Discover all 955 insights

The human story does not always unfold like an arithmetical calculation on the principle that two and two make four. Sometimes in life they make five,...

A crisis is a terrible opportunity to waste. I used that crisis as an opportunity to rebuild Airbnb from the ground up.

I break the record for being wrong. But it’s OK. Be wrong and make mistakes, but learn. I’ll always change my mind based on new data. Never emotions, ...

What happens to the old fellows is that they get a technique going; they keep on using it. They were marching in that direction which was right then, ...

The cards I was dealt meant I started at a deficit compared to everyone else, but in the end that proved an extraordinary source of inspiration and en...

“Aim for Chartres” (Christopher Alexander) — when doing something, aim to be the best there ever was at it. This compensates for your natural bias, wh...

Quantum Light is a venture fund that invests in startups based on models rather than human judgment. About three years ago, I built a small team that ...

In numbers, we aim for Revolut to be the number one global bank in 100 countries with 100 million daily active customers and 100 billion in annual rev...

When your vision of what you want to do is what you can do single-handedly, then you should pursue it. The day your vision, what you think needs to be...

Most entrepreneurs could be more ambitious. There’s this thing that happens where you have a great idea and you set out to build it, but by the time y...

Figure out what gives you new ideas, and make sure you incorporate that into your routine. For me this is talking to people, tweeting, writing in my n...

The process reinforced Musk’s appreciation for the toy industry. “They have to produce things very quickly and cheaply without flaws, and manufacture ...

At just after 4 p.m. on June 16, just three weeks after Musk came up with the idea, the new assembly line was rolling Model 3 sedans out of the makesh...

I wish I had a more creative gene. I’m a linear thinker. The moment I ask a question, my brain automatically grows into tree structure. I can see all ...

Don’t over-index on trends. Just figure out your first-principles view of what’s actually important for the world, and go from there.

Status is fake and transient. Just focus on substance and doing valuable work. Talk about it in public. Beware the inner ring fallacy.

Move to where the action is. Agglomeration effects are powerful.

Working with people you really respect, and are secretly worried are much better than you and will figure out how dumb you are, is the best.

At some point in your life, work on a startup, or at least a thing driven by a small group. Small group energy is amazing.

If you find yourself dreading Mondays, quit.

Pay attention to your production/consumption balance. If you’re only consuming and not producing, fix that.

Think about what makes you ‘imbalanced’ as a personality, & do things where this gives you an edge.

[On the ideal age to start a company] If you look at statistics, under 25 is quite negative. Between 25 and 30 is okay. The best age is 30 to 35. Afte...

I don’t think money makes you happier. Money is just an additional instrument to achieve certain goals.

[On advice for young people] First, know what you like and enjoy doing. Then go into that area. If you enjoy something, you definitely need to go ther...

And, at the end of the day it comes down to the impact you have on the lives of others and finding purpose in your life. And so the favorite book I ha...

If I had to boil it down to one thing, expand the time horizon over which you're thinking...because if you make a series of relatively short sighted d...

Nobody is an authority on your potential but you, and at some point, you're going to have to raise your hand and not be timid and ask for the opportun...

The last thing I'll say is you've got to realize that being entrepreneurial is not synonymous with being a founder. So I haven't been a founder, I nev...

If you only had one opportunity to make a career decision, maybe you want to be a little more conservative and you want to be careful. But that's not ...

I don’t think the world is prepared for the tidal wave of technological change that’s about to hit over the next handful of years. Primarily because o...

By the way, that's my number one piece of advice if you're going to join a startup, is pick a rocketship. Pick a company that's already working and th...

And the second piece of advice I give is worry more about what you want to do rather than what you want to be. So often people have in their mind "I w...

One reason per-project procrastination is so dangerous is that it usually camouflages itself as work. You're not just sitting around doing nothing; yo...

Since there are two senses of starting work — per day and per project — there are also two forms of procrastination. Per-project procrastination is fa...

Try to finish what you start, though, even if it turns out to be more work than you expected. Finishing things is not just an exercise in tidiness or ...

It's usually a mistake to lie to yourself if you want to do great work, but this is one of the rare cases where it isn't. When I'm reluctant to start ...

For example, while you must work hard, it's possible to work too hard, and if you do that you'll find you get diminishing returns: fatigue will make y...

Even when you've found something exciting to work on, working on it is not always straightforward. There will be times when some new idea makes you le...

But while you need boldness, you don't usually need much planning. In most cases the recipe for doing great work is simply: work hard on excitingly am...

If you're making something for people, make sure it's something they actually want. The best way to do this is to make something you yourself want. Wr...

What should you do if you're young and ambitious but don't know what to work on? What you should not do is drift along passively, assuming the problem...

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 ki...

The three most powerful motives are curiosity, delight, and the desire to do something impressive. Sometimes they converge, and that combination is th...

Boldly chase outlier ideas, even if other people aren't interested in them — in fact, especially if they aren't. If you're excited about some possibil...

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 knowledg...

Develop a habit of working on your own projects. Don't let "work" mean something other people tell you to do. If you do manage to do great work one da...

The way to figure out what to work on is by working. If you're not sure what to work on, guess. But pick something and get going. You'll probably gues...

The first step [to doing good work] is to decide what to work on. The work you choose needs to have three qualities: it has to be something you have a...

Some things you could do are the following. Somewhere around every seven years make a significant, if not complete, shift in your field. Thus, I shift...

Let me summarize. You've got to work on important problems. I deny that it is all luck, but I admit there is a fair element of luck. I subscribe to Pa...

I thought hard about where was my field going, where were the opportunities, and what were the important things to do. Let me go there so there is a c...

We didn't work on time travel, teleportation, and antigravity. They are not important problems because we do not have an attack. It's not the conseque...

You have to risk career-ending failure to find career-defining success. There are just some people who are willing to do that, and they want the ride....

The world is filled with good quests that require massively leveled heroes to complete:  semiconductor manufacturing, complex industrial automation, n...

For our best players with exceptional fundraising and hiring superpowers, hard quests are difficult. But for everyone else, they are nearly impossible...

Almost all of these founders have deep personal motivations to keep building, even while they have no financial incentive to do so. Throwing yourself ...

History is the record of top players completing good quests. The vast majority of quests, even during times of great progress, constitute what functio...

But unless you are a truly generational thinker, proselytizing is far less impactful than building a specific, better version of the future.

And for the rare successful operators who do go on to start a new company, most opt to copy a successful product and compete for market share. Today, ...

The impact of a player's abilities particularly matters with hard quests, where the likelihood of success is already slim. If someone with no backgrou...

In the context of your quest, you can think of yourself as a player with specific resources, skills, and powers. These attributes influence the likeli...

I started a company because I was obsessed with solving a problem. I was playing squash while I was at Harvard and I felt like I didn’t know what I wa...

here is an alternative path for society: ignore the culture war. ignore the attention war. make safe agi. make fusion. make people smarter and healthi...

- go work somewhere at the heart of the action. the AI scale-ups are going to be the best place to learn about the quickly-unfolding industry.

Both Musk and Stark were the type of men who ‘had seized an idea to live by and something to dedicate themselves to’ and were not going to waste a mom...

His fears that mankind had lost much of its will to push the boundaries were reinforced one day when Musk went to the NASA website. He’d expected to f...

Musk often talked fondly about Alexander the Great, and Justine saw him as her own conquering hero. “He wasn’t afraid of responsibility, ” she said. “...

He felt as if the public had lost some of its ambition and hope for the future. The average person might see space exploration as a waste of time and ...

With little prompting, Musk would start expounding on his desire to do something meaningful with his life—something lasting. His next move had to be e...

If you go back 20 or 25 years, I wish I would have known that there was no need to wait. I went to college. I went to law school. I worked in law and ...

This leads to my final suggestion: a technique for determining when you're on the right track. You're on the right track when people complain that you...

If I could go back and redo my twenties, that would be one thing I'd do more of: just try hacking things together. Like many people that age, I spent ...

If I had to condense the power of the marginal into one sentence it would be: just try hacking something together.

Work like a dog being taken for a walk, instead of an ox being yoked to the plow. That's what they miss.

Outsiders are not merely free but compelled to make things that are cheap and lightweight. And both are good bets for growth: cheap things spread fast...

So if you're an outsider you should actively seek out contrarian projects. Instead of working on things the eminent have made prestigious, work on thi...

Another way to find good problems to solve in one head is to focus on the grooves in the chocolate bar — the places where tasks are divided when they'...

More risk is a good thing, not a bad thing. More risk is something most people are afraid of, and it’s where the larger opportunity lies. Naseem Taleb...

“Skeptics never do the impossible.” There’s real doers, which are entrepreneurs and then pontificators, experts, gurus that always say why things can’...

Personally, if I can have an impact, it’s the most valuable thing, most rewarding thing I can do, and I’m always curious to learn about new technologi...

I want to have fun. So I turned 65 today and I have a plan for the next 20 years.

But almost certainly, great founders have great vision, passion, unreasonableness, more ambition than most practical people would accept as possible o...

As a founder, I always say in this presentation I wrote in 1986 there’s a slide that says, “Know why you want to be a founder.” And by the way, in tho...

Well, what I’d say to leaders in firms, be clear what your values are, be explicit about them, and stick with them when the going gets hard, when it’s...

I would say two things matter, and they’re different. One is the mission for a company. Many startups have that, many don’t. I’d say 50/50. And I alwa...

Figure out a way to travel to San Francisco and to meet other people who've moved there to pursue their dreams. Why San Francisco? San Francisco is th...

If you're in the US and go to a good school, there are a lot of forces that will push you towards following traintracks laid by others rather than cha...

More broadly, nobody is going to teach you to think for yourself. A large fraction of what people around you believe is mistaken. Internalize this and...

Above all else, don't make the mistake of judging your success based on your current peer group. By all means make friends but being weird as a teenag...

If you think something is important but people older than you don't hold it in high regard, there's a reasonable chance that you're right and they're ...

Don’t follow your passion. Seriously. Don’t follow your passion. Your passion is likely more dumb and useless than anything else. Your passion should ...

There were basically millennia of just subsistence farming industry and all of a sudden, there was this vertical takeoff a few hundred years ago. And ...

Suppose I have given an order: who can read the bottom of my thoughts, my true intention? And yet everybody will take hold of that order, measure it b...

Do they [men] know themselves, can they explain themselves to themselves?

Do you know what I admire most in this world? It is the total inability of force to organize anything. There are only two powers in the world - the sw...

I may have had many projects, but I never was free to carry out any of them. It did me little good to be holding the helm; no matter how strong my han...

Why and how are such useful questions that they cannot be asked too often.

[On Gustavus Adolphus] So brief a military career has left lasting memories because of the boldness and speed of his movements and the organization an...

[On Caesar] He took great risks in the adventures into which he was pushed by his boldness; his genius got him out of his difficulties. His battles in...

It is axiomatic in the art of war that the side which remains behind its fortified line is always defeated. Experience and theory agree on that point.

[Returning from his military debut at Toulon] ‘I still was far from considering myself a superior man.’ And he repeated that it was only after Lodi [1...

A big secret is that you can bend the world to your will a surprising percentage of the time—most people don’t even try, and just accept that things a...

The most impressive people I know have strong beliefs about the world, which is rare in the general population.

‘Successful people create companies. More successful people create countries. The most successful people create religions.’ I heard this from Qi Lu; I...

I think a vision that someone feels compelled to make happen in the world is probably the most important of a super successful founder. Then this idea...

If you believe that going to space is the most important project for humanity, then work on it. If you can’t figure out how to raise hundreds of milli...

It doesn’t matter how fast you move if it’s in a worthless direction. Picking the right thing to work on is the most important element of productivity...

[On Uniting Europe] that achievement was my mission. I had prepared it long in advance, perhaps at the cost of my popularity.

I approach everything from first principles. Hiring experienced executives didn't work for me, so I abandoned the traditional approach. Instead, I dev...

As he stewed about the absurd price the Russians wanted to charge, he employed some first-principles thinking, drilling down to the basic physics of t...

“We would talk about how we were going to qualify an engine or certify a fuel tank, and he would ask, ‘Why do we have to do that?’” says Tim Buzza, a ...

Memorize a few old poems, or texts that mean a lot to you.

One of Murati’s favorite movies centers on a rogue AI that kills everyone. 2001: A Space Odyssey (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062622/) continues to ...

They'll like you even better when you improve in response to their comments, because customers are used to companies ignoring them. If you're the rare...

