The Wisdom Wall

“The best startups might be considered slightly less extreme kinds of cults. The biggest difference is that cults tend to be fanatically wrong about something important. People at a successful startup are fanatically right about something those on the outside world have missed.”

“And those who urge entrepreneurs to never give up? Charlatans. Sometimes you have to give up. Sometimes knowing when to give up, when to try something else is genius. Giving up doesn't mean stopping. Don't ever stop.”

“It's not just another flavored sugar water differentiated by color or taste or flavor. It is an efficiency product. I'm talking about improving endurance, concentration, reaction time, speed, vigilance, and emotional status. Taste is of no importance whatsoever.”

“I give feedback in front of everybody. Feedback is learning. For what reason are you the only person who should learn from this? We should all learn from that opportunity. I don't take people aside. We are not optimizing for not embarrassing somebody. We're optimizing for the company learning from our mistakes.”

“If you put it in reverse, you say name a business that has been ruined because it was over downsized. I cannot think of a single one, but if you asked me to name businesses that were half ruined or ruined by bloat, I could rattle off name after name after name.”

“Jensen was a big proponent of public criticism, talked about the fact that you should criticize publicly because it should be a learning experience for the entire company. If you criticize privately, only you and that individual employee actually learned the lesson”

“The true test of an entrepreneur is someone who spends his life constantly testing his limits. The definition of an idiot is someone who has reached his goals.”

“Steve said this brutally brilliant, insightful thing. He said, no, Johnny, you're just really vain. You just want people to like you. I'm surprised at you. I thought you held the work up as the most important, not how you believe you were being perceived by other people.”

“We would propose that if knowledge is a source of value add and few things can be known for sure, then it logically follows that owning more stocks does not lower risk, but raises it.”

“if we wanted Amazon to be a place where builders can build, we need to eliminate communication, not encourage it.”

“In a democracy, everyone takes turns. But if you really want a lot of wisdom, it's better to concentrate decisions and process in one person.”

“superior sales and distribution by itself can create a monopoly, even with no product differentiation. The converse is not true.”

“This is not a problem for big companies because they don't win by making great products. Big companies win by sucking less than other big companies.”

“Saying that taste is just personal preference is a good way to prevent disputes. The trouble is it's not true. You feel this when you start to design things, whatever job people do, they naturally want to do it better. Football players like to win games. CEOs like to increase earnings. It's a matter of pride and a real…”

“He concluded, Henry was a lot smarter, but Warren had thought about investments a lot longer.”

“One of Vannevar Bush's deepest convictions was that specialization is the death of genius, and he has a great quote about this. He says, in these days, when there's a tendency to specialize so closely, it is well for us to be reminded that the possibilities of being at once both broad and deep Did not pass with…”

“Founders only sell when they have no more concrete visions for the company. Definitive founders with robust plans don't sell.”

“A new company's most important strength is new thinking. Even more important than nimbleness, small size affords space to think.”

“it is better to risk boldness than triviality. Number two, a bad plan is better than no plan. Number three, competitive markets destroy profits. Why you should be building a creative monopoly. And number four, sales matters just as much as products.”

“All happy companies are different. Each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same. They failed to escape competition.”

“moving first is a tactic, not a goal. What really matters is generating cash flows in the future. So being the first mover doesn't do you any good if someone else comes along and unseats you. It is much better to be the last mover. That is to make the last great development in a specific market and enjoy years or even…”

“Every great business is built around a secret that is hidden from the outside. A great company is a conspiracy to change the world. When you share your secret, the recipient becomes a fellow conspirator.”

“He has this thing called Teal's law, which he says that a startup messed up at its foundation cannot be fixed.”

“the best thing I did as a manager at PayPal was to make every person in the company responsible for doing just one thing. Every employee's one thing was unique, and everyone knew I would evaluate him only on that one thing.”

“Superior sales and distribution by itself can create a monopoly, even with no product differentiation. The converse is not True.”

“Poor sales rather than bad product is the most common cause of failure. If you can get just one distribution channel to work, you have a great business.”

“The creation of new value cannot be reduced to a formula and applied by professionals.”

“If anything, we should be more tolerant of founders who seem strange or extreme. We need unusual individuals to lead companies beyond mere incrementalism.”

“We don't do focus groups because that is the job of the designer. It is unfair to ask people who don't have a sense of the opportunities of tomorrow from the context of today to design.”

“When you have too much money, you just don't have that hunger. And you start spending money on floating staircases and 10,000 dollar chairs.”

“business was no more about making money than being human is about making blood. Yes, the human body needs blood, but that day-to-day business of the human body isn't our mission as human beings. It's a basic process that enables our higher aims, and life always strives to transcend the basic processes of living.”

“if you have powerful people who are able to understand the impact of the technology, they're not just going to sit on the sidelines. They won't be content to just be your advisors. So obviously what was going on was our supposed advisors were really our rivals.”

“A non-technical manager can't tell the difference between a tactically painful path and a strategically necessary one. If your managers tell you a certain chassis design or an engine material is too difficult and you don't have the technical depth to interrogate them, you have to defer.”

“The lesson isn't be like Elon. Hero worship is the wrong takeaway. One person didn't build Starship. The lesson is that structure matters more than the hero. Get the system right and the results follow.”

“the gap between the number four player in the world and the number three player in the world is massive. That the 200th ranked player in the world is closer to number four than four is to number three. And he said the main driver of that was their mental discipline.”

“Winning changes nothing. Now that I've won a slam, I know something that very few people on earth are permitted to know. A win doesn't feel as good as a loss feels bad. And the good feeling doesn't last as long as the bad, not even close.”

“Michael Dell told me in the episode I did with him and on the David center feed in our conversation, he says, if you don't have a crisis, make one, you get people excited, motivated, and you drive the necessary change that you need in your business.”

“The total editorial media value plus the media assets created around the teams That's such a good insight. Plus, the media assets created around the teams are superior to pure advertising expenditures.”

“once I'm finally certain of the right direction, I pick a fight. It helps me make my point and it makes it impossible to do an about face and go back. Once a course has been plotted, I sail a long way off and I burn the boats. It is win or die.”

“The bigger the apparent risk, the fewer people will try to go there. We would surely lose if we had to face serious competition. But if we were all alone in pursuit of our goal of building the first commercial relational database system, we had a chance to win.”

“Most people hate to admit they're wrong, but it didn't bother Bill one bit. All he cared about was what was right, not who was right. That is what makes Bill very, very dangerous. If Bill has to choose, he'd rather win the war than win the argument.”

“Each project must be broken down into component tasks, and each task must have a target time to completion that assumes no delays, no queues, and no downtime. This sets the theoretical maximum, the speed of light, that it is physically impossible to exceed. We will then judge ourselves against the speed of light Not…”

“You have to allow yourself to be obsessed with your work. I work every day. There's not a day that goes by that I don't work. If I'm not working, I'm thinking about working. Working is relaxing for me.”

“where there are no customers. There are also no competitors. That is a zero billion dollar market. Something that barely exists, maybe doesn't exist at all, but one day we'll be giant.”

“if you're gonna make something, it doesn't take any more energy, and rarely does it take more money to make it really great. All it takes is a little more time and a willingness to do so. A willingness to persevere until it's really great.”

“The enemy of most dreams and intuitions, and one of the most dangerous and stifling concepts ever invented by humans is the career.”

