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David Sacks on why founders get distribution wrong “The biggest mistake I see these days is brilliant founders who are brilliant product people, but they haven't thought about how they're going to make their product grow. They launch their product and it's like crickets chirping.” Having a technique that... show more
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![David Sacks on what made the PayPal Mafia so successful The employees of PayPal went on to build many of the companies that defined Silicon Valley in the 2000s, such as Tesla, SpaceX, LinkedIn, YouTube, Palantir, Yelp, Yammer, and more. David Sacks—founding COO and product leader at PayPal—reflects on some of the factors that he believed contributed to their success: “I think one of the key things was that PayPal innovated not just on product, but on distribution as well.” He gives three examples of distribution strategies the PayPal Mafia brought with them to their next companies: 1. Virality. PayPal paid users $20 to refer their friends, which led to explosive growth. Virality was a huge factor in LinkedIn’s success. 2. Building on an existing network/platform. PayPal leveraged eBay’s power seller network, while LinkedIn leveraged their users’ network of email contacts. You want to “go where the users already are,” Sacks argues. 3. Embeds. PayPal let customers embed the logo on their websites and eBay auctions. YouTube employed this same strategy by making their videos easy to embed on Myspace and other websites. Sacks continues: “All of these techniques today are commonplace, but in the early 2000s, we were one of the first companies to do them… We were innovating not just on product but on distribution as well, and that is something that all of the PayPal Mafia companies have done.” He contrasts the ~220 employees pre-IPO PayPal employees producing 7+ unicorns versus only a handful from Google even though Google had 100x the number of employees. “It’s a really interesting question: Why?… I think this sort of scrappiness around distribution is a big part of the explanation… If you’re an entrepreneur working in a small team, you’ve got to figure out from zero: How do I get my first user? How do I get the second user? How does that go to one hundred, one thousand, one million?… [Google] never has to think about that. They’ve got guaranteed distribution of half a billion users. And so, I think that scrappiness around distribution is one of the key reasons that there’s been so many PayPal mafia companies. I think it’s an interesting thing to think about as you create your own startups.” Video source: Draper University (2014)](https://image.24vids.com/tw-1873713143752626472/ext_tw_video_thumb/1873687754036625408/pu/img/7P7KJAu3WSmBeuKa.jpg)
![In 1997, Steve Jobs came back to Apple and canceled 70% of the product line. The engineers whose projects just died? Three feet off the ground with excitement. “They finally understood where in the heck we were going.” He spent 20 minutes explaining how he was going to bring Apple back: On focus: "We looked at the product road map going out for a few years and said a lot of this doesn't make sense." "There's way too much stuff and not enough focus." "We got rid of 70% of the stuff on the product road map." "You're going to see the product line get much simpler. And you're going to see the product line get much better." On inventory: "We've got two to three months of inventory in our manufacturing pipeline. And about an equal amount in our distribution pipeline." "So we're having to make guesses four, five, six months in advance about what the customer wants." "We're not smart enough to do that. I don't think Einstein's smart enough to do that." "So we're going to get really simple. Take inventory out of those pipelines. Let the customer tell us what they want. And respond to it super fast." On marketing: "To me, marketing is about values." "This is a very complicated world. A very noisy world. We're not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is." "So we have to be really clear on what we want them to know about us." On brand neglect: "Apple is one of the half dozen best brands in the whole world. Right up there with Nike, Disney, Coke, Sony." "But even a great brand needs investment and caring if it's going to retain its relevance and vitality." "The Apple brand has clearly suffered from neglect in the last few years." On what not to do: "The way to bring it back is not to talk about speeds and feeds. Not to talk about megahertz. Not to talk about why we're better than Windows." "The dairy industry tried for 20 years to convince you that milk was good for you. It's a lie. But they tried anyway." "Sales were going like this." [Down] "Then they tried 'Got Milk.' Sales went like this." [Up] "Got Milk doesn't even talk about the product. It focuses on the absence of the product." On Nike: "The best example of all. One of the greatest jobs of marketing the universe has ever seen is Nike." "Nike sells a commodity. They sell shoes. Yet when you think of Nike, you feel something different than a shoe company." "In their ads, they don't ever talk about the product. They honor great athletes. That's who they are." On Apple's identity: "Our customers want to know: who is Apple? What do we stand for?" "What we're about isn't making boxes for people to get their jobs done." "Apple at its core is that we believe people with passion can change the world for the better." "Those people crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones that actually do." On death: "For 33 years, I've looked in the mirror every morning and asked: if today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I'm about to do today?" "Whenever the answer has been no for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something." "Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life." "Almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death." "You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart." On time: "Your time is limited. So don't waste it living someone else's life." "Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking." "Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice." "Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become." "Everything else is secondary." "Stay hungry. Stay foolish."](https://image.24vids.com/tw-2047227782594470089/amplify_video_thumb/2047223927009886208/img/dNvhOzfGpfzYrc_V.jpg)
