Steven Neubauer

CEO @adcubum *** formerly @comparis @NZZ @mckinsey ***

[Steven Neubauer @NeubauerSteven]

@benspringwater would love to try

[Steven Neubauer @NeubauerSteven]

@suekhim Mastering the times tables

[Steven Neubauer @NeubauerSteven]

this is spot on!

[Chris Hoffmann @STLChrisH]

Favorite excerpt from Brent Beshore's annual letter:

What CEOs Are and Aren’t

Most people think of a CEO as the person at the top. That’s true in the same way it’s true that the windshield is “at the front” of the car. Technically correct.

Also, misses the point. The windshield isn’t the engine. It isn’t the wheels. It doesn’t move anything. But it does determine what the driver can see, what they ignore, and what they slam into at 70 miles an hour.

When done well, the CEO job is an arbiter of truth. The CEO stands at the border between the outside world and the inside world, between company mythology and competitive reality. That sounds obvious, but it’s not.

I’d argue the norm is delusion, where organizations create realities disconnected from truth, complete with alternate headlines, villains, and heroes, all proclaimed with a shocking level of certainty.

So the CEO’s job starts with a basic question: What’s true?

Not what’s comforting. Not what’s politically convenient. Not what our dashboards can measure. What’s true?

And what should we do about it?

But deciding what to do and then doing it, requires a blend of rare attributes.

The CEO must be confident enough to pick a direction and humble enough to change it.

Optimistic enough to inspire and paranoid enough to prepare.

Warm enough to build trust and hard enough to make calls that disappoint people they like and care about.

We need to strip away the mystique.

In practice, the CEO allocates three things:

Attention: If you want to understand a CEO, ignore their strategy deck and read their calendar. Where attention goes, energy flows. Where energy flows, money follows. And where money follows, the organization slowly becomes something different, usually without anyone noticing until it’s obvious. This is why the CEO’s attention is so expensive. It’s why it’s so easy to waste. There are a thousand “important” meetings that are actually just elaborate ways to avoid the one meeting that matters. There are a thousand “urgent” problems that are actually just the company asking the CEO to temporarily soothe anxiety. A CEO’s attention is the company’s flashlight. Point it at the right things and companies transform. Point it at the wrong thing long enough and the wrong thing becomes the thing.

People: The CEO builds the team that builds the team. I’ve learned that a healthy company isn’t built by a heroic CEO. It’s built by a great team operating with clarity, trust, speed, and accountability. The CEO’s role is to create that environment, protect it, and, when necessary, make the painful personnel decisions that preserve it. This sounds straightforward until you live it. Then you realize you’re not moving boxes on an org chart. You’re messing with people’s dignity, livelihoods, and families. You’re also messing with the morale of everyone who stays. Every hire is a bet. Every promotion is a signal. Every tolerated behavior becomes a de facto policy. The CEO becomes, whether they like it or not, the embodiment of culture. It’s not what they say they value, but what they practically reward, punish, ignore, and allow.

Money: This is the CEO’s most difficult job because it’s often the one they’re least trained for, that seems the most glamorous, and is extremely impactful over time. Most CEOs come up through some form of excellence in sales, operations, engineering, or product. Then one day they wake up and realize the biggest decisions they make are capital allocation decisions: reinvest or distribute, grow or consolidate, buy or build, add headcount or automate, bet on the future or play it conservative. Capital allocation is where strategy stops being a noun and becomes a verb. It is where vision gets an audit. And it’s also where a CEO can quietly ruin a business while looking busy.

It’s remarkably easy to confuse action with progress, and reinvestment with wisdom.

Oftentimes the best capital allocation decision is painfully boring: Do fewer things, do them better, and keep your powder dry. But, that’s not what gets applause.

In our world, with long-term owners, permanent capital, and no forced exit timetable, this is where the CEO job gets simpler. We don’t need theater. We don’t need growth for growth’s sake. We don’t need to hit a narrative for the next fundraising cycle or quarterly call. We can play offense when the opportunity is real and defense when it isn’t. We can say “not now” without pretending it’s “never.”

