Podcast
David Senra
Hosted by David Senra · EN
60episodes
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Jiro Dreams of Sushi
Feb 24, 202000:09:52Tap to summarizeI would see ideas in my dreams. My mind was bursting with ideas. In dreams, I would have visions of sushi. Once you decide on an occupation you must immerse yourself in your work. You have to fall in love with your work. You must dedicate your life to mastering your skill. That is the key to success and to being regarded honorably. Restaurant critic: I have eaten at every sushi place in Tokyo. Jiro’s was by far the best. What eating at Jiro’s is like: It is comfortable for people who like to have sushi served at a fast pace. But for people who want to drink and eat slowly, it won’t be a comfortable eating experience. All of the sushi is simple. It is completely minimal. Jiro’s in a nutshell: Ultimate simplicity leads to purity. Reservations are mandatory. At least a month in advance. The price starts at 30,000 yen [roughly $300] No drinks. No appetizers. We only serve sushi. For fast eaters, a meal might only last 15 minutes. In that sense, it is the most expensive restaurant in the world. People are convinced it is worth the price. Jiro repeats the same routine every day. He wants to get back to work as soon as possible. It is unthinkable for normal people. If it doesn’t taste good you can not serve it. That is why I always taste the food before serving it. I have never seen a chef who is so hard on himself. He sets the standard for self-discipline. He is always looking ahead. He is never satisfied with his work. He is always trying to find ways to make his sushi better. He is a better leader than a collaborator.He just works relentlessly every day. That’s how shokunin [Japanese word for artisan or craftsman] are. The way of the shokunin is to repeat the same thing every day. They just want to work. They aren’t trying to be special. Every vendor Jiro uses must specialize. The tuna vendor works exclusively with tuna. The shrimp vendor only works with shrimp. Each vendor is a specialist in their field. We are experts in sushi but each vendor is more knowledgable in their specialty. We have built a relationship of trust with them.Critic: I have never had a disappointing experience there. That is nothing short of a miracle. His son who also runs a sushi restaurant: My father’s skill is incomparable. He has been making sushi since before I was born. So there’s nothing I can do to top him. [This part reminded me of this quote from Steve Jobs: I'm convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance. Steve is saying don’t quit. ] His son again: When I left to open my own restaurant Jiro said there is no coming back. You have no home to come back to. Failure was not an option. Jiro: When you open your own restaurant you need to be tough. I told him to leave and open this restaurant because I knew he could do it. But I told him there was no turning back. You must make your own way. When I say things like this people often disagree. But when I left home at the age of 9 that is what I was told. You have no home to come back to. That is why you must work hard. I was on my own. I didn’t want to sleep under a bridge, so I worked to survive. That has never let me. I worked even if the boss kicked and slapped me. Nowadays parents tell their children You can return if it doesn’t work out. When parents say stupid things like that the children turn out to be failures. My father was making good money taking people on boat rides. But his business failed and his life fell apart. All he did was drink. I lived with him until I was 7. I was on my own after that. I never heard from him again. Jiro started out as an apprentice. Was paid almost nothing. When he got married he only had 10 yen [less than $1]. His sons would save up for months just to buy one can of Coca-Cola. Jiro worked so much when the kids were little that one time he was oversleeping on a Sunday and his sons yelled that there was a stranger in the house. He left for work before they woke up and returned after they went to bed. “I wasn’t much of a father.” Jiro: We came back to work after World War II. The masters said that the history of sushi is so long that nothing new could be invented. They may have mastered their craft but there is always room for improvement. I created sushi dishes that never existed back then. I would make sushi in my dreams. I would jump out of bed with ideas. Shokunin try to get the highest quality fish and then apply their technique to it. We don’t care about money. All I want to do is make better sushi. I don’t think I have achieved perfection. I love making sushi. I am 85. I don’t feel like retiring. These days people want an easy job, lots of free time, lots of money. But they aren’t thinking of building their skills. When you work at a place like Jiro’s you are committing to a trade for life. Most people can’t keep up with the hard work and quit.Without good taste, you can’t make good food. When I am making the sushi I feel victorious. Jiro was a troublemaker when he was young: Always doing what you are told doesn’t mean you will succeed in life. I have been able to carry on with the same job for 75 years. It is hard to slow down. Jiro’s son: Always strive to elevate your craft. That is what Jiro taught me. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit davidsenra.substack.com