“Many times in a job interview, I will purposely upset someone. I'll criticize their prior work. I'll do my homework, find out what they worked on and say, God, that really turned out to be a bomb. That really turned out to be a bozo product. Why did you work on that? The worst thing that someone can do in an interview…”

“He also said any car which holds together for a whole race is too heavy.”

“I was able to do all this because we're a family business and we're not listed on the stock exchange. This allowed us to grow calmly. To have long-term plans, to know how to wait, and to not be caught up in the frenzy of the daily ups and downs.”

“She says, I've learned to always retain majority ownership and control.”

“We have significant data related to price elasticity with rare exceptions. The volume increase in the short term is never enough to pay for the price decrease.”

“Most decisions are probably made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, you're being too slow.”

“As the company grows, everything needs to scale, including the size of our failed experiments. If the size of your failures isn't growing, you're not going to be inventing at a size that can actually move the needle.”

“Our plan is to lead the public with new products rather than ask them what kind of products they want. The public does not know what is possible, but we do. So instead of doing market research, we refine our thinking on a product and its use and try to create a market for it by educating And communicating with the…”

“The remarkable thing about management is that a manager can go on for years making mistakes that nobody's aware of. This is because management is an elusive thing. It cannot be judged by next quarter's bottom line. Managers can look good on the bottom line, but at the same time, they could be destroying the company by…”

“Interview everyone and you get a 360 degree perspective of the industry, how the business makes money, its competitive edge, who the best employees are, etc.”

“if you're in an environment where you've been somewhere for six months and you haven't learned much, do not make it six months in a day. The most valuable equity that you'll create in your lifetime is your career equity that you own is really thinking about your education, your skills. It doesn't go up and down with…”

“the problem, a lot of technology company entrepreneurs is they optimize for growth at the expense of durability. But if you actually look at when these companies make the most money, it's like 10, 20, 30 years into the future. So that takeaway was like, you don't want to optimize for, uh, growth at the expense of…”

“The whole secret of investment is to find places where it's safe and wise to not diversify.”

“I've come to regard advertising as part of the product to be treated as a production cost, not a selling cost. It follows that it should not be cut back when times are hard any more than you would stint on any other essential ingredient in your product, assuming that you need to advertise to sell your product, right?”

“Munger's response to Brent was something like, we find somebody that did a good job before and ask them to do the same job for us. And, uh, the follow-up question, Brent's follow-up question was something like, yeah, but what about, you know, hiring for potential or youth? And Munger's like, we, We don't do that.”

“While an excess of self-regard is often counterproductive in its effect on cognition, it can cause some weird successes from overconfidence that happened to cause success. Never underestimate the man who overestimates himself.”

“Brad wrote, I find that slightly understaffed teams are more focused and spend less time doing redundant busy work.”

“Many of the great founders, once that they know what they want to do, I would argue that they actually have very low levels of introspection to like almost no introspection. And the reason that is important is because low introspection equals more action.”

“The key observation is that in most things in life, the dynamic range between average quality and the best quality is at most two to one. But in the field that I was interested in, I noticed that the dynamic range between what an average person could accomplish and what the best person could accomplish was 50 or a…”

“So the speed of light means that you have to take every single project inside of your company. You break it down into, into its component tasks. And then each task must have a target time to completion that assumes no delays, no cues or no downtime. Why? Of course you're going to have some kind of unexpected things pop…”

“People who train for the Olympics grumble about training early in the morning too. Jensen was sending a message. Long hours were a necessary prerequisite for excellence.”

“Strategy is not words. Strategy is action, Jensen said. We don't do periodic planning. The reason for that is because the world is a living, breathing thing. We just plan continuously. There is no five-year plan.”

“you can mess up a lot of things in business and still do well as long as you get the big trend right.”

“there are no mature sectors where everything is already discovered, but rather companies are managers with closed minds who resist innovation.”

“There's a great quote by Mark Andreessen, where Mark says, I'm a firm believer that most people who do great things are doing them for the first time. I'd rather have someone all fired up to do something for the first time than someone who's done it before. And isn't that excited to do it again. You rarely go wrong…”

“I make the spending decisions and the engineering decisions in one head. Normally those are at least two people. There's some engineering guy who's trying to convince a finance guy that this money should be spent, but the finance guy doesn't understand engineering. So he can't tell if it's a good way to spend money or…”

“I don't do business with anyone who's not afraid, and I won't hire anybody who is confident to the point, confident to the point where fear is not very close to the surface.”

“He always said that if there were 12 steps in a deal, the whole thing depended on just one of them. The others would either work themselves out or were less important.”

“He says, the best investors aren't investors at all. They're entrepreneurs who never sold.”

“He says the biggest mistake an investor can make is to sell a stock that goes on to rise tenfold, not from owning something into bankruptcy, but that's what everyone thinks.”

“This is why all my employees I had never went to business school. They never worked in an established management firm, and some of them never even had accounting. Because I find it's easier to train them than somebody who did.”

“A's hire A's, B's hire C's, so the first B you hire takes the whole company down.”

“I have come to the conclusion that the top man has one principal responsibility. To provide an atmosphere in which creative mavericks can do useful work. To be successful, you must, out of necessity, accumulate a group of creative people. This probably means a fairly high percentage of high-strung, brilliant,…”

“I pulled people along when they didn't want to be pulled. I challenged people when they didn't want to be challenged and I earned the right because my teammates who came after me didn't endure all the things that I endured. Once you joined the team, you lived at a certain standard that I played the game and I wasn't…”

“When you pay high for the priceless, you're getting it cheap.”

“There are times when certain cards sit unclaimed in the common pile, when certain properties become available that will never be available again. A good businessman feels these moments like a fall in the barometric pressure. A great businessman is dumb enough to act on them even when he cannot afford to.”

“It's not just another flavored sugar water differentiated by color or taste or flavor. It is an efficiency product. I'm talking about improving endurance, concentration, reaction time, speed, vigilance, and emotional status. Taste is of no importance whatsoever.”

“the test of invention is the power of an inventor to push your invention through, not in the face of staunch opposition, which most people think, right? But staunch indifference.”

“Sam Walton invented practically nothing, but he copied everything anybody ever did that was smart, and he did it with more fanaticism, so he blew right by them all.”

“A players hire A players, B players hire C players, so the first B player you hire takes the whole company down.”

“A players hire A players, B players hire C players. So the first B player you hire takes the whole company down.”

“most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, he said, in most cases, you're probably being slow. Plus, either way, you need to be good at quickly recognizing and correcting bad decisions. If you're good at course correcting, being wrong may…”

“The reason writing a four page memo is harder than writing a 20 page PowerPoint is because the narrative structure of a good memo forces better thought and better understanding of what's more important than what and how things are related. PowerPoint style presentations somehow give permission to gloss over ideas, to…”

“He assumes each sentence he reads is wrong until he can prove otherwise. He's challenging the content of the sentence, not the motive of the writer”

“Steve says, if you don't have any problems, you should be very, very worried.”

“Arnold is a high agency person. The world does not happen to high agency individuals. High agency individuals happen to the world.”

“Unless your campaign contains a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night. I doubt if more than one campaign in a hundred contains a big idea.”

“The Macintosh experience taught me that A players like to work only, only with other A players, which means you cannot indulge B players.”

“My observation has been that mediocre men recognize genius, resent it, and feel compelled to destroy it. There are very few men of genius, but we need all we can find. Almost without exception, they are disagreeable. Do not destroy them. They lay golden eggs.”

