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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... gets you to scale is very important. “If you're going to have a breakout startup, you've really got to think about how you're going to innovate on distribution, not just product.” What’s tricky about this is what he calls The Law of Distribution Arbitrage: “Successful distribution techniques are copied until they are no longer effective. Think about SEO. The first people to use that technique got a lot of traffic from Google. Then, a whole bunch of people started doing it and they started gaming the system. Eventually, Google did their notorious Panda release and everyone using SEO basically lost traffic.” Friend virality is another example: “If you look at Facebook, the friend virality was very powerful in the early days. Then people got sick of the spam and stopped paying attention… So the techniques that work initially to get distribution don't stay working because everyone copies them until the channels are spammed to death.” Source: Draper University (feb 2014)show more

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Evan Spiegel on the lesson that killed his first startup and led to Snapchat: "We focused on building the perfect product for way too long before we got feedback. We worked for like eighteen months to build this perfect full-featured product, which was in direct contravention to how I was always taught to build things. Build a prototype, build an MVP, get it in front of people, learn as quickly as possible. But we had spent all this time building this perfect piece of software and we hadn't thought enough about distribution. While we built this great piece of software, our competitor at the time, Naviance, had secured distribution through all the different college counselors. What piece of software are you going to choose to help your kid get into college? The one recommended by the college counselors or the one from two kids at Stanford? I think it's a pretty easy choice. So we saw very early that we had no distribution advantage. Even if we loved our software, people weren't going to use it because we didn't have a scalable way to get it in people's hands. Around that time when we saw the emergence of the App Store on iPhone, it was very clear that was a distribution channel we could really use and benefit from. But we also needed to build things we could build quickly, things we really were going to use together with our friends so we could be the first early customers. Ultimately Peekaboo and Snapchat represented that." This is exactly the asymmetry Peter Thiel describes in Zero to One: superior distribution by itself can create a monopoly, even with no product differentiation. The converse is not true. Thiel puts an even finer point on it: most businesses get zero distribution channels to work. Poor sales rather than bad product is the most common cause of failure. If you can get just one distribution channel to work, you have a great business. Estée Lauder said: it's not enough to have the most wonderful product in the world. You must be able to sell it. Many founders over-index on product perfection and under-invest in distribution. The world is full of great products nobody knows about, and mediocre products with massive distribution that dominate markets. Evan Spiegel lived it. He built the better product, watched it lose, and then built something he could actually distribute.

Evan Spiegel on the lesson that killed his first startup and led to Snapchat: "We focused on building the perfect product for way too long before we got feedback. We worked for like eighteen months to build this perfect full-featured product, which was in direct contravention to how I was always taught to build things. Build a prototype, build an MVP, get it in front of people, learn as quickly as possible. But we had spent all this time building this perfect piece of software and we hadn't thought enough about distribution. While we built this great piece of software, our competitor at the time, Naviance, had secured distribution through all the different college counselors. What piece of software are you going to choose to help your kid get into college? The one recommended by the college counselors or the one from two kids at Stanford? I think it's a pretty easy choice. So we saw very early that we had no distribution advantage. Even if we loved our software, people weren't going to use it because we didn't have a scalable way to get it in people's hands. Around that time when we saw the emergence of the App Store on iPhone, it was very clear that was a distribution channel we could really use and benefit from. But we also needed to build things we could build quickly, things we really were going to use together with our friends so we could be the first early customers. Ultimately Peekaboo and Snapchat represented that." This is exactly the asymmetry Peter Thiel describes in Zero to One: superior distribution by itself can create a monopoly, even with no product differentiation. The converse is not true. Thiel puts an even finer point on it: most businesses get zero distribution channels to work. Poor sales rather than bad product is the most common cause of failure. If you can get just one distribution channel to work, you have a great business. Estée Lauder said: it's not enough to have the most wonderful product in the world. You must be able to sell it. Many founders over-index on product perfection and under-invest in distribution. The world is full of great products nobody knows about, and mediocre products with massive distribution that dominate markets. Evan Spiegel lived it. He built the better product, watched it lose, and then built something he could actually distribute.

David Senra

27,043 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten

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)

Startup Archive

61,009 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr

Himes: If you've got the capability to blow a boat out of the water, you've got the capability to interdict it, arrest everyone on board, interrogate them, and find out where it was going, where it came from, who the bosses are, and what the distribution networks look like. When you turn a bunch of people into a smoking wreck, you don't get any of that. All you get are a bunch of testosterone-fueled White House aides pounding on their chests.

