The Wisdom Wall

“when you do the pricing, I think that the best logical thing to do is pick a price that the alternative care, in other words, a world without this drug, you would forego all those costs for this drug.”

“Historically, everything in education has been nonprofit. And the problem with nonprofits is nonprofits are non-scalable, which is the better your product, the faster your donations go away, right?”

“I personally have found that billionaires are generally very high character people because the key to being really successful is to create allies along the way such that you're put in a room of opportunities when you're not physically there.”

“I think it's some of the worst advice I've ever heard in Silicon Valley. So what's your take? My take is that ideas are really fricking important. And if you have the wrong idea, you'd be a great team and you're screwed.”

“the two best early pickers of startups ever in the history of Silicon Valley, both make their decisions based off of just, do they feel like these people are fierce founders and they can figure that out in less than 10 minutes. And then here you have people that are doing market analysis and segmentation maps and tons…”

“So therefore, the way to avoid getting fired in VC, again, this is not Founders Fund. This is what I like about them, that they're very different. But is it, the way to avoid getting fired is to be, well, to double check everything you do with other VCs. To make sure everybody agrees. And you don't want to do it…”

“I think of it as roulette. And I think like this period that we're talking about was about me learning how to play poker, right? Poker has way better odds than roulette. If you're good at poker, you can actually win. You've got, you know, a 60% odds. When you play roulette, you've got 50% odds. It's a terrible game.…”

“It has to be an approachable young woman, and I have found that that gets the most clicks amongst all demographics”

“I would say don't never get in between a venture capitalist and their second million, because they will take to Twitter and call you a plagiarist or accuse you of having done terrible things at NYU, which you've never Ever been accused of, much less people have, people have found you guilty of.”

“It's more important that we have a smart point of view than that we're right in the long term.”

“if you're willing to dedicate three years, like you definitely can add eight figures of net worth to your, like, for sure. Like it's easy. It's not easy, but it's simple.”

“In Ripple, those guys became billionaires before banks ever used their product, which is like a really fucked up incentive, and which is why sometimes shit doesn't actually get built in crypto, because hey, I already got the millions. I could just run away. I could just do a half-assed job. It doesn't really matter at…”

“The most successful people, the, the true icons, you know, they're not creating a ton of content typically. And, um, sometimes they do when they retire, sometimes it's part of their growth strategy, but for the most part, Elon Musk doesn't have a sub stack, right? He's not trying to teach you and sell you a course on…”

“the effective altruism people miss one very important thing, which is that it is the production by people of goods that actually makes them feel that they deserve things. Like if you haven't built, you feel guilt.”

“crowdfunding is the, you know, bottom of the barrel of companies. Like the best companies, the ones that are hot, that are growing, get picked up by professional investors. And the stuff that you end up seeing on crowdfunding sites, I don't think are the big breakout companies in general.”

“So if you, if you take a company with cash and you invest in Bitcoin, you have invested, you have converted a liability to an asset.”

“So the big idea here is you want to fix any company, sweep all the cash flows into Bitcoin, convert the treasury into Bitcoin. Borrow against your future cash flows in dollars. Convert that into Bitcoin. Finance all your fixed assets in dollars. Convert that into Bitcoin. And issue equity as much as you can now at the…”

“ad buying is like a commodity, right? Now, yeah, before, a few years ago, you have to be really, really good at ad buying, but now Meta does all of that for you already, right? You don't need to do the targeting. You don't need to do all this stuff, right? All you need to really figure out is how do you get really good…”

“the content is the business, not the tours. So the tours are just content. Whereas I think what most people do is they say, I'm going to make content to try to get people to book the tour because that's where I get the transactional money. And so that's the real business. And I actually think if you want to go bigger,…”

“Agents, agents, they kind of just guess what to do, right? And if they're smart enough, they guess right most of the time, but sometimes the agents guess wrong. And the second thing is agents are using tokens, right? We probably heard token maxing, right? And so they're really expensive, but if you use Zapier, we're…”

“Well, so you could, but the thing is, you're only gonna be able to keep up with, what, 20 agents? Cause it's gonna keep assigning you tasks and more things to do and more things to do. And so there still is like a, there still is like a limit.”

“I don't need to pick an industry I love, or a product I love. I need to pick a sales motion that I love. Because guess what? Like, if you have a product, Doesn't matter what the niche is. If it's grown via enterprise sales, most of your time is going to be spent doing enterprise sales, hiring enterprise sales, and…”

“You can work in an Apple store and you are an order taker. Go down the hall to the people at the Microsoft store who have to sell a slate two doors down from a Mac, MacBook Air. Those people know how to sell. The fact that they're, they're not starving is unbelievable. So go hire them.”

“the reason you can make that playbook consistent is because you're putting your own people in to run it. This took me 10 years to figure out, but we would, we would back founders and then say, Hey, we have all these great ideas and the founders would just smile and write stuff down and never do anything, you know, and,…”

“I think if you can build proprietary data sets, which is harder than it sounds, um, or you can build really deep interfaces with your customers, which is also harder than it sounds. Those are, those are moats you can build, but really, I think sometimes what you're really, you know, you might be six months ahead of…”

“building things is a lot more durable than ripping things apart. Cause you can make like one and a half times your money, or maybe, maybe even two times your money ripping stuff If you're lucky, if you time the exit just right. But if you actually build something times your friend and it could be, I mean, you can make…”

“Surveillance Capital flipped it on its head that it did not matter whether intent was there. If we know everything about everyone at all times, all that matters is eyeball time, because now we can pinpoint whether an ad should be shown or not shown on the basis of who they are, not what they're talking about.”

“I thought, when I talked to Lex last summer, that it was going to turn everyone into a project manager of the old type. The kind of project manager who's not really doing the things, just telling other people what to do, and then you got this little shh churn, and then you get the feedback, and I realized that's not…”

“The vast majority of value creation is going to be by big companies just getting bigger. I just think that it's, it's, it's, it's much easier for Salesforce to get more efficient and launch new features than it is a new company, or at least picking those new companies very hard, but like picking a company that works…”

“there's a specific type of person and a specific moment in time when you need a system tool, and that is when you have growth, but you have a growing headache. So the business is growing healthily, but your headache is growing, you know, maybe even more than that or proportionately to that, and I think what most people…”

“Your return on your invested capital is inversely correlated to how sexy and cool an industry sounds.”

“the level of like, you know, I was completely wrong about everything, and now I'm going to fire half of you because I, of the mistakes I made will just cause you to hesitate in a way that could cost you the company itself.”

“the ones who truly Don't understand people are, don't actually turn out to be good CEOs. Like they, they don't get to that level. Like you can, you know, you can make fun of Larry Page or Elon or Zuck or so forth, but they are actually very smart about people.”

“It's not like making the old thing more efficient. It's a new medium. It's an actual new thing in the same ways that like movies weren't plays. Uh, you know, AI video is not video. The stories that you can tell are completely different because you can do things that you just, you know, without a. Million dollar budget,…”

“Honestly, it probably starts at three million in revenue where you're out of the brute force stage. Um, and it depends on your business, but something like A million a year in profit, maybe. Where you're out of the brute force stage, and what happens next is actually the hard part. The hard part is, like, how do you…”

“we say freshmen and seniors make all the money in, in the venture business, like in the entrepreneur business. So you either don't know the rules. So you go into your business and you break a bunch of rules without knowing, or you know all the rules and you build a business that sort of takes advantage of the, the…”

“every dollar I ever spent on unreasonable hospitality was far more impactful than any dollar I ever spent on traditional marketing, because when you give them those stories to tell, what do you think they're gonna do? They're gonna tell them over and over and over again.”

“it doesn't take that much more work to run a fifteen million dollar a year restaurant than it does a five million dollar a year restaurant.”

“With a mobile home or an RV park, you don't maintain the units. You just maintain the infrastructure under the ground. Um, it's a hedge against the economy. When the economy's good, the millennials and the boomers are traveling, you got short-term stays. When the economy, economy tanks, you got people living in your RV…”

“And then the claims work, I wouldn't say it's free money, but you can almost reliably compound your money on a small base, you know, like a few million bucks or something. You can Reliably compound that at pretty aggressive rates.”

“The urge to correct is so irresistible that we actually use it as one of our negotiation skills. I'll, I'll say something wrong on purpose. Because you will not be able to resist the urge to correct me with the truth. And it's a great way for me to trigger getting hidden information out of you that you won't regret…”

“No negotiation team, whether it's business or hostage, hands a negotiator off to another negotiator to be nicer. Ever. Business or hostage. If there's a change in negotiation, negotiators on the other side, it is always to take a harder line. Always.”

“Well, if they've got proprietary information that would change everything, then your must haves and your giveaways could be completely wrong.”

“Instead of, do you want to talk about what we're here for, which you're driving for yes, because that going for yes creates friction, but going for no creates protection and safety.”

“I mean, you get yourself to B level negotiator there. You'll never get, you'll never get yourself to A, A plus on leverage. Cause leverage is the ability to inflict harm. And if you're making deals based on the ability to inflict harm, these, these are not, those, those don't go for stable long-term relationships.”

“focus is overrated because compounding doesn't care. Like the, the principle of compounding does not care if we're working on one thing or a dozen things. As long as we stay in the game, whatever that game is for us and keep going, compounding is just going to keep going with us, right?”

“So what's interesting is that content's already there, but by weight, by heavily weighting it toward my content for my type of knowledge, it's much, it's not a little bit better than ChatGPT. It's like much better.”

“This is the important thing about not jumping from business to business to business, because if you jump from business to business to business, all you're doing is interrupting and compounding.”

