The Wisdom Wall

“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…”

“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…”

“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,…”

“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.”

“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…”