Discover all 964 insights

Which is why with young people you don't always need to be so impatient asking for the plum assignment. A lot of times the best way to get attention is whatever is assigned to you, you are just nailing. You're killing it. Because people will notice that's somebody who can get stuff done.

I think the best reason to announce a financing is actually for recruiting. I don't believe that financing announcements typically generate customers. There are rare exceptions, but you shouldn't announce the financing because you think you're going to get customers. It does help bring talent to you. More importantly, it may help you close. People are more willing to join startups that their significant other or their family have heard of. So imagine you're in a relationship and you're joining this crazy company that no one's heard of and it's doing this ridiculous thing. Someone around that person often barfs and says, what the hell are you doing? If you can then send them a link that they can send to their spouse or their partner or their mom, it actually really helps you close.

Let's talk a little more about the complicated business of figuring out what to work on. The main reason it's hard is that you can't tell what most kinds of work are like except by doing them. Which means the four steps overlap: you may have to work at something for years before you know how much you like it or how good you are at it. And in the meantime you're not doing, and thus not learning about, most other kinds of work. So in the worst case you choose late based on very incomplete information. The nature of ambition exacerbates this problem. Ambition comes in two forms, one that precedes interest in the subject and one that grows out of it. Most people who do great work have a mix, and the more you have of the former, the harder it will be to decide what to do.

One of the ways, the definition of a barrel is, they can take an idea from conception and take it all the way to shipping and bring people with them. And that's a very cultural skill set.

Once you've found something you're excessively interested in, the next step is to learn enough about it to get you to one of the frontiers of knowledge. Knowledge expands fractally, and from a distance its edges look smooth, but once you learn enough to get close to one, they turn out to be full of gaps.

To all of you: be kind, be original, create more than you consume, and never, never, never let the universe smooth you into your surroundings. It remains Day 1.

[On identifying A players] Yeah, it's very hard to identify. A few things. One is, does the engineer want to win in the market? Does the engineer really care about winning against competitors, winning the hearts and minds of the customer? Do they understand the business context in which they operate by which they need to do that? Are they curious about how the company makes money, about what customers love and don't love, about what the most important project is and why it's important? They're asking you questions about the business outside of just the engineering domains. Are they able to execute on what they said they were going to execute without your help or do you actually feel like you need to be behind them? Are they the one actually setting the pace, asking you to keep up with your specs, keep up with your decisions, respond more quickly to the things that are blocking them, bringing more PMs or more designers to do more things? Are they being proactive in different channels where you think it's actually your job, but actually they'll jump in anyways?

Don’t “slow down” as you get older, speed up. Lean into changes, be curious about new things. Most people seem to go the other way.

It’s such a simple idea. It’s the golden rule so to speak: You want to deliver to the world what you would buy if you were on the other end. There is no ethos, in my opinion, that is better for any lawyer or any other person to have. By and large the people who have this ethos win in life and they don’t win just money, not just honors. They win the respect, the deserved trust of the people they deal with, and there is huge pleasure in life to be obtained from getting deserved trust.

[How often should objectives be set in an MBO system?] An MBO system should set objectives for a relatively short period, such as quarterly or monthly.