they're never going to be big enough. They either have to sell the, to get liquidity, they have to sell the business because most of them can't go public. And how else can you get liquidity? Either, you're going to either have an IPO or you're going to have a sale.”

“I think you will find that most brands that are really popular Particularly in their early days, they were kind of cults. They were cult cults, meaning they had a following, because I think most brands are ultimately built by the evangelist enthusiasts of their users, their customers.”

“I think most persuasive entrepreneurs, charismatic entrepreneurs have a reality distortion fields. They're able to get people to spend their normal skepticism, and for a moment, they let them into their vision, and they, they, they catch a little bit.”

“Rightly seen, the entrepreneurial journey is a hero's journey, and a hero's journey is a spiritual journey. It's a journey of discovery. It's a journey of going deeper into yourself, knowing who you are and what really matters in life.”

“people are power law and the best ones change everything. And so once you actually see that you are very, almost like ruthless with who you let have access to you.”

“the best story always wins. And I actually spent the last couple of months, like, really trying to figure out what, what do I think best story means? And the best principles for a great story that I could come up with were originality, hardship, and transformation.”

“most people that have achieved, uh, a level of success in their field or in their job that you have begin to The, the world, when that happens, pulls you into this branching exercise where you end up doing lots of different stuff. Uh, and that, you know, you end up monetizing in different ways, or going into different…”

“And this is why I like autobiographies and biographies so much, because in many cases, the person's, like, long past dead, or they're older, and they're just like, I'm writing this book when I'm 80, like, I have no, I'm not incentivized to, to lie, and, like, here's the stuff I went through, and the trouble with…”

“The principle should be something that when you see it violated, it is your obligation to go correct it, and that that correction is an act of service for, for other people, not for yourself. It's not about you. And that's what makes the idea so powerful.”

“Dirty fuel works really well, but it consumes the person in a way that I would far rather die, you know, nobody knowing who I am with no worldly, you know, success, but having people that Could count on me, rely on me. I was faithful to, that I was loyal to.”

“the unfair advantage that we have is essentially like we'd be like professional learner. You know, like, you, you get to study somebody, you get to have a multi-hour conversation with them, and like, oh wait, he said that, or she said this, like, I'm gonna take that idea.”

“Like, if people say something's a good idea, I always get a little nervous, because if it's, if it sounds like a good idea, it just feels you're in a more competitive space, it's gonna be harder. I think the key is stuff that sounds dumb, but isn't.”

“I would add on to that, like it should be different and really hard, like really hard to do.”

“Like, people can't say no to a cover. And so I tested that theory out and, and it was true. And I think what that means is it's like the ultimate form of spotlight and attention that you can give to somebody.”

“if you want to hire someone for a thing, just go consume as much of the thing made by a million people as possible. Whoever made the best one, go for them.”

“if you create a single thing, not, it'll be 10 things, just one thing that people are amazed by. Put it, pour a year of your life into making one amazing thing that people are amazed by, and amazing things will happen, I promise you. Like the, the internet is amazing at sharing something that is great.”

“what is the thing where you naturally have a lot of reps because you just like it? And find some, build off that, because there's this learning by doing concept, like, you get better at something just through being prolific in the thing, and most people have a thing for which they are naturally prolific. Even that, if…”

“the reward for great work is more work, and I find that saying that maxim to the right person, like the kind of person I want to spend time with, they, their eyes go wide and they understand it immediately that the reward for great work is not money, power, fame. It is the privilege to get to do more of this thing that…”

“and that is every bit as successful in my mind and in my book as Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or, you know, pick the, the people that we all worship. In the business world, I'm amazed by them too, but there are flavors of success, and to me, that sort of devotion, even if it's to one person, to your wife, to your kids,…”

“And actually, if you learn that failure is so much more interesting than success, Because failure, you question it. Well, why did it go wrong? And actually, the reason it goes wrong is often very, very interesting. When something works, you say, great, that works, and you don't even stop to wonder why it works.”

“the person who's just starting out, ok, he hasn't got a name yet, but he's probably incredibly enthusiastic and will put everything behind it and work all hours to make it work. So it's the person, not the business, really, that you're backing.”

