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

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 like a double helping of memory, a double chance to remember something.

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 actually adhere to it. 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 should have access to what's going on. Other things I like to do, is to take your board decks. As you get more formal, the board decks will get more complicated. And actually review every single slide with every single employee after the board meeting. You can strip out the compensation information if you really want to. But every other slide you should go through with every single employee and explain it. If you can remember some of the feedback you got from your board that is really cool to pass on.

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 out and find offices. And they will go out and come back with photos and ideas. You need to do that yourself. The office environment that people work in everyday dictates the culture that you are going to be in. And the final thing, then I am going to take some questions, is around effort.

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 text: “.flash”. All notes with “.flash” in them are then automatically loaded into Readwise and organized under a “flash” tag. I’ll then periodically open the list of “flash” tags in Readwise, and then translate them into flashcard form in Anki. Anki helps me remember things by surfacing flashcards that I’m likely to forget just before I’d otherwise forget them. It’s called spaced repetition.

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

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 principles. And the best way of doing that is to shut down your laptop, take out a piece of paper, write the question as simply as possible at the top of the paper, and just spend time just thinking about how to answer that question. And there were a ton of questions over time.

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 interesting people, and spending time in nature.

You learn more per unit time because you make contact with reality more frequently

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