The Wisdom Wall

“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…”

“An imperative model is you give step-by-step instructions that says do this and then do this and then do this and then do this. And then I get the thing. What natural language allows us to do is use, ah, what developers would call a declarative model. Instead of describing all the steps, describe the result you want at…”

“one of the biggest opportunities in AI right now is to do what Pandora did. Okay. Is there an industry where right now we're doing really stupid keyword based matching somehow it was very, very crude. If I can take that same dataset and convert it to vector embeddings and allow people to find things in a different way…”

“Just the decrease in maintenance and wear and tear on one's psyche and soul that ownership, you know, bestows upon you is just not worth it.”

“So my position is I, I lean more towards kind of Uh, Paul Graham and the spectrum, which is, I think it's either neutral, that it doesn't matter. It's one of the things you're suggesting, uh, towards positive. Um, and the positive elements of being in a, uh, kind of downturning economy or recession is that, uh, things…”

“I think the hardest about bootstrap companies, especially tech companies that have a low kind of capital need, Is they can actually live forever and not go anywhere, right? Because it doesn't take that much stuff. It's like, okay, you've got an AWS instance somewhere that's costing you. It doesn't really cost that…”

“building large language models as OpenAI is doing is, is like supremely capital intensive, which is rare for a Software company, which is what they are.”

“There's enough real problems to solve where real money can be made. And yes, this technology can now be used in creative ways by lots of people and you should use those. But don't use as an excuse just to kind of be like an AI tourist that comes through, makes a little bit of money or whatever. And then that was that…”

“And so, you know, one of the things a founder has to kind of get good at, it's convincing really smart people to do this irrational thing, which is join you in your startup, right? And if you can't, if you can't do that, if you can't make that sale, which is the most important sale you'll make is being able to kind of…”

“They're like, um, three kind of vectors of kind of measurement of people. One is that you have the creatives, and these are people that start things. They have ideas. They have a 180 mile, you know, ideas an hour kind of thing if you sit down in a room with them. Uh, then there are the, so they're the starters. Uh,…”

“there are things that are non delegatable that, um, one of we should, we should probably talk about. It's on my list of things. Uh, so one is earnings calls. Um, another one is getting onto public stages, right? So for instance, we have an annual conference called inbound that, you know, the last time it was in person…”

“most ideas that have been super successful are not complete new from old cloth cut, right? They're like, and I don't like the cliche of building on the shoulders of giants, but it's like, like just about everything that's ever been done is derivative to some degree. It's just based on your level of abstraction, how…”

“And this is one of the reasons, uh, so my advice here was, as you're picking skills to acquire, acquire skills that are both rare, but also reinforce things that you're already exceptional at, um, that, that will kind of drive that kind of that rarity, and that's what drives Uh, drives the overall value”

“skill is something that's learnable. That's an easy definition. Uh, talent is the rate at which you could acquire a particular skill.”

“the quality of the output is almost I won't say always, but frequently a function of the number of iterations, not the quality of the, you know, the people's.”

“most people, Don't value their time enough, and don't think about it objectively enough, and it, like anything else, is a resource, but it's finite, but put a number on it, and then ask yourself, like, what are the things I'm doing with my time that are not worth that?”

“because atoms, there's a maintenance to atoms, right? Like atoms versus bits. Like if you have it, whether it's a yacht or whatever it is, a plane, Like that takes calories. I could take, I don't care how much you've delegated or whatever. That's something in your life that's kind of attached to you somehow.”

“I think copywriting overall, Is one of the most underrated skills, uh, in entrepreneurship generally. Like if people do not realize the amount of leverage you get by just spending 10, 20, 50 hours, and you can learn a lot of what you need just by, like, reading the top three books on it and just practicing the craft,…”

“the common mistake people make is that they will look at the probability of success first, and almost exclusively as the high-order bit filter. It's like, oh, I had this idea, but the likelihood is like .1% that that's actually going to work, and so I'm not even going to think about what the potential could have been,…”

“anything that can be reduced in acronym will be, which my first million is often reduced to that. Uh, and then you kind of lose the punch because when it comes down to an acronym, anyone that comes like in immediate, like they're not gonna know what it is if they don't know what it is.”

“don't decide to change the name, decide to come up with alternatives and then objectively measure those alternatives. Like, okay, Am I willing to give up the brand equity and go through the pain of changing a name because this one is just so much better.”

“the power of building a diagnostic tool for your industry is immense, right? This is the thing that, so website grader was not the solution. So it's not like a freemium thing. It's like, oh, we're giving you a lightweight version of HubSpot. It was the thing that made you realize you needed HubSpot. And that was super…”

“So if you do build a diagnostic tool, the one thing, and this is, I've learned several lessons, but one of the key ones is that relative scores work. So website grader from its early days, like, okay, so if I give you an 87, what that 87 actually means is that whatever calculations we're doing behind the scenes, this…”