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Brian Halligan

@bhalligan • 107,071 subscribers

Co-founder HubSpot | Sequoia | Propeller | MIT Host, Long Strange Trip pod: https://t.co/qj9yOQVYaU

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Managers spend way too much time trying to convince the sales teams to change behavior. Ali Ghodsi’s rule at Databricks is to never engage in the debate. If sales doesn't want to do something, and you know it's the right move, just put it in their comp plan. Align the incentives and the friction disappears.

Managers spend way too much time trying to convince the sales teams to change behavior. Ali Ghodsi’s rule at Databricks is to never engage in the debate. If sales doesn't want to do something, and you know it's the right move, just put it in their comp plan. Align the incentives and the friction disappears.

60,522 次观看

If you love what you do, they couldn't pay you to stop. -David Senra The people he studies on David Senra – the Buffetts, the Knights, the Waltons – aren't doing it for 5 years. Or 10. Or 15. They're doing it for 40+ years. Because the idea of stopping is worse than the work. Link to the full episode below 👇

If you love what you do, they couldn't pay you to stop. -David Senra The people he studies on David Senra – the Buffetts, the Knights, the Waltons – aren't doing it for 5 years. Or 10. Or 15. They're doing it for 40+ years. Because the idea of stopping is worse than the work. Link to the full episode below 👇

21,994 次观看

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Energy first, then compute. Chase Lochmiller, co-founder and CEO of Crusoe is building a lot of the data centers that power the age of intelligence. They just closed a round at a $31B valuation, about 8 years into a company that started as two guys burning flared gas in the Bakken oil field to mine Bitcoin. That wasn’t a pivot, btw. Chase was AI-pilled early. The bet was: if data and compute are the bottleneck, compute becomes an energy problem. So instead of bringing stranded energy to a market, bring the market to the energy. Bitcoin was the easiest way to turn electrons into money while he waited for AI demand to show up. It showed up on November 30th, 2022. He’s a learning machine. On track to be a professor, then a quant, then Everest, now running a 2,000+ person vertically integrated business with welders and AI researchers in the same company. A few things we get into: •Why Crusoe is an AI supermajor: upstream (power), midstream (data centers), downstream (AI cloud). Exxon famously doesn’t hedge oil because the stack hedges itself. Margins move around the stack; own the whole thing. •“Most startups die from suicide, not homicide.” We said the exact same thing at HubSpot. If someone else is chasing your opportunity, that’s a compliment. •Coopetition. He’ll partner with companies he competes with elsewhere. Useful when you’re building infrastructure the entire industry needs. •The CEO journey isn’t linear. “As soon as I’m sick of hearing myself say something, we’re just scratching the surface.” •How he scales himself: a domain expert owns each vertical. Energy, data centers, manufacturing, AI cloud. He goes deep enough to get aligned on direction and understand how it connects to the rest of the business. Then he holds them accountable to execute. Alignment first, then trust with accountability. •Should every CEO hire a coach? Yes. His coach was as much therapist as coach, and it was critical for him and the company. We get into that more. •People scale linearly, companies scale exponentially (h/t First Round). When you start thinking about letting someone go, that was probably the right time. •Actively hunt bad news. Good news is nice, but the CEO’s job is to “run into the burning buildings,” find what’s broken, and fix it. •Selling the Bitcoin business to NYDIG while it was making money. One word: focus. •The data center backlash. “The industry has a marketing problem. The truth is on our side.” Timestamps: 0:00 – Cold open 1:10 – Intro 1:35 – Professor, quant, Everest, energy, data centers: is there a throughline? 2:43 – What people get wrong about the CEO journey 3:53 – Live on the infinite growth loop 4:44 – “My biz is becoming dizzyingly complex beneath me” 6:44 – Scaling yourself with domain experts 7:36 – Trust, DRIs, and not being hands off 8:33 – Cross-org execution and the weekly staff meeting 10:11 – “As soon as I’m sick of hearing myself say it” 11:37 – Keeping urgency at 2,000 employees; the Elon tension 13:12 – Books, mentors, and a coach 15:12 – Most startups die from suicide, not homicide 16:50 – Paranoia and coopetition 17:26 – The AI supermajor: upstream, midstream, downstream 19:47 – Propeller, Blue Energy, and energy first 23:24 – Flared gas, Bitcoin, and bringing the market to the energy 24:45 – Wait But Why, Andrew Ng, and compute as an energy problem 28:52 – November 30, 2022 30:19 – Selling the Bitcoin business: focus 32:43 – Polish is learned: public speaking and Shane Metcalfe 34:31 – Should every CEO hire a coach? Yes. 37:54 – Hire slow, fire fast, and reading the mosaic 41:09 – Ali Ghodsi vs. Dev Ittycheria on exec turnover 42:51 – AI researchers and welders: the collective genius 44:15 – The data center backlash and the marketing problem 48:53 – Thick skin and speaking truth to power 51:09 – Everest: the 2014 avalanche and the Khumbu Icefall 55:12 – The Balcony and the summit 57:36 – My takeaways

Energy first, then compute. Chase Lochmiller, co-founder and CEO of Crusoe is building a lot of the data centers that power the age of intelligence. They just closed a round at a $31B valuation, about 8 years into a company that started as two guys burning flared gas in the Bakken oil field to mine Bitcoin. That wasn’t a pivot, btw. Chase was AI-pilled early. The bet was: if data and compute are the bottleneck, compute becomes an energy problem. So instead of bringing stranded energy to a market, bring the market to the energy. Bitcoin was the easiest way to turn electrons into money while he waited for AI demand to show up. It showed up on November 30th, 2022. He’s a learning machine. On track to be a professor, then a quant, then Everest, now running a 2,000+ person vertically integrated business with welders and AI researchers in the same company. A few things we get into: •Why Crusoe is an AI supermajor: upstream (power), midstream (data centers), downstream (AI cloud). Exxon famously doesn’t hedge oil because the stack hedges itself. Margins move around the stack; own the whole thing. •“Most startups die from suicide, not homicide.” We said the exact same thing at HubSpot. If someone else is chasing your opportunity, that’s a compliment. •Coopetition. He’ll partner with companies he competes with elsewhere. Useful when you’re building infrastructure the entire industry needs. •The CEO journey isn’t linear. “As soon as I’m sick of hearing myself say something, we’re just scratching the surface.” •How he scales himself: a domain expert owns each vertical. Energy, data centers, manufacturing, AI cloud. He goes deep enough to get aligned on direction and understand how it connects to the rest of the business. Then he holds them accountable to execute. Alignment first, then trust with accountability. •Should every CEO hire a coach? Yes. His coach was as much therapist as coach, and it was critical for him and the company. We get into that more. •People scale linearly, companies scale exponentially (h/t First Round). When you start thinking about letting someone go, that was probably the right time. •Actively hunt bad news. Good news is nice, but the CEO’s job is to “run into the burning buildings,” find what’s broken, and fix it. •Selling the Bitcoin business to NYDIG while it was making money. One word: focus. •The data center backlash. “The industry has a marketing problem. The truth is on our side.” Timestamps: 0:00 – Cold open 1:10 – Intro 1:35 – Professor, quant, Everest, energy, data centers: is there a throughline? 2:43 – What people get wrong about the CEO journey 3:53 – Live on the infinite growth loop 4:44 – “My biz is becoming dizzyingly complex beneath me” 6:44 – Scaling yourself with domain experts 7:36 – Trust, DRIs, and not being hands off 8:33 – Cross-org execution and the weekly staff meeting 10:11 – “As soon as I’m sick of hearing myself say it” 11:37 – Keeping urgency at 2,000 employees; the Elon tension 13:12 – Books, mentors, and a coach 15:12 – Most startups die from suicide, not homicide 16:50 – Paranoia and coopetition 17:26 – The AI supermajor: upstream, midstream, downstream 19:47 – Propeller, Blue Energy, and energy first 23:24 – Flared gas, Bitcoin, and bringing the market to the energy 24:45 – Wait But Why, Andrew Ng, and compute as an energy problem 28:52 – November 30, 2022 30:19 – Selling the Bitcoin business: focus 32:43 – Polish is learned: public speaking and Shane Metcalfe 34:31 – Should every CEO hire a coach? Yes. 37:54 – Hire slow, fire fast, and reading the mosaic 41:09 – Ali Ghodsi vs. Dev Ittycheria on exec turnover 42:51 – AI researchers and welders: the collective genius 44:15 – The data center backlash and the marketing problem 48:53 – Thick skin and speaking truth to power 51:09 – Everest: the 2014 avalanche and the Khumbu Icefall 55:12 – The Balcony and the summit 57:36 – My takeaways

