The Wisdom Wall

“the only thing in common among successful founders that I've worked with, funded, uh, interacted with is they have one comparative advantage with the rest of the world where they're in the top one percent or top 10 basis points or sometimes even top one basis points on one trait.”

“If you don't have one of those three things, a seed investment is a horrific idea.”

“if you're the most tenacious person in the world, if you, if you talk to that person's mother, they can probably give you examples from the time that that person was five years old. Um, and if they, if they can't, it's probably not top 10 basis points. Or if you're the smartest person ever, there's ways that that…”

“take everybody on your team, I'll keep pushing along. The envelope of what they can do until you see where they're struggling. And then everybody will have a natural limit, but keep pushing until you find it. And then you're going to get people to achieve things and achieve things for the company and succeed in ways…”

“And the reason why parallels matter is you can only accomplish the, the number of things you have simultaneously in parallel that are, that are defined by the number of barrels you have. So having more headcount does not allow you to accomplish more.”

“most of these traits show up early in life. Like you don't have to have a professional experience. Uh, you can illustrate through high school experiences, college experiences. Like if you're, you know, better than everybody else in a particular trait, it will show up. You don't really have to have a lot of domain…”

“domain expertise comes usually with what doesn't work, not what could be possible. Um, you know, the node, uh, has a good expression of domains are expert in the fire world and what you're trying to do is create a new world. And most people with expertise typically have learned all the rules and quotes and And are…”

“Usually there's two, um, formulas, sort of. One is they've had experience in that industry domain that's very, you know, special. So, they understand what's broken and why, and they also understand how to fix it because they actually suffered through it, and they're, you know, sort of good product thinkers. They…”

“I think a ratio of barrels of 10% of an organization would be phenomenally high. Five percent would be pretty damn good. Now that said, I, I think you want, like, an 80%, at least, success rate of hiring, where the question would be, if you can make the hire all over again, what would you do it?”

“So when you're hiring employees, the tune of the model has to be different than when you're investing in founder. Like on the founder side, I only care about the upside. I don't actually worry about the downside of being wrong. When I'm hiring for a company, an organization, or interviewing people as a board member for…”