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Finding the Edge: The Work and Insights of Edward O. Thorp
Feb 19, 202000:08:39Tap to summarizeWhat does finding an edge mean? Finding an edge in the casino meant finding a system that won money from the casino instead of losing money to the casino. In the market finding an edge was finding a way to do better than the index fund return. [10:35]I was able to find an edge with the first quantitative hedge fund. It ran for just under 19 years. It made twice as much as the index did and had 1/20 or 1/50 the risk. In 230 months it only had 3 down months. The index has 96 down months during that time. [11:53] You can apply finding the edge thinking to other things—like your life. For example: not smoking. That gives you on average 7 years more of life and the years you have will be somewhat healthier. Same for exercise. A few more years of life and those years are better. It doesn’t require much. A little discipline. A clear view of what is likely to happen. [13:15]Little things like this—if you pay attention to them—add up. They stack up in your favor. They pay off. [14:32]I liked interdisciplinary activity. That was always part of my academic life. [26:18]I wrote a book about Blackjack that generated a good amount of royalties. It was the first time in my life I had money. It was zero balances at the end of the month before that. I decided I needed to learn how to invest. I spent two summers studying anything I could about finance. I am a teach yourself kind of person because I had to be when I was growing up. My parents were always working. I was on my own much of the time. [26:38]Best advice Ed has: I think one of the most important things is to learn to think for yourself on anything important. Do your own work. Think through things rather than following what “experts” say. You will make better decisions over the long run. [32:01] Jim Simons —who built arguably the most successful hedge fund ever—spent about 20 years in the wilderness trying to figure out how to do all this. With all types of false starts, mistakes, upsets, and emotion. [45:38]Full video here: Finding the Edge: The Work and Insights of Edward O. ThorpLearn from founders who came before you. Every week I read a biography of a founder and tell you what I learned on Founders podcast. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit davidsenra.substack.com
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Keith Rabois: Key lessons from Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, and Jack Dorsey
Feb 10, 202000:05:10Tap to summarizePayPal went off the rails fairly often. We had three different CEOs in six months. We were burning $10 million a month with less than six weeks of cash left. [2:09]We had a lot of enemies back then. Visa and Mastercard hated us. eBay hated us. Various states hated us. The state of Louisiana tried to shut us down right before our IPO. [2:41]Stripe has an adage that every problem is a leadership problem. The right people doing the right things tends to produce solutions —with enough time horizon—as you wait your set of options gets incredibly reduced. The earlier you identify you have potential issues the number of options are substantially greater. [5:30]Lessons Keith learned from Peter Thiel: Focus on undiscovered talent. You must hire people who are undiscovered talents. You can not recruit people that are already proven because there are always larger incumbents that can outbid you for proven talent. [6:30]Peter can be a pretty draconian manager. He can be very rational and very unemotional. He is extremely capable of assessing people around him, identifying their strengths and weaknesses and providing feedback. [8:35] Peter believed his job was to make 3 or 4 decisions a year. That was it. He would enable and delegate to deputies he trusted to make every other decision. Peter was deciding who to promote, who to fire, and then about 3 very difficult decisions a year. [12:10]Jeff Bezos believes you need to manage people by inputs, not outputs. If you judge people by outputs, nobody on your team will take on the more difficult tasks because they are worried about their professional progression and your assessment of them.[9:35] I had a philosophy at Square that all I cared about was adding zeros to the dashboard. I didn’t want projects that would only add 10%. I would tell product and marketing I want zeros. [10:34]Jack Dorsey at Square had a very different philosophy than most startups. He would say our users are not guinea pigs. You could not A/B test. You were not allowed to give a subpar experience to anybody. Everything should be perfect. Treat all of your customers as first-rate customers. [13:40]I don’t believe you map or discover a market. I think you forge a market, or you create a market. You imagine a better future, go create it, and then you sell tickets. The best metaphor for creating a startup is like producing a movie. Someone has an idea or vision for what the movie could be. Then you write a script that details how this will play out. Then you cast the movie. You need the right people in the right roles. Then you need to finance it. Then you need to make a trailer and distribute it —which is basically a value proposition that is distinct and powerful and