[What happens when insights or questions are withheld?] Each time an insight or fact is withheld or an appropriate question is suppressed, the decisio...

[What complicates decision-making in complex issues?] When knowledge and position power are separated, both groups may feel uncertain, with knowledge ...

[How does fear of being overruled affect junior managers?] Junior managers may hang back due to fear of losing face if their position is vetoed or opp...

[Why are people reluctant to voice opinions?] One reason people are reluctant to state an opinion is the fear of going against the group by stating an...

[How can the peer-group syndrome be addressed?] If the peer-group syndrome manifests itself, and the meeting has no formal chairman, the person who ha...

[What fear paralyzes decision-making?] One thing that paralyzes both knowledge and position power possessors is the fear of simply sounding dumb.

[What undermines effective decision-making?] People didn’t really speak their minds freely, making it harder for a manager to make the right decisions...

[How can self-confidence help overcome peer-group syndrome?] Self-confidence stems from being familiar with the issue, having experience, and realizin...

[How does consensus develop in peer groups?] Groups often wander around, feeling each other out, waiting for a consensus to develop before anyone risk...

[What is the peer-group syndrome?] The peer-group syndrome occurs when a group of peers meets to solve a problem or make a decision but goes in circle...

[How should dramatic decision changes be handled?] If the final decision is dramatically different from expectations, adjourn, reconvene the meeting a...

[Why is group decision-making onerous but necessary?] Group decisions do not always come easily, and the process can be onerous, but it is essential t...

[What is the criterion for decision timing?] Don’t push for a decision prematurely. Make sure you have heard and considered the real issues, but if yo...

[What happens if decisions are vetoed unexpectedly?] Unexpected vetoes, even if legitimate, create frustration, demoralization, and impressions of pol...

[How can representation balance improve decisions?] In meetings involving multiple interest groups, it is important to give the sides roughly equal re...

[What six questions should be addressed before making a decision?] What decision needs to be made? When does it have to be made? Who will decide? Who ...

[Why is it important to avoid premature decisions?] If you either enter the decision-making stage too early or wait too long, you won’t derive the ful...

[What happens in organizations without consultation?] In organizations where decisions are made and implemented individually without consultation, it ...

[What is the manager's role in decision output?] Decision-making has an output, which is the decision itself, and it is likelier to generate high-qual...

[What happens when no consensus is reached?] If the decision-making process has proceeded correctly, the senior manager can wield position-power autho...

[Why is clarity in decisions important?] When a decision is controversial, obscuring matters to avoid an argument does not avoid conflict but merely p...

[Why is free discussion important?] The greater the disagreement and controversy, the more important becomes the word free. If knowledgeable people wi...

[Where should decisions ideally be made?] Any decision should be worked out and reached at the lowest competent level, where it will be made by people...

[How should status differentials be handled?] In the free discussion stage, everybody should voice opinions and beliefs as equals, forgetting or ignor...

[What mix of expertise is needed in decision-making?] Decision-making should occur in the middle ground, between reliance on technical knowledge on th...

[Why does Intel promote egalitarianism?] In our business we have to mix knowledge-power people with position-power people daily, and together they mak...

[What is the next stage of decision-making?] The next stage is reaching a clear decision. Particular pains should be taken to frame the terms of the d...

[What is required after a decision is made?] Everyone involved must give the decision reached by the group full support, even if they do not agree wit...

[Why do middle managers struggle with this model?] Middle managers often have trouble expressing their views forcefully, making difficult decisions, a...

[What is the first stage of decision-making?] The first stage should be free discussion, in which all points of view and all aspects of an issue are o...

[How does the rate of change impact decision-making?] The faster the change in the know-how on which the business depends or the faster the change in ...

[How did traditional industries approach decision-making?] In traditional industries, authority to make decisions went with responsibility, or positio...

[What is the challenge in knowledge-based businesses?] In businesses that mostly deal with information and know-how, a rapid divergence develops betwe...

[What types of decisions do managers face?] Decisions range from the profound to the trivial, from the complex to the very simple.

[Why do traditional decision-making models fail in fast-changing industries?] If Intel used people holding old-fashioned position power to make all it...

[What happens to knowledge-based power over time?] A young person entering a technical organization possesses a good deal of knowledge-based power, bu...

[What is the role of middle managers in decision-making?] The key to success is the middle manager, who not only is a link in the chain of command but...

[Why is decision-making important?] Making decisions—or more properly, participating in the process by which they are made—is an important and essenti...

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good, get going, make a decision and iterate.

I'm sure many of you heard about the sort of irreversible and reversible decisions type one, type two, I think the irreversible decisions just require...

Throughout the spring and early summer of 2018, he prowled the factory floor, like he had in Nevada, making decisions on the fly. “Elon was going comp...

Everyone talks about 10x engineers but the real risk for most companies is not whether you can build it, it’s if you’re building the right thing. A de...

business boils down to making the better decision time after time after time after time and when you make the wrong call, accepting that you made a m...

Third, emails relating to topics that are current working projects or pressing issues go into temporary subfolders of a folder called Action. You shou...

Second, when doing email, either answer or file every single message until you get to that empty inbox state of grace. Not keeping a schedule helps he...

First, always finish each of your two daily email sessions with a completely empty inbox. I don’t know about you, but when I know I have emails in my ...

Do email exactly twice a day—say, once first thing in the morning, and once at the end of the workday. Allocate half an hour or whatever it takes, bu...

You know, years ago I wrote a little program to look at this, like how quickly our best founders — the founders that run billion-plus companies — answ...

I spent 15–17 years in the UK, and London became home. But after working in different cities, I realized there’s so much more in other cities in terms...

When I interviewed at Sequoia, Don Valentine was still alive and he interviewed me and he actually said that he worried that I hadn't faced enough adv...

It’s OK to be wrong. Just don’t be confident and wrong.

There’s a lot of alpha in being willing to do “menial” work (take notes, send out agendas, order pizza, manually inspect raw data, whatever). Beware o...

Doing things is energizing, wasting time is depressing. You don’t need that much ‘rest’.

Doing as much as you can every day is a form of life extension.

Do the most important thing first thing in the morning, and don’t check social media until you’ve done it. Because energy compounds, the first actions...

Energy compounds on itself. If you start the morning by getting something done (a workout, an important task, writing) then you’re going to have a hig...

[On daily routine] It depends on the country. If I’m in the UK, I wake up at 6:30, sometimes train in the morning, and start work by 8:30 or 9:00 a.m....

I have never seen ordinary effort lead to extraordinary results

Every week he went over the most recent timetables and expressed, often rather strongly, his dissatisfaction. “Pretend we are a startup about to run o...

Musk held a video call with the Starship team on August 4 from a conference room at Giga Texas, where he was preparing for the annual Tesla shareholde...

By the time Musk got back from the launchpad to the Starbase main building, the video monitor by the front door had been reprogrammed. It read, “Ship+...

After SpaceX’s launch of astronauts to the Space Station in May 2020, it had an impressive run of eleven unmanned successful satellite launches in fiv...

Nevertheless, he did not try to eliminate all possible risks. That would make SpaceX rockets as costly and late as those built by the government’s blo...

Musk has a rule about responsibility: every part, every process, and every specification needs to have a name attached. He can be quick to personalize...

Musk insisted on setting unrealistic deadlines even when they weren’t necessary, such as when he ordered test stands to be erected in weeks for rocket...

One of Musk’s management tactics, then as later, was to set an insane deadline and drive colleagues to meet it. He did that in the fall of 1999 by ann...

When you're a startup, having a really focused effort, high velocity, moving quickly, getting things out, and learning often is the way to go. We're w...

I've always had this hygiene of writing a email a letter to the company every week… it was just my impressions of the week that passed like what did I...

I’ve learned that listening is key. I’m still a terrible listener, but better than I was, and that change has come down to one word: maturity. Success...

Execution gets divided into two key questions. One, can you figure out what to do and two, can you get it done. So I want to talk about two parts of g...

The way to have a company that executes well is you have to execute well yourself. Every thing at a startup gets modeled after the founders. Whatever ...

everything i've learned about operating: trust your gut. act quickly. don't let problems stew.

Most important advice I give to young people. A is just learn how to get stuff done. What I mean by that is - I've seen at every level people who are ...

what sets great builders apart is not that they are smarter [lots of people are smart], or even that they’re better at building it’s that they ask th...

By realizing you have to use the system and studying how to get the system to do your work, you learn how to adapt the system to your desires. Or you ...

The word 'try' is an especially valuable component. I disagree here with Yoda, who said there is no try. There is try. It implies there's no punishmen...

Hacking something together means deciding what to do as you're doing it, not a subordinate executing the vision of his boss. It implies the result won...

Make things. Operating in a space with a lot of uncertainty is a very different experience to learning something.

[On Turenne and Eugene of Savoy] Manoeuvres and marches in the campaigns of 1646, 1648, 1672 and 1673 were based on the same principles of those of Al...

Peril was always in front of me, and the day’s victory was always forgotten in the preoccupation with the necessity of winning a new victory on the mo...

Be successful! I judge men only by the results of their actions.

Let no one search the past for examples that might slow down our advance! Nothing in all history resembles the last years of the eighteenth century; n...

His [Alexander the Great’s] warfare was methodical and deserves the highest praise. Not one of his convoys was interrupted. His armies always grew as ...

A man who has lost courage lacks decision because he faces alternatives that are all undesirable. And the worst thing in our enterprises is indecision...

It takes time to make oneself loved, and even when I had nothing to do I always vaguely felt that I had no time to waste.

My wife could have died in Munich or in Strasbourg and it would not have interfered for a quarter of an hour with the execution of my plans.

The great majority of men attend to what is necessary only when they feel a need for it - the precise time when it is too late.

I have gained some advantages over superior forces and when totally destitute of everything, because, in the persuasion that your confidence was repos...

The best clue to Napoloen’s aim in life lifes in his curious way of making budgets - and ‘outside budgets there is no salvation’. If, for instance, he...

But there are a lot of generous people that enabled this great institution so that we could study here and we could launch our careers. And so I think...

So I think it's with that mindset that we have an obligation also to pay it forward.

And that may sound absurd but what his point was organization as a whole does everything exactly the right way. Then receivers will start running thei...

The final topic I want to talk about is details. And in my assigned reading there is a great book by Bill Walsh, called The Score Takes Care of Itself...

The reason why is because most great people actually are ammunition. But what you need in your company are barrels. And you can only shoot through the...

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 i...

engineering productivity is far more correlated with culture than team size there are startups w/ 10 engineers that ship more for their customers tha...

Like so many people privy to these performances, Lyons came away with no illusions about Musk’s personality but with the utmost respect for his vision...

Teams that had worked separately for months back at the Space X factory - propulsions, avionics, software - were thrust together on the island and for...

So each company has it's own velocity on this curve. So if the company is going like this, you can only keep people on the roles if their own learning...

The other question everybody asks about people is when do you hire somebody above somebody. And when do you mentor somebody, and when do you replace s...

[On identifying talent] The other signal to look for is once you've hired someone, with an open office, just watch who goes up to other people's desks...

How can you tell who is a barrel and who is not? One is you start with a very small set of responsibilities, it can be very trivial. It can be somethi...

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. ...

Most great people actually are ammunition. But what you need in your company are barrels. And you can only shoot through the unique barrels that you h...

The next and most important thing you do is edit the team. So these are the people you work with. Nobody is going to have a perfect team and you certa...

[On hiring] I learned how to do it now. Every time I hire for a new role I’ve never hired for before, I first interview the whole market to learn how ...

We calculate the number of strong, average, and below-average performers. Our system filters out underperforming individuals, ensuring that Revolute o...

You do not automate first; you need to delete, delete, delete. Get down to simple requirements before you do any of this stuff.

Sales is a craft. Design is a craft. Engineering is a craft. Great hiring is a craft.

The team you build is the company you build.

You can build a great interview process, but you're better off just trying to use long-term information about people, if you can.

We design our products to make very complex things very easy.

You should write unreasonably short job descriptions and know exactly what you're looking for, and make it easy to assess someone's performance on one...

Discernment is very important... You need to understand when someone is a good designer. What does that mean mechanically? In what sense? In what cont...

If you hire people who are great at their craft, I think and hope they are going to create guilds, people who are dedicated to a certain way of thinki...

You want someone who is going to pound the table and say, I’m going to go and make this person successful, particularly if they are the hiring manager...

