Big Brain Business
@BigBrainBizness • 21,285 subscribers
Learn to not suck at business
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Jeff Bezos, asked what America's real moat is, doesn't say banks or English or natural resources. He says this: "You can raise $50 million of seed capital to do something that only has a 10% chance of working. That's crazy. But the people who are giving you that seed capital know that their expected value is still positive." That's the whole argument in two sentences. Everyone nods at "venture capital" like it's a line item. Bezos is saying it's the line item. The deregulation pitch around it is weaker. "I'm very optimistic... he seems to have a lot of energy around reducing regulation" is the kind of thing a guy with a rocket company awaiting FAA approval says out loud on a stage. He's literally talking about New Glenn sitting on the pad 20 minutes later. The optimism has a return address. And he never connects the two machines. Permitting reform helps you build a bridge. It doesn't help a seed fund underwrite a 10% bet. He glides between them like they're the same argument. The part worth stealing: expected value positive on a 10% hit rate is the actual job description of early-stage investing, and most founders pitching still don't price their odds that honestly. Jeff Bezos told his own angels in '95 there was a 70% chance they'd lose it all. He raised the million anyway.
Big Brain Business86,679 просмотров • 8 дней назад
Jeff Bezos' reaction to David Blaine chewing glass is how we always imagined billionaires laugh:
Big Brain Business1,810,416 просмотров • 5 месяцев назад
Meta Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang on why your product can be better and still lose, because perception is more real than reality: Most founders assume the best product wins. Build something that works, prove it with data, and customers will see it. Wang says that assumption breaks down when you sell to large organisations. "Probably a lot of the companies that you all have worked with, they're very data-driven companies. It feels like the truth makes its way... everybody serves a shared sense of reality and whatnot. That's not true at most large companies and also not true within the government, unfortunately." So what do they run on instead? Perception. "At a lot of large customers, perception is more real than reality. The reality is just so ugly most of the time that very rarely do people actually confront reality, and most of the time they just sort of choose to believe the perceptions that they live in." That is how a better product loses. If buyers aren't judging reality, being better in reality isn't enough. The deal goes to whoever owns the perception. Wang spells out what this means for anyone building or selling to enterprises: "If you end up doing enterprise sales or you end up building enterprise products... just as much as your job is to improve the reality, it is to shape the perception." The product still matters, but by his reckoning, it's only half the job. One company he singles out for mastering the other half is Palantir: "One of Palantir's superpowers is that they shape the perception better than most other technology companies do, because I think they view themselves... it's like a combination of a sort of acting troupe combined with a software company." And Alexandr Wang means it literally: "They literally give an acting book to all of the new hires, or they did for a very long time." A software company that trained its people in performance. That tells you how seriously Palantir took the perception half of the job.
Big Brain Business271,944 просмотров • 29 дней назад
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt on the controversial hiring rules that built Google, and the beloved "glue people" he says you don't need at all: Schmidt admits the early rules were unpopular, even inside the company. "One of the rules is that we didn't want to hire your friends, which always was upsetting. We also didn't want to hire anybody from what were considered to be lesser universities. And so we also wanted to hire people who had very high GPAs." That meant saying no to people who, by most measures, deserved a yes: "So the constant problem was that somebody was a good employee, had someone they had worked with, who was very loyal, very hard working, who was not from a great university, did not have a very good GPA and we would not hire them." He concedes the policy has since been softened. But he doesn't apologise for it: "So that was controversial and we've relaxed that a little bit now. But the fact of the matter is it got us to where we were today because it produced these high IQ generalists from prestigious universities." Then there was the second rule, built on a lesson Schmidt learned before Google, at Novell. He calls them "glue people": "The glue people are incredibly nice people who sit at interstitial boundaries between groups and they assist in activity. They are glue and they're very, very loyal and people love them and you don't need them at all." The problem wasn't that they were bad people. It was that they cost speed: "At Novell, I kept trying to get rid of these glue people because they were getting in the way because they slowed everything down." And once inside, they were almost impossible to remove: "And every time I'd get rid of in one group, they'd show up in another group and they'd transfer and get rehired and all that." When Eric Schmidt raised this with Larry and Sergey, Larry's answer was to stop glue people before they ever got in: "And Larry said, yeah, let's just review all the hiring." "So guess what? From that moment on, we reviewed every offer packet. Literally everyone." The review was strict enough that even Schmidt's own preferred candidates got caught: "And anybody who smelled or looked like a glue person, plus the people that Larry and Sergey thought had backgrounds that I liked that they didn't, would all be flagged. And so anybody who sort of met the original profile, they'd go right through."
