baani

investor by day / philosopher by night

[Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan]

My biggest takeaways from @bhalligan:

1. “When you have to eat a shit sandwich, don’t nibble.” Borrowed from Ruth Porat. The temptation during layoffs is to do a small one and grow into it, and then do another six months later. Just rip the bandaid off.

2. “If you want to kill a plant, have two people water it.” Have a DRI (directly responsible individual) for every problem you want solved. When you’re small, everyone’s in the room and aligned. At scale, no one knows what’s happening across org boundaries. Committees produce the same result as two people watering a plant: it either drowns or dies of neglect.

3. Never waste a good crisis. The best improvements at HubSpot came after major problems forced them to rethink processes. After a devastating outage in 2019, they completely overhauled their deployment approach, resulting in much higher quality and reliability going forward.

4. Hire the spicy candidate, not the safe consensus pick. HubSpot used to run eight-person panels. When half scored a candidate 4/4 and half scored 2/4, they’d pick the boring all-3s candidate instead. They flipped this—started choosing the polarizing people with real weaknesses—and their hit rate improved. They also shrunk panels from eight interviewers to four.

5. The biggest skill gap in young CEOs is being able to give hard feedback. Many Sequoia founders Brian coaches are in their late 20s, have never managed anyone, and now need to layer early employees or transition co-founders into different roles. These conversations are deeply unnatural. Brian’s solution: peer groups of about 15 CEOs at the same stage. Misery loves company, and they learn faster from each other than from a coach.

6. Build your team like the 2004 Red Sox—a mix of homegrown talent and strategic outside hires. Companies consistently underrate their internal talent and overrate fancy resumes from big companies. If it’s a close call between promoting internally or hiring externally, give your homegrown talent the chance.

7. Brian’s LOCKS framework for evaluating founders: Lovable (do people really, really want to work for them?), Obsessed (deeply passionate about the problem), Chip on their shoulder (almost all great CEOs have this), Knowledgeable (about their domain), and a Student (constantly learning, like an LLM).

8. AI will transform go-to-market, but not how you might think. Enterprise sales is the last white-collar job AI will replace—but the top of the funnel is about to flip. Buyers will start in ChatGPT or Claude instead of Google, making your website less important. Brian predicts every site will have an AI avatar on the homepage handling the first conversation, scored in your CRM, and then handed to a human rep who brings their own AI sales engineer to every call.

9. Starting a company has never been easier. Scaling one has never been harder. AI make building trivial, so the number of companies is mushrooming. But that means unprecedented competition and noise. The bottleneck becomes distribution. Technical founders can build but rarely know how to distribute. Brian says the fastest learners will win. And distribution is about to shift—getting found in ChatGPT and Gemini will matter as much as getting found in Google.

10. HubSpot was #1 on Glassdoor, which Brian now thinks was the wrong goal. Their employee NPS was 60; customer NPS was 25. They were spending half their management meetings on employee issues. Brian shifted the center of gravity: customer panels at every management and board meeting, and comp plans tied to retention and customer NPS instead of revenue. His takeaway: wanting to be liked isn’t a good feature of a CEO.

[baani @baaniv1]

@bryan_johnson is that a cappucino

[Gregory Kennedy @gregorykennedy]

Dave: "Masa Son, welcome to the show. What's going on?"

Masa: "Dave, I sold my entire NVIDIA position."

Dave: "How much?"

Masa: "All 32.1 million shares. $5.8 billion."

Dave: "And why did you do that?"

Masa: "To go all-in on AI."

Dave: "You sold your NVIDIA stock... to invest in AI."

Masa: "Yes."

Dave: "NVIDIA makes the chips that run AI."

Masa: "Correct."

Dave: "So you sold the shovels to buy lottery tickets."

Masa: "I prefer to call them 'high-conviction bets.'"

Dave: "Got it. And this is your second time selling NVIDIA completely."

Masa: "That's right."

Dave: "In 2019, you sold $4 billion worth."

Masa: "Yes."

Dave: "Which would be worth $150 billion today."

Masa: "I'm aware."

Dave: "So you already missed out on $146 billion from the first sale."

Masa: "When you say it like that—"

Dave: "And now you're doing it again. To put $30 billion into OpenAI."