Question every requirement. Delete any part of the process that you can. Simplify and optimize. Accelerate cycle times. Automate.

The goal is not zero defects. Often we’re finding, you know, maybe very weird, in some cases malformed... You want to find people who are particularly...

Having simple rules for your company will clean a lot of things up.

Follow some simple algorithms and you'll be able to hire at scale.

The team you build is the company you build.

Look for slope over intercept every time.

Before you try to go hire other people, you need to actually do it. You need to actually taste it. You need to have your own perspective on it.

Find deeply talented, very spiky people, people who are very good at one thing, and think hard about how to put them in roles where they can express t...

Any company at its core, especially technology companies, they're not in the technology business, they're in the people business.

At Ramp, simplicity is really at the heart of everything that we do.

Final concept, contrarian, I also believe in hiring people who have egos. My general view in the world is almost anybody who's been world class at any...

Final concept here is I'd much rather hire for new capabilities than more of the same. So if you're struggling as a business, don't just hire X+1 of a...

I'd rather just keep extending rope, all things being equal to talented people, increasing the degree of complexity and just seeing. That is how you p...

Another Brian Chesky lesson is everybody basically will plateau at some point. So while people are on this slope of progression. You don't want to do ...

Every time you hire externally there's real risk. Brian will talk more about this in founder mode, that if you hire you're basically doing open heart ...

Time. There is no substitute to building the team at the end of the day. I like this exercise. Like, let's try this, 75% of you I know are founders, r...

So, for example, at Square, we were a design driven company, and that's easy to say. But what that actually means is when we're hiring finance people,...

Another lesson about a startup is you're not trying to hire everybody. If you read Zero to One or listen to some Peters talks about cults, you're buil...

Speed is your friend as a startup on every dimension, but it's especially important in recruiting. So I also wouldn't run in a lengthy interview proce...

Closing. So, Jack Dorsey taught me this question to ask candidates if you really want to send an offer, ask a candidate point blank, is there anything...

The hardest hire for me is usually a VPE. I'm not technical, or at least I haven't been technical since high school, and so making the call on a VPE s...

This is a subtle point. I would talk more about this with Brian Chesky, because he's the one who taught me the best answer here. When you're hiring fo...

References. I think references are mostly about error avoidance, not about positive. So in other words, you can avoid mistakes with references. I don'...

The question comes up, do you have to have passion about the company you're recruiting them for? Do they have to have interest in your industry? I act...

But anywhere you go, you might run into people who have talent. And in a hot market, you want to find talent wherever you can. You don't have the choi...

So I think figuring out what predicts success is really important. I like risk taking. And it doesn't mean that the person has taken risk before. This...

And I said, you know, Derek, when you meet a rookie for the first time in spring training, can you tell whether they're going to be an all star? He sa...

So you start learning about someone just by asking them what they’re optimizing for. The second question I love, especially for mid-level people who h...

So what I'm trying to figure out is does the person have a super power or strength that might make it more probable than not that they can solve the p...

So let's talk about how do you interview. There are methods you can learn, and there are some books on this that might translate into high tech stuff....

So for example, a salesperson is almost never worth hiring early. Almost, almost, never compromise on a first, second sales hire. Although people make...

The other classic question is, okay, I've got this A-minus person, pretty good. I need a VP of marketing. I need a Director of Marketing. I need a des...

The way Eric framed it to me, which I think is fabulous, is he said I'm not worried about when people are leaving to start their own company. I'll be ...

Other question that comes up is, do you hire people who want to be founders or not? It's very controversial. Ask ten CEOs you're going to get five dif...

One of the other things that's really important that most people gloss over is to clarify, what are you actually trying to hire for. Now, simplifying ...

The other way to cheat is hire interns. I don't think you can do it too early. So I think you do need a critical density of people that have some expe...

I think what you're likely to do is be accurate first in people that can reliably execute what I call ammunition, they're not that hard to find. You c...

So you really need to own this. If you really believe, at the end of the day, the team you build is the company you build, the most important thing yo...

So I had this hack, which is I went around the organization, I just kind of walked around the office and found the people that I thought were really t...

I think recruiters are mostly ineffective, but they do create a tempo and a discipline and a cadence that you can take advantage of. So when you're fi...

I think the best reason to announce a financing is actually for recruiting. I don't believe that financing announcements typically generate customers....

I think my favorite metaphor for building a startup, and some of you may have heard in my how to operate lecture, is you're creating a movie. So like ...

Second thing is what we call gene pool engineering, which is find the places where the people have the skills you want the most currently work. And th...

So you're going to have a core team. The first day anybody starts, have them write down on a piece of paper the 5 or 10 most impressive people they kn...

When you're a small startup and you're beginning. And most people in this room are not running, you know, one of the top 20 companies on the planet at...

So the most important lesson I ever learned from Peter Thiel when I joined Paypal was we went for a jog around the Stanford campus. And Peter said, yo...

So the most important concept is you cannot hire the obvious people. The obvious people have a lot of options in the world and we’re going to talk abo...

We didn't hire a single person in the company whose skill was managing people. If you were going to lead a design team, you had to be the best designe...

the team you build is the company you build. And like any good piece of advice, it's kind of something you already know, but it distills it in a reall...

Ernest Shackleton was an expeditionary, like, 100 years ago. He had this giant shipwreck, and famously, all the guys, like, survived. And there's a ve...

I remember Andreessen Horowitz would tell me, you should do eight hours of reference checks per employee, which is probably over the top, but you shou...

A players hire A players, B players hire lots of C players.

You are as good as the people you hire because hopefully, you learn from them.

Everything starts from within: inner peace, a drive to succeed, order. But it requires the courage to admit what you are and what you aren’t. I know m...

So, the question is, how do you balance firing people fast and making early employees feel secure? The answer is that when an employee's not working, ...

The last part on the team section is about firing people when it's not working. No matter what I say here is not going to prevent anyone from doing it...

One thing that founders forget is that after they hire employees, they have to retain them. I'm not going to go into full detail here because we're go...

There is a famous test from Paul Graham called the animal test. The idea here is that you should be able to describe any employee as an animal at what...

Another thing that I have noticed from talking to YC companies is that good communication skills tend to correlate with hires that work out. I used to...

There are three things I look for in a hire. Are they smart? Do they get things done? Do I want to spend a lot of time around them? And if I get an an...

Another question that founders ask us a lot about his experience and how much that matters. The short version here is that experience matters for some...

Sources of candidates. This is another thing that students get wrong a lot. The best source for hiring by far is people that you already know and peop...

If you compromise and hire someone mediocre you will always regret it. We like to warn founders of this but no one really feels it until they make the...

On thing that founders always underestimate is how hard it is to recruit. You think you have this great idea and everyone's going to join. But that's ...

But by having an extremely high bar, by hiring slowly ensures that everyone believes in the mission, you can get that. So let's say, you listened to t...

These hires really matter, these people are what go on to define your company, and so you need people that believe in it almost as much as you do. And...

Many of the best YC companies have had a phenomenally small number of employees for their first year, sometimes none besides the founders. They really...

The second part of how to hire: try not to. One of the weird things you'll notice as you start a company, is that everyone will ask you how many emplo...

In addition to relentlessly resourceful, you want a tough and a calm cofounder. There are obvious things like smart, but everyone knows you want a sma...

So as you're thinking about cofounders and people that could be good, there's a question of what you're looking for right? At YC we have this public p...

When hiring, look for people with the right attitude. Skills can be taught. Attitude changes require a brain transplant.

I think the single, most important fact about doing a startup is being clear about your vision and not letting it get distorted by what pundits and ex...

Hire people who hit two criteria. One is a high level of intensity and the other is a high degree of humility. That’s a powerful combination. In a dyn...

there are 2 kinds of engineers - the kind that thinks about their job as solving a series of brain teasers - the kind that thinks about their job as ...

When he received a resumé at 0230, 'he replied back in thirty minutes, addressing everything I put in there point by point. He said, ‘when you intervi...

So the quality of hiring is the most important thing. I always say the team you build is the company you build, not the business plan you make. So som...

The single most important thing I spend time on, probably more than any other single thing in my calendar, is helping our companies recruit a great te...

But the thing that matters almost more than anything in determining whether I’ll have a happy, satisfying day is this: no matter what time you get up,...

I have one big shot of espresso immediately when I wake up and one after lunch. I assume this is about 200mg total of caffeine per day. I tried a few ...

Eating lots of sugar is the thing that makes me feel the worst and that I try hardest to avoid. I also try to avoid foods that aggravate my digestion ...

I very rarely eat breakfast, so I get about 15 hours of fasting most days (except an espresso when I wake up). I know this is contrary to most advice,...

Not eating a lot in the few hours before sleep helps. Not drinking alcohol helps a lot, though I’m not willing to do that all the time.

The leadership team is great at inspiring a vision for what is possible while also laying out the path to get there. They are also very conscientious ...

I quantify everything what a person does a team does a department does a company does

But then he added, “It’s true that if they see the general out on the battlefield, the troops are going to be motivated. Wherever Napoleon was, that’s...

Like, for example, the role of a great leader is to hire great people and empower them to do their job. And I'm not saying I disagree with that statem...

Great leadership is presence, not absence. It is not good for you to hire great people and trust them to do their job. How do you know if they're doin...

The role of a leader is to change the status quo, step up the pace, and increase the intensity. Leaders are the energy bunnies and pacemakers of the o...

From the start, my prime directive, the fundamental goal, was the full and total implementation throughout the organization of the actions and attitud...

It is a conceptual blueprint for action; that is, a perception of what should be done, when it should be done, and why it should be done. Your philoso...

At its best, an organization - your team - bespeaks values and a way of doing things that emanate from a source; that source is you - the leader.

Never ask your troops to do something you’re not willing to do.

It should not be believed that a march of three or four days in the wrong direction can be corrected by a countermarch. As a rule, this is to make two...

If you want to think originally and differently, seek uncorrelated inputs. Read minor works, older things, obscure journals.

The most valuable feedback usually hurts a lot.

Once in awhile, put away all concepts you read about online and reason “up” from the base of your experience and what you’ve seen and done. (e.g. Wha...

Be honest about whether something is learning or entertainment. Real learning is extremely hard and effortful. (Podcasts, Atlantic articles, pop scien...

Ask dumb questions. The people who matter won’t judge you for it, and you’ll learn things as a result.

Synthesize things as you read. Just because you’ve read something, doesn’t mean you’ve understood it; your brain has to come up with its own encoding....

Write regularly, and learn to ‘think in writing’. This is true for literally everyone, regardless of whether you want to be a writer or not, whether y...

I remember reading "Principles" by Ray Dalio over 10 years ago when it was just a 50-page PDF. I loved it because it was direct and unpolished. Five y...

It's more due to my education. I studied physics and math, which taught me to model life. I always model various aspects of life in a quantitative way...

They all have a growth mindset, they’re all eager to listen...almost all of them [are] an absolute sponge.

...take the time to learn. There is so much valuable information you can get from your classroom.

“I try to criticize the action, not the person. We all make mistakes. What matters is whether a person has a good feedback loop, can seek criticism fr...

I think you have to be curious about what is required to run a good company at that stage and what's required to run Stripe well really matters. And o...

the most valuable skill in the world is systems engineering: the ability to debug, understand, and improve a complex system with limited/poor measure...

one of the biggest lies of psychology is that introversion vs extroversion are innate traits extroversion can be learned—given a sufficient number of...

weird phenomenon— when you're young, you say what you think—you don't know any better! then as you get older, you start to say not what you think, b...

the most valuable skill in the world is systems engineering: the ability to debug, understand, and improve a complex system with limited/poor measure...

Bill Gates began an annual tradition called the Think Week. He would seclude himself and spend an entire week dedicated to reading, learning, and thin...

[Think Weeks are] CPU time. It's time that you get to think about things... When you write down these things to think about, that's like the code, you...

Bill started to take Think Weeks back in the 90s when he was still running Microsoft. He would travel the Hood Canal and spend one week there alone, r...

If you want to think new thoughts that are different, then do what a lot of creative people do - get the problem reasonably clear and then refuse to l...

Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that ...

If you believe too much you'll never notice the flaws; if you doubt too much you won't get started. It requires a lovely balance.

- read and code CONSTANTLY. everything is changing so quickly—the tinkerers and voracious learners will win

A few books I recommend: 'Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain' — It’s about neuroplasticity, and the role of the Dalai Lama and the Buddhist community ...