29,807 次观看 • 2 天前

Ali Ghodsi never wanted to be CEO. In 2015, he was interviewing for a professor job at Berkeley when the Databricks board handed him the interim title. Revenue that year was $1.5M. This episode with Ali Ghodsi will go down as one of my favorites. 10 things I took away: 1. Focus the entire company, orders of magnitude of attention, on its single biggest bottleneck. Like a laser, almost to an extreme. The cycle is 1-3 years, not weeks. If your focus changes weekly, then you’re just in firefighting mode. 2. There is nothing worse than a conflict-averse CEO. They are wonderful people, but they are in the wrong job. Conflict is the gym for a CEO: nobody likes it, but everyone has to go. 3. Study your enemy carefully, understand their weaknesses and apply your strengths to those weaknesses. Snowflake had 2x his revenue. He didn’t copy them. He found three weaknesses (proprietary, no AI, expensive) and hammered them account by account for four years. Watch the competition, never follow it. 4. The concept of a Lakehouse was ridiculed internally and online. No one wanted to market with this new term. So he made the whole company religious about it anyway, killed the ads that converted better without the word, and put it in the sales comp plan. It worked. All hands on deck, no exceptions. 5. Be willing to take a step back for a much bigger vision, even when the company is already succeeding. At multiple hundreds of millions in ARR, he was unhappy, because the vision he pitched investors wasn’t the company he was running. So he took one step back to go ten forward. 6. On the flat org, player-coach model that a lot of people have talked about this year: “it’s BS.” Separate how the company thinks (AI, ontology) from how the humans get managed (they are after all, still humans). His staff meets 3x a week. I asked if it could just be coordinated in a Google doc. His answer: do you meet your wife and kids, or coordinate that in a Google doc? 7. His test for a sales leader: can they build the car, or just drive it? Ron Gabrisko, the Databricks CRO, had seen $0→50M and $50→100M+, and hadn’t changed jobs in 10 years prior to joining. Now he has been the CRO for over a decade. He built and drove the car the whole way. That almost never happens. 8. Hire execs ahead of the curve because by the time you need them, it’s too late. A real search takes 6-12 months. The extra time helps you increase false negatives and decrease false positives. Do an insane number of backdoor references because 80% of ‘front door’ references are bs. 9. The best salespeople are not super technical, so stop trying to force them to be. Square peg, round hole. The best win with professional aggression, high EQ, and mapping the real power base (how decisions get made high up in an organization), not technical depth. 10. Yes, your best AEs will annoy people. One of the first at Databricks got a meeting nobody could get, but got banned from the customer’s building for it. He told Ali, “what are you complaining about? I got the meeting.” Professionally aggressive is the bar. One bottleneck, zero wussing out. He reminds me of Elon Musk that way. Chapters 0:00 – Introduction 1:22 – The secret CEO search and why the board bet on a founder 4:11 – Professor or CEO? Always taking the harder option 8:18 – Pour everything into one bottleneck 12:16 – Killing PLG and learning what great enterprise sellers actually have 19:09 – Hiring ahead of the curve: sales leaders, execs, and back-door references 27:02 – The Snowflake rivalry: study your enemy, never copy them 33:22 – Lakehouse: conviction, ridicule, and the case for second acts 41:02 – The killer instinct and why conflict-averse CEOs fail 44:10 – Dunbar's number and rethinking the org chart around AI 48:00 – AGI is already here — enterprises just use it as a chatbot 52:55 – Does he still code? Two days for a connector vs. three quarters 57:18 – A day in the life, and why the Monday meeting isn't theater 1:04:53 – Why Databricks will go public, just not yet 1:08:09 – Get over conflict aversion, or don't be CEO 1:11:07 – Brian's takeaways Link to more in the comments.

Ali Ghodsi never wanted to be CEO. In 2015, he was interviewing for a professor job at Berkeley when the Databricks board handed him the interim title. Revenue that year was $1.5M. This episode with Ali Ghodsi will go down as one of my favorites. 10 things I took away: 1. Focus the entire company, orders of magnitude of attention, on its single biggest bottleneck. Like a laser, almost to an extreme. The cycle is 1-3 years, not weeks. If your focus changes weekly, then you’re just in firefighting mode. 2. There is nothing worse than a conflict-averse CEO. They are wonderful people, but they are in the wrong job. Conflict is the gym for a CEO: nobody likes it, but everyone has to go. 3. Study your enemy carefully, understand their weaknesses and apply your strengths to those weaknesses. Snowflake had 2x his revenue. He didn’t copy them. He found three weaknesses (proprietary, no AI, expensive) and hammered them account by account for four years. Watch the competition, never follow it. 4. The concept of a Lakehouse was ridiculed internally and online. No one wanted to market with this new term. So he made the whole company religious about it anyway, killed the ads that converted better without the word, and put it in the sales comp plan. It worked. All hands on deck, no exceptions. 5. Be willing to take a step back for a much bigger vision, even when the company is already succeeding. At multiple hundreds of millions in ARR, he was unhappy, because the vision he pitched investors wasn’t the company he was running. So he took one step back to go ten forward. 6. On the flat org, player-coach model that a lot of people have talked about this year: “it’s BS.” Separate how the company thinks (AI, ontology) from how the humans get managed (they are after all, still humans). His staff meets 3x a week. I asked if it could just be coordinated in a Google doc. His answer: do you meet your wife and kids, or coordinate that in a Google doc? 7. His test for a sales leader: can they build the car, or just drive it? Ron Gabrisko, the Databricks CRO, had seen $0→50M and $50→100M+, and hadn’t changed jobs in 10 years prior to joining. Now he has been the CRO for over a decade. He built and drove the car the whole way. That almost never happens. 8. Hire execs ahead of the curve because by the time you need them, it’s too late. A real search takes 6-12 months. The extra time helps you increase false negatives and decrease false positives. Do an insane number of backdoor references because 80% of ‘front door’ references are bs. 9. The best salespeople are not super technical, so stop trying to force them to be. Square peg, round hole. The best win with professional aggression, high EQ, and mapping the real power base (how decisions get made high up in an organization), not technical depth. 10. Yes, your best AEs will annoy people. One of the first at Databricks got a meeting nobody could get, but got banned from the customer’s building for it. He told Ali, “what are you complaining about? I got the meeting.” Professionally aggressive is the bar. One bottleneck, zero wussing out. He reminds me of Elon Musk that way. Chapters 0:00 – Introduction 1:22 – The secret CEO search and why the board bet on a founder 4:11 – Professor or CEO? Always taking the harder option 8:18 – Pour everything into one bottleneck 12:16 – Killing PLG and learning what great enterprise sellers actually have 19:09 – Hiring ahead of the curve: sales leaders, execs, and back-door references 27:02 – The Snowflake rivalry: study your enemy, never copy them 33:22 – Lakehouse: conviction, ridicule, and the case for second acts 41:02 – The killer instinct and why conflict-averse CEOs fail 44:10 – Dunbar's number and rethinking the org chart around AI 48:00 – AGI is already here — enterprises just use it as a chatbot 52:55 – Does he still code? Two days for a connector vs. three quarters 57:18 – A day in the life, and why the Monday meeting isn't theater 1:04:53 – Why Databricks will go public, just not yet 1:08:09 – Get over conflict aversion, or don't be CEO 1:11:07 – Brian's takeaways Link to more in the comments.