“Many times in a job interview, I will purposely upset someone. I'll criticize their prior work. I'll do my homework, find out what they worked on and say, God, that really turned out to be a bomb. That really turned out to be a bozo product. Why did you work on that? The worst thing that someone can do in an interview…”

“Part of the CEO's job is to cajole and beg and plead and threaten at times to do whatever is necessary to get people to see things in a bigger and more profound way than they have and to do better work than they thought they could do.”

“the only good reason to be a manager is so some other bozo Doesn't be the manager and ruin the group that you care about.”

“My relationship to luxury goods is really very rational. It is the only area in which it is possible to make luxury profit margins.”

“Politics is ephemeral. Companies have a durability which guarantee the only real power worth having.”

“And another thing that he repeats is that you should remember that good ideas are rare, and when you find one, you have to bet heavily.”

“You must have the confidence to override people with more credentials than you, whose cognition is impaired by incentive-caused bias or some similar psychological force that is obviously present. But there are also cases where you have to recognize that you have no wisdom to add and that your best course is to trust…”

“it's not greed that drives the world, but envy. You have to cure yourself of this. Curing yourself of this is key, key for a well-lived life.”

“Max kept repeating, A players hire A players, B players hire C players. So the first B player you hire takes the whole company down.”

“The lesson for business is that we need founders. If anything, we should be more tolerant of founders who seem strange or extreme. We need unusual individuals to lead companies beyond mere incrementalism.”

“Competitive markets destroy profits. Main theme of the book, Do not build an undifferentiated commodity business.”

“Every business is successful exactly to the extent that it does something others cannot. All happy companies are different. Each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same. They failed to escape competition.”

“Founders only sell when they have no more concrete visions for the company. Definitive founders with robust plans don't sell, which means the offer wasn't high enough.”

“Venture returns do not follow a normal distribution. They follow a power law. A small handful of companies radically outperform all others. If you focus on diversification instead of single-minded pursuit of the very few companies that, that can become overwhelmingly valuable, you'll miss those rare companies in the…”

“Every great business is built around a secret that is hidden from the outside. A great company is a conspiracy to change the world. When you share your secret, the recipient becomes a fellow conspirator.”

“Which is, a startup messed up at its foundation cannot be fixed.”

“The best startups might be considered slightly less extreme kinds of cults. The biggest difference is that cults tend to be fanatically wrong about something important. People at a successful startup are fanatically right about something those outside have missed.”

“A great programmer could create a million dollars worth of wealth in a couple weeks. A mediocre programmer over the same period will generate zero or even negative wealth.”

“If we have learned one thing from funding so many startups is that they succeed or fail based on the qualities of founders. The economy has some effects, certainly, but as a predictor of success, it's a rounding error compared to the founders, which means that, which means that what matters is who you are, not when you…”

“The best way to limit monopoly economic power, he insisted, was through the advent of small new industrial units, what we call startups today, for if these latter have half a chance, they can cut rings around the great stodgy businesses.”

“A man of intelligence, and only such will fit the need, can become well acquainted with the subject in a surprisingly short time if he puts his mind to it. This is not to master it, but to arrive at a point where he speaks the language and can judge whether a proposal before him has been thought through. If a man is a…”

“When picking an industry to enter, my favorite rule of thumb is this. Pick an industry where the founders of the industry, which is the founders of the important companies in the industry, are still alive and actively involved.”

“frankly, there's no substitute for limited competition. You can be a genius, but if there's a lot of competition, it will not matter.”

“redundancies are much more predictable and transparent than theoretical opportunities to add value. My focus is always on the downside. Overly optimistic assumptions lead to the graveyard of corporate acquisitions.”

“There are tremendous values in the stock market, but in buying stocks, not entire companies. Buying companies tends to raise the purchase price too high. Don't be misled by the few shares trading at a low multiple of six or seven. If you try to acquire those companies, the multiple is more like 12 or 14.”

“We must never judge humanity by ourselves. The things we want, the things we like, may appeal to a small minority. The losses occasioned in advertising by venturing on personal preference would easily pay the national debt. There are divided opinions, and so in every preference and every want, only the obstinate And…”

“The best ads ask no one to buy. The ads are based entirely on service. They offer wanted information. They cite advantages to users.”

“I've been working on three different ideas simultaneously, and strangely enough, it seems a more productive method than sticking to one problem.”

“A very small percentage of the population produces the greatest proportion of the most important ideas. There are some people, if you shoot one idea into their brain, you will get half an idea out. There are other people who produce two ideas for each idea sent in.”

“A business with a good definitive plan will always be underrated in a world where people see the future as random.”

“Positively defined, a startup is the largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future.”

“The history of progress is a history of better monopoly businesses, replacing incumbents.”

“If you're less sensitive to social cues, you're less likely to do the same things as everyone else around you. If you're interested in making things, you'll be less afraid to pursue those activities single-mindedly and thereby become incredibly good at them.”

“every startup should start with a very small market. Always err on the side of starting too small. If you think your initial market might be too big, it almost certainly is.”

“Your life is not a portfolio. An entrepreneur cannot diversify himself. So therefore you should focus relentlessly on something you're good at doing. But before that, you must think hard about whether it would be valuable in the future.”

“The most important things are singular. One market will probably be better than all others. One distribution strategy usually dominates all others too. Time and decision making themselves follow a power law, and some moments matter far more than others.”

“When you're in a startup, the first 10 people will determine whether the company succeeds or not. Each is 10% of the company. So why wouldn't you take as much time as necessary to find all A players? If three were not so great, why would you run a company where 30% of your company was not so great? A small company…”

“recruiting is a core competency for any company. It should never be outsourced.”

“It's more powerful, but at the same time, more dangerous for a company to be led by a distinctive individual instead of an interchangeable manager.”

“anyone can become an expert in anything in six months. After the idea, there's plenty of time to learn the technology.”

“Had we left research in the parent company, it would have been treated like a stepchild. For that company's purpose is the pursuit of profits. Since good research cannot be treated as simply as an appendage on manufacturing, I decided that it would have to be a separate distinct operation.”

“The organizational structure of a research institute is different from that of a manufacturing company. A research organization should be structured to enable individuals to make the best of their ability. Whereas a manufacturing company should be organized to yield maximum efficiency.”

“He said that newspapers should make enemies constantly, that the more enemies we have, the better. And he says the most valuable and most successful paper will generally be that which has the most enemies.”

“Between now and when you have a product, you are the product, my friend, and so you better be nice to people.”

“If you don't treat talented workers right, they can go get another job in 10 minutes. So a strange thing happens, which is the sort of the hierarchy of power inverts and the CEO is actually at the bottom. So I sort of feel like I work for most of these people because they're the ones that are doing all the brilliant…”

“I'd tell men and women in their mid-twenties not to settle for a job or a profession or even a career. Seek a calling. Even if you don't know what that means, seek it. If you're following your calling, the fatigue will be easier to bear. The disappointments will be fuel. The highs will be like nothing you've ever felt.”

“The only way I could know is if I basically push myself to the point just before death, because that is literally when you've done your best. If you die, and by die, I mean burnout or something, then you've slightly overdone it. It's like running a marathon. You have to basically fall over the line, and then ideally…”

“Who would have thought that you can actually inspire people too much, he said. Well, you can, because you can get to the point where you're deluding your team, and then they are deluding you also. It's like I'm making this judgment that this is possible because the engineers are telling me it's possible, but they're…”

“The way he saw things, if investments were chosen based on voting, the Founders Fund portfolio would consist of middle-of-the-road startups to which nobody objected. Given that all the profits in venture come from a few improbable moonshots, this sort of consensus portfolio would deliver mediocre performance.”