'Crystal Nights' by Greg Egan, 'The Last Question' by Isaac Asimov, and 'The Gentle Seduction' by Marc Stiegler. They’re all about the development of ...

“We’re all hanging out in this cabana… & Elon is there reading some obscure Soviet rocket manual that was all moldy & looked like it had been bought o...

After he sold PayPal, he started donating money to an organization called the Mars Society and hanging out there seeing what the plans were. He though...

When I highlight something from a book that contains an idea, concept, metaphor, or generally something more abstract, I’ll put it into my Zettelkaste...

When I come across something in a book that seems useful to understand and remember, I will highlight it on my Kindle and add a note to it with the te...

Anything that I find that’s important, I’ll highlight on my Kindle. All of those highlights automatically go to my Readwise where I can add them to my...

I pick books by browsing Amazon and sending samples to my Kindle. Then I check out the samples to decide what I want to actually read cover to cover. ...

The one thing I do try to follow is to go on streaks of reading a lot of books on a particular topic around the same time. Doing this is useful becaus...

As I started to read more, the question was whether to go deep or wide. I am curious about so many things, so I naturally gravitated to read widely. I...

When I started managing, I felt a strong obligation to be the best lead I could for the team. Managing is a big responsibility — and it’s especially c...

Reid recommends studying Ludwig Wittgenstein, about whom he’s taught a course at Oxford. “One of the bedrocks of modern analytic philosophy is to thin...

Copying is a good way to learn, but copy the right things. When I was in college I imitated the pompous diction of famous professors. But this wasn't ...

Working on small things is also a good way to learn. The most important kinds of learning happen one project at a time. ('Next time, I won't...') The ...

The Achilles heel of successful companies is their inability to cannibalize themselves. Many innovations consist of replacing something with a cheaper...

My all time favorite is Lying by Sam Harris.

Loonshots, about the culture of Silicon Valley.

Uninhabited Earth, about the climate crisis, something I’ve been passionate about for a long time.

My favorite economics book is Third Pillar, which is about the need for community in capitalism, and how politics, capitalists and community need to p...

My favorite technical book is Life On the Edge, which is about quantum biology.

What’s really useful to a founder if you have a good board, is focus on the two or three questions that you most need feedback on. In private company ...

Well, I always say my willingness to fail is what has allowed me to succeed. And not being embarrassed about large failures I’ve had, has given me the...

Find vivid examples of success in the domains you care about. If you want to become a great scientist, try to find ways to spend time with good (or, i...

Aim to read a lot.

In particular, try to go deep on multiple things. (To varying degrees, I tried to go deep on languages, programming, writing, physics, math. Some of t...

[On reading] I’m trying to strip out all the stuff in the middle. What I’ve discovered is the number of people who can write something in the middle z...

Really valuable to keep a personal document - so not one that lives on your work servers - as you traverse your career you are going to learn what giv...

Yet no matter what you say to him, no matter what he learns, he will profit little from it if in his innermost heart he lacks that sacred flame, that ...

Historical fact… cannot be ascertained when events actually occur, in the heat of contrary passions; and if, later on, there is a consensus, this is o...

History I conquered rather than studied: that is to say, I wanted from it and retained of it only what could add to my ideas, I spurned what was of no...

Finally, use your time to learn what you do not know - cavalry, infantry and artillery tactics and the administration of justice and of finance.

Nations and individuals alike learn only from their own experience - and, most of the time, from misfortunes.

The true wisdom of the nations is experience.

What is a theory? Mere nonsense, if you want to apply it to human masses.

It is dangerous to give too extensive a knowledge of mathematics to people who are not rich.

The most important thing about evaluating someone is their rate of improvement.

Learn, voraciously.

It’s important to learn that you can learn anything you want, and that you can get better quickly.

‘The Mind of Napoleon’. The thing that stuck with me the most — and this is a trait we see among many of our good founders — was not his operational e...

Short stories? ‘Crystal Nights’ by Greg Egan, ‘The Last Question’ by Isaac Asimov, and 'The Gentle Seduction' by Marc Stiegler. They’re all about the ...

Luck isn’t a constant, it increases with surface area: be in the right places, have lots of conversations, put yourself out there, ask for what you wa...

It isn't that you only do a little great work at this circumstance and that was luck, there are many opportunities sooner or later. There are a whole ...

I use TODOIST.com as my todo application manager and have the following routine: Every morning, I check the list of tasks of the day and rank them by ...

What you do is this: every time you do something—anything—useful during the day, write it down in your Anti-Todo List on the card. Each time you do so...

Each night before you go to bed, prepare a 3x5 index card with a short list of 3 to 5 things that you will do the next day. And then, the next day, do...

Keep three and only three lists: a Todo List, a Watch List, and a Later List... Into the Todo List goes all the stuff you “must” do—commitments, oblig...

A to-do tool where it is very simple to add and move items. I use a well-organised TODOIST because having a list of notifications is overwhelming. I u...

It was a whimsical economy of the same kind which dictated [Napoleon’s] practice, when general in Italy, in regard to his burdensome correspondence. H...

My system has three key pillars: ‘Make sure to get the important shit done’, ‘Don’t waste time on stupid shit’, and ‘make a lot of lists.’

Peter [Thiel] would enforce this pretty strictly. He would say, I will not talk to you about anything else besides than this one thing I assigned you....

So I am going to argue that you need to spend a lot of time focusing on people. This is something I learned from Peter Thiel actually. He used to insi...

And that's actually what you want to do with every since employee, every single day, is expand the scope of responsibilities until it breaks. And it w...

So what I basically believe is where there is low consequence and you have very low confidence in your own opinion, you should absolutely delegate. An...

Delegating vs doing it yourself. You don't want to do it yourself too often. So I basically borrowed from Peter, this is my first two by two matrix ev...

So it's actually a good thing if you do reference checks on somebody and half the people you call say they are a micromanager and the other half say t...

[On delegation] First, and this actually came from High Output Management and Andy Grove, is called task relevant maturity. It's a fancy phrase for, h...

Next complicated topic is delegating. So just like the other metaphor on editing is writers do most of the work in the world, editors are not writing ...

The people who work with you, generally, should be coming up with their own initiatives. So a reporter, generally, who covers Google will come up with...

Now the next thing you do is you allocate resources. So the editor construct, this is what editors do all the time. They take editors from the Mideast...

[On asking clarifying questions] We try to narrow down to, what are the one two three four things that matter most to this company? And only focus on ...

Second thing editors do, is they ask you clarifying questions. When you present a paper to someone, what do they usually do? They find some ambiguity ...

Don't accept the excuse of complexity. A lot of people will tell you, this is too challenging, this is too complicated, yeah well I know other people ...

The first thing an editor does and you have all probably had this experience in school, is you submit a paper, to a TA, a draft to your friend, and th...

So one of the most important things I learned at Square is the concept of editing. And this is the best metaphor I have ever seen in 14 years of runni...

[On productivity] Turn off notifications. Quit Slack when you're doing deep work. Check your emails once a day and just literally go through them in f...

It's not something I've changed, it's more something that our head of design, Diego, has changed. Basically having designers spend more time creating ...

So my partner bought me this WHOOP recently. Wearing it now. It gives you this real-time stress signal. That's pretty helpful. But I think it's a grea...

And I think an important element there is the initial people you hire end up impacting the next batch and the next set because they see, "Wow, this pe...

And so I can write blogs all day on how we increased velocity, but if there's one thing to take away from this is that empowered and talented engineer...

Typically, the folks that join product teams are the highest performers outside of product that either understand the customer really well and can adv...

We look for people who have a very strong desire to have impact. And the best way to assess that is the impact that they've had or the reason why they...

Your job is to make sure that they're aligned with the long-term vision and that they can deliver what they've committed to, but on top of that, they ...

[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 real...

So making everyone feel like a PM is a great way to get leverage as a PM, and that means basically empowering the designer to think about the actual s...

So that's what I would do is just spend a lot more time on the processing, be extremely good at just task management, and then grouping things, and th...

I don't spend time just grooming. So at the end of the day, I use notes. I have just a page-long thing of all the things I need to get done, all the t...

If you're a manager and, like me, you're in back-to-back meetings from 10:00 to 6:00, it's very easy to be completely overwhelmed with a sheer amount ...

Because we're really anti-meeting at Ramp, I had time in my calendar. And so what I would basically do is the Friday before I clocked out, I would loo...

All these things are really tough. And I found myself ... You could read things and that's helpful, but I don't think that reading makes you necessari...

Throughout the years at Ramp, I was often faced with a problem or a question that I couldn't answer off the bat, and I had to go back to first princip...

And what better way of holding the product team accountable for support other than having support report into product. And the second piece was that w...

So support reports into me. And the first principle there was saying, "Well, every support ticket is a failure of our product." We literally have that...

And the way to do that is to, again, align on that goal and give it to them and to problems to solve. If everyone feels like it's their team, it's the...

And I think that oftentimes CEOs would say, or leaders would say, "Hey, we've got increased velocity, therefore let's just add these status meetings a...

Yeah. And you have to create a system by which those folks are getting that feedback. And so we've really focused on what are the control mechanisms t...

And, again, it didn't use to start that way. I mean, when we first started, it was just me and another PM. I was fairly micromanaging in some areas. I...

You should be debating the interpretation of data, you should be debating the hypotheses and the different ideas that you have there as to what's real...

And so that's where you really just start alignment is, what is the goal that you're going after? What is the hypothesis that you have to reach that g...

And that product is moving in billions of dollars a year. And I think the recipe for all this is constantly small teams have a single-threaded focus, ...

There is a tendency to get to 95% done instead of 100% done. This creates ongoing project debt and mental overhead. It means that projects extend for ...

We start every project by aligning on the definition of done. We fight to avoid expanding the definition during the project without reason. This allow...

I don't really work with people who are not excellent. The way I define people who are excellent, strong, average, or below average is pretty simple. ...

[On assessing performance] Well, they just give them the goals. Then you have weekly or bi-weekly catchups, and they show you what they produced. You ...

So what I basically believe is where there is low consequence and you have very low confidence in your own opinion, you should absolutely delegate. An...

So how do you both delegate but not abdicate? It's a pretty tricky challenge, both are sins. You over delegate and you abdicate, or you micromanage, t...

Second thing editors do, is they ask you clarifying questions. When you present a paper to someone, what do they usually do? They find some ambiguity ...

Basically eliminating things, the biggest task of an editor is to simplify, simplify, simplify and that usually means omitting things. So that's your ...

You have to not micromanage. You have to continually give people small areas of responsibility. These are not the things that founders think about. I ...

Whenever there are problems to solve, don’t just meet with your managers. Do a skip level, where you meet with the level right below your managers.

'Musk found himself flying across the country to pay visits - sometimes surprise ones - on the contractors to check on their progress'

Any given “bet” you take is likely to fail. Success is making lots of “bets” and trying as hard as possible at each of them. P(success) is higher the ...

You are probably too risk-averse. Write out the worst things that can happen, realize they’re not that bad, then take the leap.

I learned early on that no matter how smart you are, you cannot predict what will happen. For me, the best approach is to try things and use quantitat...

founders are not actually risk takers, they are risk mitigators. They understand all the variables [that] could go wrong in their business and they wo...

Like the decision to forgo slosh baffles on the early version of the Falcon 1, taking these risks turned out to be a mistake. It’s unlikely that NASA ...

We have a culture of taking risks. I prefer you take a shot. I’d rather have someone who gets A, F, F, A than someone that gets B+, B+, B+, B+. I pref...

Turns out the answer is tomorrow, and the reason it's useful for you is you will always have enough time for the things you choose to prioritize. And ...

How does responsibility constrain you? The worst thing is that it allows you not to focus on real work. Just as the most dangerous forms of procrastin...

The lives of the eminent become scheduled, and that's not good for thinking. One of the great advantages of being an outsider is long, uninterrupted b...

A very structured calendar to have time for unstructured thinking. No meeting in the morning with focus time on deep topics. Dedicated time where I ch...

Only agree to new commitments when both your head and your heart say yes... In my experience, it takes time to tell the difference between your head ...

If it doesn’t go on the calendar, it is not getting done.

The big thing is basically *everything* is on the calendar. Sleep is on the calendar, going to bed is in there and so is free time. Free time is criti...

I make sure to leave enough time in my schedule to think about what to work on. The best ways for me to do this are reading books, hanging out with in...