“So the number one thing that it rolls up into is speed. So you could, you could lay out 16 characteristics that you're looking for, but all of those lead to one thing, which is speed. And so if we measure speed when we're meeting with the founders, that's the main thing that determines. And, and if you look at their…”

“And it could be a network effect, it could be an embeddedness, it could be a scale, or it could be a brand. Those are the four defensibilities in the digital world that now exist.”

“Pick the word first. And then figure out what the product does behind the word, because the word has a promise to it.”

“If I'm, you know, if I'm not good enough to play in the NBA, I shouldn't be in the NBA. Right. But this is the NBA. And so a 13% tax on being able to play in the NBA is nothing.”

“that strategy that they and many other people who are, or I don't even know if they did do it, but whoever wants to try and do that, it will almost always fail. Because in order to make a business like this work, Where you sell stuff to your audience. You almost always have to be, it has to be within your core…”

“middle America moms, who's their following, so much more profitable, profitable than like comedy, like doing comedy bits for like millennials or, uh, Gen Z, you know what I mean?”

“being at the leading edge of just the tech, you get two shots to win. If you make the breakthrough app, That actually does get product market fit. Then you get to win in the billions. If you're just the most hardcore tech team at building like good functionality and like, like working on these new platforms, your team…”

“the more I think, the worse my returns will get, is sort of what I've realized when it comes to, to tech investing, because it is all about the breakouts. And the breakouts are not things that you could just linearly You know, figure out.”

“I actually think that hate is If you have in your heart, it can be really useful. Like revenge and rage is like a very useful feeling. So is Shane. People will be like, why are you guilting someone into like doing this or that? I'm like, well, guilt is a wonderful emotion to improve.”

“there's these things that if the result is not easy to measure, But it is true, right? It's gotta be both. It's gotta be actually, actually work and not be easy to measure. Those things are usually pretty, uh, mispriced, meaning that not as many people are willing to do them because most of us want the safety and…”

“And if it's a digital task and a clear directive, all of it can be done with agents. Now the technology is here, it's ready and it's working.”

“In these emerging tech things, so everything at Founders that we do is emerging tech, I think the theme of all of them is survive. If you make it to when the industry happens, you will grow with it. If you were a small percentage of the industry and the industry grows by like a hundred X, you grew by a hundred X or…”

“you're going to be in this company, and you're going to see so many things that could be so much better, and you're going to try to do them. And for the first year, you're going to try to do them. You're, oh, you're actually going to make a little bit of headway, but you're not going to actually get the results that…”

“I think a lot of people fall into this trap with therapy and with self-improvement, where they get addicted to the medicine, and it creates, um, too much thoughts about yourself. You know, the happiest people are the ones who are, you know, that are not doing this, like, Extreme introspection all the time.”

“the cost of bringing a not great person into my circle of life is so high. The cost of dis discarding somebody who might be great is nothing. It is so low comparatively. He's like, so I am willing to be a very harsh grader of people. Meaning you're either obviously in, or I put you in the too hard to tell bucket and I…”

“you always know in the first two weeks, if someone's gonna be great, great people are great right off the bat. They show you greatness in the first two or three weeks. I've never seen, or, you know, rarely ever will you ever see somebody who turns out to be great. That just was eh in the first two, three weeks.”

“picking the right company and project will be like by far picking the right market to be in the, and then the winner of that market. If you're in the tech industry, Is by far the most impactful thing you could do in your, in your, like, career. It'll, it'll beat your hard work. It'll beat your own, like, you know,…”

“in most areas of life, you shouldn't be hoping for like the miraculous save, right? The one thing that's going to turn your business around or the, the person who's going to meet you and just give you that opportunity, just hand it to you. But there is in content and exception, which is that in content, you're really…”

“look, if you just started a boring business, like a trash hauling business or window cleaning business or whatever it is, You got it to one or two million dollars of cashflow, sell it or hold it. You're set for life. And instead they go off and they raise all this money and they don't realize that they really have a…”

“If you are, if you are winning the game and you still think it's a bad, bad category to be in, that's when you know it's a bad category. Most people, they lose the game, they're failing at it, and then they blame the category, right?”

“It's a hundred percent easier. You can hire better people because they're more ambitious and they're interested in working on harder things. Um, they're generally larger, it could be larger outcomes. You're talking about like, you know, building like new industries that maybe never haven't been built before with huge…”

“So I would say the best thing to give a founder is an enemy.”

“we still treat education very artisanally, right? It's like, you know, it's like everybody's an artist. Like, oh, Sam likes teaching history this way, and Sean likes teaching it this way, and Anand likes teaching it this way. It's like, hey, just go and, like, do, like, improv, you know, and instead of being like, oh,…”

“My job as a founder, what I've realized is, is it's to inject risk into the business. Most people, everyone pretty much at your company's job is to manage risk to some degree, to keep their job, to not push too hard or too far.”

“what I've been building this whole time is the top of a business and not the bottom of it. Like, I thought media was the whole thing. I was like, oh, actually, media is right here, and it monetizes, but the bottom is actually where, where, uh, the business lies.”

“I'd much rather hire, I'd much rather hire for talent and ambition and hard work than hire for expertise. So almost, and there's exceptions, right? So if you, if you have a company that's already really working and already really scaling, and there's like a machine that has to be run, you want to hire the guy who knows…”

“for most investors, that is a completely conscious skill. Like if you're a good investor, the last thing you should be doing when you meet a great investor, you're not thinking, oh, you'd be a great as the CEO of a 1200 person company. You know, like generally those are very far apart. And so what can end up happening…”

“you can have a business that's doing ten million dollars a year of revenue and growing 30% a year, but maybe it raised 40 or fifty million dollars. And, um, such that like The founder is probably not going to make any money because the pref stack is so high. And then the, the other part is the investor is really not…”

“one of the lessons I learned from Peter Thiel is that you should be really, really careful putting effort into new things. Almost always, it's a better idea to put money into your main compounding thing. That's got a lot more room to run. Like there's more area under the curve to kind of like fill, um, of, of something…”

“I started doing this when I was 25 years old and I had a job where I was the low man of the totem pole. I was a product manager. It can be done in any position.”

“making your customer jump through hoops in order to acquire the good. It makes it so much more valuable. The problem is, is that's really hard to pull off. But if you can pull it off, you have the, the will and discipline in order to, like, take this risk. It's pretty badass, and it creates a true cult.”

“Like there is something, um, almost strategic in doing a sort of controversial taboo, almost a naughty idea. And you will get article after article, online argument after online argument. And all it really does is it pushes away the people who were never going to be your customer. But it educates the people who…”

“The chat itself isn't better or worse. Chat is chat essentially. Onboarding and, and, and bots were the thing. And we didn't have them and they crushed us.”

“This is why when you get offered some money to sell the company, it's often a good idea to take it. Of course it could be big in the future, but if you haven't crossed over to this life-changing amount of money yet, what I was in that post called the freedom line, You could argue how free, how much money. Okay. But…”

“Now what's interesting with the box game is if you're a statistician or you're an economist, what you would say is there's no difference between the two boxes because the expected value of both box is ten million. So they're the same. And my point is, no, they're not. Expected value is not the right way to evaluate the…”

“I do think better tax strategy can actually create alpha. Alpha is a, you know, finance term for like, You will outperform. Um, and using that tax alpha to just put more dollars in the market, I think is a smarter approach”

“so I literally have somebody essentially move in with me and I just duct tape them, duct tape them to my hip. He's like, you're going to follow me everywhere to everything. And for this first six months, all you're going to do is just shadow me and just learn exactly how I think and what I want and what I do and why I…”

“then I'm going to talk to you. He's like, I'm going to spend an hour convincing you. How hard this is going to be and how much you're going to have to sacrifice to be here. And I can just see in that, do they flinch? Do they start asking me about vacation policies? Or do they get excited about like, kind of like going…”

“It's better than real estate because in real estate you have, let's say, uh, depreciation or the 10 31 exchange. These are great, but they're deferrals. Whereas this is not a deferral. This is simply, you just have a, you know, you have a exclusion on a hundred percent of your gains up to some number. So it is way…”

“if you're building a company that you want to sell, you need to take some short-term pain of having clean, simple books that you pay, you know, legit taxes on, in order for you to have A big exit at the end because they're going to see a track record of multiple years of solid profits that you're going to sell on the…”

“you should be changing something about your price every three months. That does not mean raise your price every three months, but it means, like, changing up your packaging, going up market, down market, changing up an add-on, changing up your discounting strategy.”

“you should be raising your price at least once per year. Um, there are some top outs and there's some exceptions to this particular rule, but everything about your price is basically this exchange rate on your value.”

“And what I found is that the industries were absolutely irrelevant. What matters is that you find a business that is established and has been consistently profitable for a number of years. Everything else, garbage.”

“going to work for a big company is vastly underrated. They can abuse their monopoly position. They will have that mole removed. You will get rich slowly working at Google or at McKinsey. So if you're credentialed, uh, you know, we over romanticize entrepreneurship. If you have the ability to get into the greatest…”

“We noticed that the people who were the best earlier in their life had a degenerate, like, obsession with something that wasn't, like, The thing your parents would reward you for where the school would reward you for. So for a lot of people was gaming. It's like, oh I just spent like an ungodly amount of hours in, in…”

“This is not a tech problem really right now. It's actually a rights problem. So what somebody needs to do, the move here is not to go all in on product, but to go all in on biz dev, which is a total narrative violation. Nobody says, hey, go all in on biz dev, but that's what you need to do for this business.”

“A big business and a small business both take the same amount of time. Why would you choose a small business? And that to me was the right advice for me for who I was. That's not the right advice for everybody, but like somebody out there needs to hear that right now, which is that like this idea that a small thing is…”

“A wire's a wire. You get the wire, and it's, like, the same feeling you get when, when you sell a business. Is the same feeling you get when you finish the marathon, you walk an old lady across the street, or you do anything that makes you feel good about yourself. I swear to God, and I have the right to say that…”

“No single person ever got wealthy through diversification.”

