The Wisdom Wall

“I think the value as an entrepreneur of having a million dollars in your bank account, for example, is that it does allow you to think longer term. And to think bigger. And so I do encourage other entrepreneurs if they have the opportunity to take some chips off the table when they raise their second or third or fourth…”

“the secret with goals is if you're hitting 75% of your goals, your goals aren't ambitious enough, and most people feel bad when they don't hit a goal. Um, I feel bad when I'm hitting too many of them, as ironic as that sounds. And so, you want your goals to be sufficiently ambitious, ah, that they're hard to get to.”

“You never adjust your goals. Your goals are locked for the entire year. Okay. You have to judge yourself against your original projection.”

“I think the role of the entrepreneur is to constantly, uh, minimize risk. As ironically as that sounds, your goal is to arrange land, labor, capital, entrepreneurial ability to create a value of outputs that's greater than the sum of the inputs and to hopefully create jobs and give back to the community and help them…”

“my rule of thumb for a CEO of a company larger than a hundred employees is you should be, you should rarely be working on anything that's gonna affect the current month. If you're working on something that's gonna affect the current month, you're working on the wrong thing. You need to be working on the things that are…”

“in order to get the level of a collaboration, you often need to align economic interests in some way by allowing them to invest in your firm or by potentially paying them on a monthly basis for their advice.”

“Well, there's a, you want it to be an abnormal time so people aren't late. If it's an, if it's a normal time, people are four minutes late. If it's an abnormal time, then people are right on time.”

“when we raised forty million dollars in, in series B preferred security, which is how you do venture capital, that forty million dollars is now senior in the capitalization structure, which means above, um, all of the common shareholders, which is me, my co-founder, all of the employees, and so if you don't sell for…”

“And so, I think when you get beyond, I think the magic number is a 150 employees, things become, ah, a multiple, ah, things become challenging at a, at a multiple, um, of the degree of difficulty that they were previously in order to drive change within an organization.”

“it generally tends to be that when you get to a scale of about 50 employees, you need these wonderful things called processes and you need these other wonderful things called metrics.”

“When you get to 10 or 15 people, you need to find, ah, the adjectives that describe your culture, and you need to take the time to write down the values.”

“One is, um, hire a chief operating officer. Um, when you get to about 30 employees,”

“certainly there is this executive amplitude or leaders amplitude where people are afraid to come to you and tell you things. And so you just have to proactively reach out and be extremely friendly and do skip level meetings and things like that.”