Podcast
David Senra
Hosted by David Senra · EN
60episodes
Episodes
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Interview with Tim O’Reilly, Founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media
Sep 16, 201900:06:56Tap to summarizeWhat’s one thing that you wish you would have learned earlier as a leader? Value your financial people more than you do. If you’re a technology person, you tend to think that technology is all that matters. For many years, I was the most sophisticated financial person in my company. But until I actually had a CFO who was better at it than I was, I was just missing a huge opportunity. She came in and she renegotiated our contracts. She shifted many parts of the business and made it way more efficient. . . In the 90’s, we were always short of cash. And in the 2000’s, once we got this real financial discipline, we started putting money in the bank. We ended up putting tens of millions of dollars in the bank. And it was all about understanding what a powerful lever cash flow is. It was sort of like lacking financial discipline. We still succeeded but we could have succeeded so much more if we had been running tight from the get go. We were always profitable. We were a company that had started with no investment other than $500 of used furniture that I used to start the company. Our average revenue per book in our publishing business was about $250,000 per title. After the dot-com bust, it was about $60,000. If you think about the portfolio of venture capital as a lab, they’re scientists in white coats, and they want their various lab cultures to grow fast. They want to figure out which ones are going to be winners. And that’s not necessarily the incentive for the entrepreneur. Mark Leslie [Founder of Veritas] talked about the mistake that a lot of companies make on sales which is they build a giant sales force too soon. He said, “Look, when you’re trying to figure out whether you have the right product or not, you need to bring a very different kind of sales person. And you only need two or three of them because they’re doing discovery and you don’t want to scale it until you know that it works.” I think way more businesses would benefit enormously if they understood that you’re not building a financial instrument, i.e. something to exit. You’re really trying to build a lasting business because then you have the opportunity to exit if you’re really successful. But we’ve increasingly gone into a world where it’s this self-fulfilling prophecy where you even go talk to an entrepreneur and you’ll say, “How are you doing?” And they’ll say, “Oh, we just raised our money.” And I go, “Well, that’s not about your business. That’s about your fundraising.” I want to hear them say, “We just have these amazing new customers.” Or, “Our users love us.” Why is the first thing out of your mouth is how much money you raised? I had this really wakeup call with the dot-com bust where we shrank by 30%. We were about a $70 million company in 2000 [in revenue]. And then suddenly we were a $50 million company and we had to lay off a quarter of our staff. It was pretty harrowing. It was one of the worst experiences of my life. A business model is the way that all the parts of your business work together to create customer value and business advantage. An example: Southwest Airlines and United. They’re both airlines. They have completely different business models. United had this hub and spoke model. Southwest is all point to point. United does baggage handling, Southwest doesn’t. They won’t forward your baggage from one flight to another. They’ve [Southwest] done all these things that make them able to be the low-cost airline. It’s just a really great way of forcing you to think about what makes you special, what is the source of your value. You thought the dot-com bust was the end, it was actually the clearing out of the people who had the wrong business model. Leadership is showing what’s possible. Create more value than you capture because when you make an opportunity for others you can grow with the market. Antoine de Saint-Exupery quote: If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.Full podcast here. 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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Paul Graham on Startups, Innovation, & Creativity
Sep 13, 201900:05:51Tap to summarizeWe wouldn’t describe Y Combinator as a venture capital firm. What we do is seed funding. There is not really any name for us yet [this podcast is from 2009!], because what we do is new. I have encouraged there to be no name for what we do. Whenever somebody starts to copy us the only way to describe what they are doing would be to mention us. They’d have to say it is a Y Combinator like thing. If our success rate is as high as a good VC fund I would worry. That means we are being too conservative. There ought to be a lot of failures or we are being too careful.I don't even know if Y Combinator is going to work. It seems promising so far, but I don’t know for sure. We certainly aren’t making lots of money yet.3 reasons it is cheaper to start a startups: [1] Moore’s law has made computing effectively free. [2] The Internet has made promotion free. [3] Programming languages have gotten more abstract. That means you don’t have to do as much work to get a given amount of program done. You can’t tell which ideas are going to work [beforehand]. We have funded 144 startups. I have seen so much stuff happen. I have been surprised so many times by people who seem promising and produce nothing. And other people who seem lame and produce amazing stuff. By definition you can not predict the next big thing. If it is a really good idea it will seem kind of stupid. We advise startups to release something as soon as you possibly can. The point of releasing is to start learning from your users. You learn from your users what product you should have been building. On Hackers and Painters: I found that