“food is such a signal and there's so much badge value. It's very hard to accrue like monopoly power. And how do you actually go about disrupting Nestle? If it be, if every, if every food is like an extension of personal expression, It gets very hard because as soon as everyone is doing one thing, I'm going to want to…”

“Twitch actually isn't that great for growth, unless you have other platforms already. I would save Twitch for last if you're even contemplating it, because it has no discovery system that makes any sense. It's all just recommended, and what gets recommended? People who already have viewers. How do you get viewers? You…”

“The people who are in charge of purchasing for government, they often don't benefit from saving money or reducing their manpower or any of this. In many cases, the guy in charge of making the buying decision, his political power and earning power are directly tied to his ability to keep costs high and to keep manpower…”

“So on one hand, these companies are not very defensible because anybody could take these open source language models and build a user interface on top of it. And so like I can create another competitor to copy AI or Jasper or one of these kind of things, but it's all in the, like the user interface, the applications…”

“I think if you're a company, you should be using individual faces to grow. You'll go, you'll grow faster that way. If you're an individual trying to grow like a media property, you should put it under a brand umbrella, mostly because you can't ever sell you. Um, so like if you wanted this to be an asset and not a job,…”

“The brand will be important. I just don't think it's important for us to get our first 10,000 subscribers or even a 100,000 subscribers. So let's make a deal. If we can get to a 100,000 subscribers through our janky thing that will, will reward ourselves by investing in the brand. Because I think ultimately the brand,…”

“let's say that you own a SaaS business. And your entire net worth is in the SaaS business and you currently, uh, you know, you've raised money at 20 times revenue or something. You might want to find a SaaS business that's publicly traded, that is a comp to you. And you might want to buy out of the money, put options…”

“And you say it's us versus everyone, which is a common tactic and a cult. And you should always do this in a good company, which is you have you, and then you have the enemy and everyone's out to, to, on the enemy side and it's us versus them. And you have to create that dynamic.”

“And actually that shit doesn't work in startups. Uh, it is not the norm and that would be the outlier if it was to work. The norm is what they call the benevolent dictator.”

“If we felt like we ever hired someone that was worthy of a press release, we did it wrong. Right. That's not the kind of person we were looking for because they may have done amazing things at Google, Microsoft, Facebook, pick your company of choice, but the startup is such a different context and you're, you're paying…”

“So it's actually not a great place for creators. It's a great place for content. It's not a great place for creators to build relationships with their, with their fans. That's why most TikTok creators move to YouTube to build that.”

“many people think they're great investors because when they own a business, if they make an investment, they have to talk about it at a cocktail party, and if they lose money on an investment, it gets swept under the carpet because the business itself is profitable, so it covers up those losses. So many people who've…”

“if you're solely, uh, living on the investments in your portfolio, if you can live on two percent of your assets or less, then you're in a safety zone, and obviously some people have the good fortune to earn a lot more than two or three or four percent on their assets so they can live on a little more. But once you…”

“when you've been very mistreated by like, say the media or just like elite culture, um, it's very hard for you to agree with those people, even when they're right. So you end up, going back to the contrarianism, you end up, like, going against things that ordinarily you wouldn't agree, you would totally agree with, but…”

“you can kind of sweat your way to like maybe five or ten million in a lifetime, but becoming a billionaire and this huge outlier, I think it takes like a particular type of skill. Like you just genetically Predisposed to have it in your favor. And I think that matters. You're not saying this kid does or does not have…”

“There's a sweet spot in age where they have friends, but they don't have a car. And so they come home and they're like trapped. So they just want to group. They'll just like go home, go to the room and they'll just call their friend for like six hours straight... And then they go to car and then they'll go to college.…”

“the moment someone approaches you, a potential customer, and says, Cool. We like your software. We need to redline your terms of service, or we need, uh, to invoice with POs, or we need single sign-on, or we need a Salesforce integration, or we need, there's, there's this whole list of things that instantly should…”

“The problem with all e-commerce, so our mutual friend has this great phrase, which is e-commerce businesses are great to own, horrible to invest in. Um, now I wouldn't say not horrible, but it's like, it's great for the owner of the business. It's not great for the investors. And that's only because the upside is…”

“when you shoot for these epic projects, things that get people inspired and excited. It's, it seems like it's harder to pull off, but in many ways it's easier to pull off because you'll get talent to pour in because they want to be a part of something bold. You'll get sponsors to pour in because they want to bet on…”

“A lot of people in particular men are blocking estrogen when they take TRT, which is a terrible idea. Estrogen promotes brain longevity. Estrogen is good for connective tissues. It's good for libido. Blocking estrogen is a bad idea in most cases.”

“You actually almost want to leave some dry powder for the acquirer. You want to go to the acquirer and say, yeah, we're doing amazing. And we have, we don't even know how to do retail. You guys know that, right? You guys know, you got, you got a buddy you play golf with who does target, who does, uh, I guess Safeways…”

“So I was basically arguing with my, my, my idea was I think the metaverse is actually a time. It's a moment in time where We care more about the things in our digital life than in our physical life.”

“I won't say the word it's inevitable, but I think it's actually very asymmetric, like in favor of decentralized platforms actually winning. Um, the main reason being that I think when all the content is open and anyone can build on it, I think that the speed of iteration that you can have and the like caliber of…”

“I think in order to be that successful, you have to have some kind of personality disorder. Or like trauma or something, and you look at Musk or Bezos, or if you read more about Bezos, I think he's a really difficult person to work for.”

“the biggest red flag you will ever hear is when somebody comes from, uh, you know, one industry and wants to be in another, because this one's so much easier, right? This one's it's the margins over here. It's the shelf stability over here. It's the, there's not size. It's like, they all have a position based off of…”

“Most investors, myself included, do zero due diligence. We do not, we meet the founder. Yes. We play with the product, right? Those are the two easy things.”

“as long as you have a reputation as someone who turns one dollar into two dollars, regardless of how big of a piece of shit you are, you'll always be able to convince someone to give you money.”

“I think if you're starting a media company, and if I started it again, if you didn't go subscription first, you're an idiot and you're a fool and you're a masochist and you like pain. If I, if I could do it all over again, knowing what I know now, I would only start that way.”

“I think that was like the really big breakthroughs for me. It's not quality, it's quantity. It's about always having content there for them to consume and building that habit. And then over time you focus on quality”

“if you want to start a great startup, don't try to think of a startup. And, uh, the reason for that is that, um, great startup founders are like time travelers, and they, they get out of the present, and they visualize different futures that are a breakthrough, that break free from the present, and when you try to…”

“only with big inflections does an entrepreneur go from being, uh, disadvantaged to incumbents to having a fundamental advantage vis-a-vis incumbents.”

“I don't even think a startup is a company, right? So I think a startup is, The, the capabilities and talents of the founders and their insight about the future and what you're, what you're betting is on two things. One is that their insights, right? And two is they're good enough to navigate the idea to a great product…”

“I've noticed that dyslexic people rank so high on having this ability to, and this sounds negative, I don't mean this negative, to manipulate people, and to manipulate them into believing that, like, like, to, to, to persuading and leading people.”

“top five percenters, top 10 percentage of the elite people, when they move, they move in step fashion. It'll be a bigger title, much bigger role, or a better company, and they'll get in that company, and they will be promoted multiple times, and then they'll leave, and there'll be another step change”

“a lot of people say, oh, trust, of course, trust, but verify. And I don't believe in the, but verify. I think you start out trusting people, um, and until they prove otherwise. And it's very, Risky because you can get burned, but I've seen the power of the upside of trusting somebody before they've necessarily proven…”

“You know, people tend to buy is the barbell strategy. They'll buy the aqua hire. You raise a million bucks and you bootstrapped it and you have like three good people and somebody will say like, oh, this is great. Like here's ten million... And then there's like, you can, uh, be big enough to matter to a really big…”

“We just did our biggest deal ever. Um, and it was over a hundred million dollars and it was no more work or complexity than doing a one million dollar deal. And in fact, It was simpler than a one million dollar deal. Cause it's just a better business with a better team in place and more momentum.”

“We just did this a tiny, we changed, we don't get monthly reports anymore from the CEOs. So like there's businesses where I don't, I haven't even talked to the CEO for like three or four months. I don't even know what their numbers are. And what we've realized is that when you leave people alone and trust them, usually…”

“There's this dead zone of like 200 dollars a year or 300 dollars a year or something like that. Like, and it's like, it's incredibly hard to build a big company when shit costs that much. Some people have done it. Mailchimp has done it. Um, Canva has done it. I think it's almost impossible for most other types of…”

“these courses, the truth is it's not actually about teaching your workers something good. It's about offering it. And if they use it fine, but the fact that you offer it, it makes you look better and you can hire more people.”

“social networks were invented and scaled 10 years, seven years ish before cryptocurrency. And so because of that, uh, you could only transfer status online And not value. And, uh, what that means is that everything basically boiled down to status games, leaderboard, what's the most popular, how many followers, how many…”

“media scripts humans just as code scripts machines, right?”

“Own a media corporation or be owned by one.”

“if you are rejecting good drugs or good vaccines or good tests, you are potentially doing as much or even more damage than bad one, than, than approving bad ones, and people are only focused on the PR downside of approving a bad thing and not on the unseen of not approving a good thing, right?”

“It's not just a media company. This would actually be an investment fund. So, you would be a VC fund whose brand is built Through journalism, whose distribution of how they help their companies is through their media arm. And so you're a media arm whose business model is your VC fund.”