hopefully people buy the tickets. [17:42]A mistake that companies/entrepreneurs make that is common: They tackle problems that are easier rather than harder. I think you want to go in the reverse order. What are the three most difficult things that can interfere with success? Take the harder one first. Then the second, then the third. A lot of founders like to defer that problem. I think you should take it on right away. [20:13]The best book [High Output Management by Andy Grove] on how to run a startup was written in 1982. No one has written anything nearly as good since. [22:00]Full podcast here: Starting Greatness: Keith Rabois: Key lessons from Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, and Jack DorseyLearn from founders who came before you. Every week I read a biography of a founder and tell you what I learned on Founders podcast. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit davidsenra.substack.com
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The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success (Google Talks with William Thorndike)
Feb 3, 202000:11:50Tap to summarizeIf one company materially outperforms its peer group that is worthy of study. The 8 companies and CEOs profiled in the book each fit that pattern. [1:35] All 8 were first time CEOs. As a group, if you were trying to describe them you would not use the traditional CEO’s adjectives of charismatic, strategic, and visionary. Instead, you’d use words like pragmatic, flexible, opportunistic, dispassionate, rational, analytical. [4:03] Henry Singleton is an interesting case. He outperformed the S&P 500 by 12 fold during his 30-year career. [6:20] Corporate America— as a group— is a completely ineffective repurchaser of its shares. They have a perfect record of buying high and selling low. [Henry Singleton was the exact opposite of this] [9:30]There is this distinction that Warren Buffett has between something that is simple to understand versus easy to actually do. In late 2008-2009 it was a scary period. Corporate America generally focused on husbanding resources given the uncertainty. Buffett’s actions were entirely different than that pattern. He was aggressively deploying capital. That is easy to understand but requires a certain temperament to be able to actually implement it in really difficult times. [11:55]These CEOs did not spend a lot of time on investor relations. They didn’t view that as a good use of their time. [20:45] [The CEOs in the book] were iconoclastic. They possessed a strain of independence. They were comfortable doing things different than the peer group. They were rooted in deep analytically based convictions. They did their own analytical work. They did not rely on internal finance teams or external consultants. They were focused on optimizing value per-share. [26:52]If I was asked to name an outsider CEO among the technology CEOs of the last 25 years Jeff Bezos would be my choice. I believe he is optimizing for per-share value 5 to 10 years out. He can afford that time frame because he owns a large percentage of the company himself. [29:45]It is very interesting to hear how a CEO talks about their business and how they write about it in their annual report. [I agree. I have read every single shareholder letter written by Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett.] [34:05][Outsider CEOs would optimize for the single metric they thought was most important] Example: We are running our business to optimize for one thing: recurring free cash flow per share. They moved to a single metric that was differentiated from what others in the industry were doing. [35:56]Charlie Munger once referred to CBS as prosperity blinded indifference to cost. [You want to avoid this.] [39:10]Full video here: William Thorndike: "The Outsiders" | Talks at GoogleLearn from founders who came before you. Every week I read a biography of a founder and tell you what I learned on Founders podcast. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit davidsenra.substack.com
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Yvon Chouinard on Belonging to Nature
Jan 21, 202000:07:18Tap to summarizeI had just started my business. I was making climbing gear. Blacksmithing. I was resentful of being drafted [into the military]. I tried everything to get out of the draft. I heard Japanese got out of their draft by drinking a whole lot of soy sauce. So I drank a whole bunch of soy sauce. I puked it all up. They sent me to Korea. [9:16] How he started blacksmithing: I got myself a forge, an anvil, and a book on blacksmithing. I went down to the junkyard and got some steel. I made my first pitons. They worked great. [16:13]I made them for myself. We were on the cutting edge of big wall climbing in those days. For the climbs we were doing you had to have these things. I could make two an hour and sell them for $3 a piece. [17:05]I don’t like anybody telling me what to do, and I don’t like to tell anybody else what to do. [19:12]I lead a very simple life. I don’t have a phone. [27:33]My old man was a tradesman. He could build a whole house himself. [28:04] I didn’t let school get in the way of my education. [58:00]I’m not for this globalism business. I think we should hunker down and work locally. I have traveled all over the world and cultures are being lost everywhere. [58:40]Nature