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Sam Altman taught 720 startups one formula where luck is a random number between 0 and 10,000. Stanford, 2014. The opening lecture of CS183B was so packed he asked for a bigger auditorium. He was 28, a dropout from this same school 9 years earlier, now running Y Combinator.... The formula he wrote on the board: idea × product × team × execution × luck and you only control 4 of the 5, because the fifth one goes to 10,000. His words, not a metaphor. Then he did something strange: he handed half of his own lecture to Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder of Facebook, whose entire job was to talk students out of starting companies. Dustin showed one table. Employee 100 at Dropbox with standard 10 basis points made $10 million, employee 250 at Facebook made $200 million, and employee 1,000 joining in 2009, when everyone said it was too late still made $20 million. Your own startup? Best case you build a $100 million company and keep 10% after dilution. $10 million, same as employee 1,000, minus your health. Dustin knew the price because he paid it: at 21 he was throwing his back out every 6 months from pure anxiety, always on call, unable to quit a founder who leaves wears the black eye for a decade. Then Altman twisted the lecture back with advice that cut against everything in the room. The best ideas look terrible at the start: the 13th search engine, the 10th social network limited to college kids, sleeping on strangers' couches. If an idea sounds good, too many people are already building it. Make something 100 people love instead of something 10,000 people like. Ben Silbermann recruited Pinterest's first users by walking up to strangers in Palo Alto coffee shops, then resetting every browser in the Apple Store to Pinterest's homepage until they threw him out. And the only valid reason to start is that you can't not do it. Dustin built Asana at night, after full days at Facebook, unpaid and unasked. "The idea was beating itself out of our chest." The rest is a number between 0 and 10,000.show more

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Ken Griffin asked a Harvard recruit what he would do if he made $10 million. The answer: quit and climb the highest peaks around the world. After this response, he strongly urged him not to take the job. He didn't want someone at 22 years old who already had a number in their head, a point at which they'd cash out and walk away. That mindset was fundamentally incompatible with what he was building. What he wanted to hear instead was how the person planned to climb the next mountain at Citadel. The $10 million is the evidence that you were very successful at something, which means you've earned the right to take on more responsibility and have a bigger impact. The people who build enduring things aren't running toward a finish line. They're running because the running itself is what they want to do and every milestone just opens up a larger set of problems worth solving.

Ken Griffin asked a Harvard recruit what he would do if he made $10 million. The answer: quit and climb the highest peaks around the world. After this response, he strongly urged him not to take the job. He didn't want someone at 22 years old who already had a number in their head, a point at which they'd cash out and walk away. That mindset was fundamentally incompatible with what he was building. What he wanted to hear instead was how the person planned to climb the next mountain at Citadel. The $10 million is the evidence that you were very successful at something, which means you've earned the right to take on more responsibility and have a bigger impact. The people who build enduring things aren't running toward a finish line. They're running because the running itself is what they want to do and every milestone just opens up a larger set of problems worth solving.

Milk Road Stocks

135,883 views • 16 days ago

Alex Hormozi is worth over $100 million. ten years ago he was sleeping on the floor of his own gym, eating canned tuna, and showering at the YMCA he had a Vanderbilt degree and a safe consulting job. he quit it, drove across the country, and opened a gym -> then nearly went bankrupt. by 26 he was back at zero then it clicked: he wasn't in the gym business. he was in the business of fixing gyms. so he sold all six of his and started licensing his system to other owners that company, Gym Launch, made $17 million in profit in its first year -> with $0 spent on ads. he scaled it to 4,500 gyms across 13 countries, then sold it for $46.2 million the day that deal closed, he started Acquisition..com -> today a portfolio doing over $200 million a year the strange part: he gives the entire playbook away for free. no course, no paywall. his bet is that attention is worth more than the secret his whole story, in one interview, bookmark this ↓

Alex Hormozi is worth over $100 million. ten years ago he was sleeping on the floor of his own gym, eating canned tuna, and showering at the YMCA he had a Vanderbilt degree and a safe consulting job. he quit it, drove across the country, and opened a gym -> then nearly went bankrupt. by 26 he was back at zero then it clicked: he wasn't in the gym business. he was in the business of fixing gyms. so he sold all six of his and started licensing his system to other owners that company, Gym Launch, made $17 million in profit in its first year -> with $0 spent on ads. he scaled it to 4,500 gyms across 13 countries, then sold it for $46.2 million the day that deal closed, he started Acquisition..com -> today a portfolio doing over $200 million a year the strange part: he gives the entire playbook away for free. no course, no paywall. his bet is that attention is worth more than the secret his whole story, in one interview, bookmark this ↓

Ridark

10,215 views • 1 month ago

Matt Damon says “The Town” made a fortune and was later relicensed for $35 million, but Ben Affleck still didn’t make $1 million despite writing, directing and starring in the film because he was on a flat salary Q: “Do you know what Good Will Hunting has grossed in its time?” Matt Damon: “When it came out, I think it was like 220-something in the theater.” “Actually, with our studio, that’s one of the things we really fight for… reversion rights.” “Ben called me a couple years ago and he goes, ‘You know, The Town just got relicensed for 35 million bucks.’” “Which just means that he made a great movie and people are still watching it.” “At the time, that movie made a fortune. It did all this stuff.” “But he was on a flat salary.” “I don’t even think he made a million bucks for that movie.” “And he wrote it, directed it, starred in it.” “It was one of those things.” “Our view was, look, if you do something like that as one of the real contributors to it, then if there’s money kind of in perpetuity, then you should be a part of that.”