“And also I think if, if you've lost a parent at that age, uh, life can't get much worse. So you're prepared to take risks because you've started from a horrible starting point.”

“Because you, I, I, our engineers do their own tests and build their own prototypes, um, because there's something funny about the process of actually making the prototype yourself that you learn, and when it fails, it may have been something you noticed as you were gluing it together or machining a part, that the, that…”

“Well, if you get big, there's a tendency to think you lots of people say you can do everything, but you can't. You can't do everything. You can't do everything well. Uh, and you probably can't do anything anyway. So the important thing is to decide what's really the most important thing, and just do that. And there are…”

“Follow-up was the key to everything. You didn't even have to be smart. You had to have good follow-up. If you followed up, it kind of gave you an extra point on the smart side of the scale.”

“going from one to two is, is your hardest step you'll ever have, then two to six, and six to 12, and all those growth stages are there”

“People go back and get their same sauce. They might come try it one time, and then it's also slowing down their order process and slowing down turnover time and all that stuff, and then they go back to the same sauce.”

“Either you can dispute them, but first validate it. Don't start with the disputing. First validate and say, okay, yeah, of course I'm having all these negative thoughts because I got a tough job, for example. I have a big job, there's a lot of pressure, and I'm not perfect, so I'm not getting everything right. And so I…”

“We need to reduce these demands, these musts, these shoulds, these commands that either I or you or the rest of the world is perfect to, you know, preferences, where I would like me to be better, I would like you to be better, I'd like things to go better, but they don't have to. I can still be happy, and frankly,…”

“20 to 25 is the ideal group. You have enough people that you get diversity of opinion, and you have dialectical discussions, meaning looking at issues from multiple perspectives, then analyzing those and synthesizing them and finding the truth, but you don't have so many people that you're, you know, people are…”

“The main motivation why they're coming to work is to make money, and make money for themselves, and more often to make money for others, to make money for their families, for their spouses, their kids, or whoever.”

“Go make some mistakes nobody's ever made before. Try to make them in small increments. Fix your mistakes as fast as you find them, and you actually want to make mistakes. You just want to make them small and, you know, iterate and fix them quickly.”

“what, what we, what we figured out was that if we could dramatically, uh, shrink, um, our inventory and get paid from our customers faster and, you know, uh, maybe not pay our suppliers, you know, instantly pay them a little bit later, then If you're growing and you have a negative cash conversion cycle, you actually…”

“Now, the other reason this is important is because it turns out that the price of electronic components Generally goes down, right? And, and, you know, it's, it's a pretty predictable thing. And so, uh, if our components are five days old, and the competitor's components are 90 days old, well, theirs costs a lot more…”

“I have not been in this industry for a long time, and so, uh, you know, all these reasons why it won't work are unknown to me, okay? So that's the naive part, right? Um, and that can actually be sometimes a good thing, right? Because you're not sort of bound by those conventional thinking, uh, that, that, that maybe…”

“I think happiness is a trailing indicator of impact.”

“the, the value of a company is the sum of all problems solved.”

“Which problems am I passionate about solving? And which problems can I spend the next decade of my life, um, fixing? Because if, if I'm not interested enough in it to spend a decade fixing it, it's, it's probably not worth pursuing.”

“trust is the, this notion that you'll keep doing, um, actions that will ladder up over time. It really compounds, but, um, you're going to add maybe one percent of trust for each positive interaction you're going to do, but it takes one interaction that's bad to ruin all of it. The moment where you, where you even…”

“there are many things where you can copy a specific way. For instance, Elon does things. But if it's not truly innate to you and your personality, I promise you it will not have the same impact as when Elon does things.”

“So like for me, taste is, is sort of judgment plus curiosity. And the more you can sort of like extend the curiosity branch that improves your judgment, which then builds your taste.”

“the typical thing is that the founder needs to be the product person, right? Um, by the way, it's a hundred percent true. I, I totally believe that. I think it's the most important thing in the zero to one stage.”

