INSTEAD OF WATCHING AN HOUR OF NETFLIX.
This 60-minute MIT lecture by Steve jobs will teach you more about building companies than every startup book you've read combined.
Bookmark it and give it an hour, no matter what.
Elon Musk advice to ambitious people:
Try to read a lot of books (read broadly), ingest as much information as you can and develop a good general knowledge.
Expand your mind. You can't be “China” with Onitsha Main Market looking like that.
Look at the largest mall in Asia and one of the largest in the world in Iran. It's owned by a bank and valued at $5.8b today.
Took 6 years to open, and the construction and expansion are still ongoing
21m square feet, it has
2500 stores
library
skating rink
450-room 5-star hotel
cinemas
amusement park
walking trains on the roof
gymnasiums
climbing wall
indoor pools
OMATA, you folks can do this again; money is not the issue. It needs someone to drive this. In Iran, a prominent businessman did
Jensen Huang on how to structure a company:
"Don't worry about how other companies' or charts look. You start from first principles.
Remember what an organization is designed to do.
The organizations of the past where there was a king, you know, CEO, and then you have all these, you know, the royal subjects, you know, the royal court, and then e-staff.
And then you keep working your way down. Eventually, they're employees.
But the reason why it was designed that way is because they wanted the employees to have as little information as possible because the fundamental purpose of the soldiers is to die in the field of battle, to die without asking questions.
You guys know this. I only have 30,000 employees.
I would like none of them to die. I would like them to question everything.
Does that make sense?
And so the way you organize in the past and the way you organize today is very different.
Second, the question is, what does NVIDIA build?
An organization is designed so that we could build whatever it is we build better.
And so if we all build different things, why are we organized the same way?
Why would this organizational machinery be exactly the same, irrespective of what you build?
It doesn't make any sense.
You build computers, you organize this way.
You build health care services, you build the same way.
It makes no sense whatsoever.
And so you have to go back to first principles.
Just ask yourself, what kind of machinery?
What is the input? What is the output?
What are the properties of this environment?
What is the forest that this animal has to live in?
What are its characteristics?
Is it stable most of the time?
You're trying to squeeze out the last drop of water? Or is it changing all the time, being attacked by everybody?
And so you've got to understand, if you're the CEO, your job is to architect this company.
That's my first job, to create the conditions by which you can do your life's work.
And the architecture has to be right.
And so you have to go back to first principles and think about those things.
And I was fortunate that when I was 29 years old, I had the benefit of taking a step back and asking myself, how would I build this company for the future, and what would it look like?
And what's the operating system, which is called culture?
What kind of behavior do we encourage, enhance?
And what do we discourage and not enhance? So on and so forth..."
"The founders are special. The founders need to be in charge. The founders are difficult to work with. They push people hard
I had dinner with Elon, he was flying that night at 10PM to have a meeting at midnight with xAI. Think about it"
~ Eric Schmidt
Good Products are Opinionated.
“Every great founder I’ve seen up close, or even from afar, is highly opinionated and they’re almost dictatorial in how they run things.
Also, early-stage teams are opinionated. And the products they build are opinionated. Opinionated means they have a strong vision for what it should and should not do.
If you don’t have a strong vision of what it should and should not do, then you end up with a giant mess of competing features.
@Jack Dorsey has a great phrase: “Limit the number of details and make every detail perfect.” And that’s especially important in consumer products. You have to be extremely opinionated. All the best products in consumer-land get there through simplicity.
You could argue the recent success of ChatGPT and similar AI chatbots is because they’re even simpler than Google.
Google looked like the simplest product you could possibly build. It was just a box. But even that box had limitations in what you could do.
You were trained not to talk to it conversationally. You would enter keywords and you had to be careful with those keywords. You couldn’t just ask a question outright and get a sensible answer. It wouldn’t do proper synonym matching, and then it would spit you back a whole bunch of results. That was complicated. You’d have to sift through and figure out which ones were ads, which ones were real, were they sorted correctly, and then you’d have to click through and read it.
ChatGPT and the chatbot simplified that even further. You just talk to it like a human—use your voice or you type and it gives you back a straight answer.
It might not always be right, but it’s good enough, and it gives you back a straight answer in text or voice or images or whatever you prefer.
So it simplifies what we looked at as the simplest product on the Internet, which was formerly Google, and makes it even simpler. And you just cannot make a product that’s simple enough.
To be simple, you have to be extremely opinionated. You have to remove everything that doesn’t match your opinion of what the product should be doing. You have to meticulously remove every single click, every single extra button, every single setting.
In fact, things in the settings menu are an indication that you’ve abdicated your responsibility to the user. Choices for the user are an abdication of your responsibility. Maybe for legal or important reasons, you can have a few of these, but you should struggle and resist against every single choice the user has to make.
In the age of TikTok and ChatGPT, that’s more obvious than ever. People don’t want to make choices. They don’t want the cognitive load. They want you to figure out what the right defaults are and what they should be doing and looking at, and they want you to present it to them.”