“if what you're really going for is I want to make You know, 200,300 1500 thousand, a million bucks a year, and that, that is my goal, not to change the world. There's so many better ways to do it than do a startup, in my opinion.”

“So what I've seen is in technology, The winners get really, really big. And so you kind of want to like play small bets initially and then follow on really hard. And like when you see something that actually works, be really bold, uh, in the way you approach it.”

“And this is one of the reasons why we talked about religion as a really interesting fun, uh, you know, fundamental or like base layer for any business because nobody owns religion, but it's a highly recognized brand with super high affinity. So I love businesses that are, you know, like Pray the app that's, you know,…”

“You can't hold value in a company growing at five percent a year when the cost of capital is 25% a year. That's why the only thing you can buy is going to be a high tech stock that's growing. You need to buy a tech monopoly that can grow 20 or 25% a year.”

“The way that I get out of this is I do two things. The first is I burn bridges. So a lot of people say don't burn bridges. I say, no, I actually do burn bridges. So quit your job or move to another city or do something drastic. Because for me, I've said, I cannot focus on more than one thing at a time. I can only focus…”

“And to be fair, 99% of American companies go into China and think they can just succeed with the same business model. Um, and for China to operate it successfully, you need to a completely different business model, completely different team.”

“Because the CEO perspective, they're always much more conservative. And they're looking at this from a paycheck where the founders were able to take risks that a CEO wouldn't be able to take.”

“you don't want to be the best, you want to be the only. Which is always a hard thing, right? Because somebody's always doing something. But that mentality is how you become the best because you continue to refine and refine and refine and whittle away the generic parts of what you do. Until it's really the thing that…”

“I think go viral is the wrong idea. It's sort of this, like, false hope, like, lottery ticket type of mentality. But when you say, I'm one format away, you have all of the upside of the go viral lottery ticket, but you're actually using a more grounded approach, which is, Look, if I can just figure out one core, like,…”

“I think that most every business can get to five or ten million in revenue in some capacity, given enough time.”

“turns out that just giving poor people money is probably better than, like, a huge percentage of charities where they're like, you know, in order to, like, Help young single moms who are poor. I'm going to help you get a job. I'm going to help you. Like you got to go through this program and then we're going to get…”

“Which is, if you think about, like, if you've ever been in a company, a lot of, like, the meetings you have are really theater, right? It's, it's progress theater. Like, I would like to put on a little play for you of how good I'm doing, and then you, you sit in the back, and you, you give me a little, you know,…”

“What I'm telling you is that the anecdotes typically show you that your metric is incomplete, that it's not capturing some part of the customer's experience that actually matters, and both the metric is right and the customer is right. The metric is just incomplete because it's not capturing this part of the customer's…”

“the first filter is just evidence of exceptional ability... And if you really haven't done anything exceptional, the odds of this being the place where you have the, the final, the, you know, the first exceptional thing of your career is not really a bet I'm excited to go take.”

“Like there is nothing that motivates a student more and a kid more than them being able to go head to head with their parent and winning like fair, not where the parent tanked it.”

“Which is if you can't say the opposite of it, right? Then it's not on the list. Like, so when we were doing the core values of trilogy in the nineties, I was like, well, we obviously have to have integrity on the list. And he's like, Joe, is there ever a company in the world? Who's like, I'm going to be the non…”

“It might be That one of the biggest leaks in investing is too much activity. And the remedy for too much activity is actually to just busy yourself with bridge and books and, and, uh, and playing pickleball and doing other things so that you are not prone to just sitting there and pushing buttons. Uh, cause it's the…”

“Who cares what's true? It's what's useful is what matters. And so I try to find what are the beliefs that I need to stuff in my brain that is going to lead to me doing the things I want to do to have the life I want to have.”

“people who think why and ask themselves all the time, why am I not happy? Why am I not following my life's work? Why am I not following my passion? This should feel better. This doesn't feel better. Those people are actually oftentimes significantly more discontent with their life.”

“I would argue That the answer is you should follow your passion, but your passion doesn't need to be your job. I have seen so many people that have made that mistake where they thought following their passion was following that as a career, and I think that actually can be a massive, massive mistake.”

“it's a lot, oftentimes that answer is not entrepreneurship, and it is having your, a job that you love.”

“I'm trying to figure out how to brand the hybrid athlete of, uh, business where you have the success, but you don't have the, like, grind culture suffering mindset, right? Like the Goggins, Hormozzi, like, it's just about pain, and that's what it is, and you need to not see your family and not do this, not do that.…”

“Nike's a fully matrixed organization. You pull a marketer out of Nike. That marketer has never had Uh, full P&L responsibility, full creative responsibility, full distribution responsibility. They have a very niche job, and it's really hard to determine, did this person do the work or not? Uh, and so you go way deep on…”

“hire salespeople from the ones who had the, the shitty product. He's like, if you hire a salesperson from the, the people whose, the product was just being pulled by the market, they, you know, the fish were jumping in the boat, and you don't know if that person's a great fisherman, just because they were just being…”

“the biggest mistake people make is the denominator. And they, so they, they go like, here's a perfect example. I really want to start a business. I'm going to go take this other job first, and then I'm going to make some money and then I'm going to, and then I'm going to start my business. Okay. That's what they say.…”

“having three to six months of savings is level one, which is like the peace of mind, because then, you know, like I said, you have some unexpected expense and you're, you're fine. You don't, you don't lose sleep over that. You know, you don't have to decide if you're going to pay your rent or fix your car. That's like…”

“The first is to decide what you want to say. The second one is to blindly copy the people who you like and who are already saying what you also want to say. The third is learning the rules underneath what they are saying. And the fourth is studying history.”

“I'd go so far as to say that ignorance is a benefit For a huge class of problems that you are cursed when you've been through the loop once. When you know too much, you cannot unseed in the same way. You will be locked into paradigms and thought patterns. And if you want to break those paradigms, if you want to break…”

“Being able to generate attention is not as transferable as to business outcomes as it used to be.”

“the biggest mistake that people make is not going with an obvious winner because It's already in the multiple billions, and it just looks like, okay, what, what's the potential upside from here? And, and that's just been wrong so many times in the last, uh, 10 years.”

“Typically EOS is divided quarterly. We actually at Hampton do ours every six weeks. So we do rock planning every six weeks as opposed to quarterly. I think quarterly is too long for a startup, but, uh, so you can kind of like manipulate it to like fit your needs.”

“I would say, on the whole, an overconsumption of news is, uh, I've seen is just one major leak people have in their life.”

“Guys like you and me actually suck at sales. And the reason we suck at sales is because we want to use charm, charisma, talent, whatever, and they, you know, people, the best people use process, and even the reason we actually suck isn't even because we can't adapt that, because over time we're like a problem solver,…”

“a company can basically only do one new project Maybe per quarter, but definitely, but it could be every six months. And when I say project, I mean something relatively small.”

“And so the idea of, like, going to a local high school, taking an unpaid job, and just go contributing my time, my talent, my effort, and affecting, like, a group of 12 guys. Like, that sounds small, but it feels very big. The other thing, solving world hunger felt, sounded very big, but felt very small, like there's…”

“the more smart people I meet, and it's almost like the bigger that side of your brain gets, where it's like, I am analytical. I am good at making plans, and then executing them, and operating, and like the, the better you are at that, the less I've, I've noticed They're disproportionately bad at imagination.”

“you're not giving them a shit sandwich. You're the greatest person in the world, but this is all fucked up. And I love you like that, that like people are onto that, like it's just too simple.”

“There's a big difference between taste and creativity and being a virtuoso violinist, right? Like those, those don't necessarily have to be the same thing. And it's great that, you know, people You know, whatever. Practice violin for three hours a day and like get amazing at it and all that kind of thing. But it, it's…”

“So, I haven't, this is, I haven't read a book in, like, 15 years, and I think it's very, very contrarian opinion, but I think, like, I have so many friends that are authors that I talk to that are just, like, trying to get the words out, but if you, like, listen to a podcast, it's, like, one podcast by that author is…”

“Restaurants suck as a business. You know, 10% operating margins. You're working morning, afternoon, and night. You're open on weekends. There's no let up.”

“if you pick the right people to work with, they will reward you based on what you're, what, what value you're actually creating without you needing to ask”

“I think doing content is now like an incredible way to make money. So like, you know, like we make great money here. Like you look at other content creators, they make a ton of money. So it's like, you don't have to do a company and then do content on the side. Like you could just do content as your main thing and…”

“I think everyone who becomes a good entrepreneur, they, they do the gray hat gray hat area phase.”

“people think that entrepreneurs take a lot of risk. But I, I actually think that you are a good example of what most entrepreneurs really do, which is they're actual risk minimizers. It's like, how do I win while taking the least amount of risk necessary to win?”

“That's also why you got to move to San Francisco is because you'll be surrounded by success stories and you'll see them. You'll be like, okay, cool. That guy's not special. I could do it. If you could do it, I could do it. And also everybody around you is similarly deluded, which really helps because, um, you sort of…”

“What I actually think is useful, take the week off before birth to, like, do little stuff around the house, just be there, be a calming presence, and like, kind of like, I don't know, take the, take the load of everyday life off of, you know, your, your, your partner before birth. I think that's actually really useful.…”

“And I did, and I did the same thing with my company, where I purposely did not have values And I was like, what bothers, what attributes bothers me? And what attributes do I particularly love when I see us do here? And now after, you know, my company is weird. I started it. I had someone run it. Now I'm back running it…”

“if you want to be an entrepreneur, be successful, do it, commit yourself to 20 years. You know, be an entrepreneur for 20 years. Do four or five startups, because the amount of luck that has to overlap from externalities and internal things that have to cross over to have that success, when it happens on their first…”

“instead people tended, entrepreneurs tend to focus on making customers Like, delighting customers, making customers happy, and I said, we really should focus more on pain and frustration and anger. It's the, it's the negative emotions that drive behavior changes, not the positive emotions.”

