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@WaldronLewis โข 3,941 subscribers
Co-Founder of UDG - We build viral content infrastructure for brands - 1B views to date
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Elon Musk literally sat down for a 45-minute talk with Y Combinator that explains how to build world-changing companies better than any business school on earth. This is the advice he gave a room full of young founders: 1. Don't try to build something great. Try to build something useful. Everyone obsesses over greatness. Musk says that's the wrong target. "I didn't originally think I would build something great. I wanted to try to build something useful. I didn't think I would build anything particularly great. Seemed unlikely, but I wanted to at least try." Aim for useful first. Greatness, if it comes, is a byproduct. 2. When you can't get in the front door, build your own door. Before Musk started his first company, he tried to get a job at Netscape. "I sent my resume into Netscape and nobody responded. I tried hanging out in the lobby to see if I could bump into someone, but I was too shy to talk to anyone. So I'm like, this is ridiculous, I'll just write software myself." He didn't set out to be a founder. He became one because no one would hire him. 3. He slept in the office and showered at the YMCA. The origin of his first company was not glamorous. "We couldn't even afford a place to stay. The office was 500 bucks a month, so we just slept in the office and showered at the YMCA." He couldn't afford proper internet either, so he drilled a hole through the office floor and ran a cable to the internet provider downstairs. That was the founder of the future richest man on earth. 4. Keep the chips on the table. When Musk sold his first company, he received a $20 million cheque. His bank balance went from $10,000 to $20 million overnight. Most people would have stopped. He put almost all of it straight back into his next company. "I kept the chips on the table." He did the same thing decades later, over and over. He hates money sitting idle. Money is fuel for the next mission. 5. Start with the mission, then work backwards to make it a business. Musk didn't start SpaceX to make money. He went on the NASA website to find out when humans were going to Mars, and there was no plan. So he decided to build one. "There had been no prior example of a rocket startup succeeding. A small chance of success is better than no chance of success." The mission came first. The business model came later. 6. He started SpaceX expecting to fail. He is brutally honest about the odds. "SpaceX started in mid-2002 expecting to fail. Probably 90% chance of failing. When recruiting people, I said, we're probably going to die, but small chance we might not die." The first three launches failed. The fourth one worked with no money left. "If the fourth launch hadn't worked, it would have been curtains. We made it by the skin of our teeth." 7. Break every problem down to physics. This is the core of how Musk thinks. "First principles means break things down to the fundamental elements that are most likely to be true, then reason up from there, as opposed to reasoning by analogy." His example is rockets. Everyone priced them based on what old rockets cost. Musk asked what a rocket is actually made of, priced the raw metals, and found the materials were only 1-2% of the historical price. The rest was inefficiency he could attack. 8. When told something takes 24 months, break it down and do it in six. Last year xAI needed a giant computer to train its AI. Suppliers said it would take 18 to 24 months. "It's like, well, we need to get that done in six months or we won't be competitive." So he broke it into parts. Needed a building, so he found an old factory. Needed power, so he rented generators. Needed cooling, so he rented a quarter of America's mobile cooling capacity. He slept in the data centre and ran cabling himself. It got done. 9. Watch your ego-to-ability ratio. Musk's single sharpest piece of advice for young founders is about staying honest with yourself. "A major failure mode is when your ego-to-ability ratio gets too high. Then you break the feedback loop to reality." Keep the ego small, internalise responsibility for everything, and stay ruthlessly connected to what's actually true. "You want to close the loop on reality hard. That's a super big deal." 10. Chase work, not glory. His closing philosophy ties it all together. "It's so hard to be useful. The area under the curve of total utility is how useful you've been to your fellow human beings times how many people. If you aspire to do true work, your probability of success is much higher. Don't aspire to glory, aspire to work." He was ridiculed for years. The press called him "internet guy attempting to build a rocket company." He agreed it sounded absurd. He did it anyway, because a small chance of doing something useful beat no chance at all. Here's the thing though.... Musk became the most followed founder alive because everything he does happens in public. The launches, the failures, the talks like this one. The companies made him powerful. The personal brand made his every word travel around the world before he finishes saying it. We build massive distribution and grow personal brands on X and beyond without our clients lifting a finger. If you're a founder or VC looking for that kind of exposure, book a call below. We average 1.5M views a week.
