The Wisdom Wall

“No. There's, it's not rational when you let someone go. I mean, you want to think it through, but it's, it's an instinct that you could get someone better for that role. So that the test we use is called the keeper test. Would you fight to keep that employee if they were leaving on their own?”

“I don't think our role as a platform on the internet should be to tell you what's right and what's wrong or who to trust and who not to trust. And it's a seductive idea that it should be that role. And a lot of platforms took that stance and it just didn't work.”

“So unless you absolutely feel that you need this person by your side, and that they really have something for the business that an incredible first employee can't bring you. Don't have the co-founder.”

“Recycling is a band-aid, right? And it's better than landfilling and incineration. It's a step in the right direction. You know, reuse is an even better step than recycling. But in the end, the only answer is going to be a significant reduction of, of buying things.”

“it's actually very difficult to give away money effectively because there's less accountability versus a company. Like if you imagine putting money in a nonprofit versus putting money in a company, well, the company is measured and is very motivated on being efficient and, you know, makes hard decisions. When it's a…”

“If we just publish the weights of a model on the internet, and then we realize, like, hmm, there's actually a safety issue here, we can't take that back. It's done. It's like a one-way door. We also cannot put any usage restrictions on it after we open source it.”

“And when you hear all this talk about regulating prices of drugs, um, by different politicians, they're, they're not solving the problem. They're creating different problems. The reality is that the solution is, is trying to make sure that all these manufacturers sell not just to us, but any qualified resellers slash…”

“You know, I always thought if our people need someone else to come tell us how to treat them, then that would be pretty tragic. If I thought I didn't treat our people well enough that they needed somebody else, then, you know, that's not the company I wanted to run.”

“Venture capitalists are like hitchhikers, hitchhikers with credit cards. And as long as you take them to where they want to go, they will help you pay for the gas. But if you don't take them where they want to go, they will try to hijack the car, and they will hire a new driver and throw you out on the side of the…”

“And it started to occur to me that the five big trading companies in Japan were making North American brand name clothing. In other words, they would come up with their own brand name in order to deliver that to the Japanese customer. But Japanese, those big trading companies would never come up with a name with an L…”

“I live up in Tahoe, and like, you know, entrepreneurs, they come to me, and like, they come and hang out with me in Tahoe, and they like, drink beers in my hot tub, and like, I get to know them and their businesses, and like, you know, there's part of that that you're like, oh, cool, like, that's different, but like,…”

“Venture capitalists are like hitchhikers, hitchhikers with credit cards. And as long as you take them to where they want to go, they will help you pay for the gas. But if you don't take them where they want to go, they will try to hijack the car, and they will hire a new driver and throw you out on the side of the…”

“what I now realize in hindsight is whenever you take a strategic investment, whether or not you intend to sell them the business, you should expect that to be the outcome. And the earlier you can know that when you're negotiating, probably the better.”

“I mean, the one thing that I know about building a brand is starting is not really the hard part, and even getting to a million dollars isn't really the hard part. It's really getting from, like, ten million to fifty million is probably the hardest part, and then, you know, I think after that, it's hard for different…”

“So by the way, when you go to retail. You do four times the amount of work for half of the, the reward, right? Because, uh, you know, you now have to deal with buyers. You had to become a vendor record. You have to ship it. And by the way, you know, the larger companies have put more people out of business than they…”

“Well, that's what it, is what I'm trying to say. That's what it costs. Like, that's how much it costs everybody. Now, yes, you can put active ingredients, and yes, this was 25 years ago, and yes, there are more expensive componentry and finishes and all that, but you're also paying for the corporate overhead. You're…”

“You want to take institutional capital as late in the game as possible, if not wait forever, right? Like, challenge yourself to never take it. There's a lot of great things that come from institutional capital, but you're on the record, right? Like, they believe in you and your vision and your dream, but there is a lot…”

“And ultimately, the people who are afraid that AI is going to create an influx of so many low quality and, and, uh, cheap alternatives to actual real voices, I think what they're not seeing is that in that environment, if that environment does happen, the value of a connection, the value of being a guy at Raz, the…”

“If you invent something truly new, you're not inventing one thing. You're inventing a stack of things, and that invention becomes its own protection. And as long as you behave properly, I mean, it turns out there are a bunch of rules that if you follow these rules, you can preserve that monopoly for as long as you…”

“Because anytime you try to sell something, you get about one-tenth of what you get when they want to buy you.”

“Um, the core of it was if you had incredibly talented people, you didn't need a lot of process and rules. Netflix was anti-process and rules and pro-talent density.”

“We talked about it as the informed captain. The, the leadership model is to be the informed captain. So the, the captain of a ship is the absolute ruler of that ship and makes decisions. We want our leaders to feel like they're the captain. It's not a democracy, but they needed to know what everybody else thought.”

“what I'm going to tell you is to ignore your VC no matter what they say. If they tell you to chase sales, ignore them, because they'll be right in saying this is the only way to get huge, but you don't want to be in the position where you lose control of your own company.”

“that's when I figured out not to make love to every guitar that I'm building. I'm production-minded. I like to get it done, and come out with a good guitar, you know, at the end, and the amount of time that you stroke it isn't the key factor there.”

“after survey after survey, what we found was what mattered first and foremost was how these glasses look on your face. Second price, um, you know, third quality, um, last, if at all Would be the social mission.”

“Our franchisees were about an 85, which is exceptional in the franchise world, because most of them, in quick service food, run at about a 65, 70.”

“Another advantage of having your own restaurants, company restaurants, is that your valuations are way higher, right? So your sales, your profitability, your EBITDA that goes through as you grow company restaurants, just the company's worth so much more, man.”

“if you take out a founder too early, I do think you handicap the potential of the future of that company. Um, and I think you see that with some of the results of Indiegogo.”

“as soon as you take money from an investor, your number one goal moves from whatever it is today to providing a shareholder return. And there's an expectation from those shareholders that you're going to pick up the phone, you're going to talk to them, and you really don't want someone to say to you, you know, if we…”

“And, and I think that the website ends up being more relevant than ever for a number of reasons. One being, It's where the answer engines are finding their information. You know, they're crawling the web and using either old data or modern data or more relevant data to give you the answers they give you, and when they…”

“You know, you have to depend on just a handful of customers with the long tail. You know, we're, we're serving You know, thousands or millions of tiny customers who pay small amounts of money. You don't rely on anyone, uh, too much such that, you know, they're sort of too big to fail. We cannot survive without them.…”

“I feel like I started to realize that to create real change, we can't be as dogmatic.”

“the D to C myth is that you can, you skip the wholesale markup and you can charge a lower price. You know, the reality is the increase in marketing cost, the increase in G and A that you have to have to operate both as a retailer and a brand. It's a very costly game.”

“the core insight he had was that you should make readers the customers instead of advertisers the customers. And if you change that core dynamic, especially if you monetize the relationship over time through enough subscription, then different things are possible.”

“What we've learned Is not to bet on these very new products, because you really never know if they're going to work. So it's not that Apple Watch didn't work. Apple Watch ended up working, but what didn't work was apps on Apple Watch. There's just. That's just not a thing. There's just, they tried to make them a…”

“What we've learned is, while a lot of people say they care about health, when it comes down to making a decision about what they're gonna eat, it's taste, convenience, and value. Your health is kind of there, right, you know, right in the number four range.”

“you have three things you can optimize for when you're raising money. You can optimize for the people you're working with, like the, the venture capitalists, You can optimize for the terms, you can optimize for the valuation, but pick two.”

“if you have a big network, but you're only talking to three or five or seven people in that network, that actually the size of the network doesn't matter that much. What matters is that those people, those, you know, that you talk to all the time are a part of it.”

“one of my, um, sort of design principles, it's a bit crude, but I think it's a very good approach to packaging design, is like, the consumers are stupid and lazy. Uh, stupid in the sense that they don't really care that much, The brand is supposed to make it easy for them. And then lazy in the sense they're not going…”

“I actually ended up hiring folks that were right for the stage that we were in today, not for the stage that we'd be at in three years. Um, there's pros and cons doing that, and I think for me, I needed someone that could do the job, not someone who could sort of build infrastructure and go hire teams to go do the job.”

“A customer will speak about their value of sustainability or local, but in reality, when they take out their wallet, what they care about is they just like the way that product looks and the value, the way they feel, the like, they, they like the way they feel in that product and it's the right price point for them.”

“there's something about hospitality that forces consumers into a different mental model than they are using for other Entertainment categories. And I think it's the intimacy of it. I think it's the legacy and the history of hospitality. Restaurants in people's minds are first come first serve democratic places. When…”

“There's no way a big company can do the sort of build a bear type approach and chocolate. And so you could really own that market.”

“I'm always Thinking about scale and working backwards, and I would say, you know, at sort of ten million units, what's your cost, ah, of the, of the display and the, and the packaging, you know, like, and then figure out what the retail price would be off the back of that, and obviously your cost today is a lot higher,…”

“Thought I can interview somebody and find out if they're good, and you just can't. It comes down to resume. You have a history. Um, you've been in the workforce. What have you done?”

“So, uh, you almost need to buy equity in these little vendors, because as we make them rich and famous, uh, we get squeezed out in favor of the, of the mass merchants.”

