The Wisdom Wall
11 quotable lessons, heuristics and mental models. Every one is playable at the moment it was said. No fortune cookies allowed.
“Every successful company is a cult. And what a cult really means is you have a view about the world that's different than other normal people. And you're right to be successful. Like a cult doesn't have to be right, but the startup is a cult. That's right. And that's what makes a successful startup.”
“There's only, there's two formulations. One is you are in the top call one to 10 basis points on some specific trait. And that can, they can be very different. You can be the smartest person I've ever met. You can be the most tenacious person, persistent, um, best salesperson, best at assessing people. Like you have…”
“It's because you don't have any more barrels, you're just stacking ammunition behind the same number of barrels, so you're not going to get any more done, and you're just going to frustrate people.”
“99% of everything that matters is the CEO. Um, the most important lesson for me over the last 25 years is if you have the right CEO, things that people believe to be impossible, Or very possible, sometimes probable. If you have the wrong CEO, almost nothing else matters.”
“I've found that you need to do it in person, which really reduces the scalability of it.”
“I think it's actually something you can teach yourself. Like it's an acquired taste. I think many things in life are that way. They're path dependent. You just decide to have energy.”
“Every company that's ever done that, uh, hasn't, hasn't done so well. There's this old documentary, which is a great movie called startup.com. I do not recommend this to founders.”
“you need to be able to be profitable or break even in a market when only four million Americans transact.”
“So if you find one node, a person who's in node, the five people that that person spends the most time with, there's probably some pretty other talented people in that group.”
“You don't want to be the best in the world at what you do. You want to be the only one who does what you do. And so I think that's mostly people who are successful. They figure out how to frame themselves. So they're not just the best. They're the only.”
“it's really hard to screw up a network effect business for usually at least a decade.”