the interesting parts of programming you can’t make scientific. [Startups are the same.] What makes a programmer good at programming is more like what makes a painter good at painting. It is something a little less organized. It is taste. A sense of design. A certain knack. I don’t use Facebook or Twitter. I already have enough distractions. I look at these things and they just seem like a time sink. I feel like most people like to waste a lot of their time. The United States has such a vibrant startup culture because there are so many immigrants. Immigrants start startups. Disproportionally so. There was some statistic that said more than half of the IPO’s were founded by immigrants. The single biggest problem that kills startups that we fund is VISA problems. Paul’s advice to high school students. [Applies to adults too.] You have to be in charge of what you are going to do. You have to decide what you are really going to do. What is going to be your real life? Full podcast here. 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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Masters In Business: Josh Wolfe Discusses Innovative Investments
Sep 11, 201900:13:36Tap to summarizeIf you don’t grow up with money you want it. I think the best entrepreneurs— if you can find the people with a chip on their shoulder — that came from some sort of messed up background — it is almost predictive that they will be very ambitious. Growing up in Coney Island made me super skeptical, and cynical of human nature. I’m fond of the Shakespeare quote: There are daggers in men’s smiles. Everything in my life I would describe as randomness and optionality. Ex post facto I can explain everything. A priori you never know. If you are going to be skeptical of other people then you have to be a little skeptical of yourself. For a huge number of the companies that we have invested in the ideas behind them, the technologies, the design — were modeled on things that happened 20, 30, 40 years ago in science fiction. He [Lux cofounder] is the optimist. I am the pessimist. It is just my disposition. I expect the worst. He expects the best. If you had an entire firm that was like me, we would be a bunch of cynical short sellers just trying to spot the frauds. If you had a firm entirely like him, we would be lemming growth investors paying any price, and going off the cliff. If two people think the same one of them is unnecessary. We want really high scientific and technical complexity. Not because we want to tackle things that are really hard. It’s because we don’t want competition.The problem with funding [and doing] easy things is you get hundreds of competitors. I’m psychotic about competitive advantage.The single best trait of an entrepreneur is someone who can tell a story. Somebody who has that narrative power. E.O. Wilson had the biggest impact on me intellectually. His book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge was modern renaissance thinking. Wilson turned me on to Charlie Munger. [I’ve learned from] Charlie’s view of renaissance thinking and worldly mental models, and Wilson’s view of the unity of hard sciences and soft sciences. Finding patterns helps you identify some universal truths. If you can continue to find those first principle, universal truths, I think that sets you on a good path to making good decisions. I have given so many people copies of Poor Charlie Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charlie Munger. [Founders #78 and #79 are about Charlie Munger] Somebody asked Charlie Munger, “What is the single thing you would attribute your success to?’ He said, “Being rational.” Even being aware of every cognitive bias humans have won’t stop you from falling victim to them. You can look at an illusion, know it is an illusion, yet it still works on you. There is a barbell to capital allocation today. There is money going to very small funds. I call them minnows. At the other extreme is the Megas. The people that are raising billions of dollars. [It is the same for companies. One of my favorite Jeff Bezos quotes: On the Internet, companies are scale businesses, characterized by high fixed costs and relatively low variable costs. You can be two sizes: You can be big, or you can be small. It's very hard to be medium. A lot of medium-sized companies had the financing rug pulled out from under them before they could get big.] We put a total of $3 million into this company that cleaned up nuclear waste. In the first year they did about $1 million in revenue. Then there was a negative black swan: The Fukushima Disaster. Revenue then went to $40 million, 80 million, 160 million. We sold the company for $400 million. I think military technology is one of the most exciting and important areas in the next five years. In part because the vast number of big tech companies —Google on down —are eschewing working with the military. It is creating a giant, gaping hole where there is a tremendous opportunity for some of the smartest technologists to work on these problems in defense. I like people that have this gritty, rebel side to them. Reading great books is like having conversations with the best minds of history. So many of my mentors I have never met. They are dead. They are alive in pulp [books] and ideas. I have read anything I could from Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett. It gives you a grounding sense of a true business, and markets, and human psychology. If you haven’t studied those greats you have a massive deficit. Book recommendations: How The Mind Works, I loved The Operator: David Geffen Builds, Buys, and Sells the New Hollywood. I like reading biographies. Why Zebra’s Don’t Get Ulcers, Elephant In The Brain, The Magus: A Novel, the writing of Rachel Cusk, The Overstory, The Diamond Age. Stay close to the money. Find where the capital is flowing and stay close to it. That was one of the best early advice I got from somebody. What do you know today that you wish you knew 20 years ago? I wish I would have known how rigged the game is. Every system at every point is rigged. There is always a game being played. There is a secret that the people who are making the most money keep. They won’t acknowledge publicly until after the fact. Appreciate that and look for it. Full podcast here. 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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Charlie Munger's advice on investing and life choices that make a person wealthy