“so, for the online travel industry, there was this strange, perverse effect of nine-eleven, which is that it literally put a rocket under the industry.”

“I thought the first million was harder than the first hundred million.”

“the Proliferation of clones was undermining the foundation of the business model. The business model was based on scarcity. It was based on the novelty of one of these things existing per day in a city, and when you have 50 different Groupons in Chicago, all offering a bunch of different things, on any given day you…”

“I didn't think the price was communicating the value of this shirt, so we put up the sign, we're there looking stylish in these shirts, and now it's 1295, which was a lot of money in 1978. We were swamped.”

“Um, when you get into those stores, really focusing on services like Instacart, I've seen that have a much higher, I'm talking like Two to three times higher ROI than spending on Meta.”

“That's actually a much better idea is you only franchise to groups with multiple other stores. That are running really good operations where this is exactly what they do, where when you give them the store and the training manuals and everything, they're going to know exactly what to do with it.”

“You can't be an Etsy with better values. You got to be Etsy with a different product.”

“one of my fundamental rules, I can believe, is if, unless you are really good at user research, Build, build products for yourself.”

“And to be clear, the way I define artificial general intelligence is it's an artificial agent that can do all the kinds of cognitive tasks that people can typically do and possibly more.”

“Intelligence is profoundly valuable for many, many reasons, and I don't know of any way to globally get everybody to stop using and developing this very, very valuable technology. And so, as far as I can see, this will be developed”

“smartphones are great. They're really, really great at, at what they can do now, but they're very limited in terms of how much more they can do. And if you think about if they're able to leverage some of these multimodal inputs that use text and voice and sound and image and eventually video, You need a new kind of…”

“the world is not in technical terms, a state function, meaning in a state function, if something should exist, it becomes that just because the world should be electric does not make it electric. The world is a path function. I mean, I, I think about like an alternate history. Imagine we go back to 18 nineties and…”

“we're just simply releasing more capabilities into society faster than society has the immune systems to absorb and adapt to all the new changes that accompany all of that AI getting released.”

“And I think things like liability as a regulatory framework are powerful because people understand it, right? You as an AI company shouldn't be worried about being liable for the harms if there are not going to be any harms or risks. So if you don't think there are risks, then go ahead and release it. But if you do…”

“Then you get AI and you get a double exponential. You get an exponential that accelerates its own exponential, meaning AI accelerates AI development.”

“you're not really competing against the whole company. You're competing against the section that's making a competitive product.”

“brand is the moat, and I think it's hard for people to, to wrap their head around what that means, but there's a lot of Sort of historical precedents to show that that's the case... it shows that giant companies are really bad at creating brands. Like they, there's just too much bureaucracy. There's too many focus…”

“what's most important to customers. Um, and when they're buying glasses, what's most important is the glasses look good on their face. Then how much do they cost? And then is it good quality and is it good service? Um, lastly, you know, is there a social ethos behind the brand and is my purchase sort of helping and…”

“the biggest impact is in our ability to attract and retain some of the most talented, passionate, Driven people in the world who want to work for a mission driven organization. And so that's where we tend to see kind of the biggest benefit from a business standpoint.”

“I believe we have some data to support that it creates resonance with the brand, but when it comes to the individual buying decision of, do I buy this coat versus that coat, the answer is usually not so much, especially today.”

“I know for sure that continuing to operate these systems, uh, that's heavy, heavy, heavy on, on numbers of employees who turn over very frequently is not sustainable.”

“I think there's a whole continent of computing in between the blocks that children play with and the way technology currently lands in their lap, which is just phones and tablets and reduces them to poking at pictures under glass.”

“The way I would think of Neuralink is kind of like a hip replacement. You know, no one really wants a hip replacement until, you know, you actually need one. And even if they end up being 10 times better than your actual hips in the future, You probably want to be able to keep your hips for as long as possible…”

“If you go 24 hours a day, your daytime business doubles, which is absolutely correct.”

“I remember people always telling me, you know, hey, Joel, uh, nobody pays for apps. Apps are all free. Um, and no one's gonna ever pay for an app, and I said, I'm actually not an app. I'm a, essentially, a dating business, and people have been paying for dating for centuries.”

“you cannot build a company reliant on your face, because creators come and go every five years. Every five years, somebody's hot, somebody's not. So my face is temporary. I must migrate from my face to a company.”

“you cannot build a business on top of social media. Impossible. And so, so this idea that Facebook will be my livelihood, and I can build an empire for the next 30 years, thanks to Facebook's algorithm, is, is a dream that will never materialize.”

“I think when people talk about luck, it almost feels like it's kind of like a loser attitude where it's like, oh, that was lucky. It's like, I don't feel like there's a lot of luck with this stuff. Opportunity can be luck, but you still have to like nail the opportunity and you still have to put real thought into it…”

“I could say, I'm gonna be carbon neutral, and you're gonna pay an extra 10 bucks for every unit of clothing in our stores, and because how consumerism works, and how markets works, and economies work, it would be a very, ah, noble thing to do, but you wouldn't be able to sustain that.”

“Now when you remove passengers, you still have to nail safety, but like our, our groceries don't care if we're a little bit more of a defensive driver than you or I might want our driver to be. We're okay with taking our foot off the gas. If we think we've seen something until we get enough additional sensor…”

“That's the last thing you need to be doing because that sends a very powerful message that that's not for them, that that's for their parents or grandparents.”

“if you can grow slower, you can really find your market and not buy your market.”

“the one consistent Thing that we found in those companies that was different than our peer set of, you know, the aways and the Warby's of the world is that they didn't grow by raising hundreds of millions of dollars of capital and trying to skyrocket the highest valuation possible in a short amount of time. They did it…”

“And what I realized is that the likelihood of me being successful starting a car company with, with no capital, no team, No technology, no brand, uh, no facilities, no supply chain. I actually felt the likelihood of me having impact doing that was still higher than the likelihood of me being able to impact the…”

“And I think what we found is that when you do that, you're really empowering creators and the hive mind and the network effects and all of the benefits that you get from that are so much more powerful. Like you, you get to Disney levels of empathy and belovedness for a brand much sooner when somebody can own a little…”

“I over-indexed on this idea of, hey, we really have to have just a lot more collegiality, and that works really well if you are doing great as a company. But inevitably, every company goes through ups and downs, and sometimes downs take a long time, and, you know, you go through the pit of despair for a while. And in…”

“And, and unfortunately that was also the point at which I realized when I realized that pitch work could, could break careers, could like break artists in the bad way. I was like, yeah, that really gave me pause because the reaction to that, I did not, I mean, I didn't, Expected to end his career, for God's sake. You…”

“And when you really look at the term inclusion, it means that ownership doesn't change. Now you're just being allowed here.”

“I think there's a real danger in consensus, especially when you're talking about real breakthrough innovation, because yes, Every breakthrough innovation looks like a bad idea, but it's actually a good idea, and so you, I think you really want to avoid, like, a committee that has to have unanimous yeses to, because…”

“there's a lot of folklore in the startup world, which I'd say emphasizes the role of the individual. There's a hero kind of notion that's created, you know, against all odds. And, and here we were claiming that conceiving, creating, growing companies could be the object of a company. Uh, very methodical, very Uh,…”

“the accuracy with which you have to guess what's going to work Is not at all important. Because we get into these brand new areas, it's wide open to find where value lies, right? Imagine if we waited three, four years as people did, or 10 years in the case of mRNA. Now all of a sudden they'd go into the space and…”

“I knew the second you take a dime, we're starting a clock. We're starting expectations. It kind of changes the nature of people when they even come for a job interview. You know, the question is, how much stock do I get, you know?”

“Presence is visibility, awareness, retweets, shoutouts from the stage. Presence is not bad, but when we mistake presence for power, we sometimes think we've done things that we haven't actually done. We mistake a black president for thinking that we are post-racial. We may mistake a America's love for black celebrities…”

“You can't work for everyone. And who's your customer? Your customer is the person that pays you. And buyers and sellers don't pay brokerage firms. They pay agents. And agents are the ones that pay brokerage firms. They split a percentage of what they make with you.”

“And it would take them quite a while to convert. I don't think most businesses would have the patience to wait for these customers because you'd see them come in and start a business, set up a MailChimp account, try to do something with a business. They would fail. They would shut down their business, but they would…”

“In this case, you know, you could argue this is concentrated on a small number of stocks, but the system wasn't built for People on the internet banding together, millions of people to buy the same stock or small group of stocks, and I think it kind of broke the system to some degree.”

“Like, those Black businesses should be held to the same standard of return on capital. It's just the opportunity to have access to that capital, have access to the support and training that Y Combinator companies may get, or that, you know, first-round capital companies may get. Like, it's just, it's just a matter of…”

“If you can demonstrate value to someone We had to figure out how to sell things online. And once we had done that and saw the effect of that patience, all we did is kind of continue to double down on that model every year, right? We would hire more engineers instead of once we could afford to hire salespeople, we were…”

“To be quite honest, it's often about being less bad rather than good, and I think we've gotten the two things confused. I think that when you're buying a seventh generation diaper, you're causing landfills to fill up, you're causing increased climate change. You're causing water pollution. You're having a bunch of…”

“I think the questioning and the scrutiny would be different. There would be more question of can we than how will we. Whereas if I sent someone different on my team in, the questions around how are we going to do this happened a lot quicker in the conversation, and there are women who will tell you today that's still…”

“I always encourage entrepreneurs to take money from family because I think it's the best motivation to ensure that no matter how hard things get, you're going to find a path forward.”

