![WalterIsaacson's tweet photo. The infatuation of @elonmusk with the name https://t.co/92gi3zsHin goes way back. Here are some excerpts from my upcoming book, https://t.co/JaeIDTq8FO
"When his cousin Peter Rive visited in early 1999, he found Musk poring over books about the banking system. “I’m trying to think about what to start next,” he explained. His experience at Scotiabank had convinced him that the industry was ripe for disruption. So in March 1999, he founded https://t.co/92gi3zsHin.
His concept for https://t.co/92gi3zsHin was grand. It would be a one-stop everything-store for all financial needs: banking, digital purchases, checking, credit cards, investments, and loans. Transactions would be handled instantly, with no waiting for payments to clear. His insight was that money is simply an entry into a database, and he wanted to devise a way that all transactions were securely recorded in real time. “If you fix all the reasons why a consumer would take money out of the system,” he says, “then it will be the place where all the money is, and that would make it a multitrillion-dollar company.”
Musk was able to entice the influential head of Sequoia Capital, Michael Moritz, to make a major investment in https://t.co/92gi3zsHin. Moritz then facilitated a deal with Barclay’s Bank and a community bank in Colorado to become partners, so that https://t.co/92gi3zsHin could offer mutual funds, have a bank charter, and be FDIC-insured.
One of Musk’s management tactics, then as later, was to set an insane deadline and drive colleagues to meet it. He did that in the fall of 1999 by announcing, in what one engineer called “a dick move,” that https://t.co/92gi3zsHin would launch to the public on Thanksgiving weekend. In the weeks leading up to that, Musk prowled the office each day, including Thanksgiving, in a nervous and nervous-making frenzy, and slept under his desk most nights. One of the engineers who went home at 2 a.m. Thanksgiving morning got a call from Musk at 11 a.m. asking him to come back in because another engineer had worked all night and was “not running on full thrusters anymore.” Such behavior produced drama and resentments, but also success. When the product went live that weekend, all the employees marched to a nearby ATM, where Musk inserted an https://t.co/92gi3zsHin debit card. Cash whirred out and the team celebrated.
One driver of growth was a feature that they originally thought was no big deal: the ability to send money by email. That became wildly popular, especially on the auction site eBay, where users were looking for an easy way to pay strangers for purchases.
[After a merger, with a company cofounded by Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, the company became known as PayPal.] "Musk insisted that the company’s name should be https://t.co/92gi3zsHin, with PayPal as merely one of its subsidiary brands. He even tried to rebrand the payment system X-PayPal. There was a lot of pushback, especially from Levchin. PayPal had become a trusted brand name, like a good pal who is helping you get paid. Focus groups showed that the name https://t.co/92gi3zsHin, on the contrary, conjured up visions of a seedy site you would not talk about in polite company. But Musk was unwavering, and remains so to this day. “If you want to just be a niche payment system, PayPal is better,” he said. “But if you want to take over the world’s financial system, then X is the better name.”
Levchin and Musk soon clashed on an issue that sounded technical but was also theological: whether to use Microsoft Windows or Unix as the main operating system. Musk admired Bill Gates, loved Windows NT, and thought Microsoft would be a more reliable partner. Levchin and his team were appalled, feeling that Windows NT was insecure, buggy, and uncool. They preferred using various flavors of Unix-like operating systems, including Solaris and the open-source Linux.
One night well after midnight, Levchin was working alone in a conference room when Musk walked in primed to continue the argument. “Eventually you will see it my way,” Musk said. “I know how this movie ends.”
“No, you’re wrong,” Levchin replied in his flat monotone. “It just isn’t going to work in Microsoft.”
“You know what,” said Musk. “I will arm-wrestle you for it.”
Levchin thought, correctly, that this was the stupidest imaginable way to settle a software-coding disagreement. Plus, Musk was almost twice his size. But he was loopy from working late hours and agreed to arm-wrestle. He put all his weight into it and promptly lost. “Just to be clear,” Levchin told him, “I’m not going to use your physical weight as any sort of a technical decision input.”
Musk laughed and said, “Yeah, I get it.” But he prevailed.
[Musk told me, even before he took control of Twitter, that he planned to rebrand it https://t.co/92gi3zsHin and to try to make it a platform that would fulfill his original vision from 1999. A passage from later in the book:]
In the days leading up to his takeover of Twitter at the end of October 2022, Musk’s moods fluctuated wildly. “I am very excited about finally implementing https://t.co/92gi3zsHin as it should have been done, using Twitter as an accelerant!” he texted me out of the blue at 3:30 one morning. “And, hopefully, helping democracy and civil discourse while doing so.” He said that he would turn it into the combination of financial platform and social network he had envisioned twenty-four years earlier for https://t.co/92gi3zsHin, and he added that he planned to rebrand it with that name, which he loved. A few days later, he was more somber. “I will need to live at Twitter HQ. This is a super tough situation. Really bumming me out :( Sleep is difficult.”