Sep 9, 201900:10:23Tap to summarizeWhat I love [about the shareholder meeting] is both the employees and shareholders of Berkshire are extremely enthusiastic. It is not just that they have made a lot of money —they feel like they are on the right side. . .It is like a cult. A good cult. When people use the word common sense what they mean is uncommon sense. The standard human condition is ignorance and stupidity. Q: Why is it that people can’t think clearly about investing or other decisions in their life?A: They don’t think very well about sex or gambling either. The standard human condition is a lot of miscognition. You can improve your life by eliminating your miscognitions. The economy sometimes booms and sometimes it doesn’t. You have to live through both episodes. Our attitude is we just keep swimming. Q: Some people now say federal debt is not a problem at all? A: If you believe that then you believe in the tooth fairy. Cause then we don’t have to have any taxes. We can just print money and live happily every after. There comes a point when printing money is counterproductive.If you live long enough a lot of good things happen and a lot of bad things happen. Q: Are Apple and Amazon technology companies or brand companies?A: Both I can’t think of a single example in my own life where keeping it simple has worked against us. I would say that the chief advantage Berkshire has had in accumulating a good record is that we have avoided pompous, bureaucratic systems. We give power to very talented people and let them make very quick decisions. In big bureaucracies they think the work is done when you get the work out of your inbox and into someone else’s. That is not getting it done. If everybody is in a big committee meeting all the time you are worn out at the end for the day and you haven’t done anything.If we find things that are intelligent to do we do it. If we can’t find anything we let the cash build up. What the hell is wrong with that? I’m ashamed of missing Google. We could have seen it if we looked at our own companies. Their [Google’s] advertising was working way better than other advertising. We weren’t paying enough attention.I’m a huge admirer of Jeff Bezos. I think he has been a leader all by himself [like Lee Kuan Yew]. He is a perfectly amazing human leader. Q: What do you think of those tech unicorns going public and not having any profitability?A: There are a whole lot of things I don’t think about. And one of them is companies that are losing billions of dollars a year and going public. It is not my scene. I think the shareholder meetings work best because they are spontaneous. If we were scripting things I don’t think people would like it.I think my way of thinking will work for anyone. I’m trying to be very rational and disciplined. I’m always being visited by young men who say things like I’m practicing law and I don’t like it. I’d rather be a billionaire, how do I do it? I tell them a story about Mozart. One man came to Mozart and asked him how to write a symphony. Mozart replied, “You are too young to write a symphony.” The man said, “You were writing symphonies when you were 10 years of age, and I am 21.” Mozart said, “Yes, but I didn’t run around asking people how to do it.” Full video here. 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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Marc Andreessen: From the Internet's Past to the Future of Crypto
Sep 5, 201900:08:58Tap to summarizeDecentralization was key to the Internet early on: The motivation for the Internet was to have a network that could survive a nuclear attack. It was born out of the dangers of the Cold War. At the time there were data networks but they all ran through centralized switches People forget that it was actually illegal to use the internet for commercial activity until 1993. The first Internet store was a book store. It was not Amazon. It was a little tiny science fiction bookstore called Future Fantasy Books. Future Fantasy Books did not own a computer. They had a fax machine. You would order the book online and the bookstore would get a fax. The guy in the store would package up the book and ship it. In the first two weeks the bookstore’s business doubled. It turns out there were science fiction readers all over the world that started ordering. E-commerce was not obvious. It was not obvious that it was going to make sense to have these online businesses. It was not obvious that the use cases were going to have consumer demand. It was not obvious that you were going to be able to secure it. It was not obvious that there would ever be a business model behind it. All of that had to be invented. The original sin of the Internet: If you are paying for the information you are getting then you know there is an alignment of interest between the person giving you the information and you. You might thing the logical thing to do is have a buy button in the browser. You would think it was the most obvious thing to do. That didn't happen. Because we were unable to build payments into the browser the Internet [in the West] is predominately based on advertising. Downstream from advertising is everything else that people are anxious and worked up about online: privacy, user data collection, user data targeting, 3rd party ad networks that harvest all this data etc. The misalignment of incentives. Does the news site you are reading have the incentive to actually tell you the truth? Or are they