Himes: If you've got the capability to blow a boat out of the water, you've got the capability to interdict it, arrest everyone on board, interrogate them, and find out where it was going, where it came from, who the bosses are, and what the distribution networks look like. When you turn a bunch of people into a smoking wreck, you don't get any of that. All you get are a bunch of testosterone-fueled White House aides pounding on their chests.

Acyn

302,009 Aufrufe • vor 8 Monaten

Dropbox founder Drew Houston on why distribution is more important than product LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman wrote in his book Blitzscaling: "Many people in Silicon Valley like to focus on building products that are, in the famous words of the late Steve Jobs, "insanely great." Great products are certainly a positive, but the cold and unromantic fact is that a good product with great distribution will almost always beat a great product with poor distribution." Dropbox is a great example of this. As Dropbox founder & CEO Drew Houston explains, great distribution is ultimately how they beat out dozens of competitors with similar product offerings. Drew believes that too many startups overlook the importance of great distribution. Dropbox had a great product, but it succeeded because of its great distribution. They used a combination of organic virality (users shared files with nonusers) and incentivized virality (Basic account holders get 500 MB of extra storage per user they refer; Pro account holders get 1 GB) to grow. Virality helped Dropbox double its 100,000 users at launch to 200,000 users just ten days later, then skyrocket to one million users just seven months after that. An important caveat though: if your distribution strategy focuses on virality, you have to make sure you solve retention first. Bringing new users in through the front door doesn't help you grow if they immediately turn around and leave. According to Drew, Dropbox discovered this truth the hard way, when activation rates revealed that only 40% of the people signing up were actually putting files in their Dropbox and linking them to their computers. As Drew partially explains in the clip, the early Dropbox team went on Craigslist and offered $40 to anyone who'd come in for a 30-minute usability test. They asked these people to go from a Dropbox e-mail invitation to sharing a file with another email address. Zero of the five people tested succeeded--they didn't even come close. This stunned the team. So they made a list of 80+ things in an Excel spreadsheet and sanded down all of the rough edges in the experience. They soon watched their activation rate climb and left the competition in the dust as they marched on to a $9+ billion market cap. Source: Y Combinator (Feb 2017)

Dropbox founder Drew Houston on why distribution is more important than product LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman wrote in his book Blitzscaling: "Many people in Silicon Valley like to focus on building products that are, in the famous words of the late Steve Jobs, "insanely great." Great products are certainly a positive, but the cold and unromantic fact is that a good product with great distribution will almost always beat a great product with poor distribution." Dropbox is a great example of this. As Dropbox founder & CEO Drew Houston explains, great distribution is ultimately how they beat out dozens of competitors with similar product offerings. Drew believes that too many startups overlook the importance of great distribution. Dropbox had a great product, but it succeeded because of its great distribution. They used a combination of organic virality (users shared files with nonusers) and incentivized virality (Basic account holders get 500 MB of extra storage per user they refer; Pro account holders get 1 GB) to grow. Virality helped Dropbox double its 100,000 users at launch to 200,000 users just ten days later, then skyrocket to one million users just seven months after that. An important caveat though: if your distribution strategy focuses on virality, you have to make sure you solve retention first. Bringing new users in through the front door doesn't help you grow if they immediately turn around and leave. According to Drew, Dropbox discovered this truth the hard way, when activation rates revealed that only 40% of the people signing up were actually putting files in their Dropbox and linking them to their computers. As Drew partially explains in the clip, the early Dropbox team went on Craigslist and offered $40 to anyone who'd come in for a 30-minute usability test. They asked these people to go from a Dropbox e-mail invitation to sharing a file with another email address. Zero of the five people tested succeeded--they didn't even come close. This stunned the team. So they made a list of 80+ things in an Excel spreadsheet and sanded down all of the rough edges in the experience. They soon watched their activation rate climb and left the competition in the dust as they marched on to a $9+ billion market cap. Source: Y Combinator (Feb 2017)