Matt Damon says “The Town” made a fortune and was later relicensed for $35 million, but Ben Affleck still didn’t make $1 million despite writing, directing and starring in the film because he was on a flat salary Q: “Do you know what Good Will Hunting has grossed in its time?” Matt Damon: “When it came out, I think it was like 220-something in the theater.” “Actually, with our studio, that’s one of the things we really fight for… reversion rights.” “Ben called me a couple years ago and he goes, ‘You know, The Town just got relicensed for 35 million bucks.’” “Which just means that he made a great movie and people are still watching it.” “At the time, that movie made a fortune. It did all this stuff.” “But he was on a flat salary.” “I don’t even think he made a million bucks for that movie.” “And he wrote it, directed it, starred in it.” “It was one of those things.” “Our view was, look, if you do something like that as one of the real contributors to it, then if there’s money kind of in perpetuity, then you should be a part of that.”

agim𓍯

549,436 views • 13 days ago

Demis Hassabis says he sold DeepMind in 2014 because staying independent needed $7 billion, and he could barely raise $10 million: "He saw Google as an AI company. The reason I sold was I knew it would require 7 billion dollars of investment in order to take on, try and become one of those companies." "And I was barely able to scrape together 10 million dollar rounds at that point." "And the problem was is that we'd done enough, the Atari thing, we had alerted enough of the Silicon Valley titans. They were coming after my people." "We had no business, we didn't even have a product, obviously not, because I was trying to make the core technology." "I was paying myself zero and people were being paid like 100k a year and then they were getting offers of 10 million a year." "And then if that didn't work, they could afford to come back and say, here's 50 million a year." "So at some point, that was going to go wrong." P.S: I'm hosting the AI Assurance & Governance Summit 2026 on October 1 at the Stanford Faculty Club, one day and one track, to work on the part of this that money did not solve. Frontier labs, regulated industries, insurers and investors in the room. Link in the reply. - Demis Hassabis (Demis Hassabis), co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind, at the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists Annual Lecture.

Demis Hassabis says he sold DeepMind in 2014 because staying independent needed $7 billion, and he could barely raise $10 million: "He saw Google as an AI company. The reason I sold was I knew it would require 7 billion dollars of investment in order to take on, try and become one of those companies." "And I was barely able to scrape together 10 million dollar rounds at that point." "And the problem was is that we'd done enough, the Atari thing, we had alerted enough of the Silicon Valley titans. They were coming after my people." "We had no business, we didn't even have a product, obviously not, because I was trying to make the core technology." "I was paying myself zero and people were being paid like 100k a year and then they were getting offers of 10 million a year." "And then if that didn't work, they could afford to come back and say, here's 50 million a year." "So at some point, that was going to go wrong." P.S: I'm hosting the AI Assurance & Governance Summit 2026 on October 1 at the Stanford Faculty Club, one day and one track, to work on the part of this that money did not solve. Frontier labs, regulated industries, insurers and investors in the room. Link in the reply. - Demis Hassabis (Demis Hassabis), co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind, at the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists Annual Lecture.

Karl Mehta

302,584 views • 22 days ago

A Carnegie Mellon professor walked onto a stage in 2007 and gave an hour-long lecture to 400 people about achieving your childhood dreams. He did not tell the room that the entire talk was actually written for his three kids, who would grow up without him. His name was Randy Pausch. The date was September 18, 2007. The video has since passed 20 million views, and the book that followed spent more than a hundred weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Pausch was 46 years old, had been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer a month earlier, and had been told he had three to six months of good health left. He did not walk onto that stage to talk about dying. He walked onto it to teach a single lesson hidden inside another one. Here is what I missed the first time I watched it. Pausch opened by doing push-ups on stage. He told the audience he was in phenomenally good shape, in better shape than most of them, and anyone who wanted to cry or pity him was welcome to get down and match him. The room laughed. Then he said the line that sets up the entire hour to come. We cannot change the cards we are dealt. Just how we play the hand. That was the frame. Everything after it was a demonstration. The lecture was officially titled Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams, and Pausch did spend the first 40 minutes working through his actual childhood list. Zero gravity. Playing in the NFL. Writing an entry in the World Book Encyclopedia. Being Captain Kirk. Becoming a Disney Imagineer. He walked the audience through which ones he got, which ones he didn't, and what the gap between wanting and getting had actually taught him. The framework inside those 40 minutes is the part most people remember, and it is the one Pausch delivered with the most force. He called it the brick wall. He said the brick walls in your life are there for a reason. They are not there to keep you out. They are there to give you a chance to show how badly you want something. They are there to stop the people who do not want it badly enough. They are there to stop the other people. Read that again slowly. He is not saying brick walls are a test you have to pass. He is saying brick walls are a filter nature uses to separate the people who actually want a thing from the people who only like the idea of wanting it. That is a completely different claim. Most people treat obstacles as unfair. Pausch argued obstacles are the mechanism by which desire gets proven, and without that mechanism the whole concept of wanting something would be meaningless. Every dream he achieved, he achieved by treating the wall as a signal that he was close, not a signal that he should stop. The second framework he taught the audience is the one almost nobody teaches in any classroom. He called it the head fake. He pulled it from football. Coaches teach young kids to tackle by having them run drills that look like they are about tackling, but the real lesson being embedded is teamwork, grit, how to take a hit and get back up. The kid thinks they are learning football. They are actually learning something much larger, and they will not realize it until years later. Pausch said the best teaching in the world is head fake teaching. You get people to learn the thing they need by dressing it up as the thing they already want. This is the technique behind Alice, the programming software he built at Carnegie Mellon. Kids thought they were making animated movies and games. They were actually learning to code. Pausch said one of his proudest claims to fame was that he had taught programming to a generation of students who had no idea they were being taught programming at all. And then, with about three minutes left in the lecture, he ran a head fake on the room. He asked the audience if they had figured out the first head fake of the talk itself. The room went quiet. He said the lecture was never actually about how to achieve your childhood dreams. It was about how to lead your life. If you lead your life the right way, the karma takes care of itself and the dreams come to you anyway. Then he asked if they had figured out the second head fake. Even quieter. He said the talk was not for the four hundred people in the room. It was for his three kids. Dylan was six. Logan was three. Chloe was eighteen months. They would grow up without their father, and he knew it. Pausch had spent an hour on stage pretending to give career advice to strangers because he needed to record something his children could watch when they were old enough to understand who their dad had been. The entire architecture of the lecture was a message in a bottle disguised as a keynote. The filtered brick-wall philosophy, the football stories, the dreams he chased and the ones he missed, the line about playing the hand you are dealt, all of it was something a father wanted three small children to internalize after he was no longer there to say it in person. That is the moment the video stops being a lecture and starts being something else entirely. Pausch died on July 25, 2008, ten months after giving it. His final sentence on stage was that he had given the talk tonight, and then he walked off. The applause lasted nearly a minute before the camera cut. Most professors spend their entire careers trying to say one true thing their students will remember for a week. He said one true thing his children will remember for the rest of their lives, and the rest of the world is still watching the footage.