“Like if people are not looking at you in the eye, typically like they look away or they look down to the right because they're uncomfortable about you looking at them because they're doing something that they should, or they're saying something that they shouldn't be saying, or they're lying to you.”

“if you really want to pitch somebody, you want to play the long game, don't even make an ask. You know, just be like, man, I'm working on this really great project. It's fantastic. Then at the end of it, don't even ask for anything.”

“Cause with poker, alcohol can lower your inhibition a little bit. So you're gonna just go, trust your instinct. And when I, you know, whenever I've done that, I feel like it's almost like a superpower because It allows you to sort of get past the, the fear and the rationalization for why you shouldn't take this risk.…”

“You can't get people to pay attention to you unless you've achieved some level of critical success, and that means doing the things that you aren't necessarily inclined to want to do in order to get to where you need to get.”

“So if you want to be a tech founder, you need to move to San Francisco. If you want to make movies, you go to LA. Now it's not that you had to do it, but if you want to increase your odds and you want to go faster, that's what you would do because proximity is power.”

“I like to say like, you can't go viral without half of everyone thinking you're an idiot. Right. It just comes with the territory or else it wouldn't go viral.”

“You know, this is not the way you're going to get rich. It's the way, it's a hobby for people who are already rich.”

“First, it raises the price for all of his competitors. So he's like, cool, even if they don't take my offer, now they have to pay 100 X what they were paying for talent before. Like, way to screw up their business.”

“if you're the most mercenary person in the world, and the only thing you care about is making money, then that's the fastest, easiest way to make the money.”

“And the other side will tell you if they could trust you not to hurt them with it. So your first negotiation is trust. Cause they got stuff. If they could tell you it would change everything.”

“Well, questioning somebody makes them feel cornered. Which then diminishes trust because nobody trusts you if you cornered them or interrogated them.”

“So it's compromise is to by definition, make something lose lose. And that is not compatible with a long-term relationship of trust and prosperity. It's, it's compatible with being a C player.”

“I heard a long time ago, up to age five, treat a kid like a king. Five to 15, you know, work them like an indentured servant. At 15, let them go. There's a lot of brain science that, that overlaps very closely with that in the development of the brain.”

“if it's a key asset that locks down, you know, a certain competitive advantage, don't quibble on price. In fact, come in over so that you make sure you secure that asset and you develop a reputation.”

“some of these people who are actually making the most money are actually still craftsmen.”

“Also your TikTok views are not worth nearly Close to what your Instagram views are. It's probably a factor of 10 to 20 X difference in terms of the value per view, especially if it's a little bit more meme, a little bit more humor, any like that.”

“the way that the nature of TikTok and the nature of short form content is that they're not loyal to you. They're loyal to the feed and you might show up from time to time.”

“Every change you make is another variable to like, to screwing it up. ... But if you do that before you know if that copying works or not, you're just going to increase the likelihood of screwing it up and thus not being successful.”

“people laugh at, like, the AI rapper, but I actually think, like, there's a huge moment in time to just be, like, the rapper. You be the rapper. And sell the service, sell the outcome, and, like, Do the work for somebody before they even ask for it.”

“AI doesn't really come with that, right? AI has, like, this is why the incumbents are moving so fast. It, like, makes your existing product distribution much better, right? You can add autosuggest, autocorrect, you can, like, put Gemini in every product.”

“The cost of work drops so dramatically that instead of selling the promise, you can just sell the finished work.”

“we got a long period of time before this stuff filters through the economy because it's not how fast the technology is moving. It's how fast people adjust Their reality and their habits, and that's like the friction that actually exists here.”

“So yes, it is a moat, but if you decided Claude was much better for you and you, the point is, and you spent a month just including your day each day, you're probably there. You're not, not a hundred percent. It's enough.”

“I think that for a lot of people just starting out, ideas are unimportant, because it's just like, dude, just, just get into something and you'll figure it out. But I think that if you have a proven track record of like, I, I execute, so execution, or going forward is not a problem for me. And then, if you have that…”

“80% of, or 90% of good LLM SEO is just good regular SEO.”

“There is a funny theory in behavioral science, which is that people don't make decisions in a vacuum. They make decisions through comparison. So if you have a friend who looks like you, but is slightly less attractive, then that'll make you look even more attractive.”

“I think financial advice is incredibly valuable. I think they serve a really good purpose, but at a certain point, the math ongoing flat fee is just substantially better for you, right? Like if you have five million dollars, fifty million dollars, five hundred million dollars, they don't do dramatically more things.…”

“So most people should not try and find alpha on the investment side. However, if you can be smart about saving money on taxes, that is where your alpha comes from.”

“I built a very simple model that makes the assumption that you start contributing to your Roth Diary by 21, the mega backdoor by like 30. Even if you just indexed the S&P and you looked at the hundred year average of the S&P, you end up with thirty million dollars in your Roth Diary at retirement.”

“I call it getting Ted lassoed now, which is when a Brit has twice the intelligence or knowledge, but, uh, the American has 10 X the agency or confidence, and as a result, they achieve five times more.”

“I think we're going through a seismic shift now that's similar to when writing first came online.”

“And I think the mistake people make with taxes is they have their one tax person and that person worked with their parents and they've been loyal, but actually this is a very bad place to have loyalty. It's really good to talk to like, I've talked to dozens of. ... You want to be very promiscuous here. I've talked to…”

“if, if, uh, I could just raise less VC money for these companies and just create more of them. And not be directly operating them, then that could add up to being just as valuable, if not more valuable than if I created one unicorn”

“things that to others might seem silly. Are, um, amazing starter businesses. And I think that one mistake a lot of people make when you're early on as a founder is you try to do a, what you think will work. So you end up doing some, like, I don't know, some, uh, a boring business that you're not really, you don't…”

“those are exactly the industries that people should be looking at for building AI products, right? If you think about even just the selling motion that you need to do for any new product, if you're going to a company and they have ample demand, and there's like a very, very liquid market for talent, while that means…”

“The important thing, and you see this, this is the problem with modern day entrepreneurship industry is they like, like everything except Actual, what their company actually does. So if you can find love. Right. In the activity itself, you're able to do it for a long time.”

“His point was that, like, if you're planning on a year, if you're investing in a product that may not, you know, reap any benefits over a year, You have a lot of competition, five years, less competition, 10 years, no competition.”

“people talk about beat their chest and say, I'm a self-made man and it's complete bullshit. Like most, most of us are function of a sixth grade friend who put us on a completely different path.”

“If you are disagreeable, you end up doing better as a, as an entrepreneur and a founder and as a creator, because you don't have this need to please everyone all the time.”

“strategically, if one of those other companies had figured out which network of streamers to go after, not the ranked list, Because they would take Ninja, who's a Fortnite streamer, but they wouldn't take the other Fortnite streamers. They would take this other guy who plays this other style of content. And their fans…”

“What they do is they focus on quantity, and their belief is basically that quantity is the only way to get to quality. So they're, they play a volume game, and they're like, we produce a lot of bad art, and that's where the one or two things that are real gold come from. If you just sit down and try to make gold, it…”

“a lot of the traits of, like, conspiracy theorists are, like, those of, like, a, like, a great, like, uh, founder.”

“a lot of success in business just comes from surfing the right wave. I think founders like to believe that it's our own genius that's causing our success. And when it's failure, then it's market conditions. And actually, often it's the opposite. It's the market conditions that can create success or really amplify your…”

“And, and I think like, I personally believe that your story for a company is more important than anything. I don't care if you have the greatest product in the world. If you can't tell a story about it, well, what's the point?”

“something I've come to believe is that the bigger the idea, the easier it becomes because it motivates you and the people around you, and you attract better people to come work on it.”

“hard work amongst this group, not universal. So there was one guy, I don't, you weren't there, you were, Sean like busted his knee in the second hour or something like that and had to stay at home for like this whole, one whole session. And there was this guy there who was explaining how hard he grinds. And then there…”

“the Ron Conway principle of how do you just act so benevolently that your reputation is the product you're actually building. You're not building a portfolio. You're building a reputation. The reputation builds the portfolio.”

“going and getting a job, um, at a business in order to learn how to run a business, uh, that doesn't really work. That's not actually what happens.”

“if you spend your, your life in a, in these jobs, even good jobs, even challenging jobs, you are being raised as a zoo tiger. And every year that you are in the zoo, you are less likely to be able to survive in the jungle.”

“step one of being successful, Is it not about intelligence? It's not about experience. It's not about strategy at all. It is about courage, and that courage is the rate-limiting step for 99% of smart people”

“Proximity is power. Just simply being near people who live the life that you want to live is the fastest way to become that person.”

“when you are married, you are running a business. It is the business of running a household together, and it's only in the last hundred or so years that Americans became infatuated with this idea of love as the only reason to get married. That's ahistorical.”

“Dreamers, it's, it's the next gig. It's the next deal. These are the folks who typically fall into get rich quick schemes, and they are incredibly difficult to be partners with. They're not listening. They're not reading my book. Let's put it that way. And the only reason they can live in La La Land is that they are…”

“So, in most relationships, there is one money person, and this is a huge mistake.”

“So the way that you set up your accounts to be united in a marriage, I highly recommend all the money goes into a Joint account. And from there, you each have some of the money flow to a separate individual account, a no questions asked account, which both of you know about, but each of you only has access to your own.”