getting their money from the advertiser and so they are just trying to get you hyped up so you click on more stories and they generate more revenue? If we would have had cryptocurrency [in the early 1990s] we would have been able to have a completely parallel payment system [for the Internet] that would not have been reliant on the centralized gatekeepers [Visa, MasterCard, Banks]. Had we done that 80% of what people hate about the Internet today would not have been problems. Cryptocurrency is the chance to revisit the original sin: What if you could align economics with user behavior? This is how the real world works. How do I know something is valuable? Somebody is willing to pay for it. The big what if is what businesses models could have existed this entire time? The Internet generated a lot of economic growth with just the advertising model. What if you had had a real economic model based on money integrated into the Internet from the very beginning? What kinds of services would entrepreneurs come up with that we haven’t even thought of yet? What if we could build a different system? A system were advertising wasn’t the central model. How might that be an improvement? Either an improvement on what we have or just something completely different, better, and potentially much bigger than we have today. This is what we are seeing at our firm: Entrepreneurs thinking in these terms. Full podcast here: a16z Podcast: From the Internet's Past to the Future of CryptoLearn 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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John Carmack on time management, discipline, limits, and resiliance
Sep 2, 201900:03:02Tap to summarizeWhere do you come up with all the extra time to do all these extra things? [Improving the performance of Ferrari’s, learning Judo and Brazilian jiu-jitsu, building a rocket company on the side etc..] I like to tell people you need to get enough sleep. If I don’t get 8 hours of sleep I start falling down. But there is a lot of hours left in the week after getting 8 hours of sleep. What John learned from wrestling when he was younger: The wrestler ethos is embrace the grind. I was always obsessed but if I had more discipline when I was younger I would have been better off. How John started learning Judo and Brazilian jiu-jitsu in his 30s: I went to a Judo gym and trained with a Cuban Olympian. It was a much more serious training environment. I did what I always do on something. I studied. I got the instructionals and the tapes and started working my way through them. I got pretty good at it. Then my wife got me a year of private lessons with Carlos Machado. That certainly took me up several levels. There is value in finding where your limits are: A lot of people don’t understand how a technical, brainy person would appreciate practicing Judo. There is a value to getting people to feel the physicality of it. It is valuable for people to push as hard as they can and still can’t get through. It is valuable to find the extent of what you can and can’t do. To find the limits of what your body can do. I think that is good for everybody to understand at some level. Difficulty makes you stronger: Sometimes you are the hammer and sometimes you are the nail. A lot of people go through their life without ever really internalizing that. Sometimes you get your assed kicked. You can come back stronger after that. Full video here. 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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Steve Jobs' plan to turn around Apple
Aug 28, 201900:06:16Tap to summarizeSteve Jobs gave this talk a few weeks after returning to Apple. * I’ve been back at Apple for 8 to 10 weeks. What we are trying to do is not something highfalutin. We are trying to get back to the basics. We are tying to get back to great products, great marketing, and great distribution. [0:30]* I think Apple has pockets of greatness but has drifted away from doing the basics really well. [0:56] * We started with the product line. We said a lot of this doesn’t make sense. There was way too much stuff. There was not enough focus. We got rid of 70% of the stuff on the product road map. [1:05]* You will see the product line get much simpler. And you will see it get much better. We have been able to focus a lot more on the gems. [1:25]* We have not kept up with innovations in our distribution. . .We will not only catch up where the best of the best are in distribution, but we will be innovating and breaking new ground in distribution. [2:15]* To me, marketing is about values. The world is complicated. It is noisy. We are not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is. So we have to be really clear about what we want them to know about us. [3:30]* The way to do that is not to talk about speeds and feeds. It is not to talk about why we are better than Windows. The dairy industry tried for 20 years to convince you milk was good for you. Sales kept going down. Then they tried “Got Milk?” and sales shot up. Got Milk doesn’t even talk about the product. In fact it is about the absence of the product. [4:45] * The best example of all. . .one of the greatest jobs at marketing the universe has ever seen is Nike. Remember Nike sells a commodity. They sell shoes! Yet when you think of Nike you feel something different than just a shoe company. In their ads they never talk about the products. They never tell you about their air soles and why the are better than Reebok’s air soles. What does Nike do in their advertising? They honor great athletes and they honor great athletics. That is who they are. That is what they are about. [5:02]* Our customers want to know who is Apple and what do we stand for. What we are about isn’t making boxes for people to get their jobs done. Although we do that well. Apple is about something more than that. Apple’s core value is we believe people with passion can change the world for the better. [6:15] * The ad campaign is called Think Different. It is honoring the people who think different and who move this world forward. It is what we are about. It touches the soul of this company. [Side note: The membership program for my podcast Founders is called Misfits. I stole that idea from the Think Different ad.] [8:55]* We have got to let people know who Apple is. And why it is still relevant in this world. [10:40]* This company is absolutely going to turn around. The question is not can we turn around Apple. It is can we make Apple really great again? [15:30] * Full video here. 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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Elon Musk's Commencement Address: "Magicians of the 21st Century"