A Carnegie Mellon professor walked onto a stage in 2007 and gave an hour-long lecture to 400 people about achieving your childhood dreams. He did not tell the room that the entire talk was actually written for his three kids, who would grow up without him. His name was Randy Pausch. The date was September 18, 2007. The video has since passed 20 million views, and the book that followed spent more than a hundred weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Pausch was 46 years old, had been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer a month earlier, and had been told he had three to six months of good health left. He did not walk onto that stage to talk about dying. He walked onto it to teach a single lesson hidden inside another one. Here is what I missed the first time I watched it. Pausch opened by doing push-ups on stage. He told the audience he was in phenomenally good shape, in better shape than most of them, and anyone who wanted to cry or pity him was welcome to get down and match him. The room laughed. Then he said the line that sets up the entire hour to come. We cannot change the cards we are dealt. Just how we play the hand. That was the frame. Everything after it was a demonstration. The lecture was officially titled Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams, and Pausch did spend the first 40 minutes working through his actual childhood list. Zero gravity. Playing in the NFL. Writing an entry in the World Book Encyclopedia. Being Captain Kirk. Becoming a Disney Imagineer. He walked the audience through which ones he got, which ones he didn't, and what the gap between wanting and getting had actually taught him. The framework inside those 40 minutes is the part most people remember, and it is the one Pausch delivered with the most force. He called it the brick wall. He said the brick walls in your life are there for a reason. They are not there to keep you out. They are there to give you a chance to show how badly you want something. They are there to stop the people who do not want it badly enough. They are there to stop the other people. Read that again slowly. He is not saying brick walls are a test you have to pass. He is saying brick walls are a filter nature uses to separate the people who actually want a thing from the people who only like the idea of wanting it. That is a completely different claim. Most people treat obstacles as unfair. Pausch argued obstacles are the mechanism by which desire gets proven, and without that mechanism the whole concept of wanting something would be meaningless. Every dream he achieved, he achieved by treating the wall as a signal that he was close, not a signal that he should stop. The second framework he taught the audience is the one almost nobody teaches in any classroom. He called it the head fake. He pulled it from football. Coaches teach young kids to tackle by having them run drills that look like they are about tackling, but the real lesson being embedded is teamwork, grit, how to take a hit and get back up. The kid thinks they are learning football. They are actually learning something much larger, and they will not realize it until years later. Pausch said the best teaching in the world is head fake teaching. You get people to learn the thing they need by dressing it up as the thing they already want. This is the technique behind Alice, the programming software he built at Carnegie Mellon. Kids thought they were making animated movies and games. They were actually learning to code. Pausch said one of his proudest claims to fame was that he had taught programming to a generation of students who had no idea they were being taught programming at all. And then, with about three minutes left in the lecture, he ran a head fake on the room. He asked the audience if they had figured out the first head fake of the talk itself. The room went quiet. He said the lecture was never actually about how to achieve your childhood dreams. It was about how to lead your life. If you lead your life the right way, the karma takes care of itself and the dreams come to you anyway. Then he asked if they had figured out the second head fake. Even quieter. He said the talk was not for the four hundred people in the room. It was for his three kids. Dylan was six. Logan was three. Chloe was eighteen months. They would grow up without their father, and he knew it. Pausch had spent an hour on stage pretending to give career advice to strangers because he needed to record something his children could watch when they were old enough to understand who their dad had been. The entire architecture of the lecture was a message in a bottle disguised as a keynote. The filtered brick-wall philosophy, the football stories, the dreams he chased and the ones he missed, the line about playing the hand you are dealt, all of it was something a father wanted three small children to internalize after he was no longer there to say it in person. That is the moment the video stops being a lecture and starts being something else entirely. Pausch died on July 25, 2008, ten months after giving it. His final sentence on stage was that he had given the talk tonight, and then he walked off. The applause lasted nearly a minute before the camera cut. Most professors spend their entire careers trying to say one true thing their students will remember for a week. He said one true thing his children will remember for the rest of their lives, and the rest of the world is still watching the footage.

Ihtesham Ali

56,734 views • 3 months ago

Warren Buffett turned $9.7 million into more than $370 million on a single stock, and the setup was sitting in plain sight for anyone to see. This is Buffett explaining the trade that made him, and the simple math almost nobody else acted on: In the mid-1970s, the entire Washington Post Company was on sale for $80 million. Its actual properties were worth at least $400 million. In his words, "no one would have argued with you about the properties being worth $400 million." So why was it that cheap? "The price was there for all to see, but people just didn't feel very enthusiastic about the world then." Buffett did. In 1973 he bought 1.7 million shares for $9.7 million. As a boy he had delivered that same newspaper. Now he owned 13% of it. He never sold. By the time of this interview, that $9.7 million was worth $370 million, and he still called it a holding he would keep forever. Bookmark & watch: _______ Follow Fireside Tapes for more highlights of key business and investing conversations.

Warren Buffett turned $9.7 million into more than $370 million on a single stock, and the setup was sitting in plain sight for anyone to see. This is Buffett explaining the trade that made him, and the simple math almost nobody else acted on: In the mid-1970s, the entire Washington Post Company was on sale for $80 million. Its actual properties were worth at least $400 million. In his words, "no one would have argued with you about the properties being worth $400 million." So why was it that cheap? "The price was there for all to see, but people just didn't feel very enthusiastic about the world then." Buffett did. In 1973 he bought 1.7 million shares for $9.7 million. As a boy he had delivered that same newspaper. Now he owned 13% of it. He never sold. By the time of this interview, that $9.7 million was worth $370 million, and he still called it a holding he would keep forever. Bookmark & watch: _______ Follow Fireside Tapes for more highlights of key business and investing conversations.