“And there is this like false, I would call it very false belief That if you prove that someone transacted, then that review is therefore trustworthy, but all you have to do is, like, read one of the 20 stories on Amazon about how people still easily game that system, because, like, oh, you could send the product to…”

“while I was at a hedge fund, I saw how much capital structure and incentives can really drive what an organization does. And, and the only organizations that really do stay true to some social bottom line over long periods of time are nonprofits.”

“hardware can be hard, but, um, to an ambitious group of people like the Peloton founders and now the Peloton team, um, You know, it's, uh, it's a competitive moat over time, which is, uh, which is why I think our investors are excited about it at this point.”

“A lot of companies in education eventually turn into marketing companies. For the following reason. You realize, man, making improvements in how well you teach is hard. And it really is very hard. It's, it takes years. So for every dollar you have, you quickly realize it's actually better to spend your dollar marketing…”

“Today they're certainly not, they're the They're the brands where everybody, you know, the big guys want to buy them, because they can see that we had created things that they, with all their money, and all their teams, and all their budgets, could not create. And we were still very much connected with our brands, and…”

“recognizing how challenging it was to really get capital. Particularly later stage capital as a female founder to be seen as both visionary and a strong operator.”

“technology companies, I think, often have a sort of go it alone mentality. We'll build it all in-house. We'll do it all ourselves. We can do things better than ever in the outside world. Whereas we thought that Stripe would only be possible, and it would only be possible to do it well. If we partnered closely with…”

“And this is one of the great facts about our industry, uh, is that you cannot turn, uh, Money into great products, uh, as a kind of mechanical operation. Uh, if it were possible, there would be many more great iPhone competitors. Facebook would have been long since eclipsed by MySpace or Yahoo or Google.”

“I think that you can get better as you grow, and that's been my experience. Um, when we were really small, and there's this sort of Glow around the sort of mom and pop sort of thing, I think, especially in ice cream. But when we were small, we were, we were really limited by what we could buy.”

“If you are still passionately involved in your business, if you still care, just don't sell the controlling interest to a private equity or a financial institute. Just don't do it. You can sell parts of it, but just don't give away the controlling interest, because no matter what they're telling you when they're…”

“I took the investments knowing that I'm going to be raising the clock to either go public or get sold. Um, that was the duality of, of outcome. And by the way, this is true for every person who sells shares in their company. Just most people don't realize that that's what, what's happening.”

“But the thing is never to take advice.”

“people don't buy sustainable products. They buy great products.”

“we started pricing it at 1200 dollars, because, uh, it was just over 1200 dollars was our cost, and we're like, let's price it at cost, because we have the subscription digital content business model that comes afterwards, so we don't need to make any money, and we weren't selling any at 1200, and someone told me that…”

“anybody can copy a product. Anyone. I'm at the UT campus speaking to you right now. I could go to the engineering school, probably find five really talented young engineers, and they could build Bumble. With the right support, somebody could rebuild any piece of technology. It's, it's engineering. However, You cannot…”

“and I think what really has created this long life for the restaurant is the fact that we don't have one person who is the main chef of the restaurant. We have two people, and they share their job, They work three days, and then they're paid for five. And it allows them time to recover and have ideas.”

“And just because you started the company doesn't give you any right to continue to run the company. You know, it needs to be run by somebody that can make good decisions and can manage that complex an operation.”

“You never want to be in a situation where you're rewriting the core of your platform. It always takes three times longer than you would expect. You know, the people who originally wrote it are sometimes no longer there, and it's usually a disaster.”

“once you get into a business partnership with a friend, the friendship gets totally sublimated to the business partnership. So a lot of the stuff that you used to talk about or do, you don't have time to do because you've got to work on this little growing baby company. And so it went from what was really fun and kind…”

“You create a clothing store that has no clothing. And that was the insight, which is the customer doesn't need it right away, and that flew in the face of everything everyone in retail told me from the traditional industry. Instant gratification. And it turns out for a busy customer, that's just not true. If they get…”

“let's focus on profitability. And if we have four percent of a market and we're profitable, that's better than having 90% of a market and being unprofitable.”

“Anybody that tells you that they can build you a viral video or don't, don't believe them, I did not have huge hopes for this video.”

“that's a playbook that big competitors, big incumbent competitors can do, you know, to make you look unattractive to capital, to make you look unattractive to potential acquirers.”

“Beauty brands build products and clients for the needs of, you know, Macy's and, you know, Sephora and Ulta and CVS, and those are shelf space needs and seasonality needs and margin needs and all of these different needs that have nothing to do with you as the customer. So that results in this kind of subpar, like,…”

“I always encourage entrepreneurs to Take money from family, because I think it's the best motivation to ensure that no matter how hard things get, you're going to find a path forward.”

“I think it's totally pointless to make a green product for green people, right? They're only about five percent of products in the, in the U.S. market that are sold are green products. And so if all you're doing is preaching to the converted and the five percent, like, what are you doing? We want to create a product…”

“there's a saying, if you're thinking about firing someone, a lot You should just fire them. Meaning that, like, that intuition, if that keeps coming up, it's almost certainly correct, and you wouldn't be thinking that all the time if there was a real shot at making the relationship work. Um, I think it's exactly the…”

“He said, but what if instead you started the founders at the same place as the other investors, and only when the company grows in value do the founders get more equity? And that's was, it was a reverse structure. And what that did was it helped as we grew and we raised more money, we didn't get diluted.”

“it's a term sheet is, unfortunately, not binding. It's a indication of interest that's really a buildup of good faith, and so you could do it and get away with it, absolutely, and it happened a lot in, you know, in the late nineties when you didn't have online Transparency and reputation where other entrepreneurs could…”

“There's a pervasive sense of short-termism that has invaded our markets. The reality is, when you have such short-term pressure on our CEOs, they react. And what that ends up meaning is cost-cutting. And they avoid the kind of transformative events that drove the success of Panera.”

“If you're in any of these other categories, certainly there's a big business there, but that's effectively the business that the Walmarts and the Amazons and the Targets and the Costcos, they're all in that business, selling the same exact items to everybody. And you can fight that out and try to find an advantage, but…”

“That concept does actually apply in lots of areas of life, that if you get a lot of people looking at something, people can say, hey, there's actually a problem here that maybe nobody else noticed, and then sometimes after it's been pointed out, you say, oh yeah, that's kind of obvious.”

“the best way to prepare people for Authoritarian rule is not to indoctrinate them into an authoritarian philosophy, but to make them believe that there's no such thing as truth.”

“Obsessed and mad. But the thing is never to take advice.”

“if you wait for the customer to tell you what to do, you're too late. So we were our own customer, and I think that was the secret of coming out with products that a lot of the products people didn't even know they, they wanted or needed.”

“And in fact, that's why the faster a business grows, the faster it dies also.”

“when you, when you put women in control, you completely reverse the rules. So she now has the confidence to go after what she's interested in. And the man on the other end doesn't feel rejected. He feels flattered. And then all of a sudden you've balanced the behavior.”

“anybody can copy a product. Anyone. I'm at the UT campus speaking to you right now. I could go to the engineering school, probably find five really talented young engineers, and they could build Bumble. With the right support, somebody could rebuild any piece of technology. It's, it's engineering. However, You cannot…”

“we have here a deeply entrenched and systemic issue that cannot be solved from within classrooms alone, right? This is, no amount of teaching is going to solve this. We need incredible teachers, but we also need some of those people who understand what you understand from teaching And decide, I'm going to go become a…”

“So I said, let's focus on profitability. And if we have four percent of a market and we're profitable, that's better than having 90% of a market and being unprofitable.”

“think small and act small and we'll get bigger. Think big and act big, and we'll get smaller.”

“I had several product problems like that that came from a manufacturer trying to improve his margins, and you know, this is something that in the manufacturing world people call quality fade, And it's a big problem, um, when you manufacture through China.”

“And just because you started the company doesn't give you any right to continue to run the company. You know, it needs to be run by somebody that can make good decisions and can manage that complex and operation”

“If you had asked me that in the eighties, let's say the late eighties, I would probably have said it was, um, 90% intelligence and insight and work and 10% luck. But to tell you how perspective changes with time, I would say today it was the other way around.”

“If you can run one business, you can run any business.”

“I've had other companies come to me and say, oh, I love that idea. I think I'll institute it in my company. I say, forget it. You'll fail. Because you have to start with the very first person you hire.”

“So I said, let's focus on profitability. And if we have four percent of a market and we're profitable, that's better than having 90% of a market and being unprofitable.”

“when you're starting off in business, you have to be so very careful about who You discuss your hard times with, because those who love you and care for you the most, like your mother, like your best friend, they'll give you the worst damn advice in the world.”