“The analogy here is the internet has been for AI what coal and oil were for the industrial revolution. You could just literally drill a hole in the ground and get black gold. Today, we can just download all of the internet. Neither of these resources had to be there. The dead dinosaurs are the internet. Humanity built…”

“If making 40 rockets creates a manufacturing learning curve, flying the same rocket 20 times creates an operational learning curve that's even steeper.”

“In most other companies, the sales and business teams are natural enemies of engineering logic. They promise the customer whatever they want, which creates the very bespoke complexity that the first principles thinking is trying to delete.”

“The answer to what's hard to copy isn't any single tactic. It's that the tactics are a system. Copy one without the others, and it breaks down. First, principles designed without vertical integration gives you targets you can't reach. Vertical integration without volume makes your fixed cost a liability. A fail fast…”

“If you ask for someone's feedback, you'll get a critic, but instead, if you ask for advice, you'll get a partner.”

“To the best of my ability, I followed my intuition to make career turns and have been recommended against doing so every time. It helps to realize that it's better to follow the universe or follow, in my case, I would change that sentence, follow your intuition than those around you.”

“rules direct us to average behaviors. If we're aiming to create works that are exceptional, most rules don't apply.”

“I think the hard way is the right way. So many times people give me advice that I should be outsourcing X or I should be outsourcing Y. And when I try to explain to them is what makes this special is the compounding of this over 10 years. It's because I didn't take shortcuts.”

“The people that are usually really great that create the greatest companies, the greatest inventions, the greatest technology. They're usually very obsessive and it causes them to discount other parts of their life.”

“Fear of criticism, attachment to a commercial result, competing with past work, time and resource constraints, the aspiration of wanting to change the world, and any story beyond, I want to make the best thing I can make, whatever it is, are all undermining forces in the quest for greatness.”

“I negotiate explicitly for unrestricted access to the company from the moment we sign an agreement. Immediate access to employees is an essential condition for us. This is not commonplace in M&A.”

“was I a little full of myself at 19? Sure I was. I think you have to be to do anything important.”

“If we only had a 15% price premium, we'd merely be a premium brand among soft drinks, and not a different category altogether.”

“the most dangerous thing For a brand, branded product is low interest.”

“Since it's not me on the shelf for sale, but Red Bull, it's perfectly logical that Red Bull is at the center of our marketing activities and not the person.”

“if something's banned, it's all it is is free propaganda. It's free advertising. It's going to drastically increase the amount of demand.”

“Now, another trait that Rockefeller had is this maxim that says the good ones, no more. This is not an issue of talent or intelligence. This is an issue of effort. They just collect more information. They know more about what they're doing.”

“He says, if Detroit ran like Silicon Valley, nobody would sell cars. They would just sell parts. Customers would have to figure out which were the best parts. Maybe you'd grab a Honda engine, a Ford transmission, a BMW chassis, a GM electrical system, and buy them and try to assemble them into a working car. Good luck.…”

“One of Larry Ellison's favorite maxims is the brain's primary purpose is deception. And the primary person to be deceived is the owner.”

“People, teacher, coaches, bosses, they want you to conform to some standard of behavior they deem correct. They measure and reward you on how well you conform, how you arrive on time, dress appropriately, exhibit a properly differential attitude, as opposed to how well you do your job. Programming liberated me from…”

“They were mistaking the present for the future. It is the worst mistake a tech company can make.”

“Of all the things that I value most about my abilities, intelligence is not top of that list. My ability to endure pain and suffering, my ability to work on something for a very, very long period of time, my ability to handle setbacks and see the opportunity just around the corner, I consider to be my superpowers, and…”

“He says a key advantage I had was being fanatical. That is taking all of my capabilities day and night and just focusing on how do you write good software. I loved being a fanatic. Eventually, I reveled in it. I didn't believe in weekends. I didn't believe in vacations.”

“A great programmer can outproduce an average one by 10 to one. With a genius, the ratio might be 50 to one.”

“everything that makes up what we call life was made by people no smarter and no more capable than we are, that our world is not fixed. And so we can change it for the better.”

“In my view, that's what friendly companies and friends do for each other. In the long run, these things balance out.”

“The first one was a real belief that there wasn't a hierarchy of ideas that mapped onto the hierarchy of the organization.”

“I've never been able to think of my work and my life as different things. They're the same thing.”

“Part of the CEO's job is to cajole and beg and plead and threaten at times to do whatever is necessary to get people to see things in a bigger and more profound way than they have and to do better work than they thought they could do.”

“I don't care about being right. I just want to be excellent. Please continue to challenge me. It's the way we get to the right decisions, and I enjoy it.”

“To me, marketing is about values. This is a very complicated world. It's a very noisy world. And we're not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is. And so we have to be really clear on what we want them to know about us.”

“every time we convince people that we've accomplished something at one level, they come up with something new. I used to think this was a bad thing. I thought, oh geez, when are they ever going to believe that we're going to be able to turn this thing around? But actually now I think it's great. Because what it means…”

“it's optimism and passion because it's really hard. And if you don't really, really care about what you're doing, you're going to give up if you're a sane person because it's super hard.”

“If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something better.”

“One thing that reading biographies of dead people will do for you, it will remove the illusion that you have something to lose. If you want to design calculators at HP, then do that. But if what you really want to do is to try to start a company, you're making a giant mistake playing it safe. Everything is temporary.…”

“Don't give up future rights. Walt Disney, his, one of his heroes was Charlie Chapman. Charlie Chapman was one of the founders of United Artists. Disney had a deal with United Artists. Then when they went to re-sign, Disney refused to give United Artists the TV rights for Disney's IP at a time when there was only like a…”

“Slowness is the special defect of large companies and a cause of their ruin.”

“If we imitate the products of our big company, our big competitor companies, we will inevitably lose because they will can crush us with their strength. They are fighter bombers and we are a small boat. They can wipe us out with a single blow. We must keep our distance. Instead, we must invent new products that they do…”

“Talent is the most, you have to work with the smartest, most talented people you possibly can find overpay for talent. Cause talents are you, it's really hard to overpay for talent, right?”

“Talent is likely to be found among nonconformist dissenters and rebels. And there's something Steve Jobs talked about. Steve Jobs was an example of this himself, where people are packaged deals. You have to take the good with the bad. The exceptionally talented people usually have these weird things about them.”

“Online selling is a scale business characterized by high fixed costs and relatively low variable costs. This makes it difficult to be a medium sized e-commerce company.”

“In the physical world, retailers will continue to use technology to reduce costs, but not to transform the customer experience.”

“There are folks who work hard to figure out how to charge more, and there are companies that work to figure out how to charge less. We are going to be the second full stop”

“Math-based decisions command wide agreement. Judgment-based decisions are rightly debated and often controversial.”

“In some large companies, it might be difficult to grow new businesses from tiny seeds because of the patience and nurturing required. Amazon's culture is unusually supportive of small businesses with big potential. And I believe that a source, that's a source of competitive advantage.”