Fireside Tapes

91,765 views • 1 month ago

A man who turned 7 million dollars into 500 million in 10 years sat on a desk in a classroom and taught the method to 30 students. The man is Joel Greenblatt. He ran Gotham Capital from 1985 to 1994 at roughly 50% a year, then returned all outside capital in 1995 and kept running his own money. Almost nobody sustains that number over a decade. A Columbia classroom in 2005. Chalkboard, blue plastic chairs, a camera at the back of the room recording for the students who missed it. He sits on the edge of the desk with a stack of paper. He does not teach a screen or a formula. He teaches situations most funds cannot touch, the corners of the market where the usual buyers are structurally forced to sell regardless of price. The first lecture is where he sets up why those corners exist at all, and why they keep existing after everybody knows about them. The uncomfortable turn is what he says about diversification and about how few positions he actually held. It runs directly against everything the same school teaches two floors down. It matters more now. Every screener is free, every filing is searchable, and the constraint was never information. Free on YouTube, filmed from the back row, audio uneven, students blocking the frame. He gave away 50% a year to a room of 30 people. The tape has been public for years. One classroom. 1 camera. It is in the video.

A man who turned 7 million dollars into 500 million in 10 years sat on a desk in a classroom and taught the method to 30 students. The man is Joel Greenblatt. He ran Gotham Capital from 1985 to 1994 at roughly 50% a year, then returned all outside capital in 1995 and kept running his own money. Almost nobody sustains that number over a decade. A Columbia classroom in 2005. Chalkboard, blue plastic chairs, a camera at the back of the room recording for the students who missed it. He sits on the edge of the desk with a stack of paper. He does not teach a screen or a formula. He teaches situations most funds cannot touch, the corners of the market where the usual buyers are structurally forced to sell regardless of price. The first lecture is where he sets up why those corners exist at all, and why they keep existing after everybody knows about them. The uncomfortable turn is what he says about diversification and about how few positions he actually held. It runs directly against everything the same school teaches two floors down. It matters more now. Every screener is free, every filing is searchable, and the constraint was never information. Free on YouTube, filmed from the back row, audio uneven, students blocking the frame. He gave away 50% a year to a room of 30 people. The tape has been public for years. One classroom. 1 camera. It is in the video.

Merlow

185,154 views • 14 days ago

Why Elon didn't want to be CEO: "[Elon] is at core, an engineer and a product guy. He has this great line where he said: "I realized you couldn't be fully in control of the product unless you were also in control of the company." He says he made a moral error, early in Tesla, where he was trying to have his cake and eat it too. He wanted to control the company without running the company. And that was the 2002 to 2008 era, where Tesla was just off to a really messy start. He was providing the funding. He was chairman of the board. But Martin Eberhard was CEO. Eventually, when Tesla was on the verge of death in 2008....Elon was pushed into the position of: "I have to be CEO. I don't want to be. It comes with a lot of chores. It comes with a lot of responsibilities. But if I want this company to be successful, I have to fully internalize and take responsibility for it." And that's what he did, even though he was also in the same position at SpaceX. The fact that these companies are improbable, iconic, and that he funded and led them both in parallel...it's like running a two minute mile twice at the same time. It is such a higher degree of difficulty than most people can conceive of, and the fact that it worked is still unbelievable."

Why Elon didn't want to be CEO: "[Elon] is at core, an engineer and a product guy. He has this great line where he said: "I realized you couldn't be fully in control of the product unless you were also in control of the company." He says he made a moral error, early in Tesla, where he was trying to have his cake and eat it too. He wanted to control the company without running the company. And that was the 2002 to 2008 era, where Tesla was just off to a really messy start. He was providing the funding. He was chairman of the board. But Martin Eberhard was CEO. Eventually, when Tesla was on the verge of death in 2008....Elon was pushed into the position of: "I have to be CEO. I don't want to be. It comes with a lot of chores. It comes with a lot of responsibilities. But if I want this company to be successful, I have to fully internalize and take responsibility for it." And that's what he did, even though he was also in the same position at SpaceX. The fact that these companies are improbable, iconic, and that he funded and led them both in parallel...it's like running a two minute mile twice at the same time. It is such a higher degree of difficulty than most people can conceive of, and the fact that it worked is still unbelievable."

Ti Morse

47,497 views • 4 months ago

The best hire I ever made was a 12 year old kid from LA. His name is Eric Pham. He was making Fortnite montages in his bedroom. There was something special about him… the way he commanded the room and talked to a to camera was, different. He was funny. He was charismatic. He wasn't afraid to be himself. He just had “it”. Most people would've scrolled right past him. In 2019 I met Pham, quickly saw the potential he had and wanted to help. I then picked him up to my gaming startup Devour. A two years later he was at 100K subs. Now, he has hundreds of millions of views to his name. He's gone on to build massive channels outside of gaming, and is now the CMO of one of the fastest growing companies in creator tech (Viewmax with NotLuc). Everyone waits for the numbers to tell them someone's talented. By then it's too late. The best talent doesn't look like talent yet. It looks like a chubby kid in his bedroom with a ring light and 926 subscribers.

The best hire I ever made was a 12 year old kid from LA. His name is Eric Pham. He was making Fortnite montages in his bedroom. There was something special about him… the way he commanded the room and talked to a to camera was, different. He was funny. He was charismatic. He wasn't afraid to be himself. He just had “it”. Most people would've scrolled right past him. In 2019 I met Pham, quickly saw the potential he had and wanted to help. I then picked him up to my gaming startup Devour. A two years later he was at 100K subs. Now, he has hundreds of millions of views to his name. He's gone on to build massive channels outside of gaming, and is now the CMO of one of the fastest growing companies in creator tech (Viewmax with NotLuc). Everyone waits for the numbers to tell them someone's talented. By then it's too late. The best talent doesn't look like talent yet. It looks like a chubby kid in his bedroom with a ring light and 926 subscribers.