“Sharon and I built this business together, and I love, I think you should work with the people you love. People say, oh, you shouldn't work with your spouse. You shouldn't work with your friends. Yes, you should. That's who, that's exactly who you should work. It doesn't always work out, but it doesn't always work out…”

“anytime I hear the quote, something's market, you know, it's like a, and everyone kind of goes, oh, this is kind of what you need to learn how to accept, and I'm kind of like, that, the second you tell me that something is market is the second I know that we have to do better than that. So whether it's like terms that…”

“So then, you know, number one's always taste, right? So if you quote blind taste tests against all your major competition, especially in your price point, Are you coming out on top? If you basically aren't getting a yes, then the structural argument behind the product is going to be borderline irrelevant.”

“raising equity is really complicated, and it's easy to get screwed, and you have to generate some sort of return, but I would start to go look at small business loans.”

“a small sporting goods store with limited square footage, they can't make any money off of a 40 dollar cooler, you know... it's all about, at these small shops, it's inventory turns, you know, Dollars generated per square foot, and so here we are, we showed up with this three or 400 dollar cooler, and we gave them a…”

“Once you get these bigger customers, they start naming their terms and, and hitting you with all kinds of penalties and stuff like that. And so, I felt like once we started selling to some of these bigger accounts, we had the power to say no when they were trying to push us around because we didn't have to have them.…”

“getting a patent is an expensive process, but even more expensive is actually protecting it when you do have infringement. So we felt like it was kind of a, a waste of resources, you know, instead of playing a prevent defense, it was more about being offensive minded and putting money into the brand.”

“don't fight the culture. Just like because, uh, American Idol, you know, came out and, you know, did a, uh, uh, you know, singing contest on TV, you'll notice there were 27 other singing contests that came out after them. Some of them exceeded American Idol. And being second, being third, being 10th, you want to be…”

“No matter how many times the retailers go through this, no matter how many times I went through this, everybody's thinking to themselves, this time is different. Like, this time, it's gonna sell a million a month for the next three years, and they can't even just do simple math that there's not that many people.”

“And anyone who says before they launch that they're setting a forecast they believe is accurate is totally lying. You're going out on a hope and a whim that there will be good reception to this and it will take off.”

“And if we are building a legacy business, and we're doing this right, it will mean that we're going to be dealing with characters that are polarizing, it will mean we're going to be dealing with different administrations along the way, and our job is to remain as centrist as possible through this position.”

“one of our biggest obstacles in the early years was retailers afraid to put our product on shelves. Cause they didn't want to trade the customer down. If they're selling a six dollar lip gloss and I'm selling a dollar lip gloss and they customer buys mine over theirs, then they just lost five dollars of, of sales.”

“I used to have the same theory about restaurants. If it wasn't packed from the day I opened the door, we're gonna fail.”

“the more sales you get, the bigger your problems get in, in supply. I never really understood that. I, my accounting thinking was, we just sold a million dollars worth of product, we're broke. What's the answer? Oh, we'll sell two million next year and think we'd have more money, but you don't, you're twice as broke.”

“The bigger, the faster, the better, and I think that that is a dangerous thing. I think that, that we, we need to monitor how obsessed we are with how fast we grow, because it's a dangerous thing to be moving so quickly, and it's stressful, and it challenges your employees, and And I think that we need to, you know, I…”

“I'm not convinced that eco-friendly and sustainable and better for the planet actually matter as much. I actually, I actually think right now, the, what matters to especially your kind of consumer is like the person who buys fewer things but better things. Like that's, in a lot of ways, that's the new luxury. To have…”

“the truth is if somebody's working for you on a hundred percent commission, they're working for themselves. They're not working for you.”

“The biggest difference is that content from publishers used to go viral on Facebook all the time, and everyone used to be on Facebook. Now, now the social web is really fragmented. Some people are on Facebook, some on Instagram, some on TikTok, so, you know, some are quitting the apps entirely and trying to be more…”

“I think that you can embrace AI and use it in products, but you also can counter program AI, which is people are sick of just digital experiences and want to connect with other people in the real world. And it's also scarce. You know, if all of a sudden software is, is sort of infinite and anyone can make vibe code…”

“One, if you give an entrepreneur money, they're going to spend it. There's no doubt if somebody gives a bunch of money, we'd find a way to spend it. But when you don't give them any, and they're hungry, you, you figure out a way to make it.”

“And look, most innovation comes from like really serving the needs of an extreme user that then you apply that to a general population.”

“the way you do it, at least during my time, is distributors are not going to open markets. They're going to continue your stuff. So I opened New York City. I developed New York City. Once I have 50 accounts or a hundred accounts, then I find a distributor to continue supplying and distributing for them.”

“I think it's okay to take outside capital. Because most businesses, the end result and the, the quote unquote end result for the founder, most businesses are quite binary. Like, meaning that this is going to be really big, like we're going to see Surfing Cow and Sephora and Whole Foods and everywhere over the next…”

“if a company stands behind its product, you generate more customer loyalty than if that customer never had a problem With their product at all.”

“The closer they get you to closing on a transaction like this, at this point, you're emotionally kind of already there. You're, you might even be spending the money, you know, in your mind. Oh, when I get that check, here's what I'm going to do first and all that. And pretty soon at the end, the deal is Not exactly the…”

“the learning, you know, just, and it still stands today, it's the idea that as long as customers love the service, and they're repeating, and they give you good marks, that you had something. You had something that was valuable. You had a brand, and there was lots of ways to solve the economics is what we thought and…”

“It's only when you have your life on the line and you can't afford to lose can you find the sixth gear. And when you're in that sixth gear, at least for me, It's like a out-of-body experience. It is like you don't have time to worry, think, be anxious, just have time to do.”

“farmers aren't going to give you the consistency you want. You need to have consistent rules, and you need to create what I would call, uh, like a franchise model. An upside-down franchise, and I had the experience in franchise, like, how would you do it? And I said, well, I would recruit farmers to follow our system…”

“And family, I always say family is the worst person to get advice from in the beginning, because they don't want you to fail.”

“I think that you probably shouldn't spend time worrying about patenting designs. You should focus on continuing to innovate and to offer this full authentic experience, which you really have. And I think copycats, they might look like your product, but I think for the people that are, that are really looking to, to buy…”

“in hindsight, I tell, uh, other entrepreneurs that don't be in a hurry to go public because it gives your competitors a lot of information.”

“you, you take away 20% of the revenue from every store, and that takes away the profit, right? And our customer base was highly distributed, you know, across the U.S., So, we knew that if we got to a certain size, um, that it was like, you know, a billion, it was very painful for the store-based model, and we always…”

“Patents are always a matter of who has the biggest amount of money.”

“It's best to start a business when you're young and ignorant, because I just figured I could figure it out.”

“that's a playbook that big competitors, big incumbent competitors can do, you know, to make you look unattractive to capital, to make you look unattractive to potential acquirers.”

“I do think that there's a balance between growth and profitability, and I think, you know, the pendulum used to be too far one way, right, which was grow at all costs, but then it swung the other way, and then what happens is you can't, it's too hard for a challenger brand to break through, because it is expensive to…”

“I've certainly saved menu for 29 years now, almost 30 years. If I had LTOs, which might spike business for a tiny bit, right, something new at Cain's, my managers would have to, like, then be putting up point of purchase materials, getting training everybody on how you cook this one thing during this small period of…”

“Go to Kickstarter to build a community. It's not there to raise funds. It has the side effect of raising funds, but you're really raising a community, and that's the place to do it.”

“if you want to change finance, you can't do it in the finance world.”

“whatever the amount is, times it by five or 10, because that's what they want back. So that's really what you're taking. If you take a million dollars, you're really taking ten million because you've got to give ten million back. That's what their, their expectation is.”

“the only organizations that really do stay true to some social bottom line over long periods of time are nonprofits.”

“So I think one of the best ways to kill a startup is to overfund it. So not having enough cash isn't always a bad thing. Makes us really, really get to the essence of what it is we, we need to do.”

“the systems and the approaches that we invented were really appropriate and good for our business, and some of the biggest errors we made Was listening to so-called pros tell us at a future point in time that the right way to run a business is, you know, fill in the blank. And rather than just staying true to what it…”

“But what we realized is that if we could get some 24 seven access or depot, you can get rid of rent and labor on site. And that all of a sudden allows you to operate at 40% margins.”

“Our view was that if we just capture three percent market share, we're gonna be millionaires. And so we didn't view this as a winner-take-all market.”

“I would ask for examples of founders and entrepreneurs, uh, who perhaps did not make it, um, in their portfolio and ask, uh, to, you know, call three or four of them. And then you'll get a pretty good triangulation in speaking with, you know, the founders of the company, especially those who maybe had, uh, less…”

“I would say that's more common than not, right? Uh, yes. Investors who claim to be bringing the, the, the famous word is, you know, synergies, uh, to, to what you're doing, um, and experience because they will show you that they were involved in some, you know, successful brand that you like, but then if you really…”

“when you think about re about retail, It's pretty easy really to sell in, but what you really got to focus on with retail is sell through, right? And that's where a lot of early brands that their buyers are out there in retail looking for things to buy. They're under pressure to bring in some new things. And so…”

“get profitable as early as possible and stay profitable and make, make decisions from a mindset that, you know, I want to try to maintain profitability. And even if I have to go underwater a little bit to do it, a little bit's fine. Deeply, less fine. And because, you know, honestly, when, when you're living in a…”

“No matter how many times the retailers go through this, no matter how many times I went through this, everybody's thinking to themselves, this time is different. Like this time it's going to sell a million a month for the next three years. And they can't even just do simple math that there's not that many people.”