196,596 次观看 • 1 个月前

🚨 NEW EPISODE DROP with Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour My conversation with the founder who built a $22B prediction market empire by staring straight at the fire. What he and co-founder Luana Lopes Lara have built, the "future of truth," is nothing short of extraordinary. This episode has some of the most unfiltered lessons on chaos, focus, and founder DNA from one of the sharpest operators I have seen. We talk about: • Fixing the “hole in the ship” daily and the one existential leak that can sink you • Annual roadmaps are dead • Realigning every 30-60 days • Obsessing over the last 10% • Designing co-founder disagreement as a feature • Companies win by betting on asymmetric moves • Aligning incentives so you profit when users win, not lose 00:00 The 'Everything' Exchange 01:18 Co-CEO roles at Kalshi 03:04 Disagreeing by Design 06:43 Beirut Roots and Risk 10:23 Entrepreneurial Literacy 13:37 Chaos as a Strategy 26:52 Desert Years and Never Pivoting 32:15 Weekend Work Rhythm 32:38 Founder Grind Culture 33:08 Scaling Past 150 34:40 Perfectionist Marketing 36:09 Timing The Zeitgeist 40:19 Suing The Government 47:56 Going Mainstream 51:25 Trading Vs Gambling Debate 59:08 Founder Advice Links to the full episode in the comments 👇

🚨 NEW EPISODE DROP with Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour My conversation with the founder who built a $22B prediction market empire by staring straight at the fire. What he and co-founder Luana Lopes Lara have built, the "future of truth," is nothing short of extraordinary. This episode has some of the most unfiltered lessons on chaos, focus, and founder DNA from one of the sharpest operators I have seen. We talk about: • Fixing the “hole in the ship” daily and the one existential leak that can sink you • Annual roadmaps are dead • Realigning every 30-60 days • Obsessing over the last 10% • Designing co-founder disagreement as a feature • Companies win by betting on asymmetric moves • Aligning incentives so you profit when users win, not lose 00:00 The 'Everything' Exchange 01:18 Co-CEO roles at Kalshi 03:04 Disagreeing by Design 06:43 Beirut Roots and Risk 10:23 Entrepreneurial Literacy 13:37 Chaos as a Strategy 26:52 Desert Years and Never Pivoting 32:15 Weekend Work Rhythm 32:38 Founder Grind Culture 33:08 Scaling Past 150 34:40 Perfectionist Marketing 36:09 Timing The Zeitgeist 40:19 Suing The Government 47:56 Going Mainstream 51:25 Trading Vs Gambling Debate 59:08 Founder Advice Links to the full episode in the comments 👇

327,696 次观看 • 3 个月前

Bending Spoons got 800,000 job applications last year. They hired fewer than 300. Luca Ferrari, CEO, has built one of the most unusual companies I've studied. Bending Spoons buys iconic companies (Evernote, WeTransfer, Vimeo, AOL.com), rebuilds them from the ground up, and never sells them. Often with a 25-year-old in charge. 10 things I took away from my conversation with Luca: 1/ A Harvard or Stanford degree predicts performance a lot less than you'd think. Entitlement is usually what cancels the edge. 2/ People should fluidly move between IC and lead. Org charts should be tools, not religions. 3/ Slope > experience. Extreme ownership + raw smarts beats “I’ve seen this movie” experience almost every time. 25 years olds > 45 year olds more often than people admit. 4/ Throw high-talent people into the deep end. Formal training is 10% of it. The other 90% is giving them extreme responsibility and surrounding them with other high caliber people to emulate. 5/ Interviews are the worst predictor in the hiring process, so let's stop pretending. Unless you script every question and grade the answers separately 6/ Default to “no” on complexity. The person who wants to add anything carries the full burden of proof. 7/ Never lie. Never omit something important. Even when it costs you. Be the kind of person you can trust is telling you things as they are. 8/ Teenage political activism that stops in your early 20s is a weirdly strong predictor of agency. 9/ Most serial acquirers keep companies semi-independent. Bending Spoons turns them into products on one operating system. 10/ Org charts should be tools, not religions. People should fluidly move between IC and lead. New episode of Long Strange Trip. Full episode in the comments. 0:00 – Introduction 1:15 – How Bending Spoons works: buy, rebuild, hold forever, and why operating beats picking 8:00 – Building a talent flywheel from nothing: calling hundreds of graduates 13:34 – Hiring signals: why Harvard barely matters and teenage activists do 17:56 – HubSpot's sales role-play and the reference question that gets the truth 21:33 – Strategy beats org charts: management by chaos vs. eight direct reports 25:14 – Good leader, bad manager? Head in the clouds, feet in the trenches 30:06 – Slope over experience: why 25-year-olds run the companies he buys 40:29 – Radical candor, one improvement a year, and no executive team 50:23 – "Approximately mediocre": first principles and relentless simplification 55:42 – Why Milan: building a world-beating company outside Silicon Valley 59:47 – Never lie, never omit: integrity, plus Brian's takeaways