Mitchell

23,772 views • 3 months ago

Before Uber made him a billionaire, Travis Kalanick spent four years drawing no salary and living at his mother's house to keep a startup alive. He sold it for $19 million, cleared $3 million of his own, and to this day calls it the happiest day of his life. This is him on the company almost no one remembers, and why that one small win still outweighs everything he has built since. He started Red Swoosh in 2001, a file-sharing idea he describes as BitTorrent meets Akamai, before BitTorrent existed. By his own account it should never have survived. "That company wasn't meant to be and I willed it into being." For the first four years he paid himself nothing and moved back in with his mom. "The first 4 years, no salary. Lived at mom's." When Akamai finally bought it, the number that changed his life was not the kind that makes headlines today. "I sold it to Akamai for, like, I think it was like 19 million bucks. And probably to this day is still the happiest day of my life." He would go on to build Uber, worth a hundred times more. He still measures the best day of his life by the company that almost didn't make it. Bookmark & watch ↓

Before Uber made him a billionaire, Travis Kalanick spent four years drawing no salary and living at his mother's house to keep a startup alive. He sold it for $19 million, cleared $3 million of his own, and to this day calls it the happiest day of his life. This is him on the company almost no one remembers, and why that one small win still outweighs everything he has built since. He started Red Swoosh in 2001, a file-sharing idea he describes as BitTorrent meets Akamai, before BitTorrent existed. By his own account it should never have survived. "That company wasn't meant to be and I willed it into being." For the first four years he paid himself nothing and moved back in with his mom. "The first 4 years, no salary. Lived at mom's." When Akamai finally bought it, the number that changed his life was not the kind that makes headlines today. "I sold it to Akamai for, like, I think it was like 19 million bucks. And probably to this day is still the happiest day of my life." He would go on to build Uber, worth a hundred times more. He still measures the best day of his life by the company that almost didn't make it. Bookmark & watch ↓

Fireside Tapes

117,543 views • 25 days ago

This story about how Zuck pushed Aditya Agarwal to his extreme & made him build the search engine in the early days is awesome! Aditya was one of the early engg in Facebook & in week 2 of joining he was still figuring out what to do,none were giving any directions. Mark walked upto him & asked him to build a search engine -just him he didn't mean a team. Because people want to search for others through the search engine in Facebook & this is crucial. Aditya was pretty skeptical about himself as he didn't know how to build one. He suggested hiring someone from Google or Yahoo to build this out, Mark was like: "Dude if I can build Facebook you can build a damn search engine" And he actually ended up doing it! Still now he shares this lesson from this defining moment of his life to every founders - Anything could be done if you'd put your mind into it.

This story about how Zuck pushed Aditya Agarwal to his extreme & made him build the search engine in the early days is awesome! Aditya was one of the early engg in Facebook & in week 2 of joining he was still figuring out what to do,none were giving any directions. Mark walked upto him & asked him to build a search engine -just him he didn't mean a team. Because people want to search for others through the search engine in Facebook & this is crucial. Aditya was pretty skeptical about himself as he didn't know how to build one. He suggested hiring someone from Google or Yahoo to build this out, Mark was like: "Dude if I can build Facebook you can build a damn search engine" And he actually ended up doing it! Still now he shares this lesson from this defining moment of his life to every founders - Anything could be done if you'd put your mind into it.

Aish

630,651 views • 2 years ago

.Bari Weiss in her CBS Mornings debut, promoting her town hall tomorrow with Erika Kirk and taking aim at those who celebrated Charlie’s assassination and the conspiracy theorists claiming she had something to do it... “I think Erika Kirk is a victim of what could be a very, very disturbing version of America. In other words, her husband was speaking on a college campus. Whether you agreed with him or not, he was practicing the most fundamental of American rights, he was trying to persuade people with words and then he got a bullet to his neck as he was speaking to someone that disagreed with him. Someone, by the way, who was in the audience that night. In the days and weeks that followed, the number of people in this country and not just lunatics on the internet hiding behind anonymous accounts, but prominent people justified his death with the idea that words are violence rather than violence being violence signifies something quite alarming. The idea that he somehow had it coming because people disagreed with him.” “The second thing is that in — he was murdered three months ago. If you go on the internet and frankly it is leapt beyond the internet into real life and you talk to many seemingly sane people, they do not believe that the 22-year-old named Tyler Robinson that has been arrested and charged with his murder is the actual murderer. “They believe any number of theories. They believe Erika Kirk was his Mossad handler and he was killed by a foreign government. They believe she was tracked by Egyptian planes. They believe that the rings on her hand are signs of illuminati. The theories themselves are absurd. What matters is that because — she speaks about this in the interview, the brain rot that social media is allowing to spread, the way that it is detaching us from humanity, from our ability to talk to one another and our ability to discern the truth from just out and out lies is something that is incredibly important as a theme, I think. So, she was able to speak to both of those things in a way that’s incredibly compelling.”

.Bari Weiss in her CBS Mornings debut, promoting her town hall tomorrow with Erika Kirk and taking aim at those who celebrated Charlie’s assassination and the conspiracy theorists claiming she had something to do it... “I think Erika Kirk is a victim of what could be a very, very disturbing version of America. In other words, her husband was speaking on a college campus. Whether you agreed with him or not, he was practicing the most fundamental of American rights, he was trying to persuade people with words and then he got a bullet to his neck as he was speaking to someone that disagreed with him. Someone, by the way, who was in the audience that night. In the days and weeks that followed, the number of people in this country and not just lunatics on the internet hiding behind anonymous accounts, but prominent people justified his death with the idea that words are violence rather than violence being violence signifies something quite alarming. The idea that he somehow had it coming because people disagreed with him.” “The second thing is that in — he was murdered three months ago. If you go on the internet and frankly it is leapt beyond the internet into real life and you talk to many seemingly sane people, they do not believe that the 22-year-old named Tyler Robinson that has been arrested and charged with his murder is the actual murderer. “They believe any number of theories. They believe Erika Kirk was his Mossad handler and he was killed by a foreign government. They believe she was tracked by Egyptian planes. They believe that the rings on her hand are signs of illuminati. The theories themselves are absurd. What matters is that because — she speaks about this in the interview, the brain rot that social media is allowing to spread, the way that it is detaching us from humanity, from our ability to talk to one another and our ability to discern the truth from just out and out lies is something that is incredibly important as a theme, I think. So, she was able to speak to both of those things in a way that’s incredibly compelling.”