“the way that I think by default people will use this is you ask a question, it gives an answer, and actually a equally if not more powerful way is to do the exact opposite. You basically say, I have a, I'm trying to think about this. Ask me questions. And then you, and you get it to ask you the questions. And then in…”

“Basically, is when you meet an entrepreneur who's got an uncurable, unhealable, you know, identity wound, um, that ends up being somebody who ends up doing really well.”

“being a Harvard dropout is a stronger signal than being a Harvard graduate. There's all these things that sound silly, but actually end up being true, because if you're the type of person who can get into Harvard and that has enough conviction and an idea to drop out of Harvard against the social pressures of Harvard,…”

“is this a revenge company is a great signal. It's a green flag signal.”

“If you've ever had to call top bunk with your wife. You've experienced a trauma that I would like to invest in.”

“Okay, so we know we don't, because people come on for an hour, they do a show, the epic content is not on long enough for people to show up and intersect with it. How come Twitch wins? And then it turned out that, oh, people play games for eight to 10 hours.”

“Yeah, I think a lot of people think that waiting a quarter is a long time, and that's probably the issue. Uh, they think, oh, well, I waited three months, so I'm like, try waiting 18.”

“You might think that because you're female, things are less fair, or that people will treat you differently, or that business is harder and there are things that you're going to have to overcome. And while all those things might be true in certain circumstances and certain times, and that some are irrefutably true, the…”

“I think that I've had to probably accumulate more skills that some men would not have to because I've had to learn to be better at things to be taken seriously in certain ways. Right. Or I've had to, you know, accumulate emotional skills that I wouldn't have to otherwise. I think those are all pros. And like, if I have…”

“the job of being a YC partner or leader of YC is just super hard. Just like a lot, most of those people are going to fail. So you have to kind of delude, delude yourself. Uh, if you really want to say only focus on what could happen, well, it's probably not what's going to happen in most of the cases, but, uh, that's…”

“actually, you know, you don't really want to hide behind some walls, like the real ever, ever since The blitzkrieg in, like, 1940, 19 39, whatever, we learned that, like, high velocity attack is the way to win, not, like, sitting behind defensive walls.”

“I think learning a foreign language in that country is extremely, it's not a good ROI from like, you probably won't make any money off of this, especially now with chat GPT.”

“what you really want in a pitch is to give the vibe to the investor that, wait a minute, I think this is even bigger than what they're saying. So there's this subtle art where you're, you're desperately trying to convince them that this is going to be big and awesome and it's going to work, but you cannot appear to be,…”

“I think the build something you want is a bit of a red herring. It works in some cases, but you're also very limited to your experience.”

“I think there's a, the shut your eyes, imagine the future, uh, What's it look like? Build that. I think this makes sense in retrospect. I think in the moment, it's pretty hard to generate reasonable startup ideas during that.”

“I've always felt that if you build a great Silicon Valley company, internally in your company, you should be a totally normal person, but outside, you should have that, like, 10% crazy. Yeah. It just gives you, like, actually, like, two extra valuation. It just creates this extra aura.”

“Maybe you shouldn't respond, and maybe you can make the problem a whole lot worse by responding, right? Um, you elevate it, you can, you can end up engagement, uh, uh, algorithms can end up, could end up helping spread it by you trying to fact check it.”

“there are some really different, really important differences between business marketing and political marketing, and one of them is that the cost of a, Of mis-targeting out of a false positive in your modeling is really high in politics, right? So if you are, if you have a consumer product and you're Coke and you put…”

“And, you know, digital advertising is more labor intensive for them, but buying TV is, you know, there are only so many stations in, in Wisconsin that you can put ads on and, you know, it doesn't take any more work to double the buy and they get paid a commission off of in their, you know, that, that, that's, and it's…”

“music is not about hitting the high, it's like life, it's not about hitting the perfect no or doing the run, it's about, does it, does this part of my humanity speak to that part of your humanity? I'm raising my hand, I'm taking my clothes off out here, and it's vulnerable and going, this is what it's like for me to be…”

“in reality, a plain white website that has just long form copy of like 3000 words can oftentimes more often than not convert better than a flashy website.”

“problem one with digital currencies was you can't be the guy behind it. Because as soon as this thing gets popular, you have too much power and the nation states who, who today control the currency supply, they're not going to like you or that, or they're just going to do character attacks on you to discredit the…”

“The way I look at it is Bitcoin's a savings technology, so people use, people think Bitcoin's gonna make them rich. Actually, the true purpose of Bitcoin is a store value, meaning it's meant to keep you rich.”

“The problem with conspiracies, there's two problems with them. One, secrets are really hard to keep. You know what I mean? Like if, so if 50 people know that they had to work together to do X, Y, and Z, it's really hard, particularly over decades, to keep that a secret.”

“And so, it's actually less important to figure out what's true and what's not, as it is to figure out what's useful to believe and what's not useful to believe in life.”

“I tend to take more of a market first approach than most early stage people. I focus on the market and product market more than the founders. And obviously founders are incredibly important. I started two companies myself, so I hope that founders are incredibly important. But I also think that what you're actually…”

“the traditional defense tech companies are what are known as cost plus, which means if you have a million dollar drone, they charge five percent. So they can't make more than five percent margins. They make 50 can a drone. You're Anduril. You can sell 10 better drones for a million dollars. You make 50% margin, which…”

“Naval's framework is, um, is like, well, of course, early in your career, you're at least partially a mercenary. Otherwise you're never going to find the opportunity and go win it. And then later in your life, you're a missionary, right? You're not zero sum. You're trying to do things for the greater good. And then,…”

“when people talk about gene delivery, there's like three or four aspects of it that matter, and everybody focuses now on sort of the CRISPR side of it, which is, can you modify a gene? In a, in a cell versus can you target it to the right cells? Will your immune system target those cells and turn it off? Like there's…”

“one of the things that really stood out was the more successful the person, the richer the guy, the weirder the guy, with really no exceptions during this trip. And when I say weirder, it would be that they have weird hobbies, would have that they have weird marriages or relationship dynamics. It would be that they…”

“ultimately content creation is a big meritocracy. You know, ultimately you can create content with no platform, no, no, no, no, nothing. And if, if you create the right thing at the right time, it's like a lottery ticket and it goes viral.”

“My philosophy is that every material thing should have a price tag.”

“Number one, choose red states over blue, generally speaking, because get speed to market is everything. And you want to be in a, in a place that's super easy to build.”

“Passive income when it comes to real estate, if you own the thing, that, that, that ain't true. It's still like a business that you have to run. There is no set it and forget it.”

“I think that for most entrepreneurs who are like new, I think that branding and some of these exercises aren't terribly important, but I think that if you have a proven track record where you're like, um, this person executes well and they execute. When you have that track record, which I think I do, Like for all my…”

“And hiring and retaining and developing talent on a media, as a media company, that's really, really, really hard. You got to find interesting people, which is hard. And then the most interesting creative people are typically also the biggest pain, pain in the asses to work with and to retain them.”

“These are great businesses that will just keep growing, keep compounding. You could join them today as employee 500 and you will become a millionaire without doing any of the entrepreneurial stuff. If you could just identify the kind of like 10 companies a year that fit that mold.”

“I think I'm like the end game that a lot of people are thinking about how to get to, and they want to make a business and they want to be successful, but for what? And so there's a lot of talk about when is enough. And I think I found enough and this is what happens when you get there.”

“If you are looking for an aqua hire, salespeople are in high demand. If you have guys that can sell and girls that can sell, this company will get bought. I don't care what you're selling, but start collecting salespeople and build a sales team. You'll either get bought out, you can build a SaaS around it, or you'll…”

“If you're listening to this podcast because you want to be financially successful, I think you need to have priorities in life, and it is very hard to run and be laser focused on your business when you're trying to build a relationship. Dare I say it's almost impossible.”

“Do not do a dinner party. I talk about why dinner parties are a recipe for failure for new first time hosts.”

“one small poker tell for if an employee is going to be great is if they're willing to spend money out of their own pocket to move faster.”

“It's also, by the way, why so many great engineers come from, like, the Nordic regions, because those are places where it's, like, too cold to go outside, too dark to go, it's, like, dark all the time, and so they just stay inside, they program, and they just code on computers, because there's not really better options…”

“a lot of sleep is the more you think about sleep, the more pressure you put on sleep, the worse the sleep is, which is why a lot of these, if I was, if I was the CMO of Whoop or Aura, the one thing I would suggest them to do, like coming in as a product thing, would be to never allow you to know the next day's score.…”

“obviously great people are great in spite of circumstances versus great people are bogged down in the 10 maybe reasons why they're struggling right now.”

“Democracy inside a company where everybody gets a vote on what we're doing is not a great way to build a company. Like companies are benevolent dictatorships when they win.”

“These companies are really buying certainty and it's, it's CYA, right? It's why a lot of consultants get hired in the world is, is there's a CYA component.”

“At by employee 200, you no longer need to be at the top of the genius curve. Work, you know, an incredible amount and you still get rich.”

“it is actually a competitive advantage to completely ignore the numbers at the beginning and focus more on attracting the right types of people to your content.”

“When markets crash, just, I have to assess, like, A, is the wolf at the door? Like, do I actually have an existential crisis? If so, ok, I'll, I'll, I'll make a, I'll shift my attention to this and, and change, but like, if that's the case, it's because I somehow over levered, or like, really stretched myself too thin,…”

“I think anybody who says that honestly is lying. I think you're doing it for yourself, um, and you use your kids as a justification. To, uh, why you're, why you're doing that as my, my, my general opinion.”

“There's no foolproof strategy, but the upside of finding people you love and doing life with them is so much higher than the downsides of when it doesn't work out, uh, in my opinion.”