“And that's part of the reason why I think a lot of startup founders in particular could benefit from a little bit of identity diversification. If your entire identity and self-worth is wrapped up in your company, there are too many factors outside of your control that can give you A, a real curveball type of damage.…”

“our critics don't pay for our business. Our fans do.”

“looking back on it, I think, I don't think it was worth the time and the energy. Our, our whole career has been built on not focusing on competitors, and then all of a sudden this happened, and it caused us to lose focus for a little bit, to be honest, too. So, I would probably lean more into the camp with not being…”

“It is very hard to work with your spouse in a business that is so intense, so I suggest you look elsewhere.”

“It's the music business. I'm just trying to make money. You know, it doesn't really matter. Does it? If someone's enjoying it, let them enjoy it. Who cares?”

“There is no difference between 38 and 49. So, uh, trust me, nothing will change. Actually, sometimes psychologically, when you sell something a little bit more expensive, you sell more of them, because people think, oh, that's a great thing.”

“It's the grandparents. It's the gift givers. So you need to start marketing to grandparents. Once you start marketing to grandparents, because they want to, they want to take care of their, our gift givers. They want to take care of their children or grandchildren, and they have a lot more disposable income”

“I meet hardware founders, and they talk a lot about How their first product is going to sell a 100,000 units in the first year. And I tell them that's actually the wrong goal. You really want your first product or your second product that goes to the consumer market to just teach you this. What's the state of play?…”

“Yeah, and, and we have this principle at Hinge of kind of depth over breadth, and we always You know, it's hard to try to cover up for weakness by just like expanding more like, oh, like that market's not working. Let's just launch more markets. So thinking, thinking like, okay, we got one market going. How do we get…”

“I still think of advertising as a tax on an unremarkable product. And the better you get the product, the packaging, and something that creates that immediate connection, then marketing is really just gravy and jet fuel to, to be able to accelerate that.”

“A lot of designers at that point were coming from an agency culture where, you know, you go explore, you come up with a few solutions for the client, you present, you know, three solutions. And then you have a grand reveal of, like, here's the big, amazing thing that you should obviously do. And, uh, that's just not…”

“I think so many entrepreneurs just drive themselves to not fail, not fail their employees, not fail their investors, not fail, you know, success, and will add years and years and years onto businesses that they're running, 70, eighties hours a week that they really wish they could have back in the future. And the off…”

“I don't believe in saturated markets. I believe in really good branding”

“And if you go look at what premium contemporary brands do, they grow through retail.”

“And if you're a messaging app, and your big drive is your half on Blackberry and half on iPhone, if you lose half your users, you don't actually lose half your users, you lose like, 95% of your users.”

“The problem with Facebook is not that it doesn't work, right? The problem with Facebook is that it works too well. And doesn't serve the people who use it. Right. Yes, it kills all the newspapers, but it's, it's a massively successful business that takes, takes advantage of the scale internet, yada, yada, yada.”

“In my experience, that type of business usually is a lot more successful. Even if early, if the founder is not necessarily all that much into making money, et cetera, they end up making more money than the ones that are where the founder's like, I just want to make money.”

“I, I found the right factory in Taiwan. They can build a lot cheaper than, at the time, the labor costs in Japan. And, the components are all the same. At the same time, we've, we're vertically deintegrated, I use that efficiency, and we pass the saving to the consumer.”

“Amazon's like a force of nature you can't avoid. So it's not, it should never be a question. Are we on Amazon or not? I think, um, it should be, how do we optimize it?”

“I think for a strong brand, you need to have both. You need to be in brick and mortar, and you need to have a strong presence online. Because people do want to touch and feel and try the product, and they want to experience it before they buy it. So I think, you know, the successful brands in the long term are going to…”

“you have to be very honest with yourself on what, what business you actually are in. Because with us, right, with misfits, it's easy to say, oh, we're e-commerce, we're, you know, grocery, we're, but, but fundamentally, we're an operations and logistics business. And being excellent at that is actually what is…”

“your customer when you're in grocery is not their customer, it's, it's the buyer. And what the buyer wants to see is, yeah, sure, you can split some votes, that's okay. Are you bringing new people to the category?”

“And when you bring in outside capital, you lose all of that. And so, you know, are, who's on your team? Who, how many people do you have? Are you ready to sort of like let go of that kind of control?”

“I find that PR firms can be really awesome, but you have to have somebody, you have to have somebody at that firm who is your champion. Who adores you, who believes in you, who wants to push it forward. Otherwise it falls flat and you just, you kind of go nowhere and it's very expensive.”

“There's no organ in the body that you injure to make it come back better and stronger. If you're a runner, you're never going to hurt your lungs so that you're going to be able to be even more efficient as a runner.”

“I think sometimes people think that data has to be big data in order to matter. And I've found even at the size that we are, that sometimes it's the small data. It's the conversations with, you know, eight women at dinner. That give you better insight than the surveys of millions.”

“And my point of view was, the parking industry was more about relationships. Um, at the time, you know, 60, 70% of the dollars spent in parking were cash. It was a very, you know, old school group of folks that had, you know, set ways of doing things. And this idea that you can just throw money at a problem didn't work…”

“There was a thesis that, well, if you park the car farther away, you can get an arbitrage, and especially in New York City, it's, could be a hundred dollars to park in a specific area, but it's only, you know, 15 dollars, you know. A couple of streets over. But the problem is that as the, you get farther and farther…”

“one was never, ever, ever do two businesses at once.”

“I think of wholesale as marketing that you get paid for. So anytime somebody goes into a yoga studio and sees your product, they're discovering you.”

“I actually think it's easier to break through now. I think it's harder to stick. But I think it's easier to break. Um, and what I've seen is, you know, the internet has really shifted away from the follower model. And it's shifted into an interest-based model that's hyper-focused on discovery”

“I found the right strategy for finding product market fit is actually no strategy at all. It's speed of iteration. Like your intuition is actually going to be right in some areas and wrong in some areas. And what matters most is getting through the mistakes so that you iterate your way to product market fit as quickly…”

“You have to have the mentality that you start off a startup, and you're sort of digging for silver, but you gotta be on the lookout for gold all the time, and you might just, you might just see gold, and when you see it, you gotta go for it, and it doesn't matter what egg on your face, it doesn't matter money you lost,…”

“You're not really genius unless you're not just using logic at work, you're using intuition at work. We want you to use your intuition. We authorize you to be brave enough to you. You'll make more mistakes, but you'll also be much more genius by, by using your intuition.”

“if you're trying to build loyalty and with a higher priced, lower gross margin item, then mission is your secret to success. That's your way of getting trial, getting reach, and ultimately getting that holy grail of consumer products, which is word of mouth.”

“as a business person, you have two fears in life as a niche player. You won't be successful with your investment, or you'll be too successful. If you're too successful, it becomes mainstream, and bigger guys can get into it and outprice you.”

“I, you do everything yourself the first year, maybe two years and you should.”

“the reality is, in the CPG industry, having an actual moat is very hard. It's kind of non-existent. I mean, having your own manufacturing like Brian does, um, really can help, but that's extremely expensive”

“I think that, that the more it's used, the less actually authentic something or someone is. And you often see this on social media where people say, be your most authentic self. And I think to myself, You're standing in front of a camera, and you are acting, and so how are you actually authentic? So I guess, to me,…”

“very few people bought Spanx because they loved Sarah Blakely. She's lovable and terrific, but that's not why people bought the product. They bought it because it was really effective. So, um, the, the, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter whether Allison is interesting or funny or, you know, it would, that's…”

“the truth is that I think every entrepreneur knows a dollar from one place buys you the same as a dollar from another place. They're not different. Um, you don't, there, I think if you really want to succeed and support your company, you don't need to be too picky about, you know, Where the, the funding is coming from,…”

“Lawyers get paid by the hour, and it creates literally no incentive for us to add efficiencies or to work towards a resolution. Um, the longer the divorce goes, the more we get paid.”

“a lot of brands, um, really push their social mission, and I'm not convinced that that sells product. I, I think, I think what sells a product is a good product.”

“good, good luck trying to get a bunch of people to switch their behavior if something doesn't lead with delicious flavor. And when we Talk to our consumers and, and, and try to figure out, hey, what's contributed to our, our, our kind of growth and, and the high level of kind of advocacy that our customers have for the…”

“you're not gonna get to volume if you just overcharge or charge, you know, kind of cost plus.”

“We were only going to be able to sell these kinds of things if they had stories attached to them.”

“It's the place the consumer goes to learn more about their brand. They may never even purchase from your website. The goal of the website is not to end a purchase. Well, I mean, I think our DTC business is probably a good chunk of our overall business, but our goal is to be a resource for education and then most…”

“the SAT is a game. It can be beaten. It's not about how smart you are. It's about how smart you get at that test.”