Curtis Houck

78,679 views • 8 months ago

James Currier on how he grew a photo sharing site to 47 million users in 6 months “Most product people start by saying, ‘There’s a problem and we’re going to build a product that’s going to solve that problem. Then we’re going to market it,” NFX founder James Currier observes. Of the 45 companies James has spoken to in the last 18 months, at least 40 of them have said some version of this. “I was also taught this back in the 1990s,” James says. “But through experimentation, I’ve realized that this is actually the wrong way to look at it. The right way to look at it — if you want to grow your business — is to ask, ‘What is the language? How am I going to market this?’ . . . Figure out what the language is and then build the product to fit what the language is.” James gives the example of a photo sharing site he launched years ago: “It said ‘Store your Photos’ on the homepage, and we were not growing. So one day, we literally just changed the homepage to say ‘Share your Photos.’ The team that was working on it said, ‘Our site doesn’t actually share photos. It just stores the photos.’ I said, ‘Well, fix that.’ What ended up happening was they started building features that allowed people to share their photos, and we registered 47 million people in 6 months. And that was back when the Internet was 250 million people.” He continues: “What we realized was that by changing the language, you change how the users are interacting with your site. And you also change your thinking about the product so that the features and subsequent language in the product actually fits with the main value proposition.” James gives another example: “We had a matchmaking site, and the promise there was ‘Find a date.’ It wasn’t growing and we had to buy all this traffic from Google and elsewhere to keep the whole thing going. So what we did was we changed the language and the value proposition to say, ‘Help people find a date.’ When we did that, we registered 28 million people in about 9 months, virally with no cost to us. We changed the language, and then we changed the product subsequently.” Video source: Greylock Partners (2016)

James Currier on how he grew a photo sharing site to 47 million users in 6 months “Most product people start by saying, ‘There’s a problem and we’re going to build a product that’s going to solve that problem. Then we’re going to market it,” NFX founder James Currier observes. Of the 45 companies James has spoken to in the last 18 months, at least 40 of them have said some version of this. “I was also taught this back in the 1990s,” James says. “But through experimentation, I’ve realized that this is actually the wrong way to look at it. The right way to look at it — if you want to grow your business — is to ask, ‘What is the language? How am I going to market this?’ . . . Figure out what the language is and then build the product to fit what the language is.” James gives the example of a photo sharing site he launched years ago: “It said ‘Store your Photos’ on the homepage, and we were not growing. So one day, we literally just changed the homepage to say ‘Share your Photos.’ The team that was working on it said, ‘Our site doesn’t actually share photos. It just stores the photos.’ I said, ‘Well, fix that.’ What ended up happening was they started building features that allowed people to share their photos, and we registered 47 million people in 6 months. And that was back when the Internet was 250 million people.” He continues: “What we realized was that by changing the language, you change how the users are interacting with your site. And you also change your thinking about the product so that the features and subsequent language in the product actually fits with the main value proposition.” James gives another example: “We had a matchmaking site, and the promise there was ‘Find a date.’ It wasn’t growing and we had to buy all this traffic from Google and elsewhere to keep the whole thing going. So what we did was we changed the language and the value proposition to say, ‘Help people find a date.’ When we did that, we registered 28 million people in about 9 months, virally with no cost to us. We changed the language, and then we changed the product subsequently.” Video source: Greylock Partners (2016)

Startup Archive

18,388 views • 8 months ago

A new father became so terrified of never learning anything again that he accidentally dismantled the biggest lie in education. His name is Josh Kaufman, and he wasn't a neuroscientist or a professor. He was an author working from home, running a business with his wife, with a newborn daughter who had just obliterated any concept of free time he thought he had. Around week 8 of sleep deprivation, he had the thought every parent has. I am never going to learn anything new ever again. And because he was the kind of person who responds to panic with research, he went to the library and started reading everything he could find about how humans acquire skills. He read book after book, study after study. Every single one said the same thing. 10,000 hours. He had a full-body reaction to that number. 10,000 hours is a full-time job for five years. He didn't have five years. He didn't have five hours. He had a newborn and a business and a wife who was also building a business in the same house. So he kept digging. And here is where it gets interesting. The 10,000 hour rule came from a researcher named K. Anders Ericsson at Florida State University. What Ericsson actually studied was professional athletes, world-class musicians, chess grandmasters people at the absolute tip of ultra-competitive, ultra-high-performing fields. His finding was that the people at the very top of those narrow fields had put in around 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. That is all the finding said. Then Malcolm Gladwell wrote Outliers in 2007, and the message went through a game of telephone that destroyed its meaning entirely. It takes 10,000 hours to reach the top of an ultra-competitive field became it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert, which became it takes 10,000 hours to become good at something, which became it takes 10,000 hours to learn something. That last statement is completely false. And the actual research had been showing something different the entire time. When cognitive psychologists study skill acquisition, they measure a graph that looks identical across every domain they have ever tested. At the start, performance is terrible. With a small amount of practice, it improves rapidly. Then it plateaus, and subsequent gains become much harder and slower to achieve. The steep part of that curve the jump from knowing nothing to being reasonably good happens much faster than anyone tells you. Not 10,000 hours. Not 1,000 hours. 20 hours. Kaufman tested this himself. He had always wanted to learn ukulele. He picked one up, put 20 hours of focused deliberate practice into it, and stood on a TEDx stage playing a medley of recognizable pop songs in front of a live audience. The crowd went wild. He then told them that performance was his 20th hour. But 20 hours is not just a number. There is a method inside it. The first step is to deconstruct the skill. Most things we think of as single skills are actually bundles of dozens of smaller skills. You do not need all of them. You need the ones that get you to your specific goal the fastest. In music, this means most songs use four or five chords. Learn those first. Ignore the rest until they matter. The second step is to learn just enough to self-correct. Get three to five resources books, courses, videos but do not use them as a reason to delay practice. The point of learning is not to master theory first. It is to get good enough at noticing your own mistakes that you can adjust as you go. The third step is to remove barriers to practice. Not through willpower. Through structure. If the instrument is in the case in the closet, you will not play it. If your phone is in the room, you will not focus. Kaufman was brutal about this. The environment does the work that discipline cannot sustain. The fourth step is the one that actually makes the system work. Pre-commit to 20 hours before you start. Here is why this matters. Every skill has what he called a frustration barrier. The early part of learning anything is genuinely terrible. You are incompetent and you know it. That feeling is so uncomfortable that most people quit before they ever cross to the other side of the curve. By pre-committing to 20 hours, you are making a contract with yourself to push through the frustration long enough to arrive at the part where things start clicking. The barrier to learning something new is never intellectual. It is emotional. We are afraid of feeling stupid. That fear costs most people everything they could have learned. Kaufman figured this out while holding a baby and running out of time, which is the most human possible condition for having a breakthrough. Most people are waiting for the perfect season to start. He just started. 20 hours is 45 minutes a day for a month. That is it. That is the price of going from knowing nothing to being genuinely capable at almost anything you can name. The 10,000 hour rule was never about learning. It was about becoming the best in the world. You probably do not need to be the best in the world. You just need to start.

