CEO

“As you move up in the organization, interestingly, you're probably making fewer decisions on average. So a CEO is making fewer decisions than, for example, a line employee. They're obviously more consequential decisions, but they also tend to be much more prob…”

“Usually when you're a lower level worker, your job actually tends to have a higher skill component, right? So you're doing something, you're on an accounts receivable clerk and you're collecting accounts receivables, right? We can measure what we're doing. It'…”

“For corporations, Talking about the importance of learning have the head person, whoever is the CEO, could be modeling the importance of learning, perhaps through learning something and kind of sharing it with the corporation and those in the corporation and s…”

“I have a really politically incorrect one, which is older CEOs that by choice, not biologically, because there's a big difference, never had children. I find that for whatever reason, they tend to be very controlling. Now, my sample size here is like five of f…”

“What I found is that when you replace the CEO involuntarily, you almost always make the company worse.”

“It's very hard to be the leader of a company, I would think, if you yourself aren't a believer, and aren't biased toward belief, because you need, as the CEO or the leader, to be able to inspire other people, right, with your grand vision. And so how, if you'r…”

“It's the preparation process that is really where the value lies. And in that, that quiet contemplation that the CEO goes through, that's out of the weeds, out of the day to day.”

“Yeah, it's critical, right? It's critical in a couple of ways. One, it's the operations person who fulfills on the CEO's vision and dreams and goal, but it's also the right hand person to the CEO, right? So it's the counterbalance of all that enthusiasm and dr…”

“The most successful companies are highly correlated with timing, first of all. So are you in a bear market or a bull market? That's the number one correlation between success and failure in business. Number two correlating success factor is the market that you…”

“An A CEO is a, an executive who sees change coming, You know, six, nine, 12 months ahead of everybody else and has the ability to change course in, in the face of opposition from everybody else who is happy with the status quo.”

“Part of the CEO's job is to create enough of that discretion. So that they can do those things, right? That that they know are going to be in the interest longterm, like in your case, building up some slack, you know, for the bad times because if they don't bu…”

“And this is sometimes the weaknesses that ex-operators have when they transition into investing is thinking, oh, I can do this and I'm going to dig in on, in the company and get, you know, help them with growth or help them with whatever it may be. And it ends…”

“If you pick up a, an annual report for any company or a 10 K or 10 Q, they'll have 45 risk factors, right? If you have 45 risk factors, you really have none. I would much rather see a company list. Here are the three biggest risk factors and make the CEO, not …”

“Civilian leaders can do that's much better is they can make big decisions. A military leader in combat can make a big decision, but in peacetime, laws, regulations, tables of organization equipments really narrow them down to a pretty small area of maneuver sp…”

“Obviously, like a big figure you know, a CEO with a larger than life personality will have an outsized effect, right? But I promise you that in most places, there's very junior people that do too. And the people that revolve around them, they sort of become th…”

“If I'm, if I got a CEO who knows more about marketing than the marketing person and more about finance than a finance person, more about HR and the HR person, they do not have a leadership problem. They have a selection problem. They had the wrong staff.”

“Interview any CEO who has retired. I've interviewed very many and ask him a question. Please tell me, what are you proud of? None ever told me how big their office was, how much money they made. All they ever talked about is the people they helped.”

“So what I look for in a later stage company profile is I say, I want to hire someone who's really kind of done this before in a similar or adjacent industry. And they've run a business that's at least double the size.”

“Generally speaking, you know, like for example, the only people who become CEOs have very strong alpha tendencies. The only people who run for president have very strong alpha tendencies.”

“If you walk into a board meeting and there's a crisis and you're not presented in a way that's where there's a crisis and, you know, we're doing a briefing for what the crisis is and kind of what our preliminary responses and thoughts are. What our analysis of…”

“There are some decisions where if I'm making it or if I have to make it, that probably suggests that something else organizationally or institutionally has broken. And I think the need for a decision from anyone, not just from me, is often like only a sort of …”

“If you're an external processor and you're the CEO, you have no one to externally process with, or you end up creating inappropriate relationships with people who work for you.”

“It can be a really valuable way when you sit down with a CEO is to frame a question in a way that they have to respond. So Like you might sit down and say, we've been hearing that you're having a lot of turnover in your sales department. Why is that? It puts i…”

“I think the average S&P tenure is somewhere between three and four years.”

“Titles alone didn't guarantee authority. CEOs holding little equity can be removed by boards or investors, whereas those with controlling stakes can dictate strategy and vision despite opposition.”

“I think an outgoing CEO should just leave, should not sit on the board, because then you're sort of curbing what the new CEO can do, because they're now always looking over their shoulder to see if they can take a direction that's different than the CEO sittin…”

“But you don't get to be CEO by being the perfect mom, the perfect wife, the perfect everything. You don't. You do the best you can, and that's all I did.”

“Whereas when you see sometimes CEOs that have been more coddled, where they've been like the god king of their company, and everything they say is right and true and brilliant, they're the most handsome and smart person everywhere they go. If someone disagrees…”

“The CEO's job uniquely is to consider different interests and weigh them against each other to reach the net optimal outcome for the company. When this goes wrong, what it looks like is everybody gets scared of the lawyers and the CEO follows exactly what the …”

“I actually, as an aside, I think that more comms people should have a path into a CEO role. Cause that'll be one of the most important things for a company to pull off is being well understood.”

“In practice, I've never seen someone lose a case because the CEO expressed human remorse in And empathy, and that was the thing that made them lose in the courtroom.”

“Oftentimes CEOs are great operators. They usually have come from sales or marketing or operations. They seldom come from finance, and it's not usually the career trajectory”

“As a CEO, you have only a few levers of how you can create a lot of value over time. I personally believe number one is who you surround yourself with, who's on the team, how does the team work with you together. Number two is capital allocation, where you hav…”

“When you're like a 50 person company, And the CEO is stressed about something, right? Everyone kind of knows each other. And so they all kind of like know how to react to that stress and they can kind of absorb it and we all move on. When you're an 800 person …”

“You need to discover who are the speakers of truth and get them in a room alone so that you can discover things. Otherwise you will die.”

“I am never going to be smarter. Then the sum of all the directors, that's never going to happen mathematically.”