[What should meeting minutes include?] Minutes should tell the reader what is to be done, who is to do it, and when, and they should be sent out quick...

[What should a meeting agenda include?] An agenda should clearly state the purpose of the meeting, as well as what role everybody there is expected to...

[Who should attend a mission-oriented meeting?] The chairman must identify who should attend and then try to get those people to come. If someone invi...

[How to assess meeting frequency?] The real sign of malorganization is when people spend more than 25 percent of their time in ad hoc mission-oriented...

[When should you call a meeting?] Before calling a meeting, ask yourself: What am I trying to accomplish? Is a meeting necessary? Or desirable? Or jus...

[How to justify the cost of meetings?] Determine the purpose of a meeting before committing your time and your company’s resources. Get it called off ...

[What is the ideal size of a decision-making meeting?] Keep in mind that a meeting called to make a specific decision is hard to keep moving if more t...

[Why are meeting minutes important?] Once the meeting is over, the chairman must send out minutes that summarize the discussion, the decision made, an...

[What logistical responsibilities does the chairman have?] The chairman should ensure all necessary equipment is present, send out an agenda that stat...

[What is the chairman's key responsibility?] The chairman must have a clear understanding of the meeting’s objective—what needs to happen and what dec...

[How to handle lateness at meetings?] It is criminal for the chairman to allow people to be late and waste everyone’s time. Wasting time means wasting...

[What is a mission-oriented meeting?] A mission-oriented meeting is usually held ad hoc and is designed to produce a specific output, frequently a dec...

[How should the audience view their role?] Regard attendance at the meeting for what it is: work.

[How can operation reviews motivate managers?] Managers making the presentations will want to leave a good impression on their supervisor’s supervisor...

[Who should organize the operation review?] The supervisor of the presenting managers should organize the meeting, help the presenters decide what to ...

[What is the role of the reviewing manager?] The reviewing manager should ask questions, make comments, and in general impart the appropriate spirit t...

[How should the supervisor manage time during presentations?] The supervisor should pace the presenters using inconspicuous gestures, so that the mana...

[Why should the reviewing manager avoid previewing the material?] The reviewing manager should never preview the material, since that will keep him fr...

[How should presenters use visual aids?] Presenters should use visual aids such as tables, numbers, or graphics and aim for four minutes of presentati...

[How can presenters gauge audience engagement?] A presenter has to watch his audience like a hawk. Facial expressions and body language will tell him ...

[Why are operation reviews important for junior and senior managers?] The junior person will benefit from the comments, criticisms, and suggestions of...

[How should the audience approach participation?] If a presenter makes a factual error, it is your responsibility to go on record. Lack of interest un...

[What is the audience's role in an operation review?] The audience participates by asking questions and making comments, paying attention, and contrib...

[What is the purpose of an operation review?] The basic purpose of an operation review is to keep the teaching and learning going on between employees...

Peer interaction—especially decision-making by a group of peers—is not easy. Yet it is key to good management.

[What should be discussed at a staff meeting?] Anything that affects more than two of the people present.

A supervisor should never use staff meetings to pontificate, which is the surest way to undermine free discussion and hence the meeting’s basic purpos...

Staff meetings are an ideal medium for decision-making, because the group of managers present has typically worked together for a long time.

[How structured should the meeting be?] It should be mostly controlled, with an agenda issued far enough in advance that the subordinates will have ha...

[What should a meeting agenda include?] It should also include an 'open session'—a designated period of time for the staff to bring up anything they w...

[How to maintain effectiveness in meetings?] The supervisor should keep things on track, with the subordinates bearing the brunt of working the issues...

[If the meeting degenerates into a conversation between two people] the supervisor should break it off and move on to something else that will include...

[What is the role of the supervisor in the staff meeting?] The supervisor’s most important roles are being a meeting’s moderator and facilitator, and ...

A staff meeting is one in which a supervisor and all of his subordinates participate, and which therefore presents an opportunity for interaction amon...

[About scheduling meetings] One-on-ones should be scheduled on a rolling basis—setting up the next one as the meeting taking place ends.

[About preparation for meetings] With an outline, the supervisor knows at the outset what is to be covered and can therefore help to set the pace of t...

[About preparation for meetings] The subordinate should be asked to prepare an outline, which is very important because it forces him to think through...

[About techniques for effective questioning] Ask one more question! When the supervisor thinks the subordinate has said all he wants to about a subjec...

[About shared understanding] By sharing his base of information with me, the two of us developed a congruent attitude, approach, and conclusion.

[About the leverage of one-on-one meetings] Ninety minutes of your time can enhance the quality of your subordinate’s work for two weeks, or for some ...

[About the supervisor’s role] The supervisor is there to learn and to coach. The good time users among managers do not talk to their subordinates abou...

[About discussing deeper issues] The supervisor should encourage the discussion of heart-to-heart issues during one-on-ones, because this is the perfe...

[About note-taking during meetings] Many issues in a one-on-one lead to action required on the part of the subordinate. When he takes a note immediate...

[About time-saving methods] A real time-saver is using a hold file where both the supervisor and subordinate accumulate important but not altogether u...

[About how long one-on-one meetings should last] I feel that a one-on-one should last an hour at a minimum. Anything less, in my experience, tends to ...

[About note-taking during meetings] Both the supervisor and subordinate should have a copy of the outline and both should take notes on it, which serv...

[About what should be covered in one-on-one meetings] The meeting should cover anything important that has happened since the last meeting: current hi...

[About where one-on-one meetings should take place] I think you should have the meeting in or near the subordinate’s work area if possible. A supervis...

[About the subordinate’s role] It should be regarded as the subordinate’s meeting, with its agenda and tone set by him.

[About how long one-on-one meetings should last] The subordinate must feel that there is enough time to broach and get into thorny issues.

At Intel, a one-on-one is a meeting between a supervisor and a subordinate, and it is the principal way their business relationship is maintained. Its...

At Intel we use three kinds of process-oriented meetings: the one-on-one, the staff meeting, and the operation review.

To make the most of this kind of meeting [process-oriented meeting], we should aim to infuse it with regularity. In other words, the people attending ...

The two basic managerial roles produce two basic kinds of meetings. In the first kind of meeting, called a process-oriented meeting, knowledge is shar...

But there is another way to regard meetings. Earlier we said that a big part of a middle manager’s work is to supply information and know-how, and to ...

Tell the right stories about yourself. One of the more underrated insights you can get from reading self-help books is that the story you tell yoursel...

To stay calm under pressure, you need a lot of energy. To have a lot of energy, you need to build a lifestyle that brings energy—like through sports.

Highs that don’t lead to subsequent lows: • Meditation, gratitude, prayer, journaling, unconditional love. • Yoga, exercise, play, nature walks. • ...

If you really want to be a first-class scientist you need to know yourself, your weaknesses, your strengths, and your bad faults, like my egotism. How...

'Their decisions go bad. Elon gets hyperrational. He’s still able to make very clear, longterm decisions. The harder it gets, the better he gets. Anyo...

[On church bells ringing] Quite often people thought I was meditating on a campaign plan or a law when I was simply resting my mind by abandoning myse...

You know, my dear doctor, the art of healing is simply the art of lulling and calming the imagination.

You must tranquilize your mind: this is the best way to cure the body.

Be very suspicious of a priori arguments on empirical matters (e.g. “AI will certainly kill everyone”), they’re usually wrong no matter how convincing...

Understand power laws. Outlier math rules all.

If you really can’t disprove something, it has a chance of being right. (Fallibilism.)

Form opinions on things and then find the strongest critique of those opinions. Repeat.

Map out problems using logic trees. This is a classic problem-solving and brainstorming technique, also known as morphological analysis. It’ll be fami...

Whenever you make a claim or an argument, try and imagine the strongest possible argument against it. In chess, a thing that distinguishes a good play...

A related helpful thinking technique is putting bounds on things: “well, it’s not as high as X, and it’s not as low as Y, so given that it’s somewhere...

Get in the habit of Fermi estimation, looking up key quantities, and using upper and lower bounds. I’ve noticed a lot of the smartest people I know do...

To end this part, I'll remind you, it is a poor workman who blames his tools - the good man gets on with the job, given what he's got, and gets the be...

I think that if you look carefully you will see that often the great scientists, by turning the problem around a bit, changed a defect to an asset.

[On why he runs his company] I’m surprised no one asks this, but I ask myself many times. I have two answers: a) what else to do, and b) I need to do ...

[On success] If you define success by the percentage of goals reached, it’s very simple. If your goal is to be happily married with kids and you achie...

Obviously, if you achieve something great, you need to celebrate. For me, it's about five minutes of happiness before moving on to the next big thing.

From 2007 onwards, until maybe last year, it’s been nonstop pain. There’s a gun to your head, make Tesla work, pull a rabbit out of your hat, then pul...

“Technology does not automatically progress,” Musk said. “This flight was a great example of how progress requires human agency.”

Performance. Do you bring it everyday? You can’t always be at 110%, but when it’s playoff time the great players know how to bring it. You have to tak...

give yourself a lot of shots to get lucky is even better advice than it appears on the surface. luck isn’t an independent variable but increases super...

Ninety-nine percent of people in the world are convinced they are incapable of achieving great things, so they aim for the mediocre. The level of comp...

Work has ups and downs. Don't let the downs spook you. When you hit a down, you'll feel like you're never going to have another idea. But don't worry,...

I found out many times, like a cornered rat in a real trap, I was surprisingly capable. I have found that it paid to say, oh yes, I'll get the answer ...

The steady application of effort with a little bit more work, intelligently applied is what does it. That's the trouble; drive, misapplied, doesn't ge...

What you believe determines what you think. What you think determines what you prioritize, and what you prioritize determines of what you do, and what...

- don’t be intimidated. most of what is changing the world today has been invented in the past few years. we are all novices

When on rising from sleep a man does not know what to do with himself and drags his tedious existence from place to place; when, scanning the future, ...

Something about focus and determination and drive to win and perform at your highest level. I think one thing that is a really important thing to stri...

Managing your own morale—and your team’s morale—is one of the greatest challenges of most endeavours. It’s almost impossible without a lot of self-bel...

Like most people, I sometimes go through periods of a week or two where I just have no motivation to do anything (I suspect it may have something to d...

Self-belief is immensely powerful. The most successful people I know believe in themselves almost to the point of delusion. Cultivate this early. As y...

Don’t network, make friends. Writing online is great for bringing interesting people your way. Having a wide network of friends really makes a differe...

There are some people who, after you talk to them, you feel more energized and you want to conquer the world or climb a mountain or something. They’re...

Send more cold emails. People respond! Assume everyone’s your friend.

The world's a small place. Silicon Valley is an incredibly small place. And one of the taglines I have is friends come and go, enemies accumulate. And...

My best and most general life advice: Seek positive-sum systems and relationships; avoid zero/negative-sum systems and relationships

I think it's very valuable to have first-class people around. I sought out the best people. The moment that physics table lost the best people, I left...

In general, I think networking is a waste of time. If you focus on building something great or solving a specific problem, those things lead you to me...

'He realised that just by being in Los Angeles he would be surrounded be the world’s top aeronautics thinkers. They could help him refine any ideas, a...

But having good social skills confers life-long benefits. So, don't write them off. Get good at making a good first impression, being funny (if possib...

Make friends over the internet with people who are great at things you're interested in. The internet is one of the biggest advantages you have over p...

Go out of your way to be around smart, interesting, ambitious people. Work for them and hire them (in fact, one of the most satisfying parts of work i...

I make it a point to meet and help as many smart people as I can; besides being fun and interesting, this is important to getting things done.

Doing great work usually requires colleagues of some sort. Try to be around smart, productive, happy, and positive people that don’t belittle your amb...

Finally around metrics. One insight I have had over my career is what you, you kind of want to look for the anomalies. You don't actually want to look...

[On pairing indicators] What you want to measure at the same rate as your fraud rate, is your false positive rate. That forces the team to actually in...

And finally, metrics. So you want to measure things. You want to measure outputs, not inputs. And again, you should dictate this yourself. You should ...

Another thing we did at Square is when we scaled, not everybody is going to get invited to every meeting, but they are going to want to go to every me...

Another concept is transparency. Transparency people talk a lot about, it's a goal everybody ascribes to but when push comes to shove, very few people...

You don't want to be making all these decisions yourself. You have to create tools that enable people to make decisions at the same level you would ma...