Big Brain Business151,351 просмотров • 23 дней назад
Jerry Seinfeld on why chasing your "passion" is embarrassing, and what to do instead: Seinfeld pushes back against the popular advice to find your one great passion in life. In his view, it's not just unnecessary, it's a little ridiculous. "Let go of this idea that you have to find this one great thing that is my passion. My great passion with your shirt torn open and your heaving pec muscles. It's embarrassing." Instead of chasing something dramatic, he offers a quieter alternative: "Find fascination. Fascination is way better than passion. It's not so sweaty." He explains why the heavy-breathing version of passion is actually counterproductive: "Just be willing to do your work as hard as you can with the ability you have. We don't need the heavy breathing and the outstretched arm from your passion. It makes co-workers uncomfortable in the cubicle next to you." Then Seinfeld offers what he calls his three real keys to life, no jokes: "Number one, bust your ass. Number two, pay attention. Number three, fall in love." Jerry Seinfeld elaborates on the first one: "You obviously already know whatever you're doing, I don't care if it's your job, your hobby, a relationship, getting a reservation at M Sushi, make an effort. Just pure stupid… effort." And here's the part worth sitting with: "Effort always yields a positive value even if the outcome of the effort is absolute failure of the desired result. This is a rule of life. Just swing the bat and pray is not a bad approach to a lot of things."
Big Brain Business1,158,768 просмотров • 5 месяцев назад
Ken Griffin, Founder and CEO of Citadel, on why a $2.50 Coke at McDonald's tells you everything about the U.S. economy: For Griffin, the price of a single fast-food drink captures the story of the past six years. "$2.50 for a Coke. And before the Biden administration, it was $0.99." That jump is a window into something much bigger: "The United States has endured prolonged and persistent inflation now for 6 years." Griffin explains that these everyday price shocks carry a psychological weight far heavier than the numbers themselves: "The rise of gasoline prices at the gas station, it's like a triggering event. It just brings back to all of us the fact that the purchasing power of the dollar has declined so precipitously for 6 years now." The Coke is just one example. Eggs are another. Griffin points to New York City prices in the range of "7, 8, 9 dollars for a dozen eggs", and notes that even though they've come down somewhat, they remain painfully elevated. Each of these small, daily encounters with higher prices adds up to something larger. A creeping anxiety about the future: "I think everybody in our country, when we see a price shock in any of our day-to-day commodities, gasoline for example, it's just deeply triggering. And I think that there's just a general apprehension of how much more purchasing power are we going to lose because of the economic policies that we're pursuing in Washington." His message to policymakers is direct: "It's very important that this administration and that the legislature continues to stay focused on how do we strengthen the purchasing power of the dollar? How do we make sure that Americans' paychecks go further?" The takeaway: a $2.50 Coke isn't really about a Coke. It's about what the dollar in your pocket can no longer buy at the drive-thru, the gas pump, and the grocery aisle. Until purchasing power is restored, that frustration will keep growing into something much harder to ignore.