Bending Spoons got 800,000 job applications last year. They hired fewer than 300. Luca Ferrari, CEO, has built one of the most unusual companies I've studied. Bending Spoons buys iconic companies (Evernote, WeTransfer, Vimeo, AOL.com), rebuilds them from the ground up, and never sells them. Often with a 25-year-old in charge. 10 things I took away from my conversation with Luca: 1/ A Harvard or Stanford degree predicts performance a lot less than you'd think. Entitlement is usually what cancels the edge. 2/ People should fluidly move between IC and lead. Org charts should be tools, not religions. 3/ Slope > experience. Extreme ownership + raw smarts beats “I’ve seen this movie” experience almost every time. 25 years olds > 45 year olds more often than people admit. 4/ Throw high-talent people into the deep end. Formal training is 10% of it. The other 90% is giving them extreme responsibility and surrounding them with other high caliber people to emulate. 5/ Interviews are the worst predictor in the hiring process, so let's stop pretending. Unless you script every question and grade the answers separately 6/ Default to “no” on complexity. The person who wants to add anything carries the full burden of proof. 7/ Never lie. Never omit something important. Even when it costs you. Be the kind of person you can trust is telling you things as they are. 8/ Teenage political activism that stops in your early 20s is a weirdly strong predictor of agency. 9/ Most serial acquirers keep companies semi-independent. Bending Spoons turns them into products on one operating system. 10/ Org charts should be tools, not religions. People should fluidly move between IC and lead. New episode of Long Strange Trip. Full episode in the comments. 0:00 – Introduction 1:15 – How Bending Spoons works: buy, rebuild, hold forever, and why operating beats picking 8:00 – Building a talent flywheel from nothing: calling hundreds of graduates 13:34 – Hiring signals: why Harvard barely matters and teenage activists do 17:56 – HubSpot's sales role-play and the reference question that gets the truth 21:33 – Strategy beats org charts: management by chaos vs. eight direct reports 25:14 – Good leader, bad manager? Head in the clouds, feet in the trenches 30:06 – Slope over experience: why 25-year-olds run the companies he buys 40:29 – Radical candor, one improvement a year, and no executive team 50:23 – "Approximately mediocre": first principles and relentless simplification 55:42 – Why Milan: building a world-beating company outside Silicon Valley 59:47 – Never lie, never omit: integrity, plus Brian's takeaways

60,687 次观看 • 23 天前

NEW EPISODE: jack & Roelof Botha unpack Block 40% staff cut and rebuilding the entire company as a mini-AGI. This isn’t “use AI to make people more productive.” It’s making the company itself the intelligence. If you’re a founder or operator wondering what work looks like in the next 5 years… this is the episode. The evolution looks like: • Manager mode = Pyramid 🔺 (command & control) • Founder mode = Flat ➖(founders decide fast) • Dorsey mode = Circle 🔵 w/ AI at the center, humans at the edge, and decisions flow from customer inputs → AI → humans steering it I’ve tried killing org charts before. Brutally hard. But we never had these tools. This is rewriting the CEO playbook for the AI era. Buckle up. 00:00 Existential Dread & Hope 02:56 AI Replaces Hierarchy 07:22 Block’s New Three Roles 26:47 Flattening the Company, Fast 35:23 Getting the Board to Buy-In, Fast 36:50 Building a Great Board 41:29 Founder CEO Lessons 48:18 Second Acts & Conviction 56:22 Timeless CEO Traits

NEW EPISODE: jack & Roelof Botha unpack Block 40% staff cut and rebuilding the entire company as a mini-AGI. This isn’t “use AI to make people more productive.” It’s making the company itself the intelligence. If you’re a founder or operator wondering what work looks like in the next 5 years… this is the episode. The evolution looks like: • Manager mode = Pyramid 🔺 (command & control) • Founder mode = Flat ➖(founders decide fast) • Dorsey mode = Circle 🔵 w/ AI at the center, humans at the edge, and decisions flow from customer inputs → AI → humans steering it I’ve tried killing org charts before. Brutally hard. But we never had these tools. This is rewriting the CEO playbook for the AI era. Buckle up. 00:00 Existential Dread & Hope 02:56 AI Replaces Hierarchy 07:22 Block’s New Three Roles 26:47 Flattening the Company, Fast 35:23 Getting the Board to Buy-In, Fast 36:50 Building a Great Board 41:29 Founder CEO Lessons 48:18 Second Acts & Conviction 56:22 Timeless CEO Traits

345,775 次观看 • 7 个月前

So jack wants ~6,000 employees reporting directly to him in the new version of the company. Layers between CEO and any employee in the company: ~5 today → 2-3 this year → basically zero

So jack wants ~6,000 employees reporting directly to him in the new version of the company. Layers between CEO and any employee in the company: ~5 today → 2-3 this year → basically zero

261,195 次观看 • 6 个月前

The most ‘Founder Mode’ CEO working today is not actually the founder. NEW EPISODE with Kaz Kaz Nejatian of Opendoor is now live. This is a special one. Kaz left Shopify to pull off the refounding of a struggling public company in just 16 days. Incredible story. Here are just a few of my learnings from our conversation on the latest episode of Long Strange Trip: 1. First Derivative Businesses The most enduring companies are rarely built on their primary activity; they are built on the first derivative of that core business. Great founders identify and weaponize the secondary value stream. This is important. 2. Rejecting Defaults Success is a function of the defaults you choose to overwrite. Most operators accept the 'software' of their industry or life on autopilot; exceptional builders identify the one or two critical defaults and fight them with all their power to create a new trajectory. Kaz is a master at this, and he explains how. 3. Stewardship Over Status Optimize for doing things rather than being things. When a leader optimizes for a title or happiness, they create fragile organizations; when they optimize for stewardship and service, they build a mission-driven culture that can withstand the lonely and painful stretches of the journey. 4. Write a user manual for yourself "Strong attract, strong repel. My job is to tell you what kind of a person I am so you can opt in or opt out." I love this quote. If you're a founder, you owe this to everyone around you. 5. Founder mode = responsibility for outcomes Hold yourself responsible for truth and outcomes, not processes. Hire people to round you out. Don't try to be well-rounded yourself. And don't work on your weaknesses. "Is the fact that I'm bad at this the reason I'm good at everything else?" 6. Structural Risk Mispricing The one permanent advantage for entrepreneurs is that the rest of the world structurally misprices risk. While others see a 'lion bite' in every setback, the best CEOs recognizes that things going poorly is not as painful as you think, allowing them to lean into volatility that scares off the incumbent. That's the difference. 7. Death Spiral Honesty When a company is in a death spiral, incrementalism is fatal; "what must change os everything." Professional managers are often incentivized by RSUs to delay the inevitable and manage a slow decline. You need zero incentive to manage a decline and a compensation structure aligned purely with performance. 8. AI as the New Performance Default Default to AI is not a suggestion; it is the first line of the job description. A company becomes AI-native not through top-down mandates, but by making AI proficiency a core pillar of the performance management system - effectively deciding who gets to play on the team based on their ability to automate their own craft. 9. The Career vs. Job Distinction "A job is something you do for someone else in order to get paid. A career is something you work on every day for yourself." Kaz's kids know what Opendoor is. His family is all in. Exceptional companies are built by people who self-identify with their work and treat their professional mission as a family-integrated pursuit. 10. Two timeframes matter. Everything else is noise. This week and 10 years from now. "This quarter is a deeply useless measuring period." tobi lutke applies a discount rate of basically zero to the future. That's the model. My takeaway from this conversation: ask yourself what defaults you're living by that you haven't deliberately chosen. Kaz overrides every default, and he does it over and over again.