“working backwards from customer needs can be contrasted with a skills forward approach where existing skills and competencies are used to drive business opportunities. The skills forward approach says, Hey, we're really good at X. What else can we do with X? If you use that exclusively, the company employing it will…”

“Even well-meaning gatekeepers slow innovation. When a platform is self-service, even the improbable ideas can get tried because there's no expert gatekeeper ready to say that will never work. And guess what? Many of those improbable ideas do work, and society is the beneficiary of that diversity.”

“Outsized returns often come from betting against conventional wisdom, and conventional wisdom is usually right. Given a 10% chance of a 100 times payoff, you should take that bet every time. But you're still going to be wrong nine times out of 10.”

“Day two is stasis, followed by irrelevance, followed by excruciating, painful decline, followed by death. That is why it's always day one.”

“A remarkable customer experience starts with heart. Intuition, curiosity, play, guts, taste. You will not find any of it in a survey.”

“When a memo isn't great, it's not the writer's inability to recognize the high standard, but instead a wrong expectation on scope. They mistakenly believe a high standard six-page memo can be written in one or two days, or even a few hours, when in reality, it might take a week or more.”

“Wandering is an essential counterbalance to efficiency. You need to employ both. The outsized discoveries, the nonlinear ones, are highly likely to require laundering.”

“was I a little full of myself at 19? Sure I was. I think you have to be to do anything important.”

“You need to air condition your factories before your offices. If Japanese clients come into an office of a new company and see plush carpet and private offices and too much comfort, they become suspicious that this company is not serious. That it is devoting too much thought and company resources to management's…”

“all businesses are loosely functioning disasters. Some just happen to make money.”

“to acquire a company has been number six or seven in its field and to take it to number two or three, or even vaulted to the number one was almost impossible. Companies with leadership positions, if they continue to invest and serve their customers well, Are hard to unseat. It is not impossible, but it rarely occurs.”

“make sure you push your decision-making to those who are mentally in the game in the right way, because some people just, if, if it's their first adversity, they're like the proverbial deer in the headlights.”

“This idea of late bloomers in careers. Yeah, it happens, but I think it's pretty infrequent. I think it's important to hit the ground running and to run pretty hard.”

“I didn't have to go through shareholders. I didn't have to go through a board that might say, Hey, I don't know if it's safe to do that. Should we wait another two weeks? What are our competitors doing? I don't have to answer to anybody, but my crew and my customers so I can get out there and make things happen right…”

“it's obvious from reading these books that entrepreneurs either need a supportive spouse or no spouse at all. I, I think those are literally the only two options”

“With no papers to renew, our clients had no anniversary to jog them into thinking about leaving us.”

“There's a line, this is tied to a line that, um, that Ovid said to me where he says, only founders understand founders.”

“Retirement is lame. Retirement is fatal. You need something to push forward and focus on and improve every single day.”

“work 10% less. Optimize for the long term.”

“if you're not a hundred percent into it, somebody else who is a hundred percent into it will outperform you and they won't just outperform you by a little bit. They'll outperform you by a lot because now we're operating in the domain of ideas. Compound interest really applies and leverage really applies.”

“if you look at how the fortunes were built in this country, they were built by someone who identified a wonderful business.”

“So Munger says the mistakes that have been the most extreme in our history are mistakes of omission. They do not show up in our figures. They show up in our opportunity costs.”

“Steve, Steve thought annual reviews was the dumbest thing ever. Cause like, I'm giving you feedback constantly. Why would I wait for 12, you know, once a year, uh, to give you feedback.”

“in, in many cases, like you want to overpay for talent because if they're truly talented, it's almost impossible to overpay for talent.”

“The CEOs of the fortune, 500 are not selected like the members of the Olympic track and field team. You do not have the uniformity of top quality that you get with the American Olympic team. You get some very, very terrific people, but you also get a lot of mediocrity.”

“The ideal asset is a royalty on somebody else's sales, where all you do is get a royalty check every month, and it's based on their sales volume. You came up with a product originally licensed it to them, and you never have Another bit of capital investment. You have no receivables, no inventory and no fixed assets.”

“Innovation goes on constantly. And it's stronger than any regulation.”

“to sell a railway in order to buy into airlines, in other words, to shift from the old to that, which is coming, which has been the motto for the business activities of early generations of our family is the only tradition worth caring for in which our ancestors would like to see us maintain.”

“He said, ownership without presence rots.”

“He says people with very high expectations have very low resilience. Resilience matters in success. Jensen said greatness is not intelligence. Greatness comes from character and in character in Jensen's view is can only be gained and actually earned as a result of overcoming problems, setbacks, adversities, and…”

“If you're working on something you care about, don't avoid conflict. Confrontation. You actually seek conflict.”

“We learned it was better to do fewer things well than to do too many things. Nobody goes to the store to buy a Swiss Army knife. It is something that you get for Christmas.”

“strategy. Isn't what I say. It's what they do. Jensen said, that's a good line strategy. Isn't what I say is what they do. So it's really important that I understand what everybody is doing.”

“You really should overpay for top talent because it's nearly impossible to overpay for top talent.”

“We don't have a culture of going after market share. We would rather create the market.”

“And I actually think there's a lot of genius to the fact that she didn't let anybody else filter information. All the reading that she did, all the work that she did, was contained in one, inside of one brain. And I think actually over time, Gives you a massive advantage.”

“He says, I find that slightly understaffed teams are more focused and spend less time doing redundant busy work.”

“Optimism can be very negative. You have to take risks. This was something I repeated tirelessly to all those who have joined the company.”

“He says, we are a chain of stores with a company attached. We live. So that the store is focused on selling. All the rest of us are at your service.”

“If you want to know whether you are destined to be a success or failure in your life, you can easily find out the test is simple and it is infallible. Are you able to save money? If not drop out, you will lose. You may think not, but you will lose as sure as you live. The seed of success is not in you.”

“The very best employee at any job at any level of responsibility is the person who generally believes this is their last job working for someone. The next thing they'll start will be their own.”

“Munger would say that you need to find what you're good, good at, and then pound away at it forever.”

“any regional carrier, even one with a de facto monopoly would only harm itself if it gouged its customers with excessive rates.”

“arrogance, I feel, can fuel you, especially if you keep that arrogance to yourself”

“Frankly, there's no substitute for limited competition. You can be a genius, but if there's a lot of competition, it won't matter. I've spent my career trying to avoid its destructive consequences. Competition skews people's assessments. As buyers get competitive, the demand for assets inflates pricing often beyond…”

“There is one generally infallible tenant when it comes to real estate developers, no matter how disciplined they might presume themselves, given access to easy money, they will feed at the trough and overindulge.”

“That it's better to have no experience than bad experience. Better to have no habits than bad habits.”

“A's hire A's. B's hire C's. So the first B you hire takes the whole company down.”

“Anytime we do something that no other creator can do that separates us in their mind and makes our videos more special to them.”

“It's nearly impossible to overpay for talent. Meaning somebody is the best in the world at what they do. Think about Steve jobs. Uh, what Steve jobs said earlier in some fields, the best person is not twice as good. There is a hundred times as good.”

“The common sense outcome of that equation is that if one is certain of being right, one should invest the entire portfolio in that idea.”

“Good capital allocation takes many forms and does not necessarily require a firm to grow.”

“A lot of people think, in my opinion, a lot of people that are not entrepreneurs think the main motivator for entrepreneurs is money, and I would argue it's control. It's control of what you work on, how you spend your time, who's around you.”