loves diversity. Humans love control and centralization. [1:00:25]Compromise never solves a problem. It leaves both sides feeling cheated. [1:01:13] I learned early on to invent your own games. That way you can always be a winner. [Avoid games] that produce one winner and a bunch of losers. [1:25:37]Life is a lot easier if you break the rules than if you try to conform to them. It is a lot more fun. That is the way I’ve always run my company. I never wanted to be a businessman. So I decided to do it on my own terms. I didn’t have to act like one of these greaseball businessmen that I did not respect. That led to a method of doing business that is different than anybody else. It works unbelievably well. [1:27:16] One of my employees suggested that on Black Friday let’s give all of our revenue away. I said, “Ok, let’s do it.” The year before on Black Friday we did $2.5 million. We advertised it on social media. The word got out. We did over $10 million. 60% of the sales came from people who never bought from us before. In business, you can’t believe how difficult it is to get a new customer. You could spend $5 million for a Super Bowl ad and you wouldn’t get the new customers we got from this. We thought the sales would go down after Black Friday. The sales kept climbing and climbing and have been climbing ever since. [1:28:45] The solution to depression is action. [1:41:10]Full podcast here: The MeatEater Podcast Ep. 188: Yvon Chouinard on Belonging to NatureLearn from founders who came before you. Every week I read a biography of a founder and tell you what I learned on Founders podcast. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit davidsenra.substack.com
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Ben Chestnut Co-founder and CEO, Mailchimp on Masters of Scale
Jan 14, 202000:05:48Tap to summarizeBen built a company around a strong simple service and a quirky brand that sees annual revenue of $600 million dollars – and he never raised a dollar of outside funding. [8:33]My mother ran a hair salon in our kitchen, but the word "entrepreneur" wasn't being used. This was just a way of life. This was called "making money", "paying the bills”. The house was always full of customers. [8:47] His first business was making flipbook animations with sticky notes: My marketplace was the school bus, and I would go on and I would show some kids and they just had to have it, and I would charge a dollar for each one. Highly unscalable business. [10:05]I got a job as a banner ad designer actually, which was even more invigorating than web design, because it was so fast-paced and you got results fast. [11:05] Ben decides to start a design company: My business partner and I went out, and we got clients by knocking on doors. We got paying projects. We got a $13,000 project and a $32,000 project before even getting a business license. . .We wanted to bootstrap it. We wanted to keep it simple and pragmatic. [12:01] Where the idea for Mailchimp came from: We noticed every customer—big or small— asked for the same thing: email marketing, every one of them. [19:15] For five years Mailchimp is just the side project running on its own. And the thing is the income we were getting from Mailchimp, we weren't watching it. [21:00] My partner made an Excel spreadsheet for Mailchimp's revenue, and it was climbing up and to the right – and the consulting business was just flat and maybe even declining. He said, "That's it, have faith in the math. This is what we should focus on." [21:48] Most investors pitched this idea like, "What you've done here is great, it's wonderful, it's cute. Let's invest and then we'll help you move to enterprise because that's where the real money is." I couldn't stand that. I thought about building something that would empower small businesses. [25:25]We kind of fantasized about being able to eat at Fuddruckers, because they had these $8 hamburgers. We thought, “If Mailchimp could just make enough money every month to pay our lunch every day.” It sounds ridiculous now, but that was really all the expectation we had. [27:22]Ben put a toll-free number on the Mailchimp website and asked customers to call in with their most-requested features: They started to call us and they gave us all the features that we lacked. [33:40] Ben stumbled on a way of getting the word out to their most passionate users: Every time we launched a feature and I blogged about it and tweeted about it, we got retweets and comments and more sales. [34:32] Ben: What are we going to do with marketing? Neil: Well, what's working?Ben: Well, we code and then we blog and then we tweet.Neil: Well do that, do it again.Ben: Everybody's sick of it by now.Neil: No, they're not. Keep going until it stops working.And that was the lesson he taught. Don't be afraid to beat a dead horse if it's working. Keep going and hire people to keep it going.Any kind of channel that's new, you need to be there on the ground floor before everyone else crowds it up. [35:45] Ben likes to keep analytics simple: How much money did we make this month? Is it growing? At what rate? That's all I really care about. I keep it pretty simple. [40:37] Full podcast here: Ben Chestnut Co-founder and CEO, Mailchimp on Masters of ScaleLearn from founders who came before you. Every week I read a biography of a founder and tell you what I learned on Founders podcast. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit davidsenra.substack.com