A new father became so terrified of never learning anything again that he accidentally dismantled the biggest lie in education. His name is Josh Kaufman, and he wasn't a neuroscientist or a professor. He was an author working from home, running a business with his wife, with a newborn daughter who had just obliterated any concept of free time he thought he had. Around week 8 of sleep deprivation, he had the thought every parent has. I am never going to learn anything new ever again. And because he was the kind of person who responds to panic with research, he went to the library and started reading everything he could find about how humans acquire skills. He read book after book, study after study. Every single one said the same thing. 10,000 hours. He had a full-body reaction to that number. 10,000 hours is a full-time job for five years. He didn't have five years. He didn't have five hours. He had a newborn and a business and a wife who was also building a business in the same house. So he kept digging. And here is where it gets interesting. The 10,000 hour rule came from a researcher named K. Anders Ericsson at Florida State University. What Ericsson actually studied was professional athletes, world-class musicians, chess grandmasters people at the absolute tip of ultra-competitive, ultra-high-performing fields. His finding was that the people at the very top of those narrow fields had put in around 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. That is all the finding said. Then Malcolm Gladwell wrote Outliers in 2007, and the message went through a game of telephone that destroyed its meaning entirely. It takes 10,000 hours to reach the top of an ultra-competitive field became it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert, which became it takes 10,000 hours to become good at something, which became it takes 10,000 hours to learn something. That last statement is completely false. And the actual research had been showing something different the entire time. When cognitive psychologists study skill acquisition, they measure a graph that looks identical across every domain they have ever tested. At the start, performance is terrible. With a small amount of practice, it improves rapidly. Then it plateaus, and subsequent gains become much harder and slower to achieve. The steep part of that curve the jump from knowing nothing to being reasonably good happens much faster than anyone tells you. Not 10,000 hours. Not 1,000 hours. 20 hours. Kaufman tested this himself. He had always wanted to learn ukulele. He picked one up, put 20 hours of focused deliberate practice into it, and stood on a TEDx stage playing a medley of recognizable pop songs in front of a live audience. The crowd went wild. He then told them that performance was his 20th hour. But 20 hours is not just a number. There is a method inside it. The first step is to deconstruct the skill. Most things we think of as single skills are actually bundles of dozens of smaller skills. You do not need all of them. You need the ones that get you to your specific goal the fastest. In music, this means most songs use four or five chords. Learn those first. Ignore the rest until they matter. The second step is to learn just enough to self-correct. Get three to five resources books, courses, videos but do not use them as a reason to delay practice. The point of learning is not to master theory first. It is to get good enough at noticing your own mistakes that you can adjust as you go. The third step is to remove barriers to practice. Not through willpower. Through structure. If the instrument is in the case in the closet, you will not play it. If your phone is in the room, you will not focus. Kaufman was brutal about this. The environment does the work that discipline cannot sustain. The fourth step is the one that actually makes the system work. Pre-commit to 20 hours before you start. Here is why this matters. Every skill has what he called a frustration barrier. The early part of learning anything is genuinely terrible. You are incompetent and you know it. That feeling is so uncomfortable that most people quit before they ever cross to the other side of the curve. By pre-committing to 20 hours, you are making a contract with yourself to push through the frustration long enough to arrive at the part where things start clicking. The barrier to learning something new is never intellectual. It is emotional. We are afraid of feeling stupid. That fear costs most people everything they could have learned. Kaufman figured this out while holding a baby and running out of time, which is the most human possible condition for having a breakthrough. Most people are waiting for the perfect season to start. He just started. 20 hours is 45 minutes a day for a month. That is it. That is the price of going from knowing nothing to being genuinely capable at almost anything you can name. The 10,000 hour rule was never about learning. It was about becoming the best in the world. You probably do not need to be the best in the world. You just need to start.

Ihtesham Ali

44,762 views • 4 months ago

Dana White reveals he made his son get a job after he told him he wanted to drop out of college to start a business “I made him go out put out applications and I said if I drop dead tomorrow this is what you’re qualified to do” “so he went out and ended up working at U Haul for a while and he had to clean out the back of the trucks he had to fix broken tail lights” “You have to have that shitty job that you don’t like at a young age so that you can understand I could have made 1,000 phone calls and got him some nope we’re not doing that” “To his credit he went out he did it and he learned and everything he said to me was dead on with this business and it was actually a brilliant idea”

Dana White reveals he made his son get a job after he told him he wanted to drop out of college to start a business “I made him go out put out applications and I said if I drop dead tomorrow this is what you’re qualified to do” “so he went out and ended up working at U Haul for a while and he had to clean out the back of the trucks he had to fix broken tail lights” “You have to have that shitty job that you don’t like at a young age so that you can understand I could have made 1,000 phone calls and got him some nope we’re not doing that” “To his credit he went out he did it and he learned and everything he said to me was dead on with this business and it was actually a brilliant idea”