“when you get into those things of just offering something in the Red Sea, a commodity, you can never be low enough, and it also diluted what the brand specialized was, so that was a big mistake.”

“So the strategy is no different. It's just it happens right now at, at scale more quickly because of the platforms, and it's changing. Someone who's an influencer today may not be next month.”

“advertising online is just, is challenging. It's hard to cut through in today's environment, so I really am a Much bigger believer in the right wholesale partners, the right activations at those wholesale partners to build awareness and getting the staff excited, um, and, and, and, you know, press and influence or…”

“and frankly, you know, if you look at the Under Armour story, to, to try to compete directly with Nike is suicide.”

“if you lost that foundation, if you lost that commitment to quality, you lost that value system that supported local manufacturers, your core customers would leave you, and when they left you, eventually you'd lose everybody.”

“if you exist on a, on a foundation of a commitment to a type of, of a supply chain like American made or a really high quality that gives you a leg up, you could stand out and do something unique and something that, that customers would really value.”

“probably policymakers number one, uh, probably retailers number two and brands number Three, and then consumers, I think, are fourth and the least important, because I think consumers have got to act rationally, and they should.”

“I work with a lot of restaurants, and those that are loaded up with debt can't focus on operations, and those loaded up with equity investors also are distracted from finding opportunities with their operations.”

“thinking, maybe you should work at a company before you start a company. Yeah. Which is a tip that I would recommend to most people.”

“It felt like a thing, which has, I've come to realize, is the most important thing, and like, it's, feeling is much more important than metrics early on.”

“It's so easy to get Overwhelmed by data, especially in tech. And as soon as you have anybody using your product, the attention turns to numbers, and testing, and people try to be very scientific about it.”

“it was my coach at the time, hired by a VC, which is a bad idea, um, Bill Campbell, who told me”

“A good rule of thumb is a creator will make around 5000 dollars per every one million views, and that's the reason why we have to operate on digital budget. So we have to break, you know, I would say like five million views just to break even.”

“And this is a problem a lot of YouTubers do, where it's like, they see a little bit of success, so it's like, well, what's the playbook say? Ok, I need to hire a manager, and I need to hire five editors, and a video guy, and a script guy. And then, and then you're left just being a manager of people. And then they're…”

“I feel like it's a downfall when they try and Totally pivot the channel and have eight different people on camera. People don't like it. And it's not what they subscribed for, right? It's not what they came for.”

“And one of the fundamental keys in Blue Ocean is that the more you focus on benchmarking your competition, we do that in an intent to stand out. But ironically, it helps us commoditize our own industry, and we end up in a continuous drive of imitation, driving us right into where we don't want to be, commoditization…”

“We would argue that your brand is determined by your price versus the utility that you offer. When my price versus utility that I offer is dramatic and I offer a leap in value at a reasonable price point, I automatically have brand, I Automatically get people doing word of mouth praise. I automatically get people…”

“I just never change your name. Just don't. Just keep the same name that you have. That's my advice.”

“If it's possible to be a toxic superstar, if it's possible to be a, you know, a high performer who's selfish, then your definition of performance is too narrow.”

“We believe that to become the go-to grocery shopping app, we cannot be more expensive than brick-and-mortar stores.”

“hard work and the, The talents are just necessary, but how high you can go, how far you can grow, really has a lot to do with the situations you are in, what happened to you, what people you met, and, uh, you can loosely say those are all luck, or fate, or destiny.”

“No, no, no, it's not. I am here to tell you it's not good for you. Um, it is something that humans can do, but it's not good for us.”

“And it turns out the more energy each battery cell can store, the cheaper the battery pack can be. And the way to think about the reason for that is if every battery cell you have stores twice as much energy, then you need half as many cells. And if you need half as many cells, you need less manufacturing equipment,…”

“the thermodynamics said it was not impossible, which is all you have to know. Once you know, it's not impossible. It's really just a question of how long and how hard is it going to get.”

“I think we can be pro-technology and anti-externalities, and that's the nuanced position that I want everybody to be in, rather than saying you're either for tech and for acceleration or you're a D cell.”

“I realized that Silicon Valley, we are good at a lot of things, but managing inventory is not our forte. You know, we, we think of things as very fluid and consumer and bits and bytes. So I said, that's not that inventory is not a great thing to do, but just, we are not good at it.”

“At the end of the day, Android and Chrome, you know, and Google benefit the more overall screen time there is. Versus not.”

“And the thing about it is that as you scale these digital brains, they end up with more emergent capabilities that no one who built them anticipated.”

“TiVo was a great company, but never decided, was it a product? Was it a service? Which is it? Is it both? And as the idea becomes mainstream, you've really got to do that and dive deeply. And the companies that survive do that well, and the companies that don't, don't.”

“Yeah, you got things that look expensive. But are the same price to print as a straight line.”

“all we are doing is we just want to make legitimate entertainment, not marketing. And it's a tried and true Approach that Red Bull was very successful with, Monster was very successful with, where they blur the lines between an entertainment company and a beverage company. Now their specific type of entertainment is…”

“My compass is very different from an American perspective compass. And that's what many Americans need to realize is that the world does not center around America and American interests.”

“But that doesn't exist in Singapore, in the UAE. They're so intertwined. Like you, I have a business in Singapore. We all love Singapore, right? But the government knows everything about every business and works with every business, right? And so like, yes, you can do that separation in America, but you really can't do…”

“I found out that the American way of building companies is very different than the Asian way of building companies. The American way of building companies tells you, build one product, make that product really big, go on IPO, and just like continue working on that product for the next 1020 years. Like Slack. Slack is a…”

“I would always negotiate where I would have several months of free rent so that I could have no expense on actually building out the store, and then I would make sure that I got the store built in half that time so that I could have the store open Making money before rent was actually due. So that was one thing. I also…”

“a lot of people talk about education as something that brings equality to different social classes, but I always saw it as the opposite, something that brings inequality, because what happened, at least, you know, in my case, those who have money can buy themselves the best education in the world, and those who don't…”

“making bold proclamations or performative statements can sometimes not lead to desired impact and may actually lead to disruption and, and distraction.”

“it's almost impossible to create a media brand with just your own content. You have to combine Content that you produce with content that you license from others”

“one of the most tried and true things in Hollywood is that you need to have a satisfying ending to a story. And when you don't have a clear ending, people will not recommend the show to other people.”

“despite the presumption of innocence that we all taught in school, people that go to serve on a jury believe that indicted equals guilty.”

“the single biggest assumption underpinning all radiology today is that you only ever look at one part of the body at a time. And this is a throwback from a 150 years ago when we just had x-ray, an x-ray plate that they put behind your body to take a picture of what was happening inside.”

“it's also an argument that makes sense when you start to consider these interventions at a population level, because at a population level, we're all a statistic. But at the individual level, we only have one life. You know, if we lose that one, we don't get a do-over. And so the way we might make decisions as…”

“it takes time to make decisions, and if you're informed about every decision every time, all you're going to do is induce anxiety.”

“I think you see depressed wages, uh, because margins are so tight, right? It's, it's, and I, and I think these operators would love to pay their, their folks more, but the model just can't afford to do it.”

“while hospitality may not be face to face, With the customers, it's providing a really good experience through the app. It's providing reliability on service times. It's making sure that everything that we serve is delicious.”

“And you look at a marketplace, like, I would say Etsy now, or eBay, And the primary customer is clearly the buyer, where the whole experience is optimized on the buying side, to the point where, you know, I pay a listing fee, and here's my item, but the website is going to place other items on that page that are…”

“if it's not worth standing up for, you shouldn't be having a meeting.”

“when you think about the power of technology, how it essentially lets you bypass fate and hack it, you can wield the power of meeting who you want to meet. You can filter people. You can layer, um, your search criteria in ways that you just cannot do in the real world. This, this is really powerful.”

“So you can delete it off your phone. It's the wrong metric to focus on. Instead, you're much better off reading the App Store reviews. You're much better off reading the feedback from your customer, because the stock market is the wrong voting machine to be listening to.”

“So, 50 success stories is worth more than thousands of failed dates, because those failed dates turn into the reverse flywheel of negative feedback, and so we're actually absolutely aligned with the customer finding success, because their success is our success, and we're in this to help them find healthy and equitable…”

“I, I think when we read this as food people, it didn't make sense to us that the only thing that matters to market dominance is the formula of a product. Of course it's not. That takes zero account of how people think about brand, how people discover brands, how people shop in grocery stores, how people consume food in…”

“But I don't think work is the enemy. Like, I think being productive and being in community is the antidote to social isolation and mental health challenges.”

“there has to be space for CEOs to be human and to be learning and growing alongside everyone else, and I reject the notion that a CEO should be You know, uh, know-all, be-all. Like, that's, that's really dangerous, right? That's not good. So I stepped back from that practice, and I really focused on how can we get back…”

“Whereas in our system, what you can do is just to add more salt and more coolant. And you extend duration while keeping the power portion of it. That is the machinery, the turbo machinery, the heat exchangers. You keep those all constant, but let's say you wanted 10 hours or 20 hours or 30 hours. Well, you just add…”

“I was going to have to jump in with two feet because there's just too many opportunities where things get tough and you want to retreat back to what's comfortable. And if you have a day job, you have a salary paying the bills. It's too easy to return to that safe space.”

