Burckhardt Bonello

Serial Entrepreneur fighting efficient sustainable carbon free construction & buildings

[Anatoli Kopadze @AnatoliKopadze]

https://t.co/fyBGWQbsvn

[Anatoli Kopadze @AnatoliKopadze]

https://t.co/xHKvUDKhG2

[AilaunchX @Ai_Tech_tool]

Instead of watching an hour of Netflix, watch this 2 hour hour Stanford lecture will teach you more about how LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude are built than most people working at top AI companies learn in their entire careers.

[Michael Truell @mntruell]

https://t.co/jZKOk8RAsV

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

“You escape competition through authenticity.”

— Naval Ravikant

[Vala Afshar @ValaAfshar]

Nvidia CEO: There are a lot of things in life that I think you can learn and you just have to be given the opportunity to learn it. Do not give up on people.

Demanding excellence from others is easy work. Developing excellence in others is hard work.

[Naval @naval]

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.”

[Startup Archive @StartupArchive_]

Jack Dorsey on what he learned about culture from 49ers coach Bill Walsh

When Bill Walsh joined the 49ers, they were the worst team in the NFL. Within three years, they were Super Bowl Champions.

In his book, The Score Takes Care of Itself, he writes:

“Winners act like winners before they’re winners…The culture precedes positive results. It doesn’t get tacked on as an afterthought on your way to the victory stand. Champions behave like champions before they’re champions; they have a winning standard of performance before their winners.”

And he provides six guidelines for establishing a standard of performance:

1. Start with a comprehensive recognition of reverence for and identification of the specific actions and attitudes relevant to your team’s performance and production.

2. Be clarion clear in communicating your expectation of high effort and execution of your Standard of Performance. Like water, many decent individuals will seek lower ground if left to their own inclinations. In most cases you are the one who inspires and demands they go upward rather than settle for the comfort of doing what comes easily. Push them beyond their comfort zone; expect them to give extra effort.

3. Let all know that you expect them to possess the highest level of expertise in their area of responsibility.

4. Beyond standards and methodology, teach your beliefs, values, and philosophy. An organism is not an inanimate object. It is a living organism that you must nurture, guide, and strengthen.

5. Teach “connection and extension.” An organization filled with individuals who are “independent contractors” unattached to one another is a team with little interior cohesion and strength.

6. Make the expectations and metrics of competence that you demand in action and attitudes from personnel the new reality of your organization. You must provide the model for that new standard in your own actions and attitude.

Twitter and Square founder Jack Dorsey encourages anyone thinking about leading teams or building a company to read this book:

“What’s important about this is that as you start building a team, you need to set expectations around how people need to perform in the company—how people need to act in the company. And these can be very simple things, but without that, you are rutterless—you will react to the outside. And if you react to the outside, you are building someone else’s roadmap and you’re building someone else’s dream instead of your own.”

Video source: @ycombinator (2013)

[Leaders 𝕏 Junction @LeadersJunction]

Use this to instantly eliminate fear‼️‼️

[Riley Brown @rileybrown]

CLAUDE IS SO MUCH BETTER WHEN YOU USE MCP

Both Claude Sonnet and Opus are Insanely smart Agents.

But they can't read your mind.

You need to Give it Context...
(MCP = model CONTEXT protocol)

Here is an example...

Then a tutorial on how to give Claude access to MCP tools without writing a single line of code or copying any "JSON".

TIME STAMPS:
00:00 - Introduction
01:00 - First Example with @notionhq
- Searching, Research, Scripting
02:53 - Generating 5 YouTube Thumbnails @heyglif
- Adding Auto Comments to Notion
04:52 - Claude Project System Prompt
- (Will make follow up video)
05:13 - How to set up these MCP's

[Gaurab Chakrabarti @Gaurab]

One photo shocked the entire aerospace industry:

SpaceX's new Raptor engine looked too simple to work.

Their biggest competitor thought it was fake - now they're scrambling to catch up.

