Monthly Archives: November 2019

Horowitz. The Hard Thing About Hard Things

  • Darwin Project. 6 month sprint
  • “People always ask me, “What’s the secret to being a successful CEO?” Sadly, there is no secret, but if there is one skill that stands out, it’s the ability to focus and make the best move when there are no good moves. It’s the moments where you feel most like hiding or dying that you can make the biggest difference as a CEO.”
  • the struggle is where greatness comes from

Randolph. That Will Never Work

  • You see, a startup is a lonely place. You are working on something that no one believes in, that you’ve been told time and time again will never work. It’s you against the world. But the reality is that you can’t really do it on your own. You need to enlist help. Bring others around to your way of thinking. Let them share in your enthusiasm.
  • In a place where people are judged by their work people don’t really care how you look sound or dress
  • we turned a patsy Klein Cd in a publicly traded company
  • Fathers death putting everything in perspective
  • Getting older: figuring out what you like and what you’re good at
  • IVP. TCV. $40m pre ipo.
  • Was 44 at ipo.
  • The power of narrative.
  • Sometimes you have to step back from your dream. Especially when you think that you’ve made it real. Success is doing what you want to be doing.
  • Isaacson. Jobs

    • Adoption. Identity. Independence and control
    • Eichler homes. Mass market. Inspiration for Apple design
    • His intensity. Whatever he was interested in he carried on to an irrational extreme
    • Stay hungry stay foolish
    • Frutarian. Leaves picked by virgins in the moonlight
    • Alan Kay: the best way to predict the future is to invent it
    • Good artists copy. Great artists steal
    • In the annals of innovation, ideas are only part of the equation. Execution is just as important
    • Jobs on raskin: dreamer vs doer
    • Rebellion. Nietzche will to power.
    • Knows your weak points. Can crush you. Those not crushed = stronger.
    • Don’t compromise
    • Do you want to down the rest of your life selling sugar water or do you want to change the world
    • Think different
    • Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do
    • If you need slides it means you don’t know what you’re talking about
    • True creativity comes from closed systems
    • The journey is the reward
    • Focus. Intensity.
    • Zen training
    • People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. Our job is to read what’s not yet on the page
    • jobs – “That’s the ante for being in the room. You have to be able to be super honest. Maybe there is a better way. A gentleman’s club where we all wear ties and speak in this Brahmin language and speak in velvet code words. But I don’t know that way because I’m middle class and from California.”

    Stone. The Everything Store

    • he reacts viciously to employees that don’t meet his standards
    • “there is so much stuff that is yet to be invented”
    • door desks symbolize the companys frugality
    • DE shaw – work soulmate. “fully developed left and right brain”
    • on bezos: “most introspective guy i’ve ever met. very methodical about everything”
    • bezos took a whole group out….with his focus obviously only on mackenzie
    • token extrovert. natural leader.
    • shaw and bezos used to brainstorm on business ideas.
    • juno = precursor to email. foursight of etfc /etc
    • had the vision for the everything store but focused on a narrow category. books.
    • bezos spoke to shaw. walked around central park for several hours. shaw told bezos that he understood the entrepreneurial impulse. bezos was reading “remains of the day” at the time. and he developed the regret minimization framework. “when you are in the thick of things, you can get confused by the small stuff.” think about what you’d regret when you’re 80. at the time, hypothesizing being 80, leaving a wall street bonus didn’t fee like it’d matter at the end of the day. he knew though. that he’d sincerely regret not taking part in this thing called the internet
    • jeff was 31. mackenzie was 24 when they moved across the country. watched the sun rise at the grand canyon
    • stubborn to do anything conventionally
    • critical meeting with costco
    • ravi suria lehman
    • dad; cuban immigrant. libertarianism
    • grandpa: visceral distaste for inefficiency
    • fiercely competitive
    • strong motherly influence. friend group
    • step by step ferociously
    • no powerpoint. easy to hide. focus on narratives
    • primitives. focusing on building blocks
    • to a vp: “why are you wasting my life”
    • Gazelle project. Cheetah gazelle. Targeting vulnerable /dependent publishers for favorable financial terms

    Duke. Thinking in bets.

    • What makes a decision great is not a great outcome. A great decision is the result of a good process and that process must include an attempt to accurately represent our own state of knowledge. That state of knowledge in turn is some variation of I’m not sure.
    • when it comes to self serving bias we act as if our good outcomes are perfectly correlated to good skill and our bad outcomes are perfectly correlated to bad luck