Startup Archive

29,213 Aufrufe • vor 6 Tagen

Dropbox founder Drew Houston on why distribution is more important than product LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman wrote in his book Blitzscaling: "Many people in Silicon Valley like to focus on building products that are, in the famous words of the late Steve Jobs, "insanely great." Great products are certainly a positive, but the cold and unromantic fact is that a good product with great distribution will almost always beat a great product with poor distribution." Dropbox is a great example of this. As Dropbox founder & CEO Drew Houston explains, great distribution is ultimately how they beat out dozens of competitors with similar product offerings. Drew believes that too many startups overlook the importance of great distribution. Dropbox had a great product, but it succeeded because of its great distribution. They used a combination of organic virality (users shared files with nonusers) and incentivized virality (Basic account holders get 500 MB of extra storage per user they refer; Pro account holders get 1 GB) to grow. Virality helped Dropbox double its 100,000 users at launch to 200,000 users just ten days later, then skyrocket to one million users just seven months after that. An important caveat though: if your distribution strategy focuses on virality, you have to make sure you solve retention first. Bringing new users in through the front door doesn't help you grow if they immediately turn around and leave. According to Drew, Dropbox discovered this truth the hard way, when activation rates revealed that only 40% of the people signing up were actually putting files in their Dropbox and linking them to their computers. As Drew partially explains in the clip, the early Dropbox team went on Craigslist and offered $40 to anyone who'd come in for a 30-minute usability test. They asked these people to go from a Dropbox e-mail invitation to sharing a file with another email address. Zero of the five people tested succeeded--they didn't even come close. This stunned the team. So they made a list of 80+ things in an Excel spreadsheet and sanded down all of the rough edges in the experience. They soon watched their activation rate climb and left the competition in the dust as they marched on to a $9+ billion market cap. Video source: Y Combinator (2017)

Dropbox founder Drew Houston on why distribution is more important than product LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman wrote in his book Blitzscaling: "Many people in Silicon Valley like to focus on building products that are, in the famous words of the late Steve Jobs, "insanely great." Great products are certainly a positive, but the cold and unromantic fact is that a good product with great distribution will almost always beat a great product with poor distribution." Dropbox is a great example of this. As Dropbox founder & CEO Drew Houston explains, great distribution is ultimately how they beat out dozens of competitors with similar product offerings. Drew believes that too many startups overlook the importance of great distribution. Dropbox had a great product, but it succeeded because of its great distribution. They used a combination of organic virality (users shared files with nonusers) and incentivized virality (Basic account holders get 500 MB of extra storage per user they refer; Pro account holders get 1 GB) to grow. Virality helped Dropbox double its 100,000 users at launch to 200,000 users just ten days later, then skyrocket to one million users just seven months after that. An important caveat though: if your distribution strategy focuses on virality, you have to make sure you solve retention first. Bringing new users in through the front door doesn't help you grow if they immediately turn around and leave. According to Drew, Dropbox discovered this truth the hard way, when activation rates revealed that only 40% of the people signing up were actually putting files in their Dropbox and linking them to their computers. As Drew partially explains in the clip, the early Dropbox team went on Craigslist and offered $40 to anyone who'd come in for a 30-minute usability test. They asked these people to go from a Dropbox e-mail invitation to sharing a file with another email address. Zero of the five people tested succeeded--they didn't even come close. This stunned the team. So they made a list of 80+ things in an Excel spreadsheet and sanded down all of the rough edges in the experience. They soon watched their activation rate climb and left the competition in the dust as they marched on to a $9+ billion market cap. Video source: Y Combinator (2017)

Startup Archive

113,218 Aufrufe • vor 7 Monaten

Alexandr Wang on why Paul Graham’s “Schlep Blindness” essay was seminal for Scale AI “One of the secrets to Scale AI — and I think this applies to almost every industry — was that the problem we were solving of building really high quality data sets was something that most machine learning teams knew was very important but it wasn’t necessarily the sexiest problem that every AI scientist wanted to spend their days and nights working on.” Alexandr continues: “There was one article that was pretty seminal for me early on. It was an essay by Paul Graham called ‘Schlep Blindness.’ I’d encourage everyone to read it if you get a chance. But basically the idea was that most people avoid thinking about the really difficult, hairy, ugly, and annoying problems that exist in the world but they’re really important. He actually uses Stripe as one of the examples in his essay, but these problems are everywhere. The ugly, hairy problems that everyone knows are important but aren’t sexy to work on — if you can identify what those problems are, they generally make really exciting startup ideas.” This was a lot of the original pitch for Scale: “You know this is important but you probably aren’t the most excited to work on it.” And then the early Scale team was super scrappy, which helped them earn the trust of their customers: “They saw our product velocity and how fast we were moving. They thought to themselves, ‘Even if they don’t have the perfect product today, they’re going to get to a product that we’re going to be able to rely on really quickly.’” Source: Startup Grind (Apr 2022)