This brings me to what might be the most misunderstood part of the CEO role: The CEO is the Chief “No” Officer. Every yes is a no to something else. Every strategy is a pile of exclusions. Every commitment is a tradeoff.

The organization will always ask for more: more initiatives, more products, more meetings, more hires, more exceptions, more complexity.

Increasing complexity is the default setting of life, and companies are not exempt from natural order. A CEO has to become comfortable being the person who disappoints people in the short term so the company doesn’t disappoint everyone in the long term.

This is where I’ve personally struggled, both as a leader and as an owner. I want to be helpful, agreeable, and liked. I can easily slip into short-term people pleasing at the expense of leading well. Sometimes I’ve confused my progress anxiety for insight. I’ve wandered into decisions too early because “someone should do something.”

I’ve also learned slowly and painfully that a CEO can add enormous value simply by refusing to add noise. Clarity is kindness, but often feels like inaction to busy people. A lot of CEO work is invisible. It’s pressure management. It’s absorbing emotion without spreading it. It’s knowing what you think and how to say it with grace. It’s carrying the weight of uncertain outcomes while still asking the team to move forward decisively.

This is why, in our portfolio, we care less about a CEO’s charisma and more about their character and judgment. We’ve found that the best CEOs have a rare combination of humility and intensity. They don’t need to be the smartest person in the room, but they do need to be the clearest. They don’t need to have all the answers, but they do need to be willing to make the hard call.

[Chris Hoffmann @STLChrisH]

Favorite excerpt from Brent Beshore's annual letter:

What CEOs Are and Aren’t

Most people think of a CEO as the person at the top. That’s true in the same way it’s true that the windshield is “at the front” of the car. Technically correct.

Also, misses the point. The windshield isn’t the engine. It isn’t the wheels. It doesn’t move anything. But it does determine what the driver can see, what they ignore, and what they slam into at 70 miles an hour.

When done well, the CEO job is an arbiter of truth. The CEO stands at the border between the outside world and the inside world, between company mythology and competitive reality. That sounds obvious, but it’s not.

I’d argue the norm is delusion, where organizations create realities disconnected from truth, complete with alternate headlines, villains, and heroes, all proclaimed with a shocking level of certainty.

So the CEO’s job starts with a basic question: What’s true?

Not what’s comforting. Not what’s politically convenient. Not what our dashboards can measure. What’s true?

And what should we do about it?

But deciding what to do and then doing it, requires a blend of rare attributes.

The CEO must be confident enough to pick a direction and humble enough to change it.

Optimistic enough to inspire and paranoid enough to prepare.

Warm enough to build trust and hard enough to make calls that disappoint people they like and care about.

We need to strip away the mystique.

In practice, the CEO allocates three things:

Attention: If you want to understand a CEO, ignore their strategy deck and read their calendar. Where attention goes, energy flows. Where energy flows, money follows. And where money follows, the organization slowly becomes something different, usually without anyone noticing until it’s obvious. This is why the CEO’s attention is so expensive. It’s why it’s so easy to waste. There are a thousand “important” meetings that are actually just elaborate ways to avoid the one meeting that matters. There are a thousand “urgent” problems that are actually just the company asking the CEO to temporarily soothe anxiety. A CEO’s attention is the company’s flashlight. Point it at the right things and companies transform. Point it at the wrong thing long enough and the wrong thing becomes the thing.

People: The CEO builds the team that builds the team. I’ve learned that a healthy company isn’t built by a heroic CEO. It’s built by a great team operating with clarity, trust, speed, and accountability. The CEO’s role is to create that environment, protect it, and, when necessary, make the painful personnel decisions that preserve it. This sounds straightforward until you live it. Then you realize you’re not moving boxes on an org chart. You’re messing with people’s dignity, livelihoods, and families. You’re also messing with the morale of everyone who stays. Every hire is a bet. Every promotion is a signal. Every tolerated behavior becomes a de facto policy. The CEO becomes, whether they like it or not, the embodiment of culture. It’s not what they say they value, but what they practically reward, punish, ignore, and allow.