“if you're thinking rationally and thinking about the long-term, you can subcontract the capital allocation decisions to them. You don't have to be buying and selling shares.”

“Increased revenues begets scale savings begets lower costs begets lower prices begets increased revenues.”

“It is extremely rare to find no-brainer great opportunities. You certainly do not want to diversify away from the opportunity that you have been waiting patiently for a long time to discover. For some really inferior other opportunities. Investing is essentially opportunity cost.”

“your business is built by serving the customers that love what you do and ignoring the rest.”

“So this is something that's very fascinating, and I don't think is obvious to many people, but I really do believe that great entrepreneurs likely have low introspection.”

“I found that the line which divides majority opinion from mass hysteria is often so fine as to be virtually invisible.”

“The successful businessman is no narrow specialist. He knows and understands all aspects of his business. He can spot a production bottleneck as quickly as he can an accounting error.”

“However, I have always believed that the businessman who uses credit the most sparingly is the one who has the greatest chance for achieving success.”

“It sounds so silly to say it, but it's truly hard to overpay for a truly great business.”

“I think actually the highest order bit It's belief. It's belief in yourself, and it's belief in your idea.”

“consumer studies of those recessions have showed That the companies that didn't cut their ads had in recovery captured the most market share.”

“normal rich people have no idea what MOIC is, let alone IRR or loss to lease, et cetera. If you want their money for your project, include a slide in your deck titled what we will do with your money in plain English.”

“you do not sell the product, you're not selling your product, You are selling the improvement that your product makes. People do not care about your product. They care about themselves. They only care about what your product does for them.”

“The founder of Sequoia Capital, Don Valentine, and he says the art of storytelling is critically important. Most of the entrepreneurs who come to us can't tell a story. Learning to tell a story is incredibly important because that's how the money works. The money flows as a function of the story.”

“social proof leads to more sales, which leads to better distribution, which accelerates the winner take all or winner take most flywheel, which leads to ever greater specialization, which leads to more scale.”

“as a leader, if you're not spending 90% of your time teaching, you're not doing your job.”

“It's like, you have to believe that your own opinion about what you're working on is greater than everybody else's opinion around you. None of this works if you can't trust your own judgment.”

“When you're in a startup, the first 10 people will determine whether the company succeeds or not. Each is 10% of the company. So why wouldn't you take as much time as necessary to find all A players? If three, three of the 10, uh, were not so great, why would you start a company where 30% of your people are not so…”

“Most companies have a tyranny of politeness, which means we just lie to each other. We want to have a culture of candor.”

“if I have to choose between agreement and conflict, I'll take conflict every time. It always yields a better result.”

“All of our finest thoughts and best ideas are not the work of the logical mind, but gifts from the unconscious.”

“If you're aiming to be the best at what you do, you cannot worry about whether your actions will upset other people or what they'll think of you. Your strategy is to make everyone else get on your level. You are not going down to theirs. You're not competing with anyone else ever again. They're gonna have to compete…”

“Everything is always the founder's fault. The founder has to take responsibility for everything.”

“And I think this is gonna become even more and more important. And Naval says in that book, being at the extreme of your craft is very important in the age of infinite leverage, which is what we live in. The person that is the best in the world gets to do that for everyone.”

“Uh, because they're so, such domineering personalities is, is back down from them is the worst thing because they're just going to keep abusing you. They're just going to realize, you know, this person soft, this person's weak. I can basically have my way with them. And even somebody that's not as talented, they do…”

“When you're so extraordinary at your craft, when your talent is so natural and your skill is so elevated, it's hard to understand that not everyone like you, that not everyone is like you and can do what you do. It's not a matter of they're trying more or working harder, they really just can't do it. And if it's not…”

“And so to do that, he would routinely pay the highest prices far exceeding what anyone had paid before. And in this bizarre world of capitalism that we're at at the very, the highest end, This actually made, the fact that he overpaid, uh, made his merchandise more valuable in the eyes of the buyer.”

“They believed that if you were not having big losses, that means you weren't trying enough.”

“if you permit yourself to be guided by administrators, you will never budge and your expeditions will fail.”

“keep a fortress of cash. This is what John D. Rockefeller did. This is what Warren Buffett did. They kept fortresses of cash. It is a distinct advantage to have near at hand All the supplies you need.”

“When authority is divided, opinions and actions differ, and confusion and delay arises. A single chief proceeds with vigor. He is not delayed by the necessity to confer.”

“Research cannot help you much in this domain because it cannot predict the cumulative value of an idea.”

“When you're in a startup, the first 10 people will determine whether the company succeeds or not. Each is 10% of the company. So why wouldn't you take as much time as necessary to find all A players? If three, three of the 10, uh, were not so great, why would you start a company where 30% of your people are not so…”

“extreme success is likely to be caused by some combination of the following factors. Number one, extreme maximization or minimization of one or two variables. Number two, adding success factors so that a bigger combination drives success often in a non-linear fashion. As one is reminded by the concept of break point…”

“When you're in a startup, the first 10 people will determine whether the company succeeds or not. Each is 10% of the company. So why wouldn't you take as much time as necessary to find all A players? If three, three out of the 10, uh, were not so great, why would you start a company where 30% of your people are not so…”

“A players hire A players, B players hire C players. So the first B player you hire takes the whole company down.”

“the game of competitive life often requires maximizing the experience of the people who have the most aptitude and the most determination as learning machines. If you want the very highest reaches of human achievement, that is where you have to go.”

“Almost everyone thinks that they fully recognize how important incentives and disincentives are for changing behavior, but this is not often so. I've been in the top five percent of my age cohort, my Entire life and understanding the power of incentives yet have always underestimated that power. Never a year. This is…”

“When you're in a startup, the first 10 people will determine whether the company succeeds or not. Each is 10% of the company. So why wouldn't you take as much time as necessary to find all A players?”

“I really think the most important, most prominent instinct, natural instinct and founder and entrepreneurial types is the control and conquer instinct. I think What we, we think we want money or prestige or status, but I really think what we actually want is control.”

“One of the best ways to find creative people is to ask a simple question. What books do you like? I've never met a creative person in my life that didn't respond with enthusiasm to a question about reading habits. Actually, which books people read is not as important as the simple fact that they read it all.”

“The worst thing you could do with a really powerful person is be overly differential.”

“She knew that killing stories was necessary to let people know that you had standards.”

“The same behavior by Anna is just being described as indomitable and ice queen and bitchy and all these other characterizations, but it is the same behavior. I don't think it is unique to her at all. And everything that Anna does, just like everything Steve Jobs did, just spoke to the fact that they were constantly…”

“if you look at history's greatest entrepreneurs, it's like, are they very introspective people? And my answer to that question was like, no, not really. They have such an extreme bias for action. They tend to just put all their energy and focus into what they're doing.”

“Things like mansions, yachts, private jets. These, these can be assets”

“if I had to distill every single thing down to one sentence, right? What have I learned so far in the seven years, 300 and something books, all these episodes. About the kind of mentality that these founders had. And I would say you need to combine the work ethic of Kobe Bryant with the self belief of Kanye West.”

“The best way to fail at inventing something is by making it somebody's part-time job.”

“Jeff argued that prime with streaming video would be a unique offering and a competitive differentiator. Any competitor might launch a prime prime shopping clone. He said, or they could potentially build a new Netflix type service, but it was unlikely that any one of them would be able to do both.”