Here is Musk with Peter Thiel and the https://t.co/92gi3zsHin card in 1999, and celebrating with Pappy van Winkle, @pappyvanwinkle , the world's best Bourbon, on the day he bought Twitter:](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F1wDN2LXwAAFE3k.jpg)
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Proud and humbled to be named to @fortunemagazine’s 40 Under 40 list for 2020! A special thank you to @morganstanley @usmc.
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The Presidio Trust is searching for its next CEO. We’re seeking an exceptional leader to advance our public mission, ensure long-term financial sustainability, and guide the Presidio’s next chapter. Learn more and help spread the word.https://t.co/zHwoo7Tgoh
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Full clip: https://t.co/hy1QusWhKc
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https://t.co/qnW5FLa1Q3
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The next technological breakthrough is just on the horizon. Hear from industry experts on what innovation is the next big thing in this episode of Future in Five.
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Dig into the benchmarks and stats driving the list 👇
https://t.co/q2kiqOGeQu
Fortune-ate to do this panel on AI valuations led by the incredible @agarfinks, and even better to do it with friends @darian314 @guruchahal @lilatretikov @KamranAnsari ✨
https://t.co/tMmhLSAfjl
The infatuation of @elonmusk with the name https://t.co/92gi3zsHin goes way back. Here are some excerpts from my upcoming book, https://t.co/JaeIDTq8FO
"When his cousin Peter Rive visited in early 1999, he found Musk poring over books about the banking system. “I’m trying to think about what to start next,” he explained. His experience at Scotiabank had convinced him that the industry was ripe for disruption. So in March 1999, he founded https://t.co/92gi3zsHin.
His concept for https://t.co/92gi3zsHin was grand. It would be a one-stop everything-store for all financial needs: banking, digital purchases, checking, credit cards, investments, and loans. Transactions would be handled instantly, with no waiting for payments to clear. His insight was that money is simply an entry into a database, and he wanted to devise a way that all transactions were securely recorded in real time. “If you fix all the reasons why a consumer would take money out of the system,” he says, “then it will be the place where all the money is, and that would make it a multitrillion-dollar company.”
Musk was able to entice the influential head of Sequoia Capital, Michael Moritz, to make a major investment in https://t.co/92gi3zsHin. Moritz then facilitated a deal with Barclay’s Bank and a community bank in Colorado to become partners, so that https://t.co/92gi3zsHin could offer mutual funds, have a bank charter, and be FDIC-insured.
One of Musk’s management tactics, then as later, was to set an insane deadline and drive colleagues to meet it. He did that in the fall of 1999 by announcing, in what one engineer called “a dick move,” that https://t.co/92gi3zsHin would launch to the public on Thanksgiving weekend. In the weeks leading up to that, Musk prowled the office each day, including Thanksgiving, in a nervous and nervous-making frenzy, and slept under his desk most nights. One of the engineers who went home at 2 a.m. Thanksgiving morning got a call from Musk at 11 a.m. asking him to come back in because another engineer had worked all night and was “not running on full thrusters anymore.” Such behavior produced drama and resentments, but also success. When the product went live that weekend, all the employees marched to a nearby ATM, where Musk inserted an https://t.co/92gi3zsHin debit card. Cash whirred out and the team celebrated.
One driver of growth was a feature that they originally thought was no big deal: the ability to send money by email. That became wildly popular, especially on the auction site eBay, where users were looking for an easy way to pay strangers for purchases.
[After a merger, with a company cofounded by Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, the company became known as PayPal.] "Musk insisted that the company’s name should be https://t.co/92gi3zsHin, with PayPal as merely one of its subsidiary brands. He even tried to rebrand the payment system X-PayPal. There was a lot of pushback, especially from Levchin. PayPal had become a trusted brand name, like a good pal who is helping you get paid. Focus groups showed that the name https://t.co/92gi3zsHin, on the contrary, conjured up visions of a seedy site you would not talk about in polite company. But Musk was unwavering, and remains so to this day. “If you want to just be a niche payment system, PayPal is better,” he said. “But if you want to take over the world’s financial system, then X is the better name.”
Levchin and Musk soon clashed on an issue that sounded technical but was also theological: whether to use Microsoft Windows or Unix as the main operating system. Musk admired Bill Gates, loved Windows NT, and thought Microsoft would be a more reliable partner. Levchin and his team were appalled, feeling that Windows NT was insecure, buggy, and uncool. They preferred using various flavors of Unix-like operating systems, including Solaris and the open-source Linux.
One night well after midnight, Levchin was working alone in a conference room when Musk walked in primed to continue the argument. “Eventually you will see it my way,” Musk said. “I know how this movie ends.”