Money: This is the CEO’s most difficult job because it’s often the one they’re least trained for, that seems the most glamorous, and is extremely impactful over time. Most CEOs come up through some form of excellence in sales, operations, engineering, or product. Then one day they wake up and realize the biggest decisions they make are capital allocation decisions: reinvest or distribute, grow or consolidate, buy or build, add headcount or automate, bet on the future or play it conservative. Capital allocation is where strategy stops being a noun and becomes a verb. It is where vision gets an audit. And it’s also where a CEO can quietly ruin a business while looking busy.

It’s remarkably easy to confuse action with progress, and reinvestment with wisdom.

Oftentimes the best capital allocation decision is painfully boring: Do fewer things, do them better, and keep your powder dry. But, that’s not what gets applause.

In our world, with long-term owners, permanent capital, and no forced exit timetable, this is where the CEO job gets simpler. We don’t need theater. We don’t need growth for growth’s sake. We don’t need to hit a narrative for the next fundraising cycle or quarterly call. We can play offense when the opportunity is real and defense when it isn’t. We can say “not now” without pretending it’s “never.”

This brings me to what might be the most misunderstood part of the CEO role: The CEO is the Chief “No” Officer. Every yes is a no to something else. Every strategy is a pile of exclusions. Every commitment is a tradeoff.

The organization will always ask for more: more initiatives, more products, more meetings, more hires, more exceptions, more complexity.

Increasing complexity is the default setting of life, and companies are not exempt from natural order. A CEO has to become comfortable being the person who disappoints people in the short term so the company doesn’t disappoint everyone in the long term.

This is where I’ve personally struggled, both as a leader and as an owner. I want to be helpful, agreeable, and liked. I can easily slip into short-term people pleasing at the expense of leading well. Sometimes I’ve confused my progress anxiety for insight. I’ve wandered into decisions too early because “someone should do something.”

I’ve also learned slowly and painfully that a CEO can add enormous value simply by refusing to add noise. Clarity is kindness, but often feels like inaction to busy people. A lot of CEO work is invisible. It’s pressure management. It’s absorbing emotion without spreading it. It’s knowing what you think and how to say it with grace. It’s carrying the weight of uncertain outcomes while still asking the team to move forward decisively.

This is why, in our portfolio, we care less about a CEO’s charisma and more about their character and judgment. We’ve found that the best CEOs have a rare combination of humility and intensity. They don’t need to be the smartest person in the room, but they do need to be the clearest. They don’t need to have all the answers, but they do need to be willing to make the hard call.

[Steven Neubauer @NeubauerSteven]

@NanoBanana create an image of 46°49'54.7"N 9°17'33.8"E at sunrise

[Steven Neubauer @NeubauerSteven]

@turing_hamster Yes 🙏

[Steven Neubauer @NeubauerSteven]

@MitchForest Would love to test this 🙏

[Steven Neubauer @NeubauerSteven]

@benspringwater @matter Would love to test

[Steven Neubauer @NeubauerSteven]

@alexkehr Feature: anything to properly measure strength training and recovery. Based only on heart rate not very accurate in apple health today.

[Steven Neubauer @NeubauerSteven]

@alexkehr Feature: option to put in one’s measured max heart rate as an input variable to calculate VO2max. Apple health uses a simplified formula 220-age which underestimates VO2max especially for older age groups.

[Steven Neubauer @NeubauerSteven]

@tylercowen @AskPerplexity explain

[Steven Neubauer @NeubauerSteven]

Fully aligned with @tylercowen's perspective on AI here: "amazing in the long run, will take a long time, though."