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Marc Andreessen: Why You Should Be Optimistic About the Future
Jan 7, 202000:05:37Tap to summarizeWe are very close to every adult on the planet being on the Internet. It took 25 years to get there. [2:35] [Now that everyone is connected to the Internet] I think things will get very different. I think things will be much more positive. [3:42] The Internet’s impact on culture is just beginning. A world in which culture is based on the Internet is just at the very start. That is actually happening now. [4:08] An entrepreneur comes in to pitch an idea and you feel that you should draw a judgment if it is going to work or not. That is something I am leary of doing anymore. The reason for that is every successful technology that I am aware of has an incredible 25 or 50-year backstory to them. You have to go back and excavate because you haven’t heard a lot of the backstory because the previous efforts failed. But if you go back and look there is often a multigenerational run-up. [4:40]Some of my favorite examples: RadioShack had a smartphone in 1982. Videoconferencing goes back to the mid-1960s. The telegraph was invented in the 1870s and sat on the shelf for 100 years before the Japanese turned it into an industry. Paris had an optical telegraph network under the city in the 1840s. [5:22][After AI a lot of products just won’t be relevant anymore] There are lots of business apps where you type data into a form and then you run reports against the data. That has been the model of business apps for 50 years. What if that isn’t needed anymore? What if AI has access to all your business records and it just gives you the answer to whatever the question is. You don’t need to go through all the other steps. [9:10]Google has the consumer version of this. Search has been blue links for 25 years now. Google thinks it should just be the answer. That is what they are trying to do with their voice UIs. That concept might generalize out and then everything gets built out. [9:50]Voice may be the foundation for AR. You can keep Airpods in your ear all day. You can talk to it all day. Siri, Google Now, and Cortana are getting really good and really fast. It may be that we have this constant, ongoing dialogue with a machine just talking into our ear. [11:50] Software today is massively inefficient. The old adage in tech in the 90s when Andy Grove was running Intel and Bill Gates was running software was: Andy giveth in the form of Moore’s law and Bill taketh away in the form of software bloat. [17:48] [We see a lot of Uber for X / the following of trends] That is not how the great ideas arrive. They don’t look like that. They look like very specific theories. Not general theories. They tend to be very specific to the details of the market involved. [25:13]One of the historical precedents for venture capital was how whaling expeditions were funded in the 1600s. You will have a ship that will try to bring back a whale. There was a high failure rate. Only 2/3rds of the ships would come back. They were financed by angel syndicates. Venture capital basically. The term carry —how we get paid—was the percentage of the whale that the ship carried. It was literally a physical carry. [27:44] Any important company or product takes a decade or more to build. Everything important takes a long time. Long term orientation is absolutely necessary. Long term thinking is really easy if you know the thing is going to work. [30:44] The best-run companies tend to run multiple experiments against their goals. [33:00] There is a novel Kill Decision by Daniel Suarez that extrapolates [the advancement] of drones forward. It will keep you up at night. [40:15] Full video here: Why You Should Be Optimistic About the FutureLearn from founders who came before you. Every week I read a biography of a founder and tell you what I learned on Founders podcast. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit davidsenra.substack.com
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Sebastian Thrun: Flying Cars, Autonomous Vehicles, and Education | Artificial Intelligence Podcast
Dec 30, 201900:05:43Tap to summarizeI’ve always wanted to make a robot smart. I thought it would be super cool to build an artificial human...It is fascinating to study intelligence from a constructive perspective when you build something. [5:53]Computers are so insanely dumb that you have to give them rule for every contingency. Very unlike the way people learn [from data and experiences]. Computers are being instructed, and because it is so hard to get the instruction set right we pay software engineers $200,000 a year. [6:55]The most recent innovation—which has been in the making for 30 or 40 years—is the idea that computers can find their own rules. They can learn from falling down and getting up like children can. That revolution has led to a capability that is completely unmatched. [7:12]How do you choose what problems to try and solve? I have two desires in life. [1] To make the lives of others better. [2] And I want to learn. I don’t want to be in a job I am good at because if I am in a job I am good at the chance for me to learn something interesting is minimized. So I want to be in a job I am bad at. [9:44]I