“No, you’re wrong,” Levchin replied in his flat monotone. “It just isn’t going to work in Microsoft.”
“You know what,” said Musk. “I will arm-wrestle you for it.”
Levchin thought, correctly, that this was the stupidest imaginable way to settle a software-coding disagreement. Plus, Musk was almost twice his size. But he was loopy from working late hours and agreed to arm-wrestle. He put all his weight into it and promptly lost. “Just to be clear,” Levchin told him, “I’m not going to use your physical weight as any sort of a technical decision input.”
Musk laughed and said, “Yeah, I get it.” But he prevailed.
[Musk told me, even before he took control of Twitter, that he planned to rebrand it https://t.co/92gi3zsHin and to try to make it a platform that would fulfill his original vision from 1999. A passage from later in the book:]
In the days leading up to his takeover of Twitter at the end of October 2022, Musk’s moods fluctuated wildly. “I am very excited about finally implementing https://t.co/92gi3zsHin as it should have been done, using Twitter as an accelerant!” he texted me out of the blue at 3:30 one morning. “And, hopefully, helping democracy and civil discourse while doing so.” He said that he would turn it into the combination of financial platform and social network he had envisioned twenty-four years earlier for https://t.co/92gi3zsHin, and he added that he planned to rebrand it with that name, which he loved. A few days later, he was more somber. “I will need to live at Twitter HQ. This is a super tough situation. Really bumming me out :( Sleep is difficult.”
Here is Musk with Peter Thiel and the https://t.co/92gi3zsHin card in 1999, and celebrating with Pappy van Winkle, @pappyvanwinkle , the world's best Bourbon, on the day he bought Twitter:
![WalterIsaacson's tweet photo. The infatuation of @elonmusk with the name https://t.co/92gi3zsHin goes way back. Here are some excerpts from my upcoming book, https://t.co/JaeIDTq8FO
"When his cousin Peter Rive visited in early 1999, he found Musk poring over books about the banking system. “I’m trying to think about what to start next,” he explained. His experience at Scotiabank had convinced him that the industry was ripe for disruption. So in March 1999, he founded https://t.co/92gi3zsHin.
His concept for https://t.co/92gi3zsHin was grand. It would be a one-stop everything-store for all financial needs: banking, digital purchases, checking, credit cards, investments, and loans. Transactions would be handled instantly, with no waiting for payments to clear. His insight was that money is simply an entry into a database, and he wanted to devise a way that all transactions were securely recorded in real time. “If you fix all the reasons why a consumer would take money out of the system,” he says, “then it will be the place where all the money is, and that would make it a multitrillion-dollar company.”
Musk was able to entice the influential head of Sequoia Capital, Michael Moritz, to make a major investment in https://t.co/92gi3zsHin. Moritz then facilitated a deal with Barclay’s Bank and a community bank in Colorado to become partners, so that https://t.co/92gi3zsHin could offer mutual funds, have a bank charter, and be FDIC-insured.
One of Musk’s management tactics, then as later, was to set an insane deadline and drive colleagues to meet it. He did that in the fall of 1999 by announcing, in what one engineer called “a dick move,” that https://t.co/92gi3zsHin would launch to the public on Thanksgiving weekend. In the weeks leading up to that, Musk prowled the office each day, including Thanksgiving, in a nervous and nervous-making frenzy, and slept under his desk most nights. One of the engineers who went home at 2 a.m. Thanksgiving morning got a call from Musk at 11 a.m. asking him to come back in because another engineer had worked all night and was “not running on full thrusters anymore.” Such behavior produced drama and resentments, but also success. When the product went live that weekend, all the employees marched to a nearby ATM, where Musk inserted an https://t.co/92gi3zsHin debit card. Cash whirred out and the team celebrated.
One driver of growth was a feature that they originally thought was no big deal: the ability to send money by email. That became wildly popular, especially on the auction site eBay, where users were looking for an easy way to pay strangers for purchases.
[After a merger, with a company cofounded by Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, the company became known as PayPal.] "Musk insisted that the company’s name should be https://t.co/92gi3zsHin, with PayPal as merely one of its subsidiary brands. He even tried to rebrand the payment system X-PayPal. There was a lot of pushback, especially from Levchin. PayPal had become a trusted brand name, like a good pal who is helping you get paid. Focus groups showed that the name https://t.co/92gi3zsHin, on the contrary, conjured up visions of a seedy site you would not talk about in polite company. But Musk was unwavering, and remains so to this day. “If you want to just be a niche payment system, PayPal is better,” he said. “But if you want to take over the world’s financial system, then X is the better name.”