“the dirty secret in our space is that the big brands, you know, they were really premium footwear offerings, but they never really had a premium apparel offering. Whereas like Lulu inherently was working with fabrics that were much more expensive. So before you did any cut and make of the garment, just the textiles,…”

“a steak is the most complicated food product that we eat, and there is no food technology that exists that can reach to this level of complexity, and three-D printing has a lot of disadvantages, a lot, a lot, a lot, but complexity is the number one benefit. There's no added cost for complexity.”

“It's an entire new paradigm in aviation, because when you buy an airplane, it's worst performance will be on its first day. And every year when you put new batteries into that, you, you get better performance.”

“You can't rely on minimum wage people to have motivation, and so I always figured if I take in a partner, the fact that they have equity in that individual location would make a big difference in the outcome, which is true.”

“Franchisees and franchisors are two people flipping each other off all the time. In other words, if I, if I told the franchisee to do something, they would say, well, he's not, his motivation isn't cure. He just wants more six percent from the top.”

“Most people will brag about how hard they work, this, that, and the other. What I think hard work is what keeps you up all night long when you're worrying. That's hard work.”

“Is when a business person says, I love my business. That's absolute bullshit. You love your family. You can enjoy your business, but once that becomes a love affair, you lose your objectivity.”

“When I came back, uh, I, I think when you sell your business, they shouldn't keep the founder on. It's sort of like cut, cutting the tail off an inch at a time, and everybody who was unhappy came to me, and I didn't have any influence or power to do anything about it.”

“And, uh, you're not going to make money with the sinister view of humanity.”

“my advice to mission-driven entrepreneurs is typically to try to do this, that stuff in a for-profit context, because access to capital, Is way easier in a for-profit.”

“The material choices we make, I think, need to be less about is it an alloy or glass or plastic. It's much more about how do we eliminate the need of packaging if we can. Then how do we shift to reusable packaging where the packaging is just cleaned and refilled, which eliminates the need of extracting it every time…”

“If you want little boys to buy your Game Boy, then include Mario, but if you want everyone to buy your Game Boy, include Tetris.”

“And, you know, for a location-based service, when you're meeting people, it's really, you know, all about, you want people nearby. And if someone's not nearby, that's not a great experience. And so we had the, you know, first mover's advantage. We had the network, and we were growing very quickly, and so that was, uh,…”

“And I think one of the ways that founders get caught up in validation is with, uh, Valuations. Valuations, headcount. And to me, those were vanity metrics. Those were not metrics that were, uh, important. The only metric that was really important to me was my daily active users and how many, you know, messages people…”

“Our failure was, uh, was in the architecture of what we did. And so, you know, if there was a woman, she would get hundreds and hundreds of messages. Uh, we also allowed people to exchange photos, and so women would get unsolicited nudes. That, you know, that was a problem. We also would say, you know, how far you were…”

“money is not the rate-limiting factor with these kinds of new technologies. I actually think that practical problem-solving, you know, unfanciness, and, you know, willingness to ship product quickly and learn from customers is actually the rate-limiting factor.”

“And that's the thing, like we don't, as, as a black business owner, I don't want you to support my business. I want you to shop my product because you think that this is great. Exactly. Because we make it easy for you to understand what products work for your complexion, not because you feel bad about something.”

“I think that's actually been really important for us to like having the same economic incentives all the time, same ownership. Like it's just good, you know, equal partnership. That's I'm really glad we did that in retrospect.”

“It's, it would be really difficult to meaningfully inflect product improvement without actually owning the manufacturing process.”

“what you're doing is based on non-transactional giving. You're inviting people in to your space. But if you were to sell a ticket, then it's a transaction. You buy the ticket, you expect a good coffee and a breakfast and the talk, and if it's not good, you know, like, and then it's done. The transaction is over. But…”

“no matter how much streaming content you, you watch at home, you want to get out, you want to be a part of an event, you want to have experiences. So I think there's, there's legit pressure to up the game to make sure that our industry, cinema industry, delivers, you know, exceptional experiences.”

“50, 60% of the, of the effort in an organization like that goes to the political process, right? Positioning yourself well and all that kind of stuff. It's not, it's not just doing stuff, right?”

“there are actually, there are still companies existent today that take the approach of we should three-D print everything, and We very early on made the calculated decision that, three printing is an enabler and you have to use it in the right places in the right way.”

“And that's the big catch-twenty-two of starting a food beverage company, is in order to get a store, typically a store chain, you need a distributor. And in order to get a distributor, you need a store chain. So what you really need to do is convince some store chain that they really want your stuff so much that they…”

“My second belief was if I can get the attention of a million people, It is very easy to make a million dollars. I just need the attention of a million people. Views as a currency is more powerful than dollars.”

“yes, you can do that separation in America, but you really can't do that separation in many countries around the world.”

“The American way of building companies tells you, build one product, make that product really big, go on IPO, and just like continue working on that product for the next 1020 years. Like Slack. Slack is a one product company until it got acquired. Perfect. Right? That never made sense to me. So I'm much more inspired…”

“when you threaten other people's livelihoods, they don't go, congratulations, you have the better mousetrap, and walk away. They will most likely went back into a corner, try to, uh, screw with you before they try to improve what they're doing.”

“The gist of it is everything we're going to talk about when it has to do with our business. It's not about footwear. It's about natural form. It's letting your body do what bodies are made to do naturally without getting in the way.”

“Like if you're thinking about Starting a shoe company, I would just say run as fast as you can in the other direction”

“Um, and, you know, it was always the same mindset, is, um, a country will become profitable between 16 and 24 months, and then it will pay for the next one.”

“I think the big playbook is never talk down to the customer. So whether it's a t-shirt or an evening gown, It's thoughtfully and intelligently designed, and we also have to remember, in a, in a world that is casual, the richest person in the world does not fill their entire closet with 1800 dollar jackets. And vice…”

“If we can get something that is so interesting to the most powerful people, it's gonna be interesting to anybody who cares about politics.”

“Founder led companies tend to push what the product can do. And, and then when the founders retire, what happens in those companies? Well, they, they promote the most successful executive. Uh, that reported to them who by definition is really different than the founder because they had to compliment the founder. And so…”

“The thing that happened when production moved to offshore with a lot of companies is that they also forfeited their design to those companies, to those manufacturers. I called it the Vietnam melting pot of design. It's this, uh, forfeiture of brands, unique designs over to the factories, and consequently I decided…”

“I always relished it when I saw my competitors pick up, uh, outlying products. Tents, sleeping bags, et cetera, because it, to me, it meant they were going to lose focus and expertise on what they already were doing and kind of water themselves down.”

“I never understood why somebody would be covering sports if they didn't love sports, and if you love sports, you have to have a favorite something. You can't just be an atheist, a sports atheist, basically. You have to have a player you love, or a team, or whatever”

“The spitballing is what gets hurt. You can't do it on Zoom. You can't.”

“restaurants are really the worst business model, and you have to just constantly keep up with the rising cost of food.”

“luck is not like rolling dice. It's a series of structures and power systems That make paths easier for certain people.”

“as somebody once said to me, if you want loyalty, get a dog, because there is no such thing in the record business, you know, because everybody has, starts whispering in their ear, you could make a lot more money if you were so-and-so.”

“The model of an MCN, or the model when you are on rented territory, for the lack of a better word, you're on YouTube, you're on Facebook, those algorithms change, those rules change. Also, your economics, talking about business model, because when we launched, these YouTubers could not monetize on their own. They…”

“if you are in the hospitality business, uh, this is your life. Don't be in the hospitality business if you can't take feedback. And if you can't take feedback, some of which is good and some of which is not living up to Expectations, however unreasonable they might be. You just shouldn't be in the hospitality business.”

“the reason taxis made sense versus cars that you can, you can go out and buy at a dealership is, you know, with the taxis, it'd be a fleet of vehicles that we would own and maintain. We could limit, you know, where they operated and they operate, they could operate, you know, 20, 22 hours a day. And so because they…”

“all of these independent brands were purchased by L'Oreal, by Estee Lauder, and Shiseido. So, overnight, we were then in business with the big companies, and that did two things for us. It provided a wall around us for new entrants, because the indie brands didn't need distribution anymore, they were in these big…”

“Well, in a small town, you've got to attract Everybody. Young people, the middle-aged people, the seniors, and coming from the supper club business, we were used to big menus and things like that, but thinking back, I mean, I would have loved to had a simple menu like In-N-Out or something like that where, you know,…”

“The best podcast, the best books, the best everything is not capitalistic at scale. It still needs to be capitalistic. People need to afford their way of life and their tools, but that scale is something I'm really allergic to now.”

“The moment you start working on plan B or plan C, The likelihood of Plan A working goes to zero percent.”

“It was though everybody in retail thought that the American consumer was stupid, and actually, they're not as stupid as those people thought.”

“there's one thing I got right was I knew it needed to be branded. Those French, they branded their baguettes and that's how we're still eating it. They branded this broken rice to us and now I'm going to brand Fogneau and I'm going to make it Sexy”

“Empathy cannot be made up. Empathy cannot be recreated by computer.”