Alexandr Wang on why Paul Graham’s “Schlep Blindness” essay was seminal for Scale AI “One of the secrets to Scale AI — and I think this applies to almost every industry — was that the problem we were solving of building really high quality data sets was something that most machine learning teams knew was very important but it wasn’t necessarily the sexiest problem that every AI scientist wanted to spend their days and nights working on.” Alexandr continues: “There was one article that was pretty seminal for me early on. It was an essay by Paul Graham called ‘Schlep Blindness.’ I’d encourage everyone to read it if you get a chance. But basically the idea was that most people avoid thinking about the really difficult, hairy, ugly, and annoying problems that exist in the world but they’re really important. He actually uses Stripe as one of the examples in his essay, but these problems are everywhere. The ugly, hairy problems that everyone knows are important but aren’t sexy to work on — if you can identify what those problems are, they generally make really exciting startup ideas.” This was a lot of the original pitch for Scale: “You know this is important but you probably aren’t the most excited to work on it.” And then the early Scale team was super scrappy, which helped them earn the trust of their customers: “They saw our product velocity and how fast we were moving. They thought to themselves, ‘Even if they don’t have the perfect product today, they’re going to get to a product that we’re going to be able to rely on really quickly.’” Source: Startup Grind (Apr 2022)

Startup Archive

56,503 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat

Rahul Vohra on how to measure product/market fit Rahul Vohra is the founder and CEO of Superhuman. He was looking for a metric to measure product/market fit so that he and his team could optimize, and he came across the following methodology from Sean Ellis: Simply ask your users: “How would you feel if you could no longer use the product?” with three options: (1) not disappointed, (2) somewhat disappointed, or (3) very disappointed. It turns out that the benchmark for product/market fit across hundreds of venture-backed startups is 40% of respondents saying “very disappointed”. And as Rahul puts it: “If more than 40% of your users would be very disappointed without your product, then you should focus on growing your company. If less than 40% of your users would be very disappointed without your product, then you’ll probably struggle to grow.” 40% may not sound like a lot, but it’s an incredibly hard benchmark to beat. For example, Slack posed this to 731 customers early in the company’s history, and 51% said they would be very disappointed without Slack. One might expect a terrific product like Slack to have a score of 60-80%, but that wasn’t the case. Rahul’s explanation of why the response options are focused on disappointment rather than happiness is interesting too: “I think the reason behind that is that if you ask people how they feel about a product and you give them positive potential responses, I think it invites more bias. People are more likely to be polite. And it also doesn’t get to the heart of the matter which is: how necessary has your product become in people’s lives? If you’re trying to build a company that’s going to stand the test of time, you really do have to build a product that matters and that people ultimately come to depend on because it’s just so incredible at what it does. And that’s what this question gets to the heart of.”

Rahul Vohra on how to measure product/market fit Rahul Vohra is the founder and CEO of Superhuman. He was looking for a metric to measure product/market fit so that he and his team could optimize, and he came across the following methodology from Sean Ellis: Simply ask your users: “How would you feel if you could no longer use the product?” with three options: (1) not disappointed, (2) somewhat disappointed, or (3) very disappointed. It turns out that the benchmark for product/market fit across hundreds of venture-backed startups is 40% of respondents saying “very disappointed”. And as Rahul puts it: “If more than 40% of your users would be very disappointed without your product, then you should focus on growing your company. If less than 40% of your users would be very disappointed without your product, then you’ll probably struggle to grow.” 40% may not sound like a lot, but it’s an incredibly hard benchmark to beat. For example, Slack posed this to 731 customers early in the company’s history, and 51% said they would be very disappointed without Slack. One might expect a terrific product like Slack to have a score of 60-80%, but that wasn’t the case. Rahul’s explanation of why the response options are focused on disappointment rather than happiness is interesting too: “I think the reason behind that is that if you ask people how they feel about a product and you give them positive potential responses, I think it invites more bias. People are more likely to be polite. And it also doesn’t get to the heart of the matter which is: how necessary has your product become in people’s lives? If you’re trying to build a company that’s going to stand the test of time, you really do have to build a product that matters and that people ultimately come to depend on because it’s just so incredible at what it does. And that’s what this question gets to the heart of.”