“whenever we owned the financials, it felt good because we felt in control. Problem was we were in control. The CEO looked at the numbers and was like, those are your numbers. Those aren't my numbers. I don't own that. I don't know. I don't know what that target is. I don't know what those numbers are. I'm on the…”

“if we are not adding back at least 10% of the time, the thing that we removed, either a process in the company, a role in the company, or a part of the, of the product, a feature of the product, if we're not adding back at least 10% of the time, That means we have not been removing enough.”

“When it works, it feels like a cheat code because the trust is there. The fun is there. And it's like, why wouldn't I want to do life with these people?”

“what's the difference between like the first million and the next nine hundred ninety-nine million? It is whether or not the capability exists in the company to make the product deeper and keep expanding scope for what you do for your customer, right?”

“Software three dot O is the idea that the next generation of software, a lot of it is about manipulating foundation models and they're called foundation models because they have a lot of capability out of the box. You don't need to train them from scratch. You just need to give them like guidance, reinforcement, the…”

“And so I think that will happen in a bunch of different areas where, like, basically, if you can create separation of that work already to outsource it, then maybe you can outsource it to a machine as well.”

“Usually women's products tend to be underserved compared to the ideas that most guys have around what businesses that they'll go start. And so you kind of can compete in a less, a less saturated field than, um, you know, making to-do list apps or whatever, whatever, like the average, whatever the average bro idea will…”

“with a lot of these brands, you don't really need like a significantly more innovative thing other than you have to be able to make it clean enough that you can accurately describe it as, as a better for you alternative, but it doesn't need to be a significant thing.”

“one of the cool things about working in the gaming space is it, it changed your mindset so that you're kind of one game always, you're always one game away from something changing the trajectory of the company. And if you're in a website or an app or a product business, that's dangerous because you always believe like,…”

“And he said, listen, whenever I do a deal with somebody, I always just leave a little bit extra on the table. Cause you never know when you're going to come back. I want to do another deal with them. And like, you know, the internet is filled with Here's how do you extract maximum value from the other person. Here's…”

“If I talk to nine out of 10 people, only one might need a strategy change. For nine out of 10, the answer is up your level of intensity.”

“If your strategy is convoluted, if your strategy requires multiple new innovations and leaps of faith, you are likely going to fail.”

“I think overshooting is a mistake that a lot of people make myself included. And I think they think, okay, I need to be a billionaire or be worth hundreds of millions of dollars when in reality that is overdoing it.”

“Uh, but I think round number, ten million is financial freedom for almost everybody. And ten million is not that hard to get to. If you, if you own a business, um, you, you should be able to get to, you know, let's call it one to two million a year profit a year. And sell that thing for, you know, somewhere between…”

“What you have to understand in all businesses, you're always going to be pulled to the right. So you're always going to be pulled to the high user and low gross. They're going to try to get you over there. If, if people like what you have, they like what you're doing. They're going to take you over there more to the…”

“We're seeing a big push through the Midwest on companies wanting to build these massive data centers, uh, really through the glut of the Midwest. And we think it's kind of like Cushing's Oklahoma, where we store our oil. Now we think data is going to be kind of the new oil. And so we're going to try and store our data…”

“That's a very privileged way to go about it, which is if you hit the lottery, like maybe we have, or I mean, we've worked hard, but we've got lucky as well, where that's a very privileged way to go about it. And so I do think you have to eat shit for a certain period of time and also get some luck.”

“And he goes, the second thing is that in life, you believe you're competing with a much bigger pool of people than you actually are. Because the majority of people aren't even playing the game, and of the people who are playing the game, most of them don't even believe that they can win. You're only competing with the…”

“The big sin that I made early on in my career is I looked at scratching that itch Through other business opportunities and other like things when what I do now is I'm present that that is the law of gravity. I'm always going to want to do new and novel things, but I have a new and novel thing that I do that is attached…”

“People think that the longer you spend designing something, the safer it'll be and the better it'll be. It's for sure wrong. Cause in that two year period of time where that one robot got out, I'm gonna have my third gen robot out. And I'll have, I'll have run it like an order of magnitude longer. I will have found all…”

“You know, but what we're buying are these audiences that love the content. They're, they're enthusiasts. And effectively by owning the, the magazine, which we finance through the, the P and L of the magazine itself, subscriptions and advertising. We make money in media, but we're ultimately buying the audience itself…”

“the arbitrage in aviation is that you're taking a piece of land that has beauty. It's a beautiful piece of land, but it's not next to a body of water to build a lakefront home. And so essentially what you're doing is you're taking this land and you're arbitraging because the, the runway itself is the arbitrage.”

“dude, rage is like the greatest fuel ever. I don't, you know, someone once told me, if you got hate in your heart, let it out. I'm like, no, I'm burying that deep. Let it go nowhere. That's fuel. I need that.”

“the some of the cool stories are some of these creators like Logan Paul, they now have a billion dollar company with prime roaring kitty is the exact same thing, but instead of selling prime energy drinks or whatever, He's selling, uh, not financial advice, but he's selling... This is his version of monetizing his…”

“So people, I think, have this idea of short term performance in the market, feeling like I can, I can do this forever. Just like in Vegas, you can't do that forever and you will begin to lose. And the same thing is true in the market.”

“And the main reason is why, in my opinion, is because the business world pays for that advice. It's not that it deserves the advice. It's not even that it's advice that's applicable, but that it pays for the advice. And the way I've been thinking about it is not as this, this, this, this shining beacon on a hill that…”

“Even if you hire a great, great CEO to replace you with CEO, like they're, they just don't have that... there's that thing that's present in a founder simply because they were there from the beginning, that they, they have an extra ounce of, it's not even that they're, they're not better than, they just have an extra…”

“And I think it's way more than 50%. I mean, all the way back to you didn't choose your parents. You didn't choose anything, right? You didn't choose your mind.”

“there's something about having a long A feeling of longevity and a perception of longevity in having a print product, whether that's with advertisers or it's with audience or readers that you just don't get with a blog. You don't, it doesn't feel, and, and, you know, you think about a brand like dwell, um, is a great…”

“every piece of content I put out is basically a search for validating demand for whatever's in that content.”

“Well, cause, cause the thing about it is you, if you run it like that, and it was with zero dollars of paid spend, right? And so I have no acquisition cost. My acquisition cost is equal to my media. Cause that's the only way I was getting the word out, but my media is not a cost. It's a, it's a profit driver. And so…”

“when you see a book that says, uh, number one or just like, uh, USA Today bestseller, what that tells me and what it has always told me is that they didn't make the New York Times list. Uh, so the New York Times list is kind of a benchmark because you can be a number one something on Amazon in pretty much anything.”

“No stage performer goes on stage just kind of cold and low energy. But almost every writer starts cold and low energy and just sits there somewhat miserably. And, um, and there's even some weird glory from, like, this, like, I don't know, this, like, pain that's martyrship of, like, how you need to be as a writer. I…”

“Common traits uncommonly together is very, very valuable. You don't need to be the funniest, nor do you need to be the smartest. If you're pretty smart and you're kind of funny, you're like the best”

“they're selling on something that's more like Supreme. They're selling on cool. Kids are buying it literally to drink it for the status symbol, like a fashion brand. And that can only last so long.”

“Fundraising is not to be celebrated. I mean, think about what you're saying when you celebrate fundraising. It's either a combination of Congratulations. Now the game is starting. Like, you don't get cheered for to start the game. You get cheered when you win. The second thing is, it's congratulations. You gave up a…”

“what we found was I got double the subscriber conversion, but 10 X less the views when I do that. I actually get my regular conversions when I do malicious content, but 10 X the views, which actually means I'm getting five X more subscribers”

“And I think that in general, you want to be like ultra free or ultra premium. So it's basically like, don't make money on every transaction. Don't be a gatekeeper who stands in the way of, of the traffic flowing. And it's like, not let 99% of the cars go through completely free. But then on the one where You know,…”

“Markets can trick you. Markets can look small and be bigger, but founders or teams that operate like this, That's like always a good signal. And so I'm like, let me just bet on the known versus not bet because of this hypothetical unknown thing.”

“a lot of people like to incubators cause they're like, oh, I don't want to do one company. I'm going to do 10 companies. And like, by the way, that's like much less likely to have big success cause you're not focused.”

“Is you can't really appreciate a talent unless you're within two standard deviations of it. So you think of talent as being on a normal curve for any typical, typical skill. It could be for math, could be for podcasts, whatever it is. And like, so you kind of have a natural level of talent. You could shift slightly.…”

“Um, and because the broad thesis is that these audiences are still super underpriced, basically. Um, that the equity you're giving up is you'll be more than compensated for. And I think that'll last for, for, for quite a long time.”

“the one in this case was basically that regulation only goes in one direction. It only goes up into the right. Nobody ever rolls back any of these needs. It's only gonna increase.”

“So if you're within 20 years of the founder or the number one person in the organization, You're almost always going to be a guy. Um, and if you think of like all the great firms or even, you know, companies where someone has become the new number one, there's almost always at least a 20 year gap between the person…”

“I generally think like if you want to start a company, you should just start a company. Don't go like work somewhere to get experience or whatever. But I think this might be the sole exception, which it can really open doors of either investment or vouching or connections or whatever.”

“Bragging about how many businesses you own is really weird and probably like a contra signal to how good you are.”

“if you get the chance to sell it for a great price, like that is probably the way that you maximize returns.”

“a lot of these businesses, I think if you just started them, you could really wipe the floor with, uh, with the existing competition.”

“you can become very successful. You can be late in life, but nothing bad has ever really happened to you. And I view that as kind of a liability in some sense of if you're going to partner or work with them of like, boy, like when something goes off the rails here, this might be a really big blow up. Cause of course,…”

“Feastables is going to have a way harder time without Mr. Beast than, you know, um, if he built a bank, right? If the bank had hundreds of thousands of customers or whatever, Ostensibly he could go away from that and might make the business grow slow or whatever, but it's still like a really great, great business.”