Excellent interview by @dwarkesh_sp

https://t.co/L7V2IZS0aC

[Steven Neubauer @NeubauerSteven]

@bensmithlive @levelsio @threadreaderapp unroll please

[Steven Neubauer @NeubauerSteven]

.@vonderleyen now how about you show some bias to action and you kill the useless cookie prompt until end of 2024. Relatively easy to enact, but wide reaching signal that the EU has learnt something from this report. Does not require any investment.

Cc @levelsio

[Bojan Tunguz @tunguz]

“We are killing our companies.”

💯

[Patrick Collison @patrickc]

Mario Draghi's new report on EU competitiveness doesn't mince words.

"Across different metrics, a wide gap in GDP has opened up between the EU and the US, driven mainly by a more pronounced slowdown in productivity growth in Europe. Europe’s households have paid the price in foregone living standards. On a per capita basis, real disposable income has grown almost twice as much in the US as in the EU since 2000."

"First – and most importantly – Europe must profoundly refocus its collective efforts on closing the innovation gap with the US and China, especially in advanced technologies. Europe is stuck in a static industrial structure with few new companies rising up to disrupt existing industries or develop new growth engines. In fact, there is no EU company with a market capitalisation over EUR 100 billion that has been set up from scratch in the last fifty years, while all six US companies with a valuation above EUR 1 trillion have been created in this period. This lack of dynamism is self-fulfilling."

"There are not enough academic institutions achieving top levels of excellence and the pipeline from innovation into commercialisation is weak. [...] However, while the EU boasts a strong university system on average, not enough universities and research institutions are at the top. Using volume of publications in top academic science journals as an indicative metric, the EU has only three research institutions ranked among the top 50 globally, whereas the US has 21 and China 15."

"Regulatory barriers to scaling up are particularly onerous in the tech sector, especially for young companies. Regulatory barriers constrain growth in several ways. First, complex and costly procedures across fragmented national systems discourage inventors from filing Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs), hindering young companies from leveraging the Single Market. Second, the EU’s regulatory stance towards tech companies hampers innovation: the EU now has around 100 tech-focused laws and over 270 regulators active in digital networks across all Member States. Many EU laws take a precautionary approach, dictating specific business practices ex ante to avert potential risks ex post. For example, the AI Act imposes additional regulatory requirements on general purpose AI models that exceed a pre-defined threshold of computational power – a threshold which some state-of-the-art models already exceed. Third, digital companies are deterred from doing business across the EU via subsidiaries, as they face heterogeneous requirements, a proliferation of regulatory agencies and “gold plating” of EU legislation by national authorities. Fourth, limitations on data storing and processing create high compliance costs and hinder the creation of large, integrated data sets for training AI models. This fragmentation puts EU companies at a disadvantage relative to the US, which relies on the private sector to build vast data sets, and China, which can leverage its central institutions for data aggregation. This problem is compounded by EU competition enforcement possibly inhibiting intra-industry cooperation. Finally, multiple different national rules in public procurement generate high ongoing costs for cloud providers. The net effect of this burden of regulation is that only larger companies – which are often non-EU based – have the financial capacity and incentive to bear the costs of complying. Young innovative tech companies may choose not to operate in the EU at all."

More: https://t.co/x1d1ApvG2Z.

[Steven Neubauer @NeubauerSteven]

@shreyas @UnrollHelper

[Steven Neubauer @NeubauerSteven]

@sarthakgh @sriramk @bgurley @matter

[Steven Neubauer @NeubauerSteven]

@sriramk @bgurley Send YouTube or podcast link to @matter, let it transcribe, extract as PDF and import to Claude

[Tim Urban @waitbutwhy]

New year, new you

[Steven Neubauer @NeubauerSteven]

Not a big fan of his energy nor economic policy but I stand behind these words. Well said.

[Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Energie @BMWE_]

It's almost four weeks since the horrific terrorist attack on #Israel. A lot has happened, the public debate has become heated and confused. Find thoughts from Vice-Chancellor Robert #Habeck in the video, putting the events in context. 📣With English, Hebrew and Arabic subtitles.