Big Brain Business853,915 просмотров • 5 месяцев назад
Jeff Bezos' heartwarming reaction when a veteran employee says Blue Origin is the best company he's worked for in 36 years:
Big Brain Business1,226,715 просмотров • 8 месяцев назад
A young Sam Altman pitching Loopt, the $175M startup he sold for $43M before going on to lead YC and OpenAI:
Big Brain Business762,284 просмотров • 5 месяцев назад
Ken Griffin, founder of Citadel, has a $10 plaque behind his desk that reads: "If we're all going to eat, someone has to sell." Of all the things this man could surround himself with, he chose a cheap plaque with a blunt truth about business. "You're always selling. You're selling to candidates. You're selling to vendors, you're selling to counterparties, you're selling to customers." And if you're always selling, you know what you're going to hear a lot of? "No." Griffin doesn't sugarcoat it. He tells two stories that illustrate just how brutal rejection can be. 1994 was a rough year, with Citadel losing ~4% of its capital. Griffin flew to Switzerland for a crucial lunch meeting, sat down, and his guest arrived only to say: "Oh, I thought you were John Griffin from Fen Church. I got to go." His lunch date got up and left the table. Later that afternoon, a Swiss banker spent 45 minutes with him in a beautiful office, smoking a cigar, before closing with: "Such a pity that such a bright young man picked the wrong career." Two rejections in one day for the founder of one of the most successful hedge funds in history — and his takeaway was simply this: "You just have to tolerate. You're going to hear no a lot, but you need to become accustomed to having to market your ideas and market what you represent and what you stand for." Absorbing rejection and continuing anyway is the actual skill, whether you're hiring, raising capital, or winning customers. Most people avoid selling because they're afraid of no. The ones who build great things have learned to expect it.
Big Brain Business1,059,583 просмотров • 7 месяцев назад
Meta Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang on why his college friends, not experienced engineers, were the right people to build Scale AI's early team: When Alexandr started Scale AI, his first hires didn't come from the San Francisco talent market. "I mostly hired people I knew from school." When Shawn Ryan suggests that was because he could trust them, Alexandr turns it around. It was about whether they could trust him: "I think more that they could trust me." Experienced engineers had no reason to. He explains: "If I went to like a, a 25 year old engineer in San Francisco, I was like, hey, we should, we should work together. I had no credibility." Alexandr Wang describes how those pitches usually ended: "I would get coffee with these people and I would say like, yeah, this is what we're working on. Super cool. You should join us. And then they would all just be like, okay, cool, I guess I'm going to go back to my job now." His college friends were different. They already knew him, and that relationship gave him the credibility that strangers wouldn't: "So early on, I had no credibility, except for with people I went to college with who we were just like friends and we liked each other. And so I managed to recruit a bunch of them over." Some of those friends dropped out to join him. Others were seniors who finished school first and then came on board. "It was a mix. And that was like the early nucleus of the team." That group of college friends carried Scale AI until the company had something stronger than a coffee pitch to offer: real customers. "Then we started picking up momentum because we're starting to work with large automotive companies, were starting to work with, you know, these very futuristic autonomous driving companies." Only then did the team expand beyond that first circle: "And then as momentum started to pick up, like, you know, we were able to grow and build up the team over time." The lesson is that your earliest hires are rarely the most experienced people you can find. They are the people who already believe in you. Before you have traction, a relationship can do the work that a track record can't. If you're building something new with no credibility yet, look first at the people who already know you. They may be the only ones willing to bet on you before anyone else will.