So a good way to keep momentum is to establish an operating rhythm at the company early. Where you ship product and launch new features on a regular b...

Every week we meet with all of the stakeholders and we go through in an hour and a half, two hours, we go through every element of the strategy for ac...

The second thing that I would say is the biggest waste of time is meetings and status updates. And I think that oftentimes CEOs would say, or leaders ...

Your organizational setup has a huge influence on speed of execution: 'Design your org the way you want your product to perform. Ultimately, you ship ...

Build a strong organisational system… Systems that scale are flexible… But they have some core elements… Use the architecture analogy: you have some s...

“I’m a big believer that a small number of exceptional people who are highly motivated can do better than a large number of people who are pretty good...

Regardless of your specific job, it is vital to our team that you do that job at the highest possible level in all its various aspects, both mental an...

Don’t sleep too much. Oversleeping also comes at the cost of time you’ll never get back. Moreover, there’s a good amount of evidence that sleeping mor...

I do a lot of sports. So at least once a day I try to train. So I either do swimming or gym and I think that's a must. Do exercise for all entrepreneu...

Reasons to lift weights: 1. Boosts metabolism 2. Builds lean muscle 3. Enhances mood 4. Strengthens bones 5. Improves sleep quality I have been...

I have an efficient workout. I lift weights twice a week, usually Monday and Tuesday, because I find that I can stall travel until Tuesday at 9:00 a.m...

Also, staying in shape is critical. I wake up at 4:30 a.m. to work out. It’s a commitment to have your mind and body as healthy as possible so you are...

If you want to get more serious about it, David Sinclair's podcasts and stuff are good to listen to. A Harvard professor who is into longevity and he ...

The intermittent fasting stuff is talked about, but it's not very precise often. When you fast, how do you fast. OMAD is something that a lot of tech ...

Number two, if you're interested in health, there's a few things that I think are producing pretty darn good results now among like the tech crew, whe...

The oxygen mask rule: ‘you can’t help your company if you’re not able to perform at your best. Create routines to stay physically, emotionally, and me...

'He’s built like a tank,' she said. 'He has a level of stamina and an ability to deal with levels of stress that I’ve never seen in anyone else.'

The soldier's health must come before economy or any other consideration.

Breakfasted with Napoleon in the garden. Had a long medical argument with him, in which he maintained that his practice in case of malady - to eat not...

But my Excel model for weight lifting is beautiful because they’re numbers that go up and to the right, and it’s really fun to play around with that.

Exercise is probably the second most important physical factor. I tried a number of different exercise programs for a few months each and the one that...

Do a review of your year, every year, write it out, figure out what was good and what was bad, use this to make your goals for the next year.

Do a weekly review. Every Sunday, sit down for an hour with a text editor and review your week. What went well, what went poorly, and what you’re aimi...

A few extremely well-chosen objectives impart a clear message about what we say “yes” to and what we say “no” to.

[What is the purpose of MBO?] MBO is designed to provide feedback relevant to the specific task at hand, telling us how we are doing so we can make ad...

A successful MBO system needs only to answer two questions: Where do I want to go? (The objective.) How will I pace myself to see if I am getting ther...

[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...

[Why is clarity important in planning?] If you don’t know where you’re going, you will not get there.

[What is the key benefit of MBO?] The one thing an MBO system should provide par excellence is focus.

[What is an example of an objective and key results?] I want to go to the airport to catch a plane in an hour. That is my objective. My key results be...

[Why is focus crucial in planning?] If we try to focus on everything, we focus on nothing.

Management by objectives—MBO—concentrates on steps 2 and 3 of the planning process and tries very hard to make them specific.

[What is required for effective resource allocation?] People who plan must have the guts, honesty, and discipline to drop projects as well as to initi...

[How often should planning occur?] We should avoid planning too frequently, allowing time to judge the impact of our decisions and to gather indispens...

[What is the purpose of a plan?] The output of the planning process is the decisions made and the actions taken as a result of the process.

[What is planning's role in management?] Planning is a key managerial activity with enormous leverage through its impact on the future performance of ...

[What should planners remember about commitments?] By saying “yes” to something, you are implicitly saying “no” to something else.

[What is the true output of the planning process?] The true output of the planning process is the set of tasks it causes to be implemented.

[Who should be involved in planning?] The operating management of the organization, because planners cannot be separate from those implementing the pl...

[How far ahead should planners look?] At Intel, we examine our future five years off, but the real influence is on the next year—and only the next yea...

[How should gaps in performance be addressed?] Today’s gap represents a failure of planning sometime in the past. Concentrate on what you have to do t...

[What is the key to effective planning?] The key to planning is producing tasks that have to be performed now in order to affect future events.

[How strategies and tactics differ by level] A strategy at one managerial level is often the tactical concern of the next higher level.

[About analyzing demand over time] Focus on the difference between what your environment demands from you now and what you expect it to demand in the ...

[About determining your present status] List your present capabilities and projects in progress using the same terms or “currency” in which you stated...

[About evaluating your environment] You should determine your customers’ expectations and their perception of your performance, keep abreast of techno...

[How to close the gap between demand and output] Undertake new tasks or modify existing ones to close the gap between your environmental demand and wh...

[Why not consider practical steps early?] Considering practical steps too early can confuse the issue and prevent adequate planning for real demand.

[About accounting for incomplete projects] Factor in a percentage of loss for incomplete or scrapped projects when forecasting your output.

[On defining strategy vs. tactics] The most abstract and general summary of your planned actions is your strategy, while the specific steps you’ll tak...

[About defining your environment] Your environment is made up of other groups that directly influence what you do, such as customers, vendors, and com...

[How should general planning be structured?] Step 1 is to establish projected need or demand: What will the environment demand from you, your business...

[What is step 3 in general planning?] Step 3 is to compare and reconcile steps 1 and 2: What more (or less) do you need to do to produce what your env...

[What is the dynamics of planning?] The dynamics of planning can best be understood by going back to basic production principles, focusing on forecast...

[How to think about your present status in planning?] Put another way, where will your business be if you do nothing different from what you are now d...

[What is step 2 in general planning?] Step 2 is to establish your present status: What are you producing now? What will you be producing as your proje...

[How is factory planning summarized?] Step 1, determine the market demand for product; step 2, establish what the factory will produce if no adjustmen...

Planning is an ordinary everyday activity; it’s something all of us do all the time with no fanfare, in both our personal and professional lives.

And surely, I thought I was coming into Ramp and I was going to apply the best product process, and I had to shift that process entirely because the p...

And ultimately, if your product roadmap doesn't actually hit the goals of the company, then I'm accountable because I've created a system by which I'v...

I think that, again, strategy, financial plan, roadmap. I think where we landed on with OKRs were really around more cross-functional things in nature...

We've gone through iterations, good and bad, I think. For a period of time at Ramp, we created OKRs with financial goals and quotas to some extent for...

Correct. And now every pod basically spends time writing that doc for themselves. So the pods are basically organized against outcomes, so they should...

Strategy means a lot of different things. In my mind, strategy is about how do we get to our goals? And it's not a roadmap and it's not a vision, it's...

And I think that for us, we've always been, from the start, the spend management platform that helps you spend less. Our strategy ... I share an annua...

As we grew bigger, we started planning for longer time frames. We still plan precisely for a quarter to a year and have longer-term plans. In reality,...

When I started, I didn't think about the next 5 or 10 years. I was just trying to survive as a business. It was simple: we focused on a three-month vi...

I arrived with an urgent timetable for installing an agenda of specific behavioral norms - actions and attitudes - that applied to every single person...

The only rules are the ones dictated by the laws of physics. Everything else is a recommendation.

Almost everyone's initial plan is broken. If companies stuck to their initial plans, Microsoft would be selling programming languages, and Apple would...

Still, Son insists we should keep our eyes fixed on the future, looking 100, 200 or 300 years ahead rather than paying too much attention to the passi...

At the age of 19, Son wrote a 50-year life plan to build a business empire. Now 45 years later, aged 64, he still regiments his life, dividing his dai...

Musk also trained employees to make the right trade-offs between spending money and productivity… ‘He would say that everything we did was a function ...

What Musk would not tolerate were excuses or the lack of a clear plan of attack. Hollman was one of many engineers who arrived at this realization aft...

The very first thing I do when I get up, almost always, is to sit down and work on that problem [I’ve set the day before] because that’s when I’m fres...

I have come to learn that part of the business strategy is to solve the simplest, easiest, and most valuable problem. And actually, in fact, part of d...

This technique can be generalized to any sort of work: if you're an outsider, don't be ruled by plans. Planning is often just a weakness forced on tho...

One [checklist] I review weekly with medium-to-long-term things I’m thinking about. (Lots of Stripe things, friends, skills I want to learn, people I ...

Yeah, we’re basically all about inputs. It’s basically process versus outcome. And it’s exactly for the reason you said. Venture capital is too elonga...

One, about every six months or so I feel overwhelmed. It all starts to kind of get away from me. And so typically about every six months, I’ll basical...

The head of an army must calculate the needs of all his generals on the basis of their positions and circumstances and not let their requests determin...

In order to know whether his administration is good or bad, whether his laws are in harmony with custom, my son should ask for a yearly report on the ...

Men take only their needs into consideration - never their abilities.

This is how the smallest events change the destinies of the world. The mistakes of our enemies often are more useful to them than their abilities and ...

In planning the Moravian campaign, the Emperor understood that the Russians, since they lacked a first rate general, would think that the line of retr...

I always have loved to analyse, and if I ever fell seriously in love I would take my love apart piece by piece.

There is no man more pusillanimous than I when I am planning a campaign. I purposely exaggerate all the dangers and all the calamities that the circum...

My policies are frank and open, because they are the results of long meditations and of strength.

A consecutive series of great actions never is the result of chance and luck; it is always the product of planning and genius. Great men are rarely kn...

In war nothing can be gained except by calculation. Whatever has not been profoundly meditated in all its details is totally ineffectual.

If I appear always ready to answer for everything and to meet everything, it’s because, before entering on an undertaking, I have meditated for a long...

Military science consists in first calculating all the possibilities accurately and then in making an almost mathematically exact allowance for accide...

There’s a man for you! He is forced to flee from an army that he dares not fight, but he puts eighty leagues of devastation between himself and his pu...

The great art of winning a battle consists in changing one’s line of operations in the middle of the action. This idea is entirely my own and altogeth...

But strategy alone has no value—value gets captured by execution.

One specific thing I do, which is sort of become this annual ritual I really like, is December 31st every year I take a break from vacation and I sit ...

Have clear goals for yourself every day, every year, and every decade.

I had few really definite ideas, and the reason for this was that, instead of obstinately seeking to control circumstances, I obeyed them, and they fo...

In order to govern, the question is not to follow out a more or less valid theory but to build with whatever materials are at hand. The inevitable mus...

- try to develop your own principles. the physics of technology totally changed. nobody truly understands how AI has changed the game yet—you can lead...

Figure out what your primary focus is and make progress on that every day, first thing in the morning, no exceptions. Days with 0 output are the kille...

I would say 12 months. I don’t do my best every second—who does?—but I try to bring my best every day. Even then, you might have a day or a week where...

I think it depends on your age. In my 20s, I never really had a five-year plan. I prioritized pursuing new opportunities more than imagining where I’d...

I’m wrong all the time; as Yoda says in The Last Jedi—“The greatest teacher, failure is.” When I realize I’m wrong about an investment decision, for e...

Everything! My fantasy is omniscience. I used to watch Groundhog Day and daydream that if I were stuck in a time loop, I’d go back to university and r...

I frequently reassess my routines and ask myself, 'Am I accomplishing what I want to accomplish?' That means taking the time to think about what reall...

[When starting a company] You need to address an authentic, personal problem, not just manufacture an idea because you think there’s a market opportun...

Friends come and go; enemies accumulate. At Sequoia, we meet with thousands of companies every year, and only partner with 15-20. That’s thousands of ...

Unfortunately the trick to great execution is to say no a lot. You’re saying no ninety-seven times out of a hundred, and most founders find they have ...

What you focus on is what you improve. Most founders don’t build great products because they focus on things that aren’t important like investors, hi...

In summary, I claim that some of the reasons why so many people who have greatness within their grasp don't succeed are: they don't work on important ...

there are a lot of things you want to do that you are never going to get done. embracing that is the key to accomplishing the things you *really* wan...

there are a lot of things you want to do that you are never going to get done. embracing that is the key to accomplishing the things you *really* wan...

