Thank you for sharing—very inspiring. I'm interested in the operations of starting and managing these companies in parallel. How did you go about finding people to run the companies? How much involvement do you have in their day-to-day operations? Are they "your" companies, or do you consider yourself just Customer #1?
Agree on looking at the company-behind-the-numbers. Though presumably you're aware of the Efficient Market Hypothesis. Shouldn't "slowed down datacenter growth" be baked into the stock price already?
If I'm understanding your prediction correctly, you're asserting that the market thinks datacenter spending will continue at this pace indefinitely, and you yourself uniquely believe that to be not true. Right? I wonder why the market (including hedge fund analysis _much_ more sophisticated than us) should be so misinformed.
Presumably the market knows that the whole earth can't be covered in datacenters, and thus has baked that into the price, no?
I saw a $100 bill on the ground. I nearly picked it up before I stopped myself. I realised that if it was a genuine currency note, the Efficient Market would have picked it up already.
Great writeup. With LLMs doing an increasing amount of the coding now, it would be great for the browser or development environment to have built-in validations that enforce good performance. The coding agent (or human) would get direct, immediate feedback at development time that there's a performance threshold violation, at development time.
As both a 4x founder and recovering manager-of-managers, I have to say Founder-vs.-Manager is a bit of a false dichotomy.
Interestingly, the most successful managers I've seen have themselves been founders. They had both autonomy and organizational trust, and also tenacious creativity, which led to significant successes. This binary notion of "are you a Manager™ or are you a Founder™?" is a false dichotomy and leaves great people out.
A founder mentality has certain recognizable characteristics: doing whatever it takes to succeed, applying creative solutions to challenging problems, going outside your lane to win, and putting in energy well beyond the standard 9-5 expected of a standard employee. You can hire talented people with such qualities AND build an organization with trust and autonomy. Bringing it back to Chesky's disastrous results with delegation, I'd ask this: Did he just hire bad people?
This dichotomy may at worst cause an entire generation of new founders to ignore really fantastic advice, "Hire really great people, and give them the support and space to succeed." This is not antithetical to: "Oh, and those people should look like founders." It's a Both, not One-or-the-Other.
All this said, I do think PG is touching on something super interesting, which is an almost anthropological understanding of "The Founder", and view that as a very important area of discourse and study for the next generation of great companies.
The point that both PG and BC are really trying to say is that rigid, hierarchical employee types are detrimental to company's long-term success, and instead you should be building your team with hungry, bright, and creative problemsolvers who aren't afraid to break artificial rules to succeed. But you sure as hell be building an organization with trust and giving those founder-types everything they need to succeed.
I think the dichotomy is a gross simplification when presented as a single style or piece of advice to be implemented globally. The challenge of the founder is to know what is the truly important part of their product/market and exercise a Founder mode style for those areas. It's where your time as a founder is most valuable. There's reason most of the Steve Jobs tales are from product design perspective. I expect he knew that was, or would be, a significant differentiator of his product. Yet, as his company was scaling he likely was pulled in many more directions regarding other concerns of a scaling company as all founders would be (HR, Accounting, etc), and he knew that's where you exercise Manager mode. Hire a good head of HR and CFO and let them do their job. It's not worth his time to invest much effort in those types of functional minutia although they are very important and necessary parts of scaling.
Looks very intriguing, will give this a try. As a windowing and task switching productivity nut, I built my own replacement for ⌘+Tab, Switcheroo. Check it out here: https://switchfaster.com/
Known for first-to-market solutions for modern family challenges, Life360 recently reached #1 in Apple’s US App Store’s list of free social networking apps. Nearly 1 in 10 US families with kids use Life360 an average of 12 times a day, and global membership is growing exponentially, with over 28 million active users in over 140 countries as of March 31, 2020 — making Life360 the largest mobile service for families in the world.
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