Masa: "And a $1 trillion AI manufacturing hub in Arizona."

Dave: "Right. Because WeWork worked out so well."

Masa: "That was a stain on my life, Dave."

Dave: "Cost you $11.5 billion in equity losses. Plus another $2.2 billion in debt."

Masa: "Adam and I fell in love."

Dave: "You fell in love with a guy who wanted to trademark the word 'We.'"

Masa: "He had vision."

Dave: "And before that, you lost $70 billion in the dot-com crash. The largest personal loss in history."

Masa: "But then I made it back with Alibaba."

Dave: "After a six-minute meeting."

Masa: "Jack Ma is very persuasive."

Dave: "So your entire investment strategy is falling in love during short meetings and then losing generational wealth."

Masa: "I believe in the singularity."

Dave: "Right. So just to recap: you've lost $70 billion, missed out on another $146 billion, burned $13.7 billion on WeWork, and now you're selling NVIDIA at what might be the worst possible time to bet it all on Sam Altman."

Masa: "Sometimes you have to push all your chips to the center of the table."

Dave: "You've done that four times and lost three of them."

Masa: "But that one Alibaba win though."

Dave: "Okay. Thanks for calling in."

[Noah Ryan @NoahRyanCo]

Wake up and immediately look at small screen before clocking 8 hours behind medium screen. Take a few breaks to check in on small screen. Go home and spend a few hours staring at big screen to wind down before getting into bed and looking at small screen.

Living the dream.

[Gaby Goldberg @gaby_goldberg]

Your first coffee's only purpose is to prepare you for the enjoyment of the second coffee

[baani @baaniv1]

'India's super-rich get to feel like monarchs only in India and in other poor countries.'

Compelling commentary on the curious case of the Camellias.

[Pratik Mantri @PratikMantri18]

@Vishthink @manujosephsan

[baani @baaniv1]

@ssaig ok thanks because the website says for every other city, no appointment is needed.

[baani @baaniv1]

@ssaig theres no way to walk in without an appointment?

[Bhavin Turakhia @bhavintu]

Meditation is the practice of consistently getting better at catching your brain in the act of thinking thoughts you did not ask it to think

[Kendall Pennington @Kenny___Rose]

one of my fave negs is telling people they seem like they have an mba lol

[Jetski Grizzly @Jetskigrizzly]

Men will literally develop a crippling addiction to adderall, zyn and diet coke just to send 6 emails and attend 2 zoom meetings

[𝓛𝓾𝓱𝓪𝓮𝓷𝓽𝓮𝓷 @luhaenten]

Look at you. Born to write poems, forced to write emails, doomed to write tweets. It's despicable.

[Dr. Parik Patel, BA, CFA, ACCA Esq. @ParikPatelCFA]

Call me adjusted ebitda because I can be whatever you want me to be ❤️

[EBITMA @ebitmom]

Cute that they invented “chief of staff” so boys could be secretaries too

[baani @baaniv1]

@hubermanlab for nsdr, is the idea to always do it with the tape/ audio on, or after a point just memorise the flow and do it in your head (which I assume will be more relaxing)

[baani @baaniv1]

There are more french patisseries than chai tapris in 🇮🇳 now.

[baani @baaniv1]

Looking forward to a fun evening of chai-fueled ideation with early stage founders. If you're not stuck in Bangalore traffic, join in.

[Jatin Chaudhary @jatin10]

The Bangalore edition of eChai Startup Demo Day is happening today (27th May, Saturday) at @dsh_india from 6 pm to 8 pm.

We'll also be joined by Baani Bareja (@on_india), @LakhwaniPawan (@dreamincubator1), Saptarishi Sen (Prath Ventures) and @aniketkamthe777 (@NexusVP) for the panel with investors and enablers.

Free registration @ https://t.co/iTHcPxS61N

[baani @baaniv1]

Indian parents on amazon be like

[Steph Smith @stephsmithio]

3000 BCE: Imagine a hot shower...
1000: Wouldn't a hot shower be nice
1200: Wouldn't a hot shower be nice
1400: Wouldn't a hot shower be nice
1600: Wouldn't a hot shower be nice
1800: Wouldn't a hot shower be nice
2000: Ah, nice hot showers for all 🚿
2020: How about a cold shower?!