“Ambitious people are rare, so if everyone is mixed together randomly, as they tend to be early in people's lives, then the ambitious ones won't have many ambitious peers. When you take people like this and put them together with other ambitious people, they bloom like dying plants given water. Probably the most…”

“If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something better. The takeaway here is worth repeating. Getting the team right is the necessary precursor to getting the idea right.”

“In a battle, if you're faced with two hills and you're unsure about which one to attack, he says, the right course of action is to hurry up and choose. If you find it's the wrong hill, then turn around and attack the other one. In that scenario, the only unacceptable course of action is running between the hills.”

“The key is to view conflict as essential because you know that's how we know the best ideas will be tested and survive.”

“And I think it's probably goes back to this idea that there's a lot of smart, really gifted, really talented filmmakers out there that just can't do the difficult stuff. So that gives me a tactical edge to do something nobody else has ever seen, because the really gifted people don't fucking want to do it.”

“I think when you find one singular thing that you could focus on to the exclusion of everything else, Arnold talks about in interviews and in books and everything else, he didn't believe in plan B. He believed you picked what you want to do and you burn the boats and you, you never doubt yourself. And I think most…”

“anybody that's trying to do something difficult, like build a business, achieve a goal, Must have a supportive spouse. You either have a supportive spouse or you don't have a spouse.”

“All of the greatest founders have high levels of disagreeableness.”

“If you're constantly putting your, uh, time and effort into your own personal development and those around you are not, they're going to resent you. This is inevitable.”

“The biggest threat To continuity, meaning dynastic family continuity, ok? The biggest threat to continuity was enrichment and success.”

“Their exit strategy is death. They found their life's work, and they, they had no intention of retiring, and they just kept doing it because they enjoyed to do it.”

“Search all the parks in your cities. You'll find no statues of committees.”

“I've come to the conclusion that the top man has one principal responsibility. To provide an atmosphere in which creative mavericks can do useful work.”

“The pursuit of excellence is less profitable than the pursuit of bigness, but it can be more satisfying.”

“The majority of businessmen are incapable of original thinking because they're unable to escape from the tyranny of reason.”

“You are not advertising to a standing army. You are advertising to a moving parade. Three million customers get married every year. The advertisements which sold a refrigerator to a new married couple last year will work just as successful to those who get married next year.”

“When you have written your headline, you have spent 80 cents out of your dollar. If you haven't done some selling in your headline, you have wasted 80% of your money. A change of headline can make a difference of 10 to one in sales.”

“If you want to understand the entrepreneur, study the juvenile delinquent”

“In my view, that's what friendly companies and friends do for each other. In the long run, these things balance out. I'm sorry you don't feel that way. We will be worse off as a result, and so will the industry.”

“The first one was a real belief that there wasn't a hierarchy of ideas that mapped onto the hierarchy of the organization.”

“Creativity equals connecting previously unrelated experiences and insights that others don't see.”

“And so I went back there as interim CEO and I decided right up front that I was going to act like I was the permanent CEO.”

“I don't care about being right. I just want to be excellent. Please continue to challenge me. It's the way we get to the right decisions and I enjoy it.”

“Uh, to me, marketing is about values. This is a very complicated world. It's a very noisy world. And we're not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is. And so we have to be really clear on what we want them to know about us.”

“I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should just go do something else wonderful. Not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what's next.”

“the dynamic range of people dramatically exceeds things you encounter in the rest of our normal lives, and to try to find those really great people who really, really love what they do.”

“If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something better.”

“One thing that reading biographies of dead people will do for you, it will remove the illusion that you have something to lose. If you want to design calculators at HP, then do that. But if what you really want to do is to try to start a company, you're making a giant mistake playing it safe. Everything is temporary.…”

“He did say one thing. He's like, listen, don't get caught up in owning a bunch of shit. It's just like, you're just going to keep buying nicer versions of the same stuff. Like, it's just not worth it. That's not what life is about. And he goes, there's a true luxury in life. He's like, he's like, there's one exception.…”

“if you want to understand the entrepreneur, study the juvenile delinquent.”

“In my judgment, a property is, if, if in my judgment, a property is worth the asking price, I see no reason to try for less. A lot of shrewd dealers think this is foolish, but I notice that others tend to lose more business and to poison relationships by trying to refine an already good bargain beyond a reasonable…”

“The theory had to do with breaking up a property into various components, which is what Sam Dell just told us, right? Its ground leasehold, its fee position, its operating leasehold, and a residual position, and seeking out various investors for each.”

“And so that insight by this fictional character Braun in Game of Thrones is something I see over and over again. Who were your ancestors, the one that made your family rich? Fancy lads in silk? No, they were cutthroats. That's how all the great houses started.”

“if you want to understand the entrepreneur, study the juvenile delinquent. The delinquent is saying with his actions, this sucks. I'm going to go do my own thing.”

“Instead, Steve argued there was no reason that well-designed, well-made computers, just like Yvonne is arguing here, that well-designed, well-made clothing couldn't command the same market share and margins as a luxury automobile. A BMW might get you to where you're going in the same way a Chevy that costs half the…”

“A company needs to constantly stress itself in order to grow. Our company has always done its best work whenever we had a crisis. When there is no crisis, the wise leader or CEO will invent one, not by crying wolf, but by challenging the employees with a change. If you don't move now, then you might not be able to move…”

“Conventional corporations are at the center of the ring, and eventually they will die off through either their own misdeeds or catastrophic events, such as dismal economic climates or unforeseen competition. Only those businesses operating with a sense of urgency, dancing on the fringe, constantly evolving, open to…”

“Instead of having the majority that is 51% of your money and of capital and company A. It is better to have 51% in a purely financial company B, which itself then holds 51% of company A. One therefore also has control of company A by dividing the initial capital outlay. This reasoning can be continued infinitely.”

“The biggest mistake is to relinquish your control. If you maintain the control, you'll get the money anyways.”

“The blueprint he gave me was simple. Forget what you know about buying fair businesses at wonderful prices, and instead, buy wonderful businesses at fair prices.”

“Even it's so hard to build a truly great business, and yet more likely than not, your truly great business is not going to be destroyed by competition. It's going to be destroyed by you.”

“It's remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.”

“The meta lesson is, if you are not willing to pay that price, you should presume that someone else will. If you want something like the presidency, and then, and then my note here is ours, or being a billionaire, if you want something like the presidency, you should presume there is someone out there who will devote…”

“In business, we often find that the winning system goes almost ridiculously far in maximizing and or minimizing one or a few variables, like the discount warehouses of Costco.”

“extreme specialization is the way to succeed. Most people are way better off specializing than trying to understand the world”

“I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest, sometimes not even the most diligent, but they are learning machines. They go to bed every night a little wiser than they were when they got up, and boy, does that help, particularly when you have a long run ahead of you.”

“If you have enough sense to become a mental adult yourself, you can run rings around people smarter than you. Just pick up the key ideas from all the disciplines, not just a few, and you're immensely wiser than they are.”

“The two name paper idea plus the fact that he's going to be shipping oil for Rockefeller equals Ludwig's wealth. Which then in turn causes him to go out and buy and start, you know, the hundreds of these businesses.”

“Yachts and private planes are actually undervalued assets. In the case of the Greeks and in case of Ludwig, these giant floating company headquarter mansion things wind up not only not costing them anything, but making them a ton of money.”