![Catherine Austin Fitts on how psychopaths are able to run the world "people who have no empathy are really good at... organizing for self-benefit" "[So] you have... 3 to 5% sort of psychopath[s] [at the top], [and then] 20 to 25% who are making a lot of money helping them" "then you have the other 60 to 70% [of the population] who can't fathom what's going on. And what the others are doing, what the smaller groups are doing, drives them crazy. And they become neurotic" This clip of Catherine Austin Fitts, a former Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, investment banker, and founder of the Solari Report (The Solari Report | Catherine Austin Fitts), is taken from a discussion with Alix Mayer (Alix Mayer) posted to YouTube on June 3, 2026. ----------------Partial transcription of clip--------------- "There's a wonderful book called Political Ponerology. Have you ever read it? Okay, so, the, the description of the book is as follows. It was a psychologist who had been a young man during Hitler in Poland. And after the war then Stalin came in and he was at university and he and a group of colleagues decided, you know, because they'd been so traumatized by all this tyranny, they said, we're going to study the intersection of psychopathy with politics. "And that's ponerology, the study of psychopathy mixed— And here's what they— And they wrote the book, he said, three times, tried to get it out from behind the Iron Curtain and then, failed, had to destroy it. And then when he finally got out after '89, he wrote it from memory. "And here's what it said. And what he said was that most people are born with empathy and they can't fathom not only that other people don't have empathy, but that the people who have no empathy are really good at getting together and organizing for self-benefit. "So the people with no empathy are much more effective at conspiracies than the people with empathy. Okay? "So anyway, what he said was about 20 to 25% of the population who are competent at running things are willing to work for the people who don't have empathy as long as they get paid well. "And if you look at the history of America, the way we've gotten here is a lot of people got paid a lot of money, whether with their stocks and bonds or whether their job helping the people who have no empathy do all the evil doing. "I mean, you know that because if you look at what's going on in medicine, you can see it clearly. "So what happens is you have the 3 to 5% sort of psychopathic, then you have the 20 to 25% who are making a lot of money helping them. And then you have the other 60 to 70% who can't fathom what's going on. And what the others are doing, what the smaller groups are doing drives them crazy. And they become neurotic. "They become neurotic about the food, they become neurotic about the healthcare, they become neurotic about programmable money. And until they finally come to understand, you're dealing with psychopathic and you're dealing with people who will help the psychopaths for money. "And what he said was once people could fathom what was going on, suddenly they started being effective."](https://image.24vids.com/tw-2063055849552216317/amplify_video_thumb/2063052175866249216/img/Ee9lnTHxA5xNsk08.jpg)
![.Rob Miles is spitting fire: “People are starting from a prior in which ‘[AIs] are safe until you give me an airtight case for why they're dangerous.’ This framing is exhausting. You explain one of the 10,000 ways that AIs could be dangerous, then they explain why they don't think that specific thing would happen. Then you have to change tack, and then they say, 'your story keeps changing'... "If you're building an AGI, it's like building a Saturn V rocket [but with every human on it]. It's a complex, difficult engineering task, and you're going to try and make it aligned, which means it's going to deliver people to the moon and home again. People ask “why assume they won't just land on the Moon and return home safely?" And I'm like, because you don't know what you're doing! If you try to send people to the moon and you don't know what you're doing, your astronauts will die. [Unlike the telephone, or electricity, where you can assume it’s probably going to work out okay] I contend that ASI is more like the moon rocket. "The moon is small compared with the rest of the sky, so you don't get to the moon by default - you hit some part of the sky that isn't the moon. So, show me the plan by which you predict to specifically hit the moon." And then people say, “how do you predict that [AIs] will want bad things?” There's more bad things than good things! It's not actually a complicated argument... I'm not going to predict specifically where it off into random space your astronauts are going, but you're not going to hit the moon unless you have a really good, technically clear plan for how you do it. And if you ask these people for their plan, they don't have one. What's Yann Lecun’s plan?” "I think that if you're building an enormously powerful technology and you have a lot of uncertainty about what's going to happen, this is bad. Like, this is default unsafe. If you've got something that's going to do enormously influential things in the world, and you don't know what enormously influential things it's going to do, this thing is unsafe until you can convince me that it's safe." HOST: “That’s a good way of thinking about it - with some technologies you can assume that the default will be good or at least neutral, or that the capacity of a person to use this in a very bad way is bounded somehow. There's just only so many people you could electrocute one by one."](https://image.24vids.com/tw-1684670109636300800/ext_tw_video_thumb/1684659748820426752/pu/img/FjRpVoLx9OkSek6l.jpg)