Michael McGuiness

67,106 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren

Q: What's the secret to building a great product that grows really fast? Paul Graham explains that the secret to growing really fast is to: "start with a small, intense fire." He uses Apple as an example. They started by selling just 500 Apple I computers. Today Apple is the largest company in the world. It's impossible to make something that a large number of people really want when you're just starting out. So you have to find people who want what you're building A LOT. And that's necessarily going to be a small number at first. But that's ok because that's how almost every giant company gets started. PG continues: "You have to know who those first users are and how you're going to get them. Then you're going to sit down and just have a party with those first few users and focus entirely on them and making them super super happy." Another example he draws upon is a startup in a Y Combinator batch making a new mobile email client. Their beta group had one user: Sam Altman. This startup's goal was to just make Sam happy. Sam uses email a lot on the go, knows all of the other email client options, and is super demanding. So they know that if they build a product that makes Sam happy, odds are it will make lots of other people happy too. "One of the things we tell startups in these extreme cases where they can make just one user happy is to act like a consultant. Act like Sam has hired you to make an email app just for him. All you have to do is make Sam happy--it can say 'Sam Altman' at the top of the screen. That's ok! Just so long as Sam would feel bummed if you stopped working on it. That's the test." Ultimately the secret to building a great product that grows really fast is to build something a small group of people love so much that they'd be really disappointed if you stopped working on it. There's lots of important steps to get right after this, but this is the foundation for growth. It's somewhat counterintuitive, but most of the world's largest companies (e.g. Apple, Facebook, etc.) started by building a product that made a small group of people really happy.

Q: What's the secret to building a great product that grows really fast? Paul Graham explains that the secret to growing really fast is to: "start with a small, intense fire." He uses Apple as an example. They started by selling just 500 Apple I computers. Today Apple is the largest company in the world. It's impossible to make something that a large number of people really want when you're just starting out. So you have to find people who want what you're building A LOT. And that's necessarily going to be a small number at first. But that's ok because that's how almost every giant company gets started. PG continues: "You have to know who those first users are and how you're going to get them. Then you're going to sit down and just have a party with those first few users and focus entirely on them and making them super super happy." Another example he draws upon is a startup in a Y Combinator batch making a new mobile email client. Their beta group had one user: Sam Altman. This startup's goal was to just make Sam happy. Sam uses email a lot on the go, knows all of the other email client options, and is super demanding. So they know that if they build a product that makes Sam happy, odds are it will make lots of other people happy too. "One of the things we tell startups in these extreme cases where they can make just one user happy is to act like a consultant. Act like Sam has hired you to make an email app just for him. All you have to do is make Sam happy--it can say 'Sam Altman' at the top of the screen. That's ok! Just so long as Sam would feel bummed if you stopped working on it. That's the test." Ultimately the secret to building a great product that grows really fast is to build something a small group of people love so much that they'd be really disappointed if you stopped working on it. There's lots of important steps to get right after this, but this is the foundation for growth. It's somewhat counterintuitive, but most of the world's largest companies (e.g. Apple, Facebook, etc.) started by building a product that made a small group of people really happy.

Michael McGuiness

890,425 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren

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."

Jaynit

122,064 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten

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."

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."

Sense Receptor

64,820 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat

🚨NEW: Joe Rogan: "How crazy is it that Biden deported 1.49 million while letting in 20?" "Like, what do you think they were doing!?" "I know there was also efforts to move people to specific states so that you can get a larger number for the census so you get more congressional seats." "This is a dark thing that people don't want to admit because they're a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat." "I had a conversation with my parents about it and they're like, 'No!' I'm like, 'Yes! It's about congressional seats. It's like, the census counts illegals!'" "And not only that, they're trying to make it so that those people can vote!" "And if you can make it so that those people can vote, then all of the sudden you ship these people to a place, you give them EBT cards, you get them on food stamps, you give them Medicaid money — they have money." "And now, who are you going to vote for? You're going to vote for the people who got you money!" Daily Caller

🚨NEW: Joe Rogan: "How crazy is it that Biden deported 1.49 million while letting in 20?" "Like, what do you think they were doing!?" "I know there was also efforts to move people to specific states so that you can get a larger number for the census so you get more congressional seats." "This is a dark thing that people don't want to admit because they're a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat." "I had a conversation with my parents about it and they're like, 'No!' I'm like, 'Yes! It's about congressional seats. It's like, the census counts illegals!'" "And not only that, they're trying to make it so that those people can vote!" "And if you can make it so that those people can vote, then all of the sudden you ship these people to a place, you give them EBT cards, you get them on food stamps, you give them Medicaid money — they have money." "And now, who are you going to vote for? You're going to vote for the people who got you money!" Daily Caller

Jason Cohen 🇺🇸

259,092 Aufrufe • vor 10 Monaten

.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."

.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."