“overregulation and usually overregulation caused by special interests can actually cripple or kill a new industry.”

“Founders are much higher on the disagreeableness scale than, you know, people that are not founders.”

“That building a great product is not scientific. It's not something that could just be derived from data alone. You have to have taste, and one way to develop taste is through years of practice”

“I think founder, having founder mentality is more important than if you actually founded the actual company you're working with.”

“He said, you make more money closing bad stores than by opening new ones.”

“Dad was the ultimate extrovert, yet he told me that the right strategy was to be, quote, a sleeper. That is, not to be known for success when it did come.”

“Jobs' return to Apple 12 years later shows how the most important task in business The creation of new value cannot be reduced to a formula and applied by professionals.”

“The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd, but to think for yourself. That is a main thing that you and I have talked about over and over again. None of this works for entrepreneurs and investors if you cannot trust your own judgment. If you cannot trust your own judgment, you have to go work for…”

“A startup is the largest endeavor over which you can have definitive mastery. Definitive mastery. You can have agency not just over your own life, but over a small and important part of the world.”

“The most important things are singular. One market will probably be better than all others. One distribution strategy usually dominates all others too.”

“The engineer's grail is a product great enough to quote, sell itself, but anyone who would actually say this about a real product must be lying. Either he's delusional, which means he's lying to himself, or he's selling something and thereby, thereby contradicting himself.”

“There is a large random multiplier in the success of any company. Most startups tank. It's common for a startup to be developing a genuinely good product, take slightly too long to do it, run out of money, and have to shut down.”

“Probably the reason this trick works so well is that when you have two choices and one is harder, the only reason you're even considering the other is laziness.”

“You should figure out programs as you're writing them, just as writers and painters and architects do.”

“In every case, their creation of wealth seems to appear and disappear. That's a really important part. Like the noise of a fan as you switch on and off the prospect of keeping it.”

“In business, there's nothing more valuable than a technical advantage your competitors don't understand.”

“If you can make something that appeals to people today, and would also have appealed to people in 15, in the year 1500, there's a good chance that it will appeal to people in the year 2500.”

“One of the strangest is that the founders find themselves able to speak more freely with founders of other companies than with their own employees.”

“Many problems have a hardcore at the center, surrounded by easier stuff at the edges. Working hard means aiming towards the center to the extent that you can.”

“A deep interest in a topic makes people work harder than any amount of discipline can.”

“Speed defines startups. Focus enables speed.”

“whenever you get a chance to play against these guys, don't be afraid, man. Just play your game. You'll be surprised. They go for all the moves that high school guys go for.”

“if you want something like the presidency, or being a billionaire, I think that was my, uh, quote, not his, uh, like the presidency, you should presume there is someone out there who will devote all their time, money, relationships, sense of ethics, everything, in sacrifice of that one goal. Of course, that kind of…”

“The key ideas arose in the special groups that were working for months and years with the problems, and they arose from nowhere else.”

“you can drive away great people by making the speed of decision-making really slow.”

“Once you find your life's work, extra strategy is death. It's not retirement.”

“There were weeks when our billion dollar company was scrambling to scrape up enough money to make payroll. I didn't know it then, but this phrase in my career, or this phase, excuse me, this phase in my career was the genesis of a mantra that I would repeat regularly for decades to come. Liquidity equals value.”

“I had always believed that every day you choose to hold an asset, you're also choosing to buy it.”

“He believed that what counts in the long run is the increase in per share value, not overall growth or size.”

“He believed that cashflow, not reported earnings is what determines long-term value.”

“He believed that sometimes the best investment opportunity is your own stock.”

“Singleton believed buying stock at attractive prices was self catalyzing. Analogous to coiling a spring that at some future point would surge forward to realize full value, generating exceptional returns in the process.”

“many of the distinctive tenants of Warren Buffett's unique approach to managing Berkshire Hathaway were first employed by Singleton at Teledyne. In fact, Singleton can be seen as a proto-Buffett, and there are uncanny similarities between the two.”

“Our contention was that smaller units gave management better control and made the local manager fully responsible for the success of their own operations and motivated them to perform well.”

“The subsidiaries existed to generate cash, and Singleton's job was to allocate that cash.”

“some of the best founders, best managers, they're just teachers. They, they have this unique philosophy, which we've, you and I've been talking about, you know, for quite some time now, and then they just spend their time teaching their entire organization the way they want the business run, why they're doing what…”

“Through doing the signing, it's amazing how much you learn about the business. There's a reminder of each event or action behind every check.”

“A good product Is its own best salesman. It is uphill work to sell goods without samples.”

“the big salaries are paid to the salesman, to the men who bought in orders are to the men in the factory who reduce costs. They could increase profits, and if you can show profits, then you can command a reasonable share of those profits.”

“no argument in the world. Can ever compare with one dramatic demonstration.”

“We are too apt to regard people in the mass. We must get down to individuals. We must treat people in advertising as we treat them in person.”

“Again and again, I have told simple facts common to all makers in that industry, too common to be told, but they have been given the product first allied with them an exclusive and lasting prestige.”

“Products handed out without asking lose respect. It is different when you force people to make an effort.”

“People will do anything to cure a trouble, but little to prevent it. Countless advertising ideas have been wrecked by not understanding that phase of human nature. Prevention offers slight appeal to humanity in general.”

“Once you have an ad that works, stick to it. Stop changing it. Stop jumping around. They say this over and over again. You see people, modern day people make this mistake over and over again.”

“A mediocre salesman may affect a small part of your business. Mediocre advertising affects it all.”

“if an offer is limited to a certain class of people, it is far more effective than a general offer. For instance, an offer limited to veterans of the war or to members of a lodge or to executives, those who are entitled to any seemingly advantage advantage by being part of a group will go long way not to lose…”

“platitudes and generalities roll off the human understanding like water from a duck. They have no impression whatsoever to say best in the world, lowest prices, et cetera, are all at best simply claiming the expected. A definitive statement is usually accepted. However, Actual figures are not generally discounted.…”

“Your main appeal should lie in your headline. Whatever promise, the best promise that you have, which is the actual benefit that the customer gets from using your product, make sure it's in the headline.”

“The great insights don't spring from curiosity alone, but from dissatisfaction. Not the depressive kind of dissatisfaction, but rather a constructive dissatisfaction, or a slight irritation when things don't look quite right.”

“There's no reason why technology should be limited to computers. Properly understood, any new and better way of doing things is technology.”

“The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd, but to think for yourself.”

“Rivalry causes us to overemphasize old opportunities and slavishly copy what has worked in the past.”

“The fact that you see this entrepreneurs make this mistake all over and over again, they over optimize for growth at the expense of durability.”

“Sequencing markets correctly is underrated, and it takes discipline to expand gradually. The most successful companies make the core progression to first dominate a specific niche and then scale to adjacent markets, a part of their founding narrative, just like Amazon did.”

“To a definitive optimist, the future will be better than the present if he plans and works to make it better.”

“A conventional truth can be important, but it won't give you an edge. It's not a secret.”

“People are scared of secrets because they are scared of being wrong. By definition, a secret hasn't been vetted by the mainstream. If your goal is to never make a mistake in your life, you shouldn't look for secrets.”

“This leads us to a second, less obvious understanding of the founding. It lasts as long as the company is creating new things and it ends when creation stops.”

“advertising doesn't exist to make you buy a product right away. It exists to embed subtle impressions that will drive sales later.”