Lewis ๐ด๓ ง๓ ข๓ ท๓ ฌ๓ ณ๓ ฟ636,965 ๆฌก่ง็ โข 4 ๅคฉๅ
Jeff Bezos reveals why he refuses to make a single important decision before 10am: "I like to putter in the morning. I like to read the newspaper. I like to have coffee. I like to have breakfast with my kids before they go to school. My puttering time is very important to me. That's why I set my first meeting at 10 o'clock" "I like to do my high IQ meetings before lunch. Anything that's going to be really mentally challenging, that's a 10 o'clock meeting. Because by 5pm, I'm like, I can't think about that today. Let's try this again tomorrow at 10am" "As a senior executive, what do you really get paid to do? You get paid to make a small number of high quality decisions. If I make three good decisions a day, that's enough. Warren Buffett says he's good if he makes three good decisions a year"
Lewis ๐ด๓ ง๓ ข๓ ท๓ ฌ๓ ณ๓ ฟ2,820,087 ๆฌก่ง็ โข 1 ไธชๆๅ
Jeff Bezos reveals why politicians never actually fix anything: "There's this tale of two economies. People are struggling with pay rent, groceries. And politicians are using this age-old technique of picking a villain and pointing fingers. But the problem is that doesn't solve anything." He says at Amazon they would never operate that way. "If we have a problem at Amazon, the way we would fix it is we'd go in and do the five whys and try to get to a root cause. We try to find a root fix. And then when we fix it at the root, you're fixing it forever. It's a real solution." "What we don't do, because it doesn't work, is just point fingers and blame people. It might feel good for 10 seconds but doesn't accomplish anything." Most leaders blame, but the best ones diagnose. โ Jeff Bezos P.S. We build content infrastructure for founders and athletes. 1.5M views/week average. Your voice, cross platform, compounding daily. If you need massive distribution or want to build your brand, apply here:
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![Tesla just offered Elon Musk $1,000,000,000,000. That's more than most countries' GDP. So I went digging into why - and found 7 things that will change how you see him. [1/7] He ran an illegal nightclub in college to pay rent ๐งต](https://image.24vids.com/tw-1964633823767122363/amplify_video_thumb/1964633769924857856/img/bxwFy4blvvvC1zfu.jpg)
Tesla just offered Elon Musk $1,000,000,000,000. That's more than most countries' GDP. So I went digging into why - and found 7 things that will change how you see him. [1/7] He ran an illegal nightclub in college to pay rent ๐งต
Lewis ๐ด๓ ง๓ ข๓ ท๓ ฌ๓ ณ๓ ฟ4,295,383 ๆฌก่ง็ โข 10 ไธชๆๅ
Jamie Dimon just asked Elon Musk why he's taking SpaceX public after a decade of saying no. The answer is very Musky and MIND BLOWING: "I've been asked for many years about taking SpaceX public. Probably been almost ten years that people have been suggesting I should." "We've been positive cash flow for quite a long time. I think since around 2014, 2015. And we've been self-funding. In fact, our private equity rounds have actually not been fundraising rounds. They've been liquidity rounds for investors and employees. SpaceX has actually bought back stock in most of our funding events." So why now? "We are embarking on a significant growth phase, a capital growth phase, where we are going to put in orbit probably over a hundred thousand satellites just for communications." "Version 3 is ten to twenty times more capable than the Version 2 satellite. It's a hundred times more bandwidth than the Starlink system currently offers and half the latency." Then Dimon asked about AI. And this is where it went somewhere nobody in the room expected... "The peak bandwidth of a human is a few hundred bits per second. But bandwidth of a computer can be a trillion bits per second. The appetite for bandwidth of AI and robots is gonna be enormous." "We're also doing the AI data centres in space. Which is another massive capital endeavour." Then it started to sound like something straight out of a sci-fi film: "It's increasingly difficult to build power plants on the ground. There are very few people who want a power plant in their backyard. If we wanted to double the electricity usage of the United States, which is on average about 500 gigawatts, we would have to build about twice as many power plants. Most communities are not super excited about that." "But if we go to space, we can go far beyond the electricity generation of Earth." "This is gonna sound crazy, but you could actually increase harnessed energy by a factor of a million and still be using much less than a millionth of the Sun's energy." Sorry, but this is HUGE. The SpaceX IPO hits next week and is expected to make Elon Musk the world's first trillionaire. He is SpaceX. He is Tesla. He is Neuralink, xAI, The Boring Company, and the owner of X. That doesn't happen by accident. It happens because he is one of the most powerful personal brands the world has ever seen. Every company he touches gets amplified by the fact that the world already knows his name, his face, and his vision before he says a single word. That is the compounding effect of a personal brand built over two decades. SO: We build massive distribution and grow personal brands on X and beyond without our clients lifting a finger. If you're a founder or VC looking for that kind of exposure, book a call below. We average 1.5M views a week and have brought in over $5 million in attributable revenue for our clients.