The most ‘Founder Mode’ CEO working today is not actually the founder. NEW EPISODE with Kaz Kaz Nejatian of Opendoor is now live. This is a special one. Kaz left Shopify to pull off the refounding of a struggling public company in just 16 days. Incredible story. Here are just a few of my learnings from our conversation on the latest episode of Long Strange Trip: 1. First Derivative Businesses The most enduring companies are rarely built on their primary activity; they are built on the first derivative of that core business. Great founders identify and weaponize the secondary value stream. This is important. 2. Rejecting Defaults Success is a function of the defaults you choose to overwrite. Most operators accept the 'software' of their industry or life on autopilot; exceptional builders identify the one or two critical defaults and fight them with all their power to create a new trajectory. Kaz is a master at this, and he explains how. 3. Stewardship Over Status Optimize for doing things rather than being things. When a leader optimizes for a title or happiness, they create fragile organizations; when they optimize for stewardship and service, they build a mission-driven culture that can withstand the lonely and painful stretches of the journey. 4. Write a user manual for yourself "Strong attract, strong repel. My job is to tell you what kind of a person I am so you can opt in or opt out." I love this quote. If you're a founder, you owe this to everyone around you. 5. Founder mode = responsibility for outcomes Hold yourself responsible for truth and outcomes, not processes. Hire people to round you out. Don't try to be well-rounded yourself. And don't work on your weaknesses. "Is the fact that I'm bad at this the reason I'm good at everything else?" 6. Structural Risk Mispricing The one permanent advantage for entrepreneurs is that the rest of the world structurally misprices risk. While others see a 'lion bite' in every setback, the best CEOs recognizes that things going poorly is not as painful as you think, allowing them to lean into volatility that scares off the incumbent. That's the difference. 7. Death Spiral Honesty When a company is in a death spiral, incrementalism is fatal; "what must change os everything." Professional managers are often incentivized by RSUs to delay the inevitable and manage a slow decline. You need zero incentive to manage a decline and a compensation structure aligned purely with performance. 8. AI as the New Performance Default Default to AI is not a suggestion; it is the first line of the job description. A company becomes AI-native not through top-down mandates, but by making AI proficiency a core pillar of the performance management system - effectively deciding who gets to play on the team based on their ability to automate their own craft. 9. The Career vs. Job Distinction "A job is something you do for someone else in order to get paid. A career is something you work on every day for yourself." Kaz's kids know what Opendoor is. His family is all in. Exceptional companies are built by people who self-identify with their work and treat their professional mission as a family-integrated pursuit. 10. Two timeframes matter. Everything else is noise. This week and 10 years from now. "This quarter is a deeply useless measuring period." tobi lutke applies a discount rate of basically zero to the future. That's the model. My takeaway from this conversation: ask yourself what defaults you're living by that you haven't deliberately chosen. Kaz overrides every default, and he does it over and over again.

271,721 次观看 • 7 个月前

“Startups are somewhere between completely impossible and very, very, very, very hard.” That's Parker Conrad, CEO of Rippling, on the first episode of Long Strange Trip. Parker's got one hell of a story. Violently fired by David Sacks from Zenefits. Character assassinated in the press. Everyone (including me) thought he was done. Then he built a $17B company in the exact same space. In this episode, Parker talks about turning your darkest professional moment into rocket fuel. How he keeps a 4,000-person scaleup moving at startup speed. Why he he's hired over 100 ex-founders. And what it's really like when someone plants a spy inside your company. This isn't your typical founder story. It's raw, it's real, and there are some serious lessons buried in the drama. I hope you enjoy it.

“Startups are somewhere between completely impossible and very, very, very, very hard.” That's Parker Conrad, CEO of Rippling, on the first episode of Long Strange Trip. Parker's got one hell of a story. Violently fired by David Sacks from Zenefits. Character assassinated in the press. Everyone (including me) thought he was done. Then he built a $17B company in the exact same space. In this episode, Parker talks about turning your darkest professional moment into rocket fuel. How he keeps a 4,000-person scaleup moving at startup speed. Why he he's hired over 100 ex-founders. And what it's really like when someone plants a spy inside your company. This isn't your typical founder story. It's raw, it's real, and there are some serious lessons buried in the drama. I hope you enjoy it.

327,370 次观看 • 11 个月前

You basically need to be unemployed to keep up with all this AI stuff. jack feels it too

You basically need to be unemployed to keep up with all this AI stuff. jack feels it too

191,187 次观看 • 6 个月前

NEW EPISODE of Long Strange Trip with the CEO of Clay, Kareem Amin Clay is one of those companies where iykyk. The Go-To-Market Platform for the AI Era that went from $1M ➡️$100M ARR in two years. But it wasn't always that way. Everyone I spoke to about Kareem, from employees to investors, to former colleagues and even competitors describe him as more of a philosopher who happens to be scaling a 🚀 than a typical CEO. They aren't wrong. Kareem is different. A few things we get into → Why "9-9-6" is performance art and sometimes a sign you just don't have a moat → How they run the company with “just-in-time” decision making, not exact team meetings (love this) → How they named a category instead of trying to invent one, and turned the Go To Market Engineer into a movement → Being a momentum detective & where a CEO should actually spend their time → Why he answered a pricing backlash by publishing his exact internal reasoning → Building from wholeness, and not the overplayed chip on the shoulder → The silent-retreat realization that changed how he thinks about building → The Hegelian Product Flip strategy → Why future thinking can be detrimental 00:00 Introduction 01:35 Competitive Fire and Drive 03:06 Building From Wholeness 06:42 Living in the Present 09:31 Contrarian Founder Style 14:40 Five Years in the Desert 27:35 Naming GTM Engineering 35:49 Winning Content Battles 36:10 Naming the Category 37:27 Building the Agency Channel 40:19 Pricing Backlash Playbook 43:15 Momentum Detective CEO 52:32 Trust and Tough Calls 01:03:49 Calling Out Elephants 01:06:41 Closing 👇Full episode in the comments

NEW EPISODE of Long Strange Trip with the CEO of Clay, Kareem Amin Clay is one of those companies where iykyk. The Go-To-Market Platform for the AI Era that went from $1M ➡️$100M ARR in two years. But it wasn't always that way. Everyone I spoke to about Kareem, from employees to investors, to former colleagues and even competitors describe him as more of a philosopher who happens to be scaling a 🚀 than a typical CEO. They aren't wrong. Kareem is different. A few things we get into → Why "9-9-6" is performance art and sometimes a sign you just don't have a moat → How they run the company with “just-in-time” decision making, not exact team meetings (love this) → How they named a category instead of trying to invent one, and turned the Go To Market Engineer into a movement → Being a momentum detective & where a CEO should actually spend their time → Why he answered a pricing backlash by publishing his exact internal reasoning → Building from wholeness, and not the overplayed chip on the shoulder → The silent-retreat realization that changed how he thinks about building → The Hegelian Product Flip strategy → Why future thinking can be detrimental 00:00 Introduction 01:35 Competitive Fire and Drive 03:06 Building From Wholeness 06:42 Living in the Present 09:31 Contrarian Founder Style 14:40 Five Years in the Desert 27:35 Naming GTM Engineering 35:49 Winning Content Battles 36:10 Naming the Category 37:27 Building the Agency Channel 40:19 Pricing Backlash Playbook 43:15 Momentum Detective CEO 52:32 Trust and Tough Calls 01:03:49 Calling Out Elephants 01:06:41 Closing 👇Full episode in the comments