“We had a moment that we need to put the price, price wall. That is the, um, the way we can weed out who are not ready to commit for adopting healthy behavior, and that is the way also, as we are a product company, we can actually gather, gather higher quality data in order to build a better product.”

“there isn't a work-life balance, because there's no, like, demarcation between work and not work, really. I mean, we, we go out to dinner at night where it's, it's at an account. Like, we go to somewhere on the weekend, like, pretty much everywhere sells beer, right? So, so, We're traveling, and, um, there is no, like,…”

“Patience to wait for the big idea is just not inherent. Well, it's inherent in the design kind of way of being, but it's not inherent in corporate America because you look smart if you have the answer early on.”

“The difference between financial investors and other types of investors is that, uh, people are fungible, uh, and they were less interested in the value that different people brought to the parts of the business than they were in getting down to what was a reasonable headcount and a reasonable fixed cost for the…”

“It's not building great, beautiful software, uh, to win. It's building good enough software and great sales.”

“watching a movie for free on a service instead of buying the movie to watch it is a substitution for what you're doing. But watching someone else play a game is actually marketing for the game.”

“unlike most social media, You can't really go viral on Twitch. It's almost, because, because it's live, it can't go, you can't get to, oh my god, look at this, millions of people see it. It's like, however many people saw it, saw it, it's over.”

“Anyone who's trying to make finance, personal finance, sound complicated, or like if there's a lot of math in it or things like that, they're probably just trying to get money out of you. Um, because there's really not that much to know, honestly. Spend less than you make. I mean, there's really not, you know, there's…”

“something that I learned early on working in media is that, you know, if you're dealing in scale, you're in a race to the bottom. There's no two ways about it.”

“We've flipped that on its head and said, we're going to start with the lowest income people first, and that allows us to be mass market first, and so that has been a painful journey, but now that we've seen a little bit of success, yeah, we do have a competitive advantage, and that we can expand to be mass market…”

“95% of the population Would likely only do this when they are forced to it. And that's eventually to get to billions of tons of CO two removal. We need regulation. We need corresponding legislation. We need governmental procurement programs that might be CO two taxes or CO two burdens or incentives, um, that, that we…”

“if the world of the internet becomes suddenly very social, there are all these humans that are emotional. What will they do? What will they need? They're all going to just follow the seven deadly sins because that's what humans do. We're all wired to transgress in sinful ways.”

“hard is not always valuable. Valuable is typically hard, but the inference doesn't work the other direction all the time.”

“If you are, what's in the industry is evocatively called a sloppy payer, which is someone who generally pays their bills, but are almost never on time. The normal financial industry behaviors say, great, you're a fantastic revenue opportunity. You have the money. You just don't, don't care about being on time and we'll…”

“And what do you do after, once you see one of those, have one of those, it does come down to work ethic and just willingness to grind and, you know, sleep less and Compromise things like work-life balance, which have their own consequences. It's, it's not free, and it can be very damaging, but luck is the kickstart.”

“And then you merge, and it's a fifty-fifty merger, which means just no one knows who won. And that's, by the way, sort of the root of all complexity at paypalx.com story is that because we sort of settled on this, well, there's not really a senior partner. Equity's just split evenly. There was no sense of, well, who…”

“And I have to say, it is such a profoundly humbling, meaningful, good, And challenging, sometimes maddening experience to realize that all these years you were, you know, woe is me, being a CEO is so hard, and it actually turns out that being an employee in a lot of ways is harder, because you care, you know, just as…”

“I think that hypomanic state is almost indistinguishable from an entrepreneur who is quote unquote on, right?”

“it's easy to explain away, um, The mood swings you might experience as a person with bipolar disorder, if you're also an entrepreneur, as being due to the fact that you're an entrepreneur, when there's something else that you need to be dealing with as well, that is contributing or amplifying those highs and lows.”

“And, and what I learned crucially is that your attention didn't collapse. Your attention has been stolen from you by some very big forces, and once you understand that, it opens up a very different set of solutions.”

“And look, I, I never believed in the word balance, and I don't think you can have it, but I knew I needed a system that the same way I was able to accomplish every dream I had professionally, I didn't understand why I didn't have that system. Personally.”

“as people have joined Strava historically, they often don't join because they're trying to join the community. They join because they're looking for a way to track their own personal activities. And I often refer to it as single player mode versus multiplayer mode. If you go back to our earliest days, we actually had…”

“Like startups, the thing they don't really tell you is when you raise VC, it's like, you have to sell it. So you're building this thing. You put your blood, sweat and tears into it. And, and your job is to, if you're successful is you sell it. I mean, it's like, you know, raising a kid and then being like, all right,…”

“And if we add healthy items, people aren't going to order that anyway, and it's just going to complicate our system, meaning lettuce is produce. Produce goes bad quickly. That's going to complicate what we're trying to do, and it's not going to equate to sales, and I knew this.”

“A YouTube video has to cost you zero dollars, and you have to be able to do it over an extremely long period of time.”

“what I realized is once you get into a business partnership with a friend, the friendship gets totally sublimated to the business partnership.”

“And it's true, the software didn't do most of the things their software did. It was worse in so many ways, but it was better in a way that mattered, which was like speed and ease of use.”

“Companies like Stripe, SpaceX, uh, they've gone to a hundred billion plus valuations as private companies, so you don't need to go public anymore.”

“I don't think you need any kind of formal training to do that, or necessarily, it's like, sometimes ripping something and telling someone to do that thing that you just did is like the thing that you need to do, you know, to get what you want. It's not a refined thing, and I don't think my craft is such a refined…”

“You have to understand that when people, you know, you have these institutions like Vogue and Style.com, and they're like the Library of Congress of fashion. So they, their, your entry means that you happened. So when they refuse to even record that you had a show, they are saying that you don't exist.”

“Well, think, you know, these things are usually for show. They're for press. It's just, you want a press release saying that happened, and then you get a little check for your design fee.”

“Overproducing by design, right? Two collections, like, you know, 400 items every six months. Absolutely wasteful. And you end up, when you have to make like that, that's why you are selling a pair of jeans for a thousand dollars, is because you didn't figure out the supply chain at all for that, right? It takes a year…”

“you can't be in a position where you're binding with Your success or your survival to your exploitation. And that's the position that we're put in, in the creative industries in general. Like, we need the platform, we need the budget, we need the distribution. And in order to change that situation, you literally have…”

“I realized that, yeah, you have to be a founder to make life changing money.”

“telling other entrepreneurs, like, don't just take anyone's money, or be really careful who you take money from. Um, that's all well and good when you've got cash in the bank. When you don't, um, it's really unhelpful advice, because it's true, you really want to make sure who you take money from, but you also just…”

“we don't disclose it, and it's so funny because, um, I, I think there's a real, there's a real dark side to talking about how much money you've raised, and I think what happens often in startup culture is that, that is what you become known for.”

“Testing the magic, very difficult. The only way you're going to test it is by putting it at retail.”

“mainly it's about a risk approach, which is just assuming more risk per satellite. Okay, that one satellite has slightly more chance of having a dust on it, but we're going to put more satellites up than we need, and if a couple have that, it's not the end of the world, because we're going to put up a hundred or more.”

“The more information different countries have about each other's activities, including military activities, the more it's likely to be peace.”

“You can't run your company the way you want if you take someone else's money, and I wasn't about to let anybody ruin my vision”

“Being first to market has the biggest advantage you could have with getting in front of the buyers, being in the market, getting first positioning. It has the biggest advantage of anything.”

“I, I've heard, and you probably have heard this too, that, ah, there's a lot of patterns of fatherlessness in highly entrepreneurial people.”

“Now I know, of course, you know, without a portfolio patents are worthless, but, you know, at that point I didn't.”

“Book publishing is a, is, is people who love books, meaning that they're willing to get paid less, or they have the wherewithal to not get paid a lot, and you know, and they go into a world, and usually, they stand for the status quo and they usually resist, you know, technological change in particular and others.”

“I think it's something on the order of 50.5 to 51%, uh, purposeful good calls and, and brave moments, and And times when you just didn't give up, the rest of it is definitely luck, because otherwise, how could I have made so many stupid, boneheaded decisions along the way that didn't, didn't kill us?”

“if you hit singles, Which we do, and we're good at. You're not gonna hit a grand slam. And that's just, you need to make your peace with that. And I think I would take the staying in the game of singles to striking out a whole bunch and every once in a while getting a grand slam.”

“when people talk about work-life balance, I think, you know, there's really no such thing as balance. If you want to do something really great, whether that's be a great mom or Um, or be a great entrepreneur or a great business person, you're really gonna have to dig in and have a lot of imbalance for a while. But it…”

“In biotech, these companies have a half-life or a life cycle of, say, 10 years, 15 years. So people don't do one company after another, after another, after another. If they do one company after 1015 years and they succeed, they stop doing it. So you have to create the talent.”

“You know, we sort of felt that free was the enemy of, Of a successful business.”

“Believe it or not, it, the closed captioning was a very beneficial thing to us, more so than any marketing.”

“you can't do all this based on data analytics to understand what you need to do for programming of content for learning. But I kind of always had this belief you had to be a little bit of a bookie and a fortune teller. And the data analytics is very important, but it's not the main driver. It only tells you where have…”