Lewis ๐ด๓ ง๓ ข๓ ท๓ ฌ๓ ณ๓ ฟ223,802 ๆฌก่ง็ โข 1 ไธชๆๅ
Warren Buffett reveals the ONE skill that's worth 50% more than any degree: "I was totally terrified of public speaking. I couldn't do it. I would throw up. I mean, I just wouldn't. So I arranged my classes in high school and college so I didn't have to do it" "I saw an ad in the paper. I went down to Midtown, New York. I gave him a check for 100 bucks to sign up for the Dale Carnegie course. I went back and stopped payment on the check" "Then I came out here to start selling securities. I knew I had to do it. So I saw another ad and I went down and handed the guy $100 in cash" "If you improve your communication skills, I will guarantee you that you'll earn 50% more money over your lifetime. It isn't some elaborate formula about options. Go out and improve your speaking and communication skills" --- Btw, 1.5 million views a week. That's what our content infrastructure averages. We build it for founders who want distribution without the overhead. We take on a handful per quarter - sign up here for a discovery call:
Lewis ๐ด๓ ง๓ ข๓ ท๓ ฌ๓ ณ๓ ฟ129,422 ๆฌก่ง็ โข 1 ไธชๆๅ
>be John Davidson >born 1971 >Galashiels, Scotland >working class family in the Scottish Borders >football-mad kid >just wants to be a goalkeeper 1983: >you're 12 >a scout is coming to watch you play >this is your shot >then something happens >your body starts doing things you can't control >tics >involuntary vocalisations >noises you didn't choose >head teacher's response: whip your hands with a belt >you perform badly >dad leaves shortly after >you walk into a river >you're 12 school: >no diagnosis >no framework >just a kid who "can't behave" >mocked daily >leave at 16 >no qualifications >the world has decided what you are 1989: >BBC comes to Galashiels >films your life >"John's Not Mad" >airs nationally >some people feel compassion >most kids use it as ammunition >your face becomes shorthand for mockery in playgrounds across the country >you know this >you keep going the wilderness years: >no diagnosis until you're 25 >25 years old before anyone gives it a name >you've been living it for over a decade without language for it >you get a job >caretaker at Langlee Community Centre >you stay there your whole working life the turn: >a family is referred to you >their daughter has Tourette's >she's struggling >you start hosting workshops >schools >police stations >you explain what it means to live in a body people don't understand >unpaid >for years >because nobody did it for you 2019: >Holyrood Palace >the Queen is about to give you an MBE >you shout "Fuck the Queen" >directly at her >she reacts with complete calm and kindness >the kid the belt hit >gets a medal 2025: >a film about your life premieres at Toronto International Film Festival >"I Swear" >six BAFTA nominations February 2026: >you're in the auditorium >watching a film about your life >your Tourette's doesn't stop for the occasion >it never has >mid-ceremony your tics ring out across the room >and on the live broadcast >as Black actors take the stage >you shout a racial slur >involuntarily >uncontrollably >you leave early >you know you're causing distress >you've known that feeling your whole life >Jamie Foxx goes on Instagram >"Nah he meant that s**t" >"Out of all the words you could've said Tourette's makes you say that" >the internet piles on >thousands outraged at a man who cannot control what comes out of his mouth >the film that explains exactly this wins three BAFTAs that same night >including Best Actor >the room got it >the internet did not >because the internet didn't watch the film see -- Every founder, artist, activist, author, coach or ANYONE who wants to change the world should take note: Stop apologising for who you are. Be the change you want to see.