82,684 次观看 • 3 个月前

Find the bottleneck. Swarm the bottleneck. Shatter the bottleneck. If every CEO that I coach focused like Ali Ghodsi, I wouldn't have a job. His strategy: - Identify the main bottleneck - Focus the whole company on it (to an extreme) - If you overdo it, thats great. You did it right. Databricks put all their attention on one thing at a time, and in this story it was figuring out how to get the commercial engine humming. Complete obsession. Now at a $7B run rate. Link to full episode in the comments

Find the bottleneck. Swarm the bottleneck. Shatter the bottleneck. If every CEO that I coach focused like Ali Ghodsi, I wouldn't have a job. His strategy: - Identify the main bottleneck - Focus the whole company on it (to an extreme) - If you overdo it, thats great. You did it right. Databricks put all their attention on one thing at a time, and in this story it was figuring out how to get the commercial engine humming. Complete obsession. Now at a $7B run rate. Link to full episode in the comments

33,766 次观看 • 1 个月前

I ran HubSpot for about 15 years. This year I became a beginner again. Being totally honest, learning to build Hal, my digital twin, with all the AI tools was wildly outside of my comfort zone. For most of my career, when I wanted something built, I chased developers. For Hal, I did it myself. Coding very long into the nights and weekends. Let me tell you...it was humbling. Stuff broke constantly. I felt dumb a lot. It also changed how I work with CEOs. I can't tell the founders I work with to rethink their companies around AI if I haven't gotten my own hands dirty. So I did. In my interview with the #goat Tom Brady at the HubSpot UNBOUND Conference last week he said something that stuck with me: "We only get better and we only grow when things are outside of our comfort zone." Seven rings and he's still hunting for the uncomfortable thing. The rest of us don't have much of an excuse. If AI scares you a little, good. Dive in anyway. Post about it, and I'll tell you what I think.

I ran HubSpot for about 15 years. This year I became a beginner again. Being totally honest, learning to build Hal, my digital twin, with all the AI tools was wildly outside of my comfort zone. For most of my career, when I wanted something built, I chased developers. For Hal, I did it myself. Coding very long into the nights and weekends. Let me tell you...it was humbling. Stuff broke constantly. I felt dumb a lot. It also changed how I work with CEOs. I can't tell the founders I work with to rethink their companies around AI if I haven't gotten my own hands dirty. So I did. In my interview with the #goat Tom Brady at the HubSpot UNBOUND Conference last week he said something that stuck with me: "We only get better and we only grow when things are outside of our comfort zone." Seven rings and he's still hunting for the uncomfortable thing. The rest of us don't have much of an excuse. If AI scares you a little, good. Dive in anyway. Post about it, and I'll tell you what I think.

28,258 次观看 • 1 个月前

Is radical candor in the workplace the right call for CEOs? My co-founder dharmesh ran a 360 on me once. "On a scale of 1–10, how likely are you to recommend Brian as CEO of HubSpot? Why?" He sent it to ~25 people: board, customers, employees. People wrote novels. He organized the results like a product spec. Features and bugs, with direct quotes. The first 10 pages were features. I'm reading thinking....I've got this nailed. Page 11 is where the bugs started. There were a lot! Year one, I tried to fix all of the bugs that people had with me. Didn't work. After that I picked 1 or 2 a year. Luca Ferrari, CEO of Bending Spoons, landed in the same place. He started with five things to improve, realized halfway through the year that was too many, and now picks one per year. The rest is radical candor. See something good or bad, say it. Right away, even in front of the whole meeting. Wording, accuracy, hurt feelings are all secondary to being honest. His one thing right now: telling great people how great they are. He says he's awful at saying it out loud. I got the exact same feedback pretty much every year. My fix was a 15-minute block on Friday afternoons just for compliments. Luca's version of the old "five positives for every correction" rule: "Let's use all six slots for corrections." Pick one "bug" that you have. Get a lot better at it. Then pick the next one. Episode to the full episode in the comments.

Is radical candor in the workplace the right call for CEOs? My co-founder dharmesh ran a 360 on me once. "On a scale of 1–10, how likely are you to recommend Brian as CEO of HubSpot? Why?" He sent it to ~25 people: board, customers, employees. People wrote novels. He organized the results like a product spec. Features and bugs, with direct quotes. The first 10 pages were features. I'm reading thinking....I've got this nailed. Page 11 is where the bugs started. There were a lot! Year one, I tried to fix all of the bugs that people had with me. Didn't work. After that I picked 1 or 2 a year. Luca Ferrari, CEO of Bending Spoons, landed in the same place. He started with five things to improve, realized halfway through the year that was too many, and now picks one per year. The rest is radical candor. See something good or bad, say it. Right away, even in front of the whole meeting. Wording, accuracy, hurt feelings are all secondary to being honest. His one thing right now: telling great people how great they are. He says he's awful at saying it out loud. I got the exact same feedback pretty much every year. My fix was a 15-minute block on Friday afternoons just for compliments. Luca's version of the old "five positives for every correction" rule: "Let's use all six slots for corrections." Pick one "bug" that you have. Get a lot better at it. Then pick the next one. Episode to the full episode in the comments.

19,728 次观看 • 22 天前

I built 𝗛𝗮𝗹 - my AI agent/second brain trained on my entire life. He now runs my day, sends emails, organizes projects, collaborates with the team without me, and 𝗻𝗼𝘄 𝗽𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗽𝗮𝘁𝗲𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝗺𝘆 𝗭𝗼𝗼𝗺 𝗺𝗲𝗲𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀. He’s not just a copilot anymore. He is me. See video 👇 This is V1 - Hal is starting to move to autopilot. Next: he’ll run more of my meetings and work without me. He already remembers more than I do and he’s getting smarter fast. At some point, I imagine him handling more of my meetings and work, without me. He remembers more than I do and will be smarter. What capability should I build into Hal next? (He’ll be animated by next week — video 👇)

I built 𝗛𝗮𝗹 - my AI agent/second brain trained on my entire life. He now runs my day, sends emails, organizes projects, collaborates with the team without me, and 𝗻𝗼𝘄 𝗽𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗽𝗮𝘁𝗲𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝗺𝘆 𝗭𝗼𝗼𝗺 𝗺𝗲𝗲𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀. He’s not just a copilot anymore. He is me. See video 👇 This is V1 - Hal is starting to move to autopilot. Next: he’ll run more of my meetings and work without me. He already remembers more than I do and he’s getting smarter fast. At some point, I imagine him handling more of my meetings and work, without me. He remembers more than I do and will be smarter. What capability should I build into Hal next? (He’ll be animated by next week — video 👇)

86,454 次观看 • 4 个月前

Here is to all the AEs out there. Ali Ghodsi told me about one of the first AEs at Databricks who got a meeting nobody could get. An Exec from the customer who took the meeting saw him and said "get that guy out of here" because he had emailed too many people. But it worked. The AE's response when Ali confronted him: "I got you the meeting. went through every door. I broke glass." Squeaky wheel gets the grease. Your best salespeople might piss people off. But they got it done. Full episode in the comments below.