Aug 26, 201900:06:06Tap to summarizeWhen I was young, I didn’t really know what I was going to do when I got older. People kept asking me. But then eventually, I thought the idea of inventing things would be really cool. And the reason I thought that was because I read a quote from Arthur C. Clark which said that, “A sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” And that’s really true. If you go back say, 300 years, the things we take for granted today, you’d be burned at stake for. Being able to fly? That’s crazy. Being able to see over long distances, being able to communicate anywhere. ..having access to all the world’s information instantly from almost anywhere on the earth. This stuff really would be magic in times past. So I thought, well if I can do some of those things – basically if I can advance technology, then that is like magic and that would be really cool. [In 1995] The Internet started to happen. And I thought well I could either pursue this technology [trying to improve the energy density of electric vehicles], where success may not be one of the possible outcomes, or I could participate in the Internet and be part of it. So, I decided to drop out. The initial thought with PayPal was to create a conglomeration of financial services. You would have one place where all of your financial services needs could be seamlessly integrated and would work smoothly. And we had a little feature, which was payments through email. Whenever we’d show the system off to someone, we’d show the hard part, which was the conglomeration of financial services, which is quite difficult to put together. Nobody was interested. Then we showed people email payments, which was quite easy and everybody was interested. So, I think it’s important to take feedback from your environment. You want to be as closed loop as possible. We focused on email payments and tried to make that work. And that’s what really got things to take off. But, if we hadn’t responded to what people said, then we probably would not have been successful. So, it’s important to look for things like that and focus on them when you seem them, and you correct your prior assumptions. When I started SpaceX, initially, I thought that well, there’s no way one could start a rocket company. I wasn’t that crazy. But, then, I thought, well, what is a way to increase NASA’s budget? That was actually my initial goal. I thought if we could do a low cost mission to Mars and land seeds in dehydrated nutrient gel, and hydrate them upon landing. . .you’d have this great photo of green plants in a red background. The public tends to respond to precedence and superlatives. And this would be the first life on Mars and the furthest life had ever traveled as far as we know. Starting SpaceX was against the advice of pretty much everyone I talked to. One friend made me watch a bunch of videos of rockets blowing up. Let me tell you he wasn’t far wrong. It was tough going there in the beginning. Because I never built anything physical. I mean I built like a model rocket as a kid and that kind of thing. But I never had a company that built any physical. So, I had to figure out how to do all these things and bring together the right team of people. It’s worth noting that Earth has been around for 4 billion years, but civilization in terms of having writing has been about 10,000 years, and that’s being generous. So, it’s really somewhat of a tenuous existence that civilization and consciousness has been on earth. I think the overreaching point I want to make is you guys are the magicians of the 21st century, don’t let anything hold you back. Imagination is the limit. Go out there and create some magic. Full video here. 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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Marc Andreessen: Software has eaten the world
Aug 21, 201900:07:31Tap to summarizeMy basic observation was that the modern tech industry is about 70 years old. It was started when there were like 5 computers. Over the last 70 years we figured out how to pack super computer technology that used to cost $25 million into a $500 product that we all have. There was this 70 year journey to get everyone a computer and onto the internet. So what is next? [Here is the link to Marc’s 2011 essay Why Software Is Eating The World. It serves as the basis for this podcast.] After the financial crisis, there was a prevailing mood of pessimism about the economy and the technology industry. My view was the exact opposite. Not only are we not done, we are just beginning. Everybody is connected to the internet and [as a byproduct of that] connected to an entire universe of services, information, and communications. To me, that is just the beginning. So now [think about] what can we do on top of that? [In my essay]I had 3 claims. The first claim: Any product or service —in any field that can become a software product— will become a software product. The next claim is: Any company that is any of these markets in which this process is happening has to become a software company. Claim 3: As a consequence of claim 1 and 2, in the long run, in every market, the best software company will win. This [claim 3] is tricky because software is