Lewis ๐ด๓ ง๓ ข๓ ท๓ ฌ๓ ณ๓ ฟ287,178 ๆฌก่ง็ โข 4 ไธชๆๅ
Jeff Bezos just explained why changing your mind is a sign of intelligence, not weakness: "You have to be able to be decisive and make decisions quickly. And that's a very hard thing to do as organizations get larger, because so many people have opinions." "The thing to realize is most decisions are reversible. Very rarely are they high-consequence irreversible decisions. By the way, when they are, you should go slowly. Of course. But most decisions can be made by a single high-judgment individual. And if they go the wrong direction, you stop, you back up. It's a two-way door. You come in, you look at it again, and you change your mind." "In politics, people call you a flip-flopper if you change your mind. How foolish would it be to get new data, to have new analysis, to see something in a fresh way, to have that beginner's mind, have a better idea, and not change your mind." "I've noticed that people who are right a lot change their mind a lot." โ Jeff Bezos (Jeff Bezos) P.S. We build content infrastructure for founders and athletes. 1.5M views/week average. Your voice, cross platform, compounding daily. If you need massive distribution or want to build your brand, apply here:
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In 2003, Elon Musk gave a 45-minute masterclass on building companies from nothing. He convinced the world that: โข A team of 30 can outbuild a billion-dollar agency โข Your customers can sell for you โข Obsession is a strategy 7 lessons on entrepreneurship and branding:
Lewis ๐ด๓ ง๓ ข๓ ท๓ ฌ๓ ณ๓ ฟ177,305 ๆฌก่ง็ โข 4 ไธชๆๅ
Jeff Bezos just revealed the best time to start a company: "There's never been a better time to be an inventor and a pioneer than right now because the world is on fire with new ideas and with AI and space opportunities. And we're in the middle of multiple golden ages right now with a rapid rate of change." "And by the way, rapid change is good for startup companies and bad for incumbents. It's hard for incumbents to keep up, to move fast." "And so this is the best time ever, in my lifetime, probably ever, to start a company and do something inventive." "The second thing is an eagerness to invent. That you wanna be pioneering, that you wanna do new things." Every incumbent is struggling to keep up. Every startup has the advantage of speed. The founder of Amazon just told you the window is wide open. โ Jeff Bezos Jeff Bezos P.S. We build content infrastructure for founders and VCs. 1.5M views/week average. Your voice, cross platform, compounding daily. If you need massive distribution and brand exposure, apply here:
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In 1997, Steve Jobs gave a 60-minute presentation that saved Apple from bankruptcy. He convinced the world that: โข A computer company could be a lifestyle brand โข Think Different meant Apple 9 lessons on building a personal brand that sells BILLIONS:
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Someone just paid $245,000 for the Fyre Festival brand on eBay. Yep, THAT Fyre Festival - cheese sandwiches, stranded passengers, landed the founder in jail. Why would anyone pay a quarter million for a brand synonymous with fraud and failure? Here are 3 reasons why it actually makes perfect sense: ๐. ๐๐ซ๐จ๐ฏ๐๐ง ๐๐ข๐ ๐ก-๐๐๐ฅ๐ฎ๐ ๐๐ฎ๐ฒ๐๐ซ๐ฌ We know for certain that at least 5,000 people on that email list already spent $900-$250,000 on luxury experiences. That's not interest - that's verified purchase behavior for premium products. ๐. ๐๐ก๐๐ฒ ๐๐๐ซ๐๐ง'๐ญ ๐๐ฎ๐ฒ๐ข๐ง๐ ๐ญ๐ก๐ ๐๐ซ๐๐ง๐ The buyer saw past the toxic brand to the real asset: that audience. Social media followers are rented. Email subscribers are owned. Even when your brand implodes spectacularly, that direct line to your audience retains real value. ๐. ๐๐๐ซ๐๐๐๐ญ ๐๐๐ซ๐ค๐๐ญ ๐๐ข๐ฆ๐ข๐ง๐ With everyone focused on the scandal, nobody else saw the opportunity. Well, almost nobody - Ryan Reynolds' agency Maximum Effort was bidding too. The Fyre Festival brand was worthless. But those email addresses? Pure golden goodness. They didn't buy the brand, they bought an audience - founders take note!
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