AI Notkilleveryoneism Memes ⏸️

77,350 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren

Nick Saban shares what transformational leadership really looks like and the trap most leaders fall into. "If you're in any kind of managerial position, I think you should define your job the same way: Provide the leadership to develop the relationships to help people create and accomplish the opportunities that they have, and help them establish the discipline they need to do it." Then he broke down what leadership actually is: "Leadership is about helping somebody else, affecting somebody else for their benefit. Not for your benefit - for their benefit." "If you're doing it for your benefit, it's manipulation. And people can see right through that." That's the line right there... Leadership serves others. Manipulation serves yourself. "You gotta develop a relationship, because they gotta know you care. Hard to affect people if they don't think you care about them." Then he called out where most leaders spend their time: "How do you spend all your time? If you're a manager, you spend all your time with the people who don't do the right things. I call them energy vampires." "We got 5 guys on our team - they don't go to class, they don't do the right thing in practice, they loaf all the time. Those are the guys I meet with every day. They're energy vampires." So he made a commitment: "I'm gonna meet with 3 guys who didn't do anything wrong every day to see how they're doing. To make sure they know I care about them, their family, and what's happening in their life." "I wanna have a relationship with those people, so that when I need to affect them, I have a chance to do it." "People gotta know you care. If they think you only care about yourself, they're gonna think you're just a manipulator and you're not really going to affect them in a positive way." "You gotta serve other people." The core of servant leadership is wanting to see others at their best. It's not about control, it's about serving others. (🎥 CBT Automotive)

Nick Saban shares what transformational leadership really looks like and the trap most leaders fall into. "If you're in any kind of managerial position, I think you should define your job the same way: Provide the leadership to develop the relationships to help people create and accomplish the opportunities that they have, and help them establish the discipline they need to do it." Then he broke down what leadership actually is: "Leadership is about helping somebody else, affecting somebody else for their benefit. Not for your benefit - for their benefit." "If you're doing it for your benefit, it's manipulation. And people can see right through that." That's the line right there... Leadership serves others. Manipulation serves yourself. "You gotta develop a relationship, because they gotta know you care. Hard to affect people if they don't think you care about them." Then he called out where most leaders spend their time: "How do you spend all your time? If you're a manager, you spend all your time with the people who don't do the right things. I call them energy vampires." "We got 5 guys on our team - they don't go to class, they don't do the right thing in practice, they loaf all the time. Those are the guys I meet with every day. They're energy vampires." So he made a commitment: "I'm gonna meet with 3 guys who didn't do anything wrong every day to see how they're doing. To make sure they know I care about them, their family, and what's happening in their life." "I wanna have a relationship with those people, so that when I need to affect them, I have a chance to do it." "People gotta know you care. If they think you only care about yourself, they're gonna think you're just a manipulator and you're not really going to affect them in a positive way." "You gotta serve other people." The core of servant leadership is wanting to see others at their best. It's not about control, it's about serving others. (🎥 CBT Automotive)

Coach AJ 🎯 Mental Fitness

37,867 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten

“Companies take on the form of their leaders. That’s where Google’s culture comes from.” — Nikesh Arora “The founders were very product-obsessed... I remember Larry going to the first ads all-hands and saying, ‘I hate ads that are intrusive.’” “Every product they built, they didn’t look at monetizing for a very long time, until they believed the product had become ubiquitous.” “I think the secret sauce is the consistent focus on product greatness.”

“Companies take on the form of their leaders. That’s where Google’s culture comes from.” — Nikesh Arora “The founders were very product-obsessed... I remember Larry going to the first ads all-hands and saying, ‘I hate ads that are intrusive.’” “Every product they built, they didn’t look at monetizing for a very long time, until they believed the product had become ubiquitous.” “I think the secret sauce is the consistent focus on product greatness.”