have been focused on what is the maximum impact on society. Transportation is something that has transformed the 20th century more than any other invention. Yet we still have a sub-optimal transportation solution where we kill 1.2 million people every year in cars. We are extremely inefficient resource-wise. Just go to any city and look at the number of parked cars. We spend endless hours in traffic jams. A self-driving car or a flying car could completely change this. [10:34] Maintain a continuous focus on improving the weakest part of the system. As long as you focus on improving the weakest part of the system you eventually build a really great system. [17:11] As a professor, you empower other people. Your job is to make your students look great. That is all you do. [19:07] The biggest skill I think that people should acquire is to put themselves into the position of the other person. To listen to what the other person has to say. They’d be shocked how similar the other person is to themselves. They would be shocked by how their owns actions don’t reflect their intentions. [21:08]Read How to Win Friends & Influence People and apply it every day. [22:10]What DARPA did was genius. They made a completely new funding model. They said let’s not fund effort [reserch papers] let’s fund outcomes. [24:58]This new funding model drew in new people. These people are mostly crazy people. They had a car and a computer and wanted to make a million bucks [the prize money]. It was so awesome. [25:35]On the Udacity self-driving car course: We should give everyone the skill to build a self-driving car. If we do this we would have 1,000 self-driving car startups. If 10% succeed that would mean there would be more self-driving cars and everyone would be safer. [43:36] If you added up all the engineers that were acquihired in the self-driving space and do the math —as a lower bound I’d estimate that the value of each engineer was $10 million. Think about this. You get yourself a skill, you team up and build a company and your worth is now $10 million. That is cool. What other thing could you do in life to be worth $10 million within a year? [44:45]Education should be a basic human right. It can not be locked up behind ivy tower walls. It can’t be only for rich people. It has to be opened up to everybody. [56:50] Full Video Here: Sebastian Thrun: Flying Cars, Autonomous Vehicles, and Education | Artificial Intelligence PodcastLearn from founders who came before you. Every week I read a biography of a founder and tell you what I learned on Founders podcast. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit davidsenra.substack.com
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Conversation with Jeff Bezos Founder, Amazon, & Blue Origin
Dec 18, 201900:06:22Tap to summarizeMy grandfather was a fascinating man with amazing judgment. I had a special relationship with him because I spent all of my summers —from age 4 to 16—with him on his ranch. He would take me every summer because my mom had me when she was only 17 years old. She needed a break from me. My grandparents were an extra set of parents for me. [3:18]One of the primary criticisms of the Strategic Defense Initiative at the time was that it was too technically ambitious. That is couldn’t be done. My grandfather would have just said, “Well then we better get started.” [6:48]There are a lot of things at Amazon and Blue Origin that are grafted from my Grandfather and his points of view. [7:10] The way you earn trust, the way you develop a reputation, is you do hard things well— over and over and over. [8:45]My view is if Big Tech is going to turn their backs on the Department of Defense, this country is in trouble. That can’t happen. [12:46] I know it is complicated but do you want a strong national defense or don’t you? I think you do. So we have to support that. [13:33] How do you recruit great talent? At Amazon, we haven’t created a country club culture where you get free massages and all the perks of the moment. I have always had a bit of skepticism about those kinds of perks because I always worried people would stay at your company for the wrong reasons. You want people to stay at your company for the mission. You don’t want mercenaries at your company, you want missionaries. Missionaries care about the mission. [15:10] You can drive great people away [from your organization] by making the speed of decision making really slow. Why would a great person stay in an organization where they can’t get things done? [16:25] There are two types of decisions: 1) One-way doors. Decisions that are irreversible and highly consequential. They need to be made slowly and carefully. Most decisions are not like that. 2) Two-way doors. You can make the decision and if it turns out it was the wrong decision you back up. You can do it again. Most decisions are two-way doors [17:54] In large organizations, all decisions end up using the heavyweight process that is really intended to be used only for irreversible, highly consequential decisions. [They are confusing one-way and two-way doors] And that is a disaster. [18:50] If it is a one-way door let’s analyze it in five different ways. Let’s be careful because that is where slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. You do not want to make one-way door decisions quickly. [19:29]Controversial