different. Software is a different kind of product to develop than most people are used to. The culture of a software company is different. The kind of people you need to hire to build software are different. There are 500 self-driving startups within 50 miles of here. What those founders would tell you is that 90% of the value of cars [within a few years] will be software. Those cars will be electric. They won’t have all the internal combustion components that these car companies have spent 100 years optimizing. When we started the firm 10 years ago I would never imagine we’d be investing in new car companies. The car industry was an entrepreneurial industry in like 1890. There were hundreds of new American car companies in the early 1900s and then they shrunk to basically 3. A lot of VCs like us did not invest in Spotify because there was this 15-year history that all the other attempts to do what Spotify was doing had failed. But the time had actually come. There are entire companies called API companies that build software building blocks that you plug together. It is this constant process of everybody building on everybody else’s creativity. The result is everything rises. We started to see a new kind of founder. This hybrid type. For example: A PhD in biology that has been programming computers since they were young. We didn’t know quite what to make of these. A lot of the best companies in Silicon Valley are founded by people who have one or two significant failures before they founded the winner.Big companies are going to do the obvious ideas. We are doing the non-obvious stuff. The controversial stuff. The stuff that is not proven. There is a risk with each and everything we do. But when it works it can get really big. People can’t visualize new products on their own. You have to paint a picture. The picture has to be vivid. A lot of companies have a problem that I call too hungry to eat. You have a great product, your customers really want it but you are charging very little money for it. Usually these are naive founders who don’t quite understand business. They think if they charge less they will sell more. But they charge less and that is why they sell less. The reason is they don’t charge enough for the product — they aren’t getting enough revenue back into the company. They aren’t getting enough calories [dollars] into the company. They just get stuck. In a lot of cases, the right answer is to raise prices. It’s weird. Full podcast here. 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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George Hotz: Comma.ai, OpenPilot, and Autonomous Vehicles | Lex Fridman Podcast #31
Aug 19, 201900:10:58Tap to summarizeI would like to move to virtual reality. I would like to physically move there. I read a book in 2006 called Grey Hat Hacking. I realized that if you acquired these sort of powers you could control the world. I didn’t know much about computers back then. I started with electronics. The first iPhone hack was physical. What systems have vulnerabilities these days? Everything does. What have you learned about the design of systems? You learn to not take things for what people say they are. You look at things for what they actually are. I understand that is what you tell me it is, but what does it do? Vulnerabilities exist in the world. Nation-states have them. High-powered bad actors have them. Elon Musk was looking for someone to build a vision system for Autopilot. We talked about a contract. If I could deliver something that meets Mobileye level performance tomorrow I would get $12 million. I would lose $1 million for each month I couldn’t deliver. In life, I usually get away with saying stupid things. Elon is very sharp. He immediately called me out on it. Most people don’t even notice. If I sell out to make money I sold out. It doesn’t matter. What do I get? A yacht? I don’t want a yacht. Tesla is going to win level 5. Tesla is gathering data on a scale no one else is. They are putting real users behind the wheel. The incremental strategy is the only strategy that works. Lex: The way you make videos for your company is awesome. [He live streams videos from his phone] If stuff goes a little wrong you just go with it. It is real. It’s beautiful and in contrast to the way, other companies would put together videos like that. I think that is actually what people love. It’s genuine. Before we ship a consumer product that can drive cars I want to make sure I have a driver monitoring system you can’t cheat. A huge success for driver-assist programs would be if they could fix drivers that are drunk, distracted, and asleep. [The causes of a large percentage of fatalities.] The long-term idea for Comma.AI to make money: Be a car insurance company. I have the best data set to see who statically are the safest drivers. We see you driving unsafely we won’t insure you. This causes a bifurcation in the market because the only people who can’t get Comma insurance are the bad drivers. Geico can insure them. Their premiums are crazy high. Our premiums are crazy low. We would win car insurance. Take over the whole market. Our burn rate is about 200k a month. And our revenue is about 100k a month. We need to 4X our revenue. We sell stuff at shop.comma.ai. To me that is respectable revenues. We make it by selling products to consumers. We are honest and transparent about what they are. I don’t want attention from the masses. I want attention from people who I respect. I respect people who have skills. I would like to be known among people who have real skills.When I say that life is work what I mean is that work gives my life meaning. I don’t mean that every minute of the day you should be working. I don’t think that is the best way to maximize results. If you are working 12 hours a day you should be working smarter - not harder.Full podcast here.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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