Levchin and Musk soon clashed on an issue that sounded technical but was also theological: whether to use Microsoft Windows or Unix as the main operating system. Musk admired Bill Gates, loved Windows NT, and thought Microsoft would be a more reliable partner. Levchin and his team were appalled, feeling that Windows NT was insecure, buggy, and uncool. They preferred using various flavors of Unix-like operating systems, including Solaris and the open-source Linux.
One night well after midnight, Levchin was working alone in a conference room when Musk walked in primed to continue the argument. “Eventually you will see it my way,” Musk said. “I know how this movie ends.”
“No, you’re wrong,” Levchin replied in his flat monotone. “It just isn’t going to work in Microsoft.”
“You know what,” said Musk. “I will arm-wrestle you for it.”
Levchin thought, correctly, that this was the stupidest imaginable way to settle a software-coding disagreement. Plus, Musk was almost twice his size. But he was loopy from working late hours and agreed to arm-wrestle. He put all his weight into it and promptly lost. “Just to be clear,” Levchin told him, “I’m not going to use your physical weight as any sort of a technical decision input.”
Musk laughed and said, “Yeah, I get it.” But he prevailed.
[Musk told me, even before he took control of Twitter, that he planned to rebrand it https://t.co/92gi3zsHin and to try to make it a platform that would fulfill his original vision from 1999. A passage from later in the book:]
In the days leading up to his takeover of Twitter at the end of October 2022, Musk’s moods fluctuated wildly. “I am very excited about finally implementing https://t.co/92gi3zsHin as it should have been done, using Twitter as an accelerant!” he texted me out of the blue at 3:30 one morning. “And, hopefully, helping democracy and civil discourse while doing so.” He said that he would turn it into the combination of financial platform and social network he had envisioned twenty-four years earlier for https://t.co/92gi3zsHin, and he added that he planned to rebrand it with that name, which he loved. A few days later, he was more somber. “I will need to live at Twitter HQ. This is a super tough situation. Really bumming me out :( Sleep is difficult.”
Here is Musk with Peter Thiel and the https://t.co/92gi3zsHin card in 1999, and celebrating with Pappy van Winkle, @pappyvanwinkle , the world's best Bourbon, on the day he bought Twitter:](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F1wDN2oWwAAZX_5.jpg)
Alongside @NextBigTeng and @gracejhma, I'm excited to share @BessemerVP's latest installation in our Scaling Series:
Scaling GTM from $25 to $50MM of ARR 📈
We share 8 lessons key to scaling GTM orgs in this dynamic period 👇
https://t.co/PpM7Ea5HlO
@bdeeter @LauraBehrensWu I actually like OneNote a lot. I’m also forced to use it, but it is quite good.
In the Centaur report, we were excited to highlight a @BessemerVP portfolio company announcing (!) Centaur status:
@LaunchDarkly 🚀, #34 on the @cloud100
LaunchDarkly achieved its $100M ARR milestone through a thoughtful combination of product excellence and market evangelism
1/ ‼️ Accompanying today's list launch, @JanelleTeng @AndrewSchmitt and I @BessemerVP are proud to present the 2022 @cloud100 Benchmark Report! ‼️
Here we dive into the data and trends that we can learn from the 100 best cloud companies in the world 🧵
https://t.co/q2kiqOXhSu
1/ 🚨 Alongside today’s launch of the 2022 @Cloud100, we just published our new Centaur Report! 🚨
In it, @theValuesVC @spdholakia @NextBigTeng @aschmitt111 @deakhaus & I @BessemerVP take a look at the special cloud companies that have hit $100M ARR 🧵
��️https://t.co/ZJPZJGGoHQ
A very interesting new way — a Centaur, or company with $100MM of ARR — to benchmark the size and quality of private companies.
1/ As the unicorn herd has grown to 1K+, @AdamRFisher and I @BessemerVP sought to identify a new milestone for cloud founders that cannot be gamed - one rooted in business fundamentals and divorced from market sentiment.
Introducing the "Centaur" : A $100 Million ARR business 🧵
1/ Today @ethankurz @aschmitt111 and I @BessemerVP Growth are excited to announce that we are leading the $110M Series C in @goteleport, the easiest, most secure way to access infrastructure 🎉
https://t.co/STUXECcjlB
🧵
Startup Growth Guide 📚The 4 key elements to go from $1 - $10M in ARR by @mcadonofrio @NextBigTeng
💻Product—strong resonance with your customer
📈GTM strategy—repeatable sales
💰Finance—growth endurance & capital efficiency
👨👨👧👧Team—functional experts
https://t.co/4MWHzFiWox
1/ Today @NextBigTeng @TheEthanDing and I @BessemerVP Growth are excited to present the Growth Investor's Early Stage Playbook -- "Scaling from $1 to $10 Million of ARR." 🧵
With insights on Product, GTM, Team, and Finance starting in the early stages.
https://t.co/DAZDOhe9kG
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