“all the Silicon Valley guys are really when like behind closed doors are really, um, envious of the New York hedge fund guys. Cause they're so liquid. Like they might not actually be as rich per se, but they're so, they make so much cash that it's like, it may as well be a whole different thing.”

“He goes, if you have a team, everybody just centers around the safe picks that, uh, we can all agree on. And he's like, you know, you'll never find the truly, truly contrarian hated and unloved things. If you, if you invest as a team, because it's not a team sport.”

“And actually the move is to go vet branding agencies or naming agencies, and then just pluck the most interesting person you have and be like, you're gonna run our whole brand. Come over and just come in house. You're gonna run our whole brand.”

“And because you have that free time, um, you're, you're able to actually get more stuff done, even though your calendar looks less productive.”

“The trade-off of the unscheduled life is that that's not compatible with other people who live a highly scheduled life.”

“Top, top flight university, universities are part luxury brand, Part daycare, part education, part insurance policy.”

“Working at a place like Facebook, unless you're one of the first maybe, like, two to 500 employees, um, it kind of just is like, all right, you're, like, kind of legit. You know, you worked at a place that has some sort of high bar. But now there's, uh, 80,000 people that worked at Facebook as of, like, the end of last…”

“My theory in crypto now is, uh, selling is less to do with price levels. Like, like in, um, the public markets, people will hold a stock and they're like, okay, if this ever gets overvalued, I'm selling, I'm trimming the position. In crypto, it's much more cyclical. And so I actually think that selling is more about…”

“And you stop, uh, and you just give up. Frankly, you just give up, which is something I think more people ought to do.”

“the principle around this is that in any industry, um, generics eventually come in. For example, there's a lot of chat tools that exist in software today in, in, in, in the industry. So they're basically commodities, but they're still priced like luxuries.”

“I think more people should be using this tactic, and the reason why I think they don't, to be honest, is because there is no reason to be building their product. There is no intrinsic why. There is no strong point of view that would get people behind it. Their product is either derivative or sort of mediocre, or it's…”

“If you just wait till the end to try to add those novelties, you'll never have enough time. You're always running out of time at the end and you're never going to try new things. You're not going to have the tolerance or the, the, the, uh, the patience to, to wander. So then you end up leaving those things out and then…”

“Consumers really don't value their time. Um, but even in business, that's true.”

“saving money, saving time. It's not a bad proposition, but often the same product can be shown to generate value instead of saving time. And all of a sudden it's literally an order of magnitude more valuable.”

“One mistake I made many times is like build the best product. In the, in a whatever market, in a meh market, but you'd rather go into an amazing market and build a good enough product. That's like where a lot more success comes.”

“And you know that if somebody is creating content like this, it's just a matter of time until they create a product that goes mainstream because they understand what makes people tick and what's going to get the click and what's going to get the conversion. And eventually they'll stop making silly videos or the stop…”

“Don't discount something because of those, like, kind of those limitations. Like, basically find, does it have any extreme strengths? Because if it has a couple of extreme strengths, it's actually going to be a winner.”

“what I, he goes, I realized you gotta be really careful what you, what projects you pick because anything can be optimized to infinity.”

“your product doesn't have to change the world. Your product, actually, as a CEO or owner, could be, I create jobs for wonderful people, and I give them a great place to work. And, like, most people just want a nine-to-five, and they want to play softball on the weekends. And they want to make sure they've got good…”

“You work with, you don't work for, and it's actually a pretty big mentality shift, which is working with somebody is a partnership. It's an agreement. It's a mutually beneficial thing versus I work for you is a, you know, um, you know, there's a dominant person and there's a person who just basically takes orders and…”

“And one is enough. One is enough. That's the key. I think one problem people can do is they go logo collecting. One is enough. If you, if you got Harvard, Awesome. You don't need to also go get another MBA from some other place. Or if you have Facebook, you don't have to make the next one Google. You can make the next…”

“This actually is also inside of a company. You need to put a price tag on your projects that you simply will not work on projects that can't move the needle for the action for the company. Cause if not, why am I here? What is the point? And if you carry yourself with somebody who can actually move the deal for the…”

“I think that when you get into a group, whether it's work or any other type of group, oftentimes the most confident person is not usually the smartest person, but the most confident person wins.”

“Business plans are stupid. Business cards are stupid. LLCs are stupid.”

“Facebook started that way in a weekend. Airbnb did. A lot of other companies can too.”

“I don't think out of the batch of a hundred people that the difference between the winners and losers was intelligence or talent or hard work. I don't believe that that's what was the difference.”

“The absolute disregard for social norms I've now learned is like a very, very positive attribute or signal in highly, highly successful people.”

“All of them got rich as well in one way. Like I was just at FedEx this morning because I interviewed the guy from Kinko's. He just focused on copiers. That's it. But a lot of newer entrepreneurs I've seen are ones that haven't had as much success. They're like, I'm going to do five different solopreneur startups this…”

“If you want to know what products work, go look at what MLMs work and work backwards from there.”

“the number one choke point of any business is the psychology of the owner. Like, every problem you think your business has, If you do the root cause analysis, it goes right back up to the root, to the psychology of the, of the owner, right?”

“You have high margin product, You have repeat purchase because people are going to have to, they have to keep applying the thing. You have a visual before and after, and you have a true story around the creators, like actual need versus just like a, a nice to have. And, you know, that is like the, you know, that's the,…”

“If you can find eight to 12 uncorrelated investments, he said, you can reduce your risk by 80% and make a slight increase in your upside.”

“The first thing I think everyone should know, even people who are not entrepreneurs yet is the U S tax code is rigged in favor of business owners. Um, it's very intentional, but you can look at a country's tax code and learn a lot about what it stands for. And in America, two things stand out. The tax code is rigged in…”

“I think women is the right market for a product like this. People who want an opinion on everything and want to discuss and want to get answers and want high trust recommendations.”

“Now that I know that like mom and pop is better than big, you know, big corporate company vibe, keep it, keep it lame or not lame. Keep it kind of like, uh, like, uh, thrown together. That's the way to do it. I want to see a USPS box. I want to see some of the tape all messed up when you like tape everything in there.…”

“our loyal fans, our hardcore viewers come first. They're going to want to see Jimmy's face. But after that, after, you know, basically the 24 hour period, it's going to be more fans that are from the platform, just people browsing YouTube. They don't know Jimmy. They don't want to see his face. So let's just put this,…”

“There's this weird dynamic that happens where when the bill comes, if you pay the bill, you're showing off, or you're implying they can't afford it, and if you don't pay the bill, you're an asshole because you can afford to, and so that's why we do that.”

“I think that's an extreme case, but I think there's many cases where you create a billion dollar business and you actually walk away with like eight percent of the company.”

“Another reason why robots are interesting is you are only working within the laws of physics. And the laws of physics, I find, I find those to be a bit easier to work in compared to say, creating the next Louis Vuitton, like to creating a brand or consumer product.”

“Because there's no better brand than a brand of something you can't get into.”

“these e-commerce companies, let's say, uh, you know, ad flips, competition flips, whatever, they don't, like, retain that much value, because the sale is already done in the past. You basically get no credit for past, you know, past sales here, because it's not recurring revenue. It's not like a network effect style…”

“Because if taxes impact half your income potentially, if you invest just even five or 10% of your time this year to finding five amazing tax strategists, get all their advice and figure out how to apply it, 10% of your time. It's the upper bound here. And you're making, like, way more money as a result. It pays for…”

“actually the same thing that makes the sex tape go viral gets you elected to be president today. So like in some ways it's actually the exact same skillset, just, you know, packaged up in a different way and, uh, with different ambitions or, or aspirations.”

“whether it's Twitter, whether it's podcasts, whatever, the people who tend to be good at it, don't think of it and like sit down and like create a marketing calendar. Like, I dunno, they're like taking a poop and they pull out their phone and they start tweeting like random things and like they go viral. Right. At the…”

“a lot of times guys like you and me or people listening, they think clothes don't matter. They think, you know, I'm just going to curse and people are going to think that I'm real and all this stuff. I've grown to think that's complete nonsense that like, you know, we act like we shouldn't play this bureaucratic…”

“What's the longest you've ever gone on a project you were passionate about without sleep? And their answer will tell you a lot. Either they'll struggle to even come up with a number because they don't, they've ever actually had an obsession, a project they're so passionate about that they kind of became a degenerate.…”

“And I'm not even saying that this is all BS. Like maybe it's all true. Maybe it's all false. I have no idea. But they believe it's true. And as an entrepreneur, that's all that matters is that there are people that, that are all bought in, like they are bought fully into a lifestyle. And in that lifestyle, you could…”

“one of the most important things you got to figure out is who's actually buying this company. It's not a company that buys a company. There is a person in a company who needs something for their job. And you have to figure out who is that person and what is the fire under their ass?”

“the party that's willing to be more uncomfortable generally will win. Or the way my dad taught me was the more stubborn person wins in any negotiation.”

“in any negotiation, it is not the side that has the better argument or the more, or more logic. It's whoever has more leverage, number one. And then within that, you're, that's like the, the, the, the substance. And then you have the style and the style is whoever's a little more stubborn and a little more crazy, a…”

“if you ask the dinner guests, what's for dinner, they will always say steak. And I was like, oh my God, that's so true. Right. It's like, why wouldn't they, you know, it's not their money. They, you know, yes. Don't get me wrong. Like a CEO is incentivized for a bonus, but for a CEO's bonus, They can spend 300,000…”

“we've realized that, like, cold outreach is not the way to go. Like, we would much rather go and have a public presence and a reputation and have people actually seek us out and say, hey, I want to sell you my company.”