Focus intensely on the things that do matter. Every day, figure out what the 2 or 3 most important things for you to do are. Do those and ignore other...

The founders that are really successful are relentless about making sure they get to their top two or three priorities each day (as part of this, they...

I am relentless about getting my most important projects done—I’ve found that if I really want something to happen and I push hard enough, it usually ...

[On additional features causing product complexity] Solve this problem through interface design. The interface should be super simple—show the right p...

To win in the market, you need to be product strategy-driven, not sales or marketing-driven. You need to believe that the product strategy will delive...

The best possible roadmap is have a very clear guide view of what matters to your merchant, have a super strong model of your own capabilities as a co...

If your product seems finished, there are two possible explanations: (a) it is finished, or (b) you lack imagination. Experience suggests (b) is a tho...

I think the solution is to assume that anything you've made is far short of what it could be. Force yourself, as a sort of intellectual exercise, to k...

Perhaps the most important reason to release early, though, is that it makes you work harder. When you're working on something that isn't released, pr...

Maximize your baseline energy levels. There is the obvious stuff: figure out a personal exercise practice and do it at least five days a week (I like ...

[On what makes Sequoia so successful] I think it's grit, persistence, tenacity, determination, never/refusing to give up, not tolerating low performer...

So then there's this question of how do you figure out what to focus on each day. Each day it's really important to have goals. Most good founders I k...

Writing is a design problem. Example: never use the idiom of ‘the former or the latter.’ It forces the reader to go back and figure out what you’re re...

Break the rules once you learn the rules. Write in your authentic voice. Tell a story. Use adjectives. Write poetry. Learn which word choices unlock a...

Skim Strunk & White once in a while. You don’t need to read the whole book at once. Also read The Day You Became a Better Writer.

Use persuasion checklists like CLASSR and SUCCES.

Don’t apologize. Don’t qualify, apologize or anticipate arguments. Just say it. Some people will never understand that BOCTAOE. You can always put an ...

Kill your darlings. Delete beautiful ideas and phrases if they don’t help the customer solve their problem.

Scrutinize every word for bias and rhetoric. Are they an ‘unruly mob’ or ‘patriots’? Perhaps neither—just call them by their name. Argue the other sid...

Avoid adjectives. Use numbers instead. An adjective is an admission that you don’t know the number.

Delete half the words. Say more with less. That’s good customer service. “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.”

Writing is rewriting. Write down your thoughts in a stream of consciousness. Don’t get hung up on diction. Then spend most of your time rewriting and ...

Start with a summary. A good summary absolves the reader from reading further. But they will still want to.

Don’t write your thought process. The final draft shouldn’t mimic the path you took to come up with the idea. Instead, start the piece with a conclusi...

Email it to yourself and read it on your phone. You’ll see the words with fresh eyes, as if someone else wrote them. This will force you to keep it sh...

Sum it up in a tweet. If the tweet isn’t compelling, the rest isn’t compelling. The ideal tweet absolves the reader from reading further. Sequoia says...

Pretend you’re sending an email. Or a Slack message. It will calm your mind and yield better writing.

It’s good to know the market but the competition is irrelevant. The market is big. Winning comes by knowing the customer better, executing better, and...

At Facebook, there was a time (2005 thru mid-2006) when we hired customer service people at a constant ratio with user growth. When we had 10M users, ...

Hence, your operating efficiency, and thus the number of people you need to hire, and therefore your costs, are directly impacted by the ingenuity of ...

spend 10-20% of your time reorienting

you decide whether to live in the past or in the future with your every action

have a concrete positive vision of the future

if you’re not failing you’re not operating at the edge. if you’re not operating at the edge, you’re not learning as much as you can

easy to replace systems get replaced by difficult to replace systems

get to inbox 0 every day, unless you have a specific reason not to

every document must have a specific goal written at the top of it

set 5 minute timers and write next steps. set a 5 minute timer and start doing the next step

you’ll learn 10x more by talking to the paper’s author for 30 minutes versus reading it for 30 minutes

if you did a sequence of actions 3 times, make a checklist

everything has an MVP & final version. MVP can usually be done in 10% of the time with a timer for 5-10-15 minutes & ensures you don’t get stuck. what...

if you don’t have consistent scheduled time for your top goals, you don’t have top goals

expectation of progress towards a goal is key to motivation. we are not motivated if don’t know next step. we are not motivated if we don’t know what ...

I do believe that as a company and as an entrepreneur, you have to want to succeed more than your competitors want you not to. That is hard to teach. ...

As human beings it is our right (maybe our moral duty) to reshape the universe to our preferences. Technology, which is really knowledge, enables this...

The number one mistake people make is thinking too big on their first business. They try to start the next SpaceX when they should be starting a pavi...

Execution certainly matters a great deal. And I think that within your question is, in fact, the fact that having simpler ideas that you can execute p...

Execution is critically important; it is better to have a simple idea that can be easily implemented rather than a complicated idea that has implement...

Enthusiasm matters! It's much easier to work on things that are exciting to you. It might be easier to do big things than small things for this reason...

You can do more than you think. We are tied down by invisible orthodoxy. The laws of physics are the only limit.

If you could just play well enough to get another game, you can be there for a long time. Most companies just need to realize that in fact this is a l...

It's important to do things fast. You learn more per unit time because you make contact with reality more frequently. Going fast makes you focus on wh...

Free startup idea: Pinterest for Knowledge A platform that allows individuals to bookmark the best content they've consumed around the internet. Th...

I would encourage people to read broadly in many different subject areas, and then try to find something where there's an overlap of your talents and ...

I encourage people to read a lot of books, just read, basically try to ingest as much information as you can, and try to also just develop a good gene...

Like I said, I would encourage people to use the mental tools of physics and apply them broadly in life. They are the best tools.

Try to be useful. Do things that are useful to your fellow human beings, to the world. It's very hard to be useful. Very hard. Are you contributing mo...

So what will often happen in trying to design a product is people will start with the tools and parts and methods that they are familiar with, and try...

Like a good example of thinking about things in the limit is if you take any product, any machine or whatever, like take a rocket or whatever, and say...

And then another good physics tool is thinking about things in the limit. If you take a particular thing and you scale it to a very large number or to...

Saying like, physics is law and everything else was a recommendation. I've met a lot of people that can break the law, but I have never met anyone who...

I mean, for me, it's simply this is something that is important to get done and we should just keep doing it or die trying. And I don't need a source ...

If you feel behind focus on movement, not blame. Everything takes up energy. Choose wisely.

The “two do” list has changed my life. Most people create a 30 point to-do list and then what? They do the easiest thing first and NEVER get to the ha...

The content no productivity guru will share….. Yesterday I sat on the couch for 7 hours. Binged Dave. Ate ice cream. Got a little high. Had no clue wh...

Want to get ahead of everyone... ...reading about personal brands? ...bookmarking posts about personal brands? ...buying courses about personal brands...

My 1 tip for climbing to VP at age twenty seven? My Managing Up Monday email. Most people do a horrible job of managing up & out yet it's the single m...

When we combine various elements, we create new substances. This is no great surprise, but what can be surprising in the alloying process is that 2+2 ...

A catalyst either kick-starts or maintains a chemical reaction, but isn’t itself a reactant. The reaction may slow or stop without the addition of cat...

A fire is not much more than a combination of carbon and oxygen, but the forests and coal mines of the world are not combusting at will because such a...

Most of the engineering marvels of the world were accomplished with applied leverage. As famously stated by Archimedes, “Give me a lever long enough a...

Velocity is not equivalent to speed; the two are sometimes confused. Velocity is speed plus vector: how fast something gets somewhere. An object that ...

Both friction and viscosity describe the difficulty of movement. Friction is a force that opposes the movement of objects that are in contact with eac...

An object in motion with a certain vector wants to continue moving in that direction unless acted upon. This is a fundamental physical principle of mo...

The laws of thermodynamics describe energy in a closed system. The laws cannot be escaped and underlie the physical world. They describe a world in wh...

If I push on a wall, physics tells me that the wall pushes back with equivalent force. In a biological system, if one individual acts on another, the ...

Relativity has been used in several contexts in the world of physics, but the important aspect to study is the idea that an observer cannot truly unde...

Hard to trace in its origin, Hanlon’s Razor states that we should not attribute to malice that which is more easily explained by stupidity. In a compl...

Simpler explanations are more likely to be true than complicated ones. This is the essence of Occam’s Razor, a classic principle of logic and problem-...

Inversion is a powerful tool to improve your thinking because it helps you identify and remove obstacles to success. The root of inversion is “invert,...

Probabilistic thinking is essentially trying to estimate, using some tools of math and logic, the likelihood of any specific outcome coming to pass. I...

Almost everyone can anticipate the immediate results of their actions. This type of first-order thinking is easy and safe but it’s also a way to ensur...

Thought experiments can be defined as “devices of the imagination used to investigate the nature of things.” Many disciplines, such as philosophy and ...

First-principles thinking is one of the best ways to reverse-engineer complicated situations and unleash creative possibility. Sometimes called reason...

When ego and not competence drives what we undertake, we have blind spots. If you know what you understand, you know where you have an edge over other...

The map of reality is not reality. Even the best maps are imperfect. That’s because they are reductions of what they represent. If a map were to repre...

The last idea that I want to give you as you go out into a profession that frequently puts a lot of procedure and a lot of precautions and a lot of mu...

Another thing of course is life will have terrible blows, horrible blows, unfair blows, doesn’t matter. And some people recover and others don’t. And ...

Two partners that I chose for one little phase of my life had the following rule: They created a little design/build construction team, and they sat d...

Another thing that I found is an intense interest of the subject is indispensable if you are really going to excel. I could force myself to be fairly ...

I think the game of life in many respects is getting a lot of practice into the hands of the people that have the most aptitude to learn and the most ...

Well we all remember that Darwin paid special attention to disconfirming evidence particularly when it disconfirmed something he believed and loved. W...

The way I solved that is, I figured out the people I did admire and I maneuvered cleverly without criticizing anybody, so I was working entirely under...

Incentives are too powerful a controller of human cognition and human behavior, and one of the things you are going to find in some modern law firms i...

Generally speaking, envy, resentment, revenge and self pity are disastrous modes of thought. Self-pity gets pretty close to paranoia, and paranoia is ...

I have what I call an iron prescription that helps me keep sane when I naturally drift toward preferring one ideology over another. And that is I say ...

If you’re unreliable it doesn’t matter what your virtues are, you’re going to crater immediately. So doing what you have faithfully engaged to do shou...

The way complex adaptive systems work and the way mental constructs work, problems frequently get easier and I would even say usually are easier to so...

What I noted since the really big ideas carry 95% of the freight, it wasn’t at all hard for me to pick up all the big ideas from all the big disciplin...

It means that you’re hooked for lifetime learning, and without lifetime learning you people are not going to do very well. You are not going to get ve...

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 ...

What is the one goal, if completed, that could change everything? What is the most urgent thing right now that you feel you “must” or “should” do? ...

Life Hack: The 1-1-1 Method. Every single evening, write down three points: 1 win from the day, 1 point of tension, stress, or anxiety, & 1 point of g...

Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.' Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more t...

“Every person on that island was a fucking star, and they were always holding seminars on radios or the engine. It was such an invigorating place.” 

The sun rose at 7 A.M. each day, and that’s when the SpaceX team got to work. A series of meetings would take place with people listing what needed to...

I think a good model for thinking of the Weekly Review is as an operating system. It is the backbone of everything else that happens during your week;...

To the extent that you enjoy working hard, do. Subject to that constraint, it's not clear that the returns to effort ever diminish substantially. If y...

Notifications in the least places: I’m trying to have my notifications in as few places as possible. I have selected my email inbox and Slack and I do...

I take a lot of notes though I’ve never referred to the notes later. I was reading this great book about memory. When you take notes, it’s actually li...

He used sometimes to spend whole days without doing any work, yet without leaving the palace, or even his work-room. In these days of leisure, which w...

I shall be credited with great profundity and subtlety in things which perhaps were simplicity itself…

My great and most distinctive talent is to see everything in a clear light; even my eloquence is of the kind which sees the core of each question from...

Mohammed came at a moment when general opinion was ready for a single God… A man is but a man, but often he can do much; often he is a tinderbox in th...

There is a moment in every battle at which the least manoeuvre is decisive and gives superiority, as one drop of water causes overflow.