Third

4,320,652 views • 3 months ago

TikTok just got caught running a secret experiment on 15 million Americans to find out how much money their dangerous version could make them. In 2021 the company rewrote part of its recommendation algorithm so users would stop getting buried under harmful content over and over. Then it held back 10% of its American users and left them on the OLD version. At the time that was roughly 15 million people. None of them were told. They opened the same app, saw the same logo, and scrolled a feed the company had already replaced for everyone else. Internally the practice has a clean name. It is called a backtest, and it is the same A/B test any company runs when it wants to prove a change actually worked. Companies normally run those on button colors and checkout flows. TikTok ran one on what happens to people when the app stops protecting them. Why would a business do that? Because a safer feed is a less sticky feed, and stickiness is the product. One of the 15 million was a 16 year old named Chase Nasca. He had no history of mental health issues. He committed sicide in February 2022. In March 2023, a Bloomberg Businessweek reporter emailed the company asking about Chase for a story on teenagers and the algorithm. Only then did TikTok's algorithm and safety teams go back and reconstruct his account. They found he had been assigned to the control group. The same report notes that most of what he actually searched for on the app was sports and comedy - but he was regularly shown sicide and other harmful content. Their findings became a 14 page internal report on youth safety and filter bubbles. Its key contacts list shows it went to 10 teams inside the company, including communications, legal response, policy, security and search. So the lawyers knew about it. The communications team knew. Policy, security and search all got a copy. Then came the recommendations, and this is where it gets genuinely ugly... The report proposed two fixes: The first was to shrink the control group from 10% of American users to under 1%. The second was to cut how long the same users sit inside it, from as long as a full year down to seven days. Nobody proposed stopping. And the report ran the numbers on its own suggestion. Even at 1%, it said, at least 1.8 million users would still be excluded from the safety change, and it warned those people would be left "at risk for falling into bubbles." Someone typed that sentence, sent it to 10 teams, and the practice continued. A former TikTok trust and safety team leader who worked there while the experiment was live said he had never heard of it. After seeing the details he said the control group was far too big, and that the test should have excluded minors and suicide content entirely. The staff paid to protect users did not know the experiment on users existed. TikTok's answer this week is that the 2022 test was routine, and that its purpose was to check whether safety changes were working as intended. The internal report describes its own recommendations as a way to prevent future incidents. Chase's parents sued for wrongful death. A judge dismissed the case last year after TikTok argued that Section 230 protects it from liability for what its algorithm recommends. The appeal is still pending. So the company's legal position is that it is not responsible for the videos its algorithm served a teenager, while its OWN document confirms it chose which version of that algorithm he received. Every large platform runs tests like this one. But not one of them publishes how many users are sitting in the old version at any given moment. TikTok's number was never supposed to become public.

Ricardo

31,047 views • 12 days ago

The best piece of advice Brian ever got was from Paul Graham (Paul Graham): "It's better to have a hundred people love you than a million people sort of like you." "That came from Paul Buchheit (Paul Buchheit). Paul was a partner at Y Combinator. He created Gmail. The famous story was he couldn't ship it until 100 people inside of Google love it. It actually took two years to get 100 people to actually like the product. But once a hundred people like something, a hundred million people like it. The problem is, if you try to make something a million people like, you can't talk to a million people. It's like you're trying to heat up an ocean and you can't tell. Instead of heating up an ocean, heat up a bathtub. Make the problem as small as possible. Do things that don't scale, then scale. Product market fit is a distinct problem from industrialization. Understand the user, put yourself in their shoes, blow their mind. Do things you've never thought before. Do them by hand. Make them unscalable. Don't worry how much it costs. Just prove the model."

The best piece of advice Brian ever got was from Paul Graham (Paul Graham): "It's better to have a hundred people love you than a million people sort of like you." "That came from Paul Buchheit (Paul Buchheit). Paul was a partner at Y Combinator. He created Gmail. The famous story was he couldn't ship it until 100 people inside of Google love it. It actually took two years to get 100 people to actually like the product. But once a hundred people like something, a hundred million people like it. The problem is, if you try to make something a million people like, you can't talk to a million people. It's like you're trying to heat up an ocean and you can't tell. Instead of heating up an ocean, heat up a bathtub. Make the problem as small as possible. Do things that don't scale, then scale. Product market fit is a distinct problem from industrialization. Understand the user, put yourself in their shoes, blow their mind. Do things you've never thought before. Do them by hand. Make them unscalable. Don't worry how much it costs. Just prove the model."

Patrick OShaughnessy

66,272 views • 3 months ago

$Gmail creator Paul Buchheit on how to build something 100 people love In the clip below, Paul talks about how he built the first version of Gmail. The first version was built in one day, and from there, he iterated his way to 100 people who loved the product: “The whole thing was just iterating, step by step trying to build something that made people happy.” The team decided that they needed to have 100 happy users before launching gmail to the world. To achieve this, Paul embedded a quick questionnaire in the interface that asked users: “Are you happy? Yes or No” Paul would then seek out all of the “No” responders and ask them directly: “What will it take to make you a happy user?” He ignored feedback from the people who said things like “it basically needs to be a clone of Outlook” because it was unlikely he would be able to convert them. But other people just needed a minor feature or a bug fix. So Paul worked on those requests one-by-one until he hit 100 happy users. Email was 30 years old when Paul started building gmail, and it’s pretty much impossible to enter a space like that and build something that appeals to everyone. If you try, what you will end up building is a mediocre product that nobody really loves. What Paul recommends doing instead—and what he did with gmail—is: “Build a thing that has really deep appeal. Even if it’s to just a tiny fraction of people—if you can make that small fraction of people obsessively love what you’re building, it’s easier to just grow that group. There’s always people at the margin where if you make the thing slightly better, they’re going to join into that group. It’s easier to start with deep, narrow appeal and broaden it over time than it is to start with broad ‘meh’ and convert ‘meh’ to loving your thing en masse.”$

Gmail creator Paul Buchheit on how to build something 100 people love In the clip below, Paul talks about how he built the first version of Gmail. The first version was built in one day, and from there, he iterated his way to 100 people who loved the product: “The whole thing was just iterating, step by step trying to build something that made people happy.” The team decided that they needed to have 100 happy users before launching gmail to the world. To achieve this, Paul embedded a quick questionnaire in the interface that asked users: “Are you happy? Yes or No” Paul would then seek out all of the “No” responders and ask them directly: “What will it take to make you a happy user?” He ignored feedback from the people who said things like “it basically needs to be a clone of Outlook” because it was unlikely he would be able to convert them. But other people just needed a minor feature or a bug fix. So Paul worked on those requests one-by-one until he hit 100 happy users. Email was 30 years old when Paul started building gmail, and it’s pretty much impossible to enter a space like that and build something that appeals to everyone. If you try, what you will end up building is a mediocre product that nobody really loves. What Paul recommends doing instead—and what he did with gmail—is: “Build a thing that has really deep appeal. Even if it’s to just a tiny fraction of people—if you can make that small fraction of people obsessively love what you’re building, it’s easier to just grow that group. There’s always people at the margin where if you make the thing slightly better, they’re going to join into that group. It’s easier to start with deep, narrow appeal and broaden it over time than it is to start with broad ‘meh’ and convert ‘meh’ to loving your thing en masse.”

Startup Archive

44,476 views • 2 years ago