Here is to all the AEs out there. Ali Ghodsi told me about one of the first AEs at Databricks who got a meeting nobody could get. An Exec from the customer who took the meeting saw him and said "get that guy out of here" because he had emailed too many people. But it worked. The AE's response when Ali confronted him: "I got you the meeting. went through every door. I broke glass." Squeaky wheel gets the grease. Your best salespeople might piss people off. But they got it done. Full episode in the comments below.

31,285 次观看 • 1 个月前

One of the smartest things Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora said about M&A on the pod had nothing to do with price. When Palo Alto acquires a company, they don’t “integrate” it the traditional way. They flip the org chart. If the founders beat you with fewer people and less capital, why would you put them under your bureaucracy? Nikesh’s rule is simple: they run it. That one decision helps explain why their M&A actually works - and why most corporate acquisitions quietly die. If you’re a founder thinking about selling, or a CEO thinking about buying, his is a masterclass in how talent (not technology) is the real asset.

One of the smartest things Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora said about M&A on the pod had nothing to do with price. When Palo Alto acquires a company, they don’t “integrate” it the traditional way. They flip the org chart. If the founders beat you with fewer people and less capital, why would you put them under your bureaucracy? Nikesh’s rule is simple: they run it. That one decision helps explain why their M&A actually works - and why most corporate acquisitions quietly die. If you’re a founder thinking about selling, or a CEO thinking about buying, his is a masterclass in how talent (not technology) is the real asset.

159,865 次观看 • 9 个月前

🚨NEW Long Strange Trip episode: David Senra, creator of David Senra David has studied the minds of more generational company builders than anyone alive, from Jesus of Nazareth to Jensen Huang. I sat down with him to reverse engineer the psychological frameworks of history's greatest titans. 6 Lessons on the Unfiltered Reality of Iconic Founders. 1. Taste is real, and it starts with shutting up and actually listening. 2. On Negative Self-Talk: Many elite CEOs are fueled in their early days by a dark, chaotic mind and intense self-criticism. They categorically refuse to sleep on their wins, obsessing over everything that is currently broken. I was guilty of this at Hubspot. To survive a multi-decade career without self-destructing, that initial fuel source must eventually convert from negative anxiety into a love for the craft. 3. We need to stop trying to heavily manage or over-advise elite entrepreneurial talent. The greatest founders are irrepressible forces of nature who will relentlessly hunt down the specific knowledge and frameworks they need to win. They are not passively discovered by the market or by venture capitalists; VCs can't help them out of a bad year. They violently force the world to recognize their existence. 4. Small egos don't build big companies. Elite founders are driven by control, not money. Money is just a side effect. 5. Co-Founder Dynamics: Despite the modern dogma that you need a balanced co-founding team to succeed, historical precedent shows that a singular driving force almost always takes over. From Henry Ford operating as an autocrat to Steve Jobs refounding Apple alone, the equal partnership rarely stands the ultimate test of time. Even brilliant minds like Charlie Munger recognized they had to deliberately subjugate their own massive egos to support a singular talent like Warren Buffett . 6. Focus is the whole game: "Mute the world and build your own" as he says. True focus is your willingness to say no to incredibly good ideas because they distract from the truly great ones. 00:00 Introduction 01:11 Focus Above All 01:50 Dana White UFC Focus 04:19 Focus vs Obsession 05:05 Origins in Childhood 06:07 Coppola and His Father 08:48 Assholes and Archetypes 11:14 Autism and Originality 14:55 Immigrant Drive and Grit 16:38 Bet on the Founder 17:52 Solo vs Partners 23:20 Negative Self Talk Fuel 26:39 Platform Shifts and Founder Mode 28:07 Dell Versus IBM 30:02 Infinite Leverage Edge 31:38 Focus Versus Speed 34:20 Taste And Listening 40:52 Founder Traits And Balance 54:22 Closing Takeaways (link to episode in comments 👇)

🚨NEW Long Strange Trip episode: David Senra, creator of David Senra David has studied the minds of more generational company builders than anyone alive, from Jesus of Nazareth to Jensen Huang. I sat down with him to reverse engineer the psychological frameworks of history's greatest titans. 6 Lessons on the Unfiltered Reality of Iconic Founders. 1. Taste is real, and it starts with shutting up and actually listening. 2. On Negative Self-Talk: Many elite CEOs are fueled in their early days by a dark, chaotic mind and intense self-criticism. They categorically refuse to sleep on their wins, obsessing over everything that is currently broken. I was guilty of this at Hubspot. To survive a multi-decade career without self-destructing, that initial fuel source must eventually convert from negative anxiety into a love for the craft. 3. We need to stop trying to heavily manage or over-advise elite entrepreneurial talent. The greatest founders are irrepressible forces of nature who will relentlessly hunt down the specific knowledge and frameworks they need to win. They are not passively discovered by the market or by venture capitalists; VCs can't help them out of a bad year. They violently force the world to recognize their existence. 4. Small egos don't build big companies. Elite founders are driven by control, not money. Money is just a side effect. 5. Co-Founder Dynamics: Despite the modern dogma that you need a balanced co-founding team to succeed, historical precedent shows that a singular driving force almost always takes over. From Henry Ford operating as an autocrat to Steve Jobs refounding Apple alone, the equal partnership rarely stands the ultimate test of time. Even brilliant minds like Charlie Munger recognized they had to deliberately subjugate their own massive egos to support a singular talent like Warren Buffett . 6. Focus is the whole game: "Mute the world and build your own" as he says. True focus is your willingness to say no to incredibly good ideas because they distract from the truly great ones. 00:00 Introduction 01:11 Focus Above All 01:50 Dana White UFC Focus 04:19 Focus vs Obsession 05:05 Origins in Childhood 06:07 Coppola and His Father 08:48 Assholes and Archetypes 11:14 Autism and Originality 14:55 Immigrant Drive and Grit 16:38 Bet on the Founder 17:52 Solo vs Partners 23:20 Negative Self Talk Fuel 26:39 Platform Shifts and Founder Mode 28:07 Dell Versus IBM 30:02 Infinite Leverage Edge 31:38 Focus Versus Speed 34:20 Taste And Listening 40:52 Founder Traits And Balance 54:22 Closing Takeaways (link to episode in comments 👇)

84,224 次观看 • 4 个月前

Technical founders: hiring salespeople is where you will most likely get wrecked.

Technical founders: hiring salespeople is where you will most likely get wrecked.

126,393 次观看 • 8 个月前

Never bet against immigrants. "He plays more aggressively than you think is possible." Ali Ghodsi, CEO of Databricks, describes having: - Chip on his shoulder from growing up in Europe as an immigrant (the US has actually softened him a lot) - Switching schools and environments = pent up frustration - Had things to prove to himself, and to the world - Or, maybe it's just genetic? Link to full episode in the comments.