TBPN

26,325 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten

Chamath Palihapitiya on the growth principles that got Facebook to billions of users “The most important thing we did was I teased out virality, and said, ‘You cannot do it. Don’t talk about it. Don’t touch it. I don’t want you to give me any product plans that revolve around this idea of virality. I don’t want to hear it.” Instead, Chamath urged the growth team at Facebook to focus on “the three most difficult and hard problems that any consumer product has to deal with”: 1. How do you get people in the front door? 2. How do you get them to an aha moment as quickly as possible? 3. How do you deliver core product value as often as possible? Chamath warns that focusing on virality is why you see so many startups experience this amazingly steep rise and then fall off a cliff. The second thing he set out to do at Facebook was invalidate all of the lore: “In any given product, there’s always people who strut out around the office like, ‘I have this gut feeling.’ It’s all about gut feeling. And most people’s gut feelings are morons. They don’t know what they’re talking about. Gut feel is not useful because most people can’t predict correctly. We know this. So one of the most important things that we did was just invalidate all of the lore… You can’t believe your own BS. Because when you do, you start to compound these massively structural mistakes that don’t expose core product value… You don’t listen to customers because you think it’s all about your gut. You don’t bother doing any of the traditional, straightforward, obvious things, and you lose yourself.” As Chamath explains, a maniacal focus on delivering core product value as frequently and fast as possible is what led Facebook to its most important realization: “The single biggest thing we realized was to get any individual to 7 friends in 10 days. That was it… There was not much more complexity than that. There’s an entire team now of hundreds of people that have helped ramp this product to a billion users, based on that one simple rule — a very elegant statement of what it was to capture core product value… And then what we did at the company was talk about nothing else. Every Q&A. Every all-hands… It was the single, sole focus.” He continues: “You have to work backwards from: What is the thing that people are here to do? What is the ‘aha moment’ that they want? Why can I not give that to them as fast as possible? That’s how you win.” Chamath recommends starting with a cohort of your most engaged users — What features are they using? What pathways in your product did they take? Then work backwards and try to get all of your other users to that same state.

Chamath Palihapitiya on the growth principles that got Facebook to billions of users “The most important thing we did was I teased out virality, and said, ‘You cannot do it. Don’t talk about it. Don’t touch it. I don’t want you to give me any product plans that revolve around this idea of virality. I don’t want to hear it.” Instead, Chamath urged the growth team at Facebook to focus on “the three most difficult and hard problems that any consumer product has to deal with”: 1. How do you get people in the front door? 2. How do you get them to an aha moment as quickly as possible? 3. How do you deliver core product value as often as possible? Chamath warns that focusing on virality is why you see so many startups experience this amazingly steep rise and then fall off a cliff. The second thing he set out to do at Facebook was invalidate all of the lore: “In any given product, there’s always people who strut out around the office like, ‘I have this gut feeling.’ It’s all about gut feeling. And most people’s gut feelings are morons. They don’t know what they’re talking about. Gut feel is not useful because most people can’t predict correctly. We know this. So one of the most important things that we did was just invalidate all of the lore… You can’t believe your own BS. Because when you do, you start to compound these massively structural mistakes that don’t expose core product value… You don’t listen to customers because you think it’s all about your gut. You don’t bother doing any of the traditional, straightforward, obvious things, and you lose yourself.” As Chamath explains, a maniacal focus on delivering core product value as frequently and fast as possible is what led Facebook to its most important realization: “The single biggest thing we realized was to get any individual to 7 friends in 10 days. That was it… There was not much more complexity than that. There’s an entire team now of hundreds of people that have helped ramp this product to a billion users, based on that one simple rule — a very elegant statement of what it was to capture core product value… And then what we did at the company was talk about nothing else. Every Q&A. Every all-hands… It was the single, sole focus.” He continues: “You have to work backwards from: What is the thing that people are here to do? What is the ‘aha moment’ that they want? Why can I not give that to them as fast as possible? That’s how you win.” Chamath recommends starting with a cohort of your most engaged users — What features are they using? What pathways in your product did they take? Then work backwards and try to get all of your other users to that same state.

Startup Archive

156,392 Aufrufe • vor 6 Monaten

🚨 HOLY SMOKES. JD Vance just PUMMELED the entire Democrat Party, this is the 2026 midterms message 🔥 "If they ever get power, are they going to lower Americans' taxes? No. Are they going to make your life more affordable? No. Are they going to solve the crime crisis? No." "You don't give power back to the very people who set the house on fire! You give more power to the person who put the fire out." "They have nothing to actually run on or GOVERN on. Their entire obsessive focus of that party is they hate Donald Trump." "What they're going to do is they're going to spend all their time and all of your money trying to get Donald Trump. I think it's ridiculous. I think it's ridiculous that's what they're running on." "But the American people are going to make this determination. I think the American people should vote for the people who want to make their life more affordable and want to make their neighborhoods safer. That's what we're trying to deliver every single day." JD Vance 💯