“one of the most interesting ideas, um, um, that I learned after sort of, again, overfitting the concepts in, in the book and sort of teaching people about it is you can only tell, uh, that you have power when, when it's there. It doesn't tell you how to get there.”

“a large scale corporation, what they do is they just get better and better and better at doing what they already do. And, um, the way to do that is obviously minimize mistakes. So, um, you know, that also means minimize brilliance, minimize waste, minimize all these other things.”

“When you make a lot of money, you tend to make life more comfortable. Um, so you tend to spend more time golfing. You spend some time doing all these other things. Uh, but the reality is you become distracted, and you're not gonna be on your A game anymore.”

“I actually think what kind of video games you like is a pretty good revealer of your things too. Like, I wasn't, um, playing any kind of first person shooter games or any of that, some of it, but not much. Most of what I was playing was, uh, strategy games. Um, you know, civilization, business strategy game. I played…”

“I think you have to love technology in order to go to the depth of understanding what's possible. And, and because it's off, oftentimes like the greatest ideas is truly innately understanding something and truly innately breaking constraints around that something, um, by understanding the rules and knowing when, when…”

“investing is, is actually more about, um, learning about your temperament than it is about the specific action that you're doing. Your temperament, actually, it's, it's more about being in line with your temperament than, than not, or which game you're picking.”

“poles and wires move energy through space, and batteries move energy through time.”

“Well, one of them is the discussion is always about the topic. It isn't about who's right.”

“We also, uh, published everything, uh, and part of this was the realization that the people that we wanted were the people who wanted to be part of the bigger community. At this time, the computer graphics community called SIGGRAPH was just starting, And they wanted to be able to, to publish. So publishing everything…”

“it's harder to build a clock, but if you ask me the time every day for the next 20 years, it's probably easier to build the Clock than to tell you the time every day for the next 20 years. And that was part of the thought behind Roblox.”

“The content on Roblox was perpetual. It was made by creators, and the acquisition of users was perpetual, and that it was word of mouth.”

“In Roblox, the viral loop is both the quality of the content as well as the users being with each other. So There's both a content viral loop and a communication connection viral loop.”

“Something very similar happened with the Builder's Club and we Entered this interesting period where user growth was going like this, but re revenue and bookings was kind of going like this. And so what that meant is builders club was getting a little old and stale. And for the wider range of users, it was really not…”

“if you're not on the frontier, like, Elon obviously wants to operate on the frontier and the domains that he's operating in, and the reason that is important is not only because he wants to push his, his missions forward, but you also unlock opportunities you can't see unless you're on the actual frontier.”

“It's sort of like investing and you have to let it compound over many years. Well, you have to let a business compound over many years as well.”

“retailers don't have patents. We couldn't patent a natural food supermarket. We couldn't patent our product mix. We couldn't patent our marketing. We couldn't patent our service levels.”

“So when I meet younger entrepreneurs, I'm like, you need to write down what, what you're experiencing. You're, you think, It's such an intense feeling. You think you're gonna remember. You're gonna forget all of this, and you're doing an act of service to the, you know, for the future you, for two, three, four, uh,…”

“And the theory is the faster you make a motor go, Um, the smaller it can be, the fewer materials it can have, and the more electrically efficient it is.”

“And, ah, if you have fairly low volume in your new manufacturer, all your costs are 30% higher. Because you're not buying very many, um, seats from the seat manufacturer, or very many tires from the tire manufacturer, and so on. So all your costs are much higher.”

“Part of it is that each successive wave of technological improvement is built on the prior, you know, foundations, and so, they're able to go faster.”

“about every 10 years or so, something comes along and just completely expands the opportunity set for the industry.”

“There's something about, I'm not talking about us here, but there's something about, um, if it's been around that long, it's not a fluke. You can, like, have something that's hot for a while, and it can go, it can go out. That's kind of a fluke, or like a, a, a trend, or a fad, or something. But to be around for a long…”

“You know, it's all just like fun and interesting, and I want to learn. And it's like, uh, it's like a big puzzle to solve and understand. And you think about the impact that technology has on the world What could be more exciting than to be in the middle of that and, and, and to figure it out and to, you know, help,…”