Never bet against immigrants. "He plays more aggressively than you think is possible." Ali Ghodsi, CEO of Databricks, describes having: - Chip on his shoulder from growing up in Europe as an immigrant (the US has actually softened him a lot) - Switching schools and environments = pent up frustration - Had things to prove to himself, and to the world - Or, maybe it's just genetic? Link to full episode in the comments.

22,007 次观看 • 1 个月前

🚨NEW Long Strange Trip episode just dropped: Ivan Zhao, CEO of Notion jack gave us the circular org chart. Brian Armstrong gave us player-coach. Ivan Zhao just added Jazz Mode. Notion is one of the clearest examples of a great SaaS company making the successful leap into becoming an AI company. That transition is much harder than it looks. Ivan Zhao is the definition of a Refounder, and has rebuilt his company nearly three times. Anyone who is looking to move into this new era, the “jazz era” should listen to this one 👇 Notes from our chat: 1. The Next Evolution to companies is structured freedom You need operators who can improvise and contribute creatively without waiting for orders. Think jazz band over marching band. Leaders must build teams that riff off each other dynamically rather than blindly following a rigid sheet of music. 2. Build a barbell engineering team Pair hyper senior architectural minds with junior talent. Senior leaders provide the taste and direction that language models lack, while junior engineers manage fleets of coding agents to execute the vision. 3. The best companies reinvent themselves When a startup stalls, incremental pivots rarely save it. Sometimes you must cleanly sever the past and start fresh. True technological shifts shouldn't feel like feature updates; they should feel existential. Interacting with frontier models should command a complete re-evaluation of your company's purpose. If a founder hasn't built with AI to feel this paradigm shift firsthand, they cannot find a new path forward. 4. Why Wartime is More Fun Peacetime in SaaS was comfortable, but wartime is where companies actually feel alive. When survival is on the line, the stakes are higher, and a shared, urgent purpose amplifies meaning for everyone. 5. Hire people who can blur traditional roles The best Notion hires have always blurred lines: designers who code, PMs who ship, engineers with taste. Baseline capability is no longer the bottleneck. The premium is now on a candidate's energy, optimism, and fundamental taste across multiple areas. 6. Acqui-hire founders aggressively As companies scale, they naturally calcify and slow down. The antidote is systematically acquiring early-stage startups just for the founders. Ex-founders act as aggressive machinery, breaking old patterns and forcing the organization to regenerate. 7. Financials March, Product Strategy Jazzes You cannot build a rigid product roadmap anymore because the underlying technology shifts too rapidly. Financial planning is the only system that still requires predictability; product strategy must be entirely fluid and improvisational. 8. Make compensation radically more meritocratic The SaaS era of "peanut buttering" compensation across the entire team is over. Companies must transition to extreme meritocracies to reward top performers. 9. Don’t reinvent the wheel unless you must Notion tried to first principle their way into sales. Eventually, they realized that was just plain wrong. Founders waste years trying to creatively invent a new sales system when the classic playbook works best. 10. Decentralizing the CMO Traditional marketing departments move too slowly to keep up with modern shipping cadences. The solution for Notion was to rip the CMO org apart and embed storytelling directly next to the product team. Demand generation now strictly serves the sales function. Lots lots more on this one. Ivan, as stylish as ever, was a blast. Enjoyed this one a lot. (links below) 👇👇 00:00 Introduction 02:22 From Founder Mode to AI Org 11:00 Hiring for Taste and Agency 24:28 Refounding Notion in Kyoto 30:27 Craft Versus Commerce 32:26 When to Refound 34:07 GPT-4 Refounding Shock 45:35 Leadership and Founder Energy 53:17 Sales Culture and Closing Thoughts

🚨NEW Long Strange Trip episode just dropped: Ivan Zhao, CEO of Notion jack gave us the circular org chart. Brian Armstrong gave us player-coach. Ivan Zhao just added Jazz Mode. Notion is one of the clearest examples of a great SaaS company making the successful leap into becoming an AI company. That transition is much harder than it looks. Ivan Zhao is the definition of a Refounder, and has rebuilt his company nearly three times. Anyone who is looking to move into this new era, the “jazz era” should listen to this one 👇 Notes from our chat: 1. The Next Evolution to companies is structured freedom You need operators who can improvise and contribute creatively without waiting for orders. Think jazz band over marching band. Leaders must build teams that riff off each other dynamically rather than blindly following a rigid sheet of music. 2. Build a barbell engineering team Pair hyper senior architectural minds with junior talent. Senior leaders provide the taste and direction that language models lack, while junior engineers manage fleets of coding agents to execute the vision. 3. The best companies reinvent themselves When a startup stalls, incremental pivots rarely save it. Sometimes you must cleanly sever the past and start fresh. True technological shifts shouldn't feel like feature updates; they should feel existential. Interacting with frontier models should command a complete re-evaluation of your company's purpose. If a founder hasn't built with AI to feel this paradigm shift firsthand, they cannot find a new path forward. 4. Why Wartime is More Fun Peacetime in SaaS was comfortable, but wartime is where companies actually feel alive. When survival is on the line, the stakes are higher, and a shared, urgent purpose amplifies meaning for everyone. 5. Hire people who can blur traditional roles The best Notion hires have always blurred lines: designers who code, PMs who ship, engineers with taste. Baseline capability is no longer the bottleneck. The premium is now on a candidate's energy, optimism, and fundamental taste across multiple areas. 6. Acqui-hire founders aggressively As companies scale, they naturally calcify and slow down. The antidote is systematically acquiring early-stage startups just for the founders. Ex-founders act as aggressive machinery, breaking old patterns and forcing the organization to regenerate. 7. Financials March, Product Strategy Jazzes You cannot build a rigid product roadmap anymore because the underlying technology shifts too rapidly. Financial planning is the only system that still requires predictability; product strategy must be entirely fluid and improvisational. 8. Make compensation radically more meritocratic The SaaS era of "peanut buttering" compensation across the entire team is over. Companies must transition to extreme meritocracies to reward top performers. 9. Don’t reinvent the wheel unless you must Notion tried to first principle their way into sales. Eventually, they realized that was just plain wrong. Founders waste years trying to creatively invent a new sales system when the classic playbook works best. 10. Decentralizing the CMO Traditional marketing departments move too slowly to keep up with modern shipping cadences. The solution for Notion was to rip the CMO org apart and embed storytelling directly next to the product team. Demand generation now strictly serves the sales function. Lots lots more on this one. Ivan, as stylish as ever, was a blast. Enjoyed this one a lot. (links below) 👇👇 00:00 Introduction 02:22 From Founder Mode to AI Org 11:00 Hiring for Taste and Agency 24:28 Refounding Notion in Kyoto 30:27 Craft Versus Commerce 32:26 When to Refound 34:07 GPT-4 Refounding Shock 45:35 Leadership and Founder Energy 53:17 Sales Culture and Closing Thoughts

69,991 次观看 • 5 个月前