🚨 HOLY SMOKES. JD Vance just PUMMELED the entire Democrat Party, this is the 2026 midterms message 🔥 "If they ever get power, are they going to lower Americans' taxes? No. Are they going to make your life more affordable? No. Are they going to solve the crime crisis? No." "You don't give power back to the very people who set the house on fire! You give more power to the person who put the fire out." "They have nothing to actually run on or GOVERN on. Their entire obsessive focus of that party is they hate Donald Trump." "What they're going to do is they're going to spend all their time and all of your money trying to get Donald Trump. I think it's ridiculous. I think it's ridiculous that's what they're running on." "But the American people are going to make this determination. I think the American people should vote for the people who want to make their life more affordable and want to make their neighborhoods safer. That's what we're trying to deliver every single day." JD Vance 💯

Eric Daugherty

384,112 Aufrufe • vor 6 Monaten

Lane Kiffin on the return of Will Wade to LSU: "If you're passionate about a place and you're a really good coach, that's a really good combination. I know there's a lot of judgement about whether he should go and he just got there. Everything is everybody's story. You got one life to live. What they want to choose to do, and believe what their story is after they get the best information they can from the people that are closest to them, and they make their decisions. In my opinion, it's that person's job to prove that decision right. It does speak volumes of LSU. There's somebody that understands everything about LSU, understands the power of LSU. Went through a very unique situation, a break up. Then makes the decision to come back. To me, that says a lot about LSU."

Lane Kiffin on the return of Will Wade to LSU: "If you're passionate about a place and you're a really good coach, that's a really good combination. I know there's a lot of judgement about whether he should go and he just got there. Everything is everybody's story. You got one life to live. What they want to choose to do, and believe what their story is after they get the best information they can from the people that are closest to them, and they make their decisions. In my opinion, it's that person's job to prove that decision right. It does speak volumes of LSU. There's somebody that understands everything about LSU, understands the power of LSU. Went through a very unique situation, a break up. Then makes the decision to come back. To me, that says a lot about LSU."

Garland Gillen

130,487 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten

Don’t start with the product. Start with distribution. I give this advice to entrepreneurs all the time because distribution is the hardest part of building a company. “Build it and they will come” almost never works. And even if you expect distribution to be hard—it’ll be 10× harder. HotelTonight started with a distribution insight. In 2009, we saw that the App Store about to become a massive channel. Billion-dollar companies would be built there, and early movers could earn free distribution before the competition showed up. From that insight, we worked backwards to the product: - A use case uniquely suited to mobile: last-minute hotel booking - Designed to win App Store ranking and retention: beautiful UI, lightning-fast 8-second bookings - Clear, curated choices and amazing deals that fit the mobile moment That combo—a unique distribution edge + a product tailored to it—powered our growth. As you think about your next company, begin with your edge in distribution. Maybe you are an expert at selling into a specific vertical. Maybe you're great at creating authentic content. Maybe you’ve spotted an emerging channel before anyone else. Only then decide what to build—the product that best amplifies your distribution advantage. At speedrun, we’re seeing teams win with GEO, founder-led content, and high-intent launch videos. So I’ll leave you with a prompt: What’s your unique approach to distribution—and what product could you build that maximizes it? If you’re working on this, I’d love to hear from you. Apply to a16z speedrun 🧊 at sr [dot] a16z [dot] com.

Don’t start with the product. Start with distribution. I give this advice to entrepreneurs all the time because distribution is the hardest part of building a company. “Build it and they will come” almost never works. And even if you expect distribution to be hard—it’ll be 10× harder. HotelTonight started with a distribution insight. In 2009, we saw that the App Store about to become a massive channel. Billion-dollar companies would be built there, and early movers could earn free distribution before the competition showed up. From that insight, we worked backwards to the product: - A use case uniquely suited to mobile: last-minute hotel booking - Designed to win App Store ranking and retention: beautiful UI, lightning-fast 8-second bookings - Clear, curated choices and amazing deals that fit the mobile moment That combo—a unique distribution edge + a product tailored to it—powered our growth. As you think about your next company, begin with your edge in distribution. Maybe you are an expert at selling into a specific vertical. Maybe you're great at creating authentic content. Maybe you’ve spotted an emerging channel before anyone else. Only then decide what to build—the product that best amplifies your distribution advantage. At speedrun, we’re seeing teams win with GEO, founder-led content, and high-intent launch videos. So I’ll leave you with a prompt: What’s your unique approach to distribution—and what product could you build that maximizes it? If you’re working on this, I’d love to hear from you. Apply to a16z speedrun 🧊 at sr [dot] a16z [dot] com.

Sam Shank

328,277 Aufrufe • vor 10 Monaten