Here's how Elon's Algorithm changed manufacturing forever:

[Startup Archive @StartupArchive_]

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang: “I really discourage 1-on-1s”

Jensen famously has 60 direct reports. When Stripe founder Patrick Collison points out that this isn’t conventionally considered best practice, Jensen shares his reasoning:

“I don’t do 1-on-1s, and almost everything I say, I say to everybody all the time. I don’t really believe there’s any information that I operate on that only one or two people should hear about… I believe that when you give everybody equal access to information, that empowers people. And so that’s number one… Number two, if the CEO’s direct staff is 60 people, the number of layers you’ve removed in a company is probably something like seven.”

Patrick offers to steal man the other side of the argument:

“1-on-1s are where you provide coaching, where you maybe talk through personal goals and career advancement, where maybe you give feedback on something that you see somebody systematically not doing so well… Do you not do those things or do you do them in a different way?”

Jensen responds:

“I give you feedback right there in front of everybody. In fact, this is a really big deal. First of all, feedback is learning. For what reason are you the only person who should learn this?… We should all learn from that opportunity… Half the time I’m not right, but for me to reason through it in front of everybody helps everybody learn how to reason through it. The problem I have with 1-on-1s and taking feedback aside is you deprive a whole bunch of people that same learning. Learning from other people’s mistakes is the best way to learn.”

Video Source: @stripe

[Reid Hoffman @reidhoffman]

With AI, "we did 1,000,000,000 years of PHD time in one year."

Nobel Prize Winner and @GoogleDeepMind CEO @demishassabis on AlphaFold, the groundbreaking AI system developed to solve one of biology’s most complex problems: protein folding.

[Startup Archive @StartupArchive_]

Facebook VP of Growth Alex Schultz: “Startups should not have growth teams”

It’s easy to forget that Facebook didn’t create their growth team until 2007, when they already had tens of millions of users.

Alex points out a common mistake startups often make:

“Startups should not have growth teams. The whole company should be the growth team. The CEO should be the head of growth. You need someone to set a north star for you about where the company wants to go and that person needs to be the person leading the company, from what I’ve seen.”

At Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg selected monthly active users as the north star metric he made the world hold the company accountable to. At WhatsApp, Jan Koum published daily sends. Airbnb chose nights booked and benchmarked themselves against the largest hotel chains in the world.

Alex continues:

“When you’re operating for growth, it is critical that you have that north star and define it as a leader. The reason this matters is the second you have more than one person working on anything, you cannot control what everyone is doing… And the thing is, it’s not clear to everybody what the most important thing is for a company.”

For example, Jan could’ve chosen monthly active users for the North Star metric of WhatsApp, but if a person uses it once a month, is WhatsApp really their primary messaging app?

Picking a north star metric and holding the entire company accountable to it helps ensure that when an engineer and designer go to build that new feature, they’re optimizing for the right thing.

But if you’re the CEO, don’t get too caught on picking the perfect north star metric. Alex explains:

“They’re probably all correlated to each other, so it’s fine to pick almost any metric. Whichever one you feel best about, that aligns with your mission and values, go for that one. But realistically, DAUs is fairly correlated to MAUs. We could have gone with either one…. Pick the one that fits with you and that you know you’re going to be able to stick with for a long time. But have a north star.”

Video source: @ycombinator (2014)

[Startup Archive @StartupArchive_]

Naval Ravikant’s advice for raising venture capital: “It is an emotional sale, not a rational sale”

“The process of raising money from an investor, a friend of mine once joked, is the process of young men and women seducing old men and women. You’re essentially trying to get them to look at you, and to see themselves in you… And so it is an emotional sale. It is not a rational sale. And you have to understand that at its core level.”

And as Naval explains, emotional sales do not happen via checklists. For example, it’s rare to fall in love with someone because they check a bunch of boxes (e.g. pretty good looking, pretty nice, pretty smart, etc.).

“Usually there is one thing about the person that is so overwhelming that makes you fall in love with them. And in that same way, when an investor is deciding to make an investment in a startup, they usually look for one exceptional characteristic about the startup that they truly adore.”