Sometimes a single battle decides everything, and sometimes, too, the slightest circumstance decides the issue of a battle.

The issue of a battle is the result of a single instant, a single thought. The adversaries come into each other’s presence with various combinations; ...

All great events hang by a single thread. The clever man takes advantage of everything, neglects nothing that may give him some added opportunity; the...

The art of war consists, with a numerically inferior army, in always having larger forces than the enemy at the point which is to be attacked or defen...

The chief virtues of a soldier are constancy and discipline. Valor comes only in second place.

[Instructions, 1801, to his personal librarian] Every day, Citizen Ripault will obtain copies of all the newspapers except the eleven political papers...

No one knew so well as he how to sort papers, documents, and statements. Lists were to be all of like dimensions, clothed in uniform binding, arranged...

I cannot write well, because my ideas and my hand are in two different currents. The ideas go faster, and then good-bye legibility! I can only dictate...

During the night, enter my chamber as seldom as possible. Do not awake me when you have any good news to communicate; with that there is no hurry. But...

I arrive tired, I must stay up all night for administrative work, and I must go everywhere in person to restore order.

He [Napoleon] told me that he had frequently laboured in state affairs for fifteen hours, without a moment's cessation, or even having taken any nouri...

I have no ambition - or, if I have any, it is so natural to me, so innate, so intimately linked with my existence that it is like the blood that circu...

Work is my element. I was born and built for work. I have known the limitations of my legs, I have known the limitations of my eyes; I have never been...

All my life I have sacrificed everything - comfort, self-interest, happiness - to my destiny. Destiny must be fulfilled - that is my chief doctrine.

I’m always working, and I meditate a great deal.

The Emperor explained the clarity of his ideas and his ability to prolong his occupations indefinitely without experiencing fatigue by saying that eac...

Here’s what I like in a workspace: natural light, quiet, knowing that I won’t be interrupted if I don’t want to be, long blocks of time, and being com...

I use a full spectrum LED light most mornings for about 10-15 minutes while I catch up on email. It’s great—if you try nothing else in here, this is t...

Focus is a force multiplier on work. Almost everyone I’ve ever met would be well-served by spending more time thinking about what to focus on… Once yo...

I have a fixed budget of cognitive output per day. I can spend that on whatever. If I let it go on unimportant stuff then I never have time to get to ...

Minimize your own cognitive load from distracting things that don’t really matter. It’s hard to overstate how important this is, and how bad most peop...

I wrote custom software for the annoying things I have to do frequently, which is great. I also made an effort to learn to type really fast and the ke...

So basically, there’s two kinds of projects. Apple has this concept they call the directly responsible individual, the D.R.I. For any project, I’ve tr...

One key to effective negotiation is to have multiple options and be OK with it not working out. Even if you really need the thing, it’s never your onl...

Ultimately I don't believe you can create a company without a lot of effort and that you need to lead by example. So Bill Walsh, in the first chapter ...

Similarly, often one that people get wrong is office space. So one natural thing is when you need an office to have an office manager of your team go ...

So some things will look like a problem, and they are actually colds, they are just going to go away. So somebody is annoyed about this or that, that ...

So at first, when you start a company everything is going to feel like a mess. And it really should. If you have too much process, too much predictabi...

Now as a leader, what is your real job, what's your role? Strictly speaking there is only one book ever written that actually explains how to do this....

As Warren Buffett says, build a company that idiots could run because eventually they will. So this is what you want. Basically a performance machine ...

So basically what you are doing when building a company is building an engine. At first you have a drawing on a white board and you are architecting i...

You have been forging a product and now you are forging a company. And I would actually argue, forging a company is a lot harder than forging a produc...

I can’t imagine, you know, that 100 years from now people would say, you know, “Like, I wish—” to paraphrase Jeff Bezos—“like, I just wish you would h...

But I actually think when you look at Ramp and part of what’s made it work has really been starting with what are the timeless truths that are not goi...

Well, first, I mean, part of being a founder and a builder, I think, is just about, like, running this very long-standing and continuous race. I think...

It’s—look, for me, I happen to think a lot of purpose in life is creation. I think people build tools, I think, you know, want to move things forward....

And I think now today, functionally you can have human-level reasoning, and in some cases superhuman level reasoning available through an API. I think...

And I think part of why, you know, as we’re releasing products, engineers are on the call with customers when we ship. They’re accountable for metrics...

Which is to say, you know, you can go to a small startup with 10 people, and everyone’s talking to users. And then somehow you go to a company with 50...

Well, so a couple of things, I mean, I would go back to again, like, what is Ramp like? We’re not some AI-driven finance tool that we’re going to mark...

We’re excited by the idea of building a great company with a small A+ team. For this to be possible, it’s essential that the entire team operates with...

On Wednesdays meetings are banned within the company. This is a day for us to do deep work. As much as possible, this shouldn’t just apply to Wednesda...

Our standard isn’t good. It isn’t even great. It is insanely great. This might seem contradictory to speed. But it isn’t. Speed is what allows us to g...

[On operational tracking of product bets] We just build a nice tracking system. We use Jira to track every single bet, and everything feeds into dashb...

I'm very cost-conscious as well. People who throw money at problems are wrong. What really delivers the most is brainpower. When you sit down and thin...

[On scaling product bets that work] Launch it and look at how much money it generates month one, month two, month three, month four. Compare it with o...

Then all the unpleasant problems no one else solves go to me. I end up doing all the shitty jobs and solving problems no one else wants or can solve. ...

Well, basically it's the whole goal setting, right? So we set up the goals for the companies, usually five or six goals a year, and then we quantify t...

When the company laid off over 100 people and I hired experienced executives, I realized it wasn't working—they failed miserably. To fix things, I hir...

Transparency is crucial. When you start traditional management, it can be the beginning of the end for the company. Reality is important for every man...

I quantify everything a person, team, department, and company does. It starts with defining five to six company goals for the year. We cascade these g...

I'm very controlling and dislike outside dependencies that I can't manage. As a result, early on, I brought everything in-house. In business, being de...

As a manager or founder, you need to know exactly what every person in the company is doing at any given time. This is crucial to prevent people from ...

In product reviews, each product team presents how they plan to change their product, detailing client screens step by step in Figma.

We have about 40 to 45 direct reports. Each general manager is responsible for specific products. Since we have many products, we have up to 15 genera...

I still work directly with the designers and individual contributors whenever I want to make changes.

In smaller companies with up to 100 people, you don't really need formal processes because everyone knows who is good and who isn't. However, once you...

On Mondays, I conduct business reviews for key departments, and half of Tuesday is also dedicated to business reviews. A Business Review is a standard...

Usually, the business comes later, and the temptation for you as MBA students is you're often thinking about the business model early, great, because ...

I think it starts with authenticity, a lot of people talk about founder-market fit. The thing I actually look for is founder-problem fit, why are you ...

He learned one very big lesson from these ventures: “It’s not the product that leads to success. It’s the ability to make the product efficiently. It’...

One of his maxims was that you should never use a cruise missile to kill a fly; just use a flyswatter. Was using a neural network to plan paths an unn...

He had a core belief that you could not separate engineering from product design. In fact, product design should be driven by engineers. The company, ...

“One of Elon’s rules is ‘Go as close to the source as possible for information,’” Riley says. The line workers said they thought the tank walls could ...

Getting to Mars would cost serious money. So Musk combined, as he often did, an aspirational mission with a practical business plan. There were many r...

Musk had come to realize that designing a good factory was like designing a microchip. It was important to create, in each patch, the right density, f...

The experience became a lesson that would become part of Musk’s production algorithm. Always wait until the end of designing a process—after you have ...

5. Automate. That comes last. The big mistake in Nevada and at Fremont was that I began by trying to automate every step. We should have waited until ...

4. Accelerate cycle time. Every process can be speeded up. But only do this after you have followed the first three steps. In the Tesla factory, I mis...

3. Simplify and optimize. This should come after step two. A common mistake is to simplify and optimizea part ora process that should not exist.

2. Delete any part or process you can. You may have to add them back later. In fact, if you do not end up adding back at least 10% of them, then you d...

1. Question every requirement. Each should come with the name of the person who made it. You should never accept that a requirement came from a depart...

The point of a startup is to make usable technology for others. When you make software, you have to watch at least 10 people use it. Sit next to them ...

Or engineers telling you, like, why are you looking at everything? And there was this paradox of CEO involvement. The less involved I got in a project...

So it was crazy. So what I ended up doing, I took a playbook of Steve Jobs, Elon Musk does this, Jensen Huang does this, Walt Disney does this, all of...

The first thing I did is I went from a divisional structure to a functional organization. Functional organizations is what most of you are, you have d...

The CEO should be the chief product officer of the company, because isn’t the most important thing for a company to make a product? And shouldn’t the ...

You should start in the details, develop trust, develop muscle memory, and then let go.

If you want people to work harder, have a launch deadline. Make the thing crazy ambitious and check every week. That is the way to make people work ha...

I also knew that organizational ethics were crucial to ultimate and ongoing success.

[My overriding goal] to implement what I call the Standard of Performance. It was a way of doing things, a leadership philosophy that has much to do w...

[On advice to someone starting a company] Do it for the right reasons: you want to make an impact, you want to change the world, you want to see your ...

So let me walk through a little bit of transparency and different stages of transparency. Metrics are the first step. So everyone in your company shou...

So how do you create scale and leverage? The first thing I would recommend is to build a dashboard. This is an old Square dashboard, it looks pretty p...

And then focus until you conquer this one problem. And the insight behind this is that most people will solve problems that they understand how to sol...

The other signal to look for is once you've hired someone, with an open office, just watch who goes up to other people's desks. Particularly people th...

And that's actually what you want to do with every since employee, every single day, is expand the scope of responsibilities until it breaks. And it w...

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. ...

So here’s a good rule of thumb: don’t worry about a competitor at all, until they’re actually beating you with a real, shipped product. Press releases...

Apple, Google, and Facebook have each done this extremely well. It's not about the product, it's about everything they do. They move fast and they bre...

So you have to be really intense. This only comes from the CEO, this only comes from the founders. One of the biggest advantages that start ups have i...

The good news here is that a small amount of extra work on the right thing makes a huge difference. One example that I like to give is thinking about ...

The other piece besides focus for execution is intensity. Startups only work at a fairly intense level. A friend of mine says the secret to start up s...

So you want to have the right metrics and you want to be focused on growing those metrics and having momentum. Don't let the company get distracted or...

I'm going to talk about this a little bit later, but growth and momentum are something you can never lose focus on. Growth and momentum are what a sta...

The founders really set the focus. Whatever the founders care about, whatever the founders focus on, that's going to set the goals for the whole compa...

The CEO, people ask me all the time about the jobs of the CEO. There are probably more than five, here are five that come up a lot in the early days. ...

Alright, so now we're going to talk about execution. Execution for most founders is not the most fun part of running the company, but it is the most c...

If I had to say the most important traits of the most successful founders, I’ve already mentioned determination, that is by far the most important qua...

It's all about users. The most reliable way to become a billionaire is to start a company that grows fast, and the way to grow fast is to make what us...

The best thing you can do in a YC interview is to teach the partners about your users. So if you want to prepare for your interview, one of the best w...

So this is one thing the YC partners will almost certainly dig into during your interview. Who are your first users going to be, and how do you know t...

There have to be some people who want what you're building right now, and want it so urgently that they're willing to use it, bugs and all, even thoug...

That's what the partners will be trying to figure out: is there a path to a huge market? Usually the path to a huge market is by growing a small marke...

What YC looks for, above all, is founders who understand some group of users and can make what they want. This is so important that it's YC's motto: "...

The way to succeed in a startup is to focus on the goal of getting lots of users, and keep walking swiftly toward it while investors and acquirers scu...

Startup founders are naturally optimistic. They wouldn't do it otherwise. But you should treat your optimism the way you'd treat the core of a nuclear...

The most important quality in a startup founder is determination. Not intelligence-- determination.

Way more startups hose themselves than get crushed by competitors. There are a lot of ways to do it, but the three main ones are internal disputes, in...

You should compete against what someone else could be doing, not just what you can see people doing.

In the best case these two suggestions get combined: you tell visitors what your site is about by showing them. One of the standard pieces of advice i...

for startups, chaos is directly proportional to growth chaos, to a certain degree, is usually an indicator the right stuff is happening. chaotic and g...

The biggest epiphany I've had this year is that what really matters is the machine that builds the machine the factory and that is at least towards a ...