Big Brain Business96,738 просмотров • 21 дней назад
Mark Cuban on the door-to-door garbage bag business that taught him how to sell at age 12: It started because his dad wouldn't buy him a pair of shoes. Cuban was 12, and he wanted new Converse. His dad was in the middle of a poker game. "Dad, I need a new pair of Converse, right?" Cuban recalls asking. His father wasn't moved: "I see those, you know, those shoes on your feet. They still work, right?" Cuban admitted they did. So his dad laid down the rule that would end up shaping his career: "Well, when you have a job, you can buy whatever you want, but until then, those shoes still work." Cuban pushed back with the obvious problem: "Dad, I can't get a job. I'm 12 years old." Then one of his dad's poker buddies spoke up. "Yeah, I got a job for you," the man said. "I've got these boxes of garbage bags and you can go sell them around the neighborhood." So that's what Cuban did. He knocked on doors with a simple pitch: "Hi, I'm your neighbor, Mark. Do you use garbage bags?" The economics were straightforward. The boxes cost him three dollars for a hundred. He sold them for six. Then he'd come back every couple of weeks to restock his neighbors whenever they needed more. He was clearing about 20 bucks a week, which felt like big time, and he got his shoes. The money was never the real lesson. What stuck with him was what selling actually is: "That taught me to be confident and that taught me that I could sell. And that taught me that selling was helping, not convincing." That distinction became the foundation of how Mark Cuban thinks about business. Once he realized everyone already needed garbage bags, the whole game clarified: "Once I figured out that everybody needed garbage bags, then it really became obvious to me that if I can find things that people needed, right, and wanted and I could do it a better way than what they were doing it, then I can make some money. And that's kind of stayed with me since."
Big Brain Business338,845 просмотров • 2 месяцев назад
Tim Cook reveals a surprising truth about hiring at the world's biggest tech company: You don't need to know how to code to work at Apple. "We hire people from all walks of life and people that have college degrees, people that don't. People that code, people that don't." Tim is a vocal advocate for learning to code, but not because it's a prerequisite for getting hired. He sees it as something far broader: "I do recommend coding for everyone to learn because I think it's a form of expressing yourself and it's a global language and it's the only global language that we all share is coding." So if coding isn't the golden ticket, what is? Tim explains that the traits he values most have nothing to do with technical credentials. There are three that matter above all else. The first is collaboration. Not just the willingness to work with others, but a deep, genuine belief that teams produce better outcomes than individuals ever could: "Can they really collaborate? Do they deeply believe that one plus one equals three?" The second is curiosity. Tim Cook gravitates toward people who are relentless in their need to understand, people who never stop probing how the world works and why people think the way they do: "I think curiosity is a trait that I love about people, about people that ask questions that are so curious about how things work, how people think. All of the why and how questions." The third is creativity. This is where everything comes together. Apple's entire model depends on anticipating needs that consumers haven't even recognised yet: "We're looking for people that can see around the corner because ultimately we want to create products that people can't live without, but they didn't know they needed." Collaboration. Curiosity. Creativity. None of them show up on a résumé, and none of them require a degree. But according to Tim Cook, they're exactly what makes a great team player at Apple.
Big Brain Business441,376 просмотров • 3 месяцев назад
Jeff Bezos on why too many ideas can destroy a company, and the discipline that built Amazon's inventive edge: "Jeff, you have enough ideas to destroy Amazon." That's what senior executive Jeff Wilke told Bezos after just one year of working together. Bezos was confused. He pushed back: "What do you mean?" Wilke was a manufacturing expert. He explained it simply: Every new idea Bezos released created a backlog. Work piling up, adding no value, creating distraction instead. The fix wasn't to stop having ideas. It was to control when they came out: "You have to release the work at the right rate that the organisation can accept it." So Jeff Bezos changed how he operated. He started keeping lists, holding ideas back, and waiting until the organisation had the bandwidth to absorb them. But then he flipped the problem entirely. He asked: "How do I build an organisation that's ready for more ideas?" His answer was structural: get the right senior team, give leaders real executive bandwidth, and build a company capable of running multiple bets at once. And there's a benefit he didn't expect. Slowing down made the ideas themselves better: "If you are releasing the ideas through time, it forces you to prioritise them better. You end up sharpening the ideas better." The constraint becomes a filter. The ideas that survive the wait are the ones worth acting on. The result? Faster execution, less distraction, and better ideas.
Big Brain Business925,959 просмотров • 7 месяцев назад
When asked a great question at MIT in 1992, Steve Jobs sat in silence for 19 seconds before giving his most honest answer.
Big Brain Business468,947 просмотров • 4 месяцев назад