Naval believes there are four categories in which you can really excel:

1. Team. “If you can show that you have done something exceptional, other than starting this company, that’s a huge thing.”

2. Product. “A lot of entrepreneurs make the mistake of showing investors a half-finished or not-working product and then try and explain their way around it. The reality is investors are users also, so they’re highly visual. They want to see it. They want to play with it. And they’ll make up their mind very quickly.”

3.Customer traction. “If you have users and if those users are organically joining and growing, that’s very good. If you have to say: give us money and then I’ll go get customers, they don’t like to hear that.”

4. Social proof. “Social proof is basically looking at what other people are doing and doing that. So in the investing context, what this means is if you have one investor committed, very often you can get more investors interested. Or if you have a famous entrepreneur or advisor who’s very knowledgeable, involved with with the company, that can help bring investors.”

Naval concludes:

“So those are the four criteria that I think most investors look at, and you really want to be exceptional at at least one of them.

[Startup Archive @StartupArchive_]

DoorDash founder Tony Xu: "You can't compete against an incumbent on their territory”

Tony argues:

“You have to find something where they're not incentivized to do it (Innovator's dilemma)… and you have to find an area where you think you can be advantaged.”

For DoorDash, this was end-to-end delivery and focusing on suburbs rather than cities. The incumbents at the time didn’t want to touch end-to-end delivery because it was lower margin. Incumbents also focused on cities because of the network density, but DoorDash realized the market outside of city centers was actually the bigger opportunity because that’s where most people lived.

“Knowing where the market is and knowing structurally why that's different and why that might be difficult for a competitor to serve, that's pretty important. Now, you also have to be correct on that bet… [Our bet on serving suburbs] turned out to be correct. But we didn't know that a priori.”

Tony’s other piece of advice is that you have to be “super fast”. A key advantage versus incumbents is that they have to make capital allocation decisions across their many businesses. But you probably only have one product so you should be able to move much faster:

“Focus is actually really easy… You’ve got to build that one product”

Video source: @khoslaventures (2024)

[Startup Archive @StartupArchive_]

Jeff Bezos explains Amazon’s process for expanding into new products like Kindle and AWS

“I would definitely advise a small startup company to be as narrow and as focused as is possible to be. If you look at the original Amazon business plan, there was no hint of anything other than books in it… I wanted to build an online bookstore, and that was it.”

But the online bookstore worked better than they thought it would. So Amazon launched music, and that worked better than they thought. Then video, and that worked too. So Jeff sent an email to customers:

“I picked about 1,000 customers and I said, besides the things we sell today - books, music, and video - what would you like to see us sell? And the list came back incredibly long-tailed… So it’s been kind of one foot in front of the other.”

As Jeff explains, Amazon expands into new businesses in two ways:

“One is from a customer need. We will work from a customer need to the skills that we need. And the other one is skills forward: from a skillset we have to a new set of customers.”

Kindle is an example of a customer need - Amazon had no hardware team at the time, but to make sure they didn’t miss the transition to ebooks, they built one.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is an example of skills-forward:

“We had probably more distributed computing expertise than anybody else in the world because of transactions. Transaction systems are so complicated and hard to build, and we had a service-oriented architecture of great complexity - probably before anybody else. Because we were doing that, we could see the future a little bit and decided to build AWS, which has turned into a huge business in its own right.”

Jeff concludes:

“Business is very situational. Rules of thumb are good, but they have to be applied to the right situation. Sometimes the old maxim that you should stick to the knitting is correct, but sometimes it’s wrong. And a senior leader’s job is to figure out: Which situation are you in?”

Video source: @BusinessInsider (2014)

[Startup Archive @StartupArchive_]

a16z co-founder Ben Horowitz: “Don’t follow your passion”

Ben gives this advice to the Columbia University class of 2015:

“Don’t follow your passion. Now I know you’re probably thinking: ‘That’s a really dumb