decisions must be escalated quickly. You can’t let two junior people argue for a year and exhaust themselves. You have to teach your junior people to escalate and escalate fast. [20:57] I disagree and commit all the time. I will debate something for an hour, a day, a week. Then I will say, “You know what, I really disagree with this but you have more ground truth than I do. We are going to do it your way. I promise I will never tell you I told you so.” This works great. It is very calming. [21:37] The speed of movement is so important. [23:02] The most important thing for doing well against competition is being both robust and nimble. Scale is an advantage because it gives you robustness. You can take a punch. But it is also good to dodge a punch—that is nimbleness. As you get bigger your robustness gets better but your nimbleness gets worse. [24:43] Decision making speed is the most important piece of nimbleness. [25:30]Full talk here: Conversation with Jeff Bezos Founder, Amazon, & Blue Origin.Learn from founders who came before you. Every week I read a biography of a founder and tell you what I learned on Founders podcast. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit davidsenra.substack.com
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Bill Gates on Masters of Scale: How To Accelerate History
Dec 12, 201900:04:36Tap to summarizeWe’re thinking, “Oh my God, the revolution could happen without us.” And so that’s when Paul pleads that I should drop out [of Harvard] and we should get out there and become the software suppliers to this kit first personal computer. . .That’s where Microsoft gets started. We’re watching the chip revolution and it finally delivers a microprocessor that is beyond a mini-computer. [4:51] When you do get there three months earlier and get more people and get the better customers, the mythology is like, “Oh my God, nobody ever thought of that. Nobody ever did anything like that.” Well, it’s b******t. Actually, probably, some guy did it years before you did, but he just didn’t get all these pieces right. [6:10] Paul was totally critical to there being a Microsoft at all. Paul read about hardware. I didn’t like hardware. He drew me into that. He got me to read about that...Even when I go to Harvard, he takes a job back in Boston, he’d tell me all the time, “We’ve got to get going.” [10:30] Paul wanted us to actually build a personal computer. I said, “No, no. We’re just going to do software.” [11:05] [The insight that allowed Microsoft to scale]: If our BASIC was on every machine – a library of BASIC programs – various applications, games to business applications, would be written in our BASIC, which had unique and proprietary aspects to it. Then anybody doing a new computer would want Microsoft BASIC. [14:45] When IBM first comes to us, they viewed this as an experiment. So we jumped on that opportunity. We saw it as a chance to get from 8-bit computers to 16-bit computers. We put so much energy into this thing. Then they introduced the PC. It becomes kind of the model [19:25] And they were really good at quality, particularly IBM Japan was so picky about quality. At first, we were like, “Who are these guys? They’re crazy.” But then we realized, “Actually, they’re not that crazy. They’re just disciplined and oh God, we’re going to have to learn how to do that.” So having IBM Japan as a customer was incredibly helpful for us. [21:07] If you can pick these toughest customers and meet their needs, then you can sit back and wait. You’re going to be fine. [21:53] [Why Bill needed a partner like Steve Ballmer] Because I’m innovation–engineering-oriented, I needed a partner who thought about comm structure, organizational structure, and could go out and have lunch with 50 people. Just because of time allocation and lack of skill or whatever – I’m going to be a little more daft about that stuff. [23:48]It was the virtuous cycle: The cheaper the PC was, the more volume there was for PCs, the more software for our platform there was, the more people would want to buy those PCs. [25:30] We decided you had to do first-party applications [and not just operating systems]. So that business model really gets its full proof in the late ’90s as Windows 95 ships and we do Office software around it. [29:00]He [a competitor] said, “Bill is wrong. But he works so hard, he probably will succeed even though he’s wrong in this case.” And I viewed that as quite a compliment, that my hardcore-ness could bend even the outcome of what was the right approach. [30:00] [The biggest mistakes of Microsoft] The fact that Google got so far ahead in search, we didn’t do the right things to catch up. The fact that we didn’t get the phone or tablet stuff right. Economically, the phone one is the most egregious thing in the whole history of the company. The tablet one actually bothers me the most for a lot of reasons in terms of mistakes I shouldn’t have made. [37:23] Full podcast here: Bill Gates on Masters of ScaleLearn from founders who came before you. Every week I read a biography of a founder and tell you what I learned on Founders podcast.If you are looking for something to read check out this list of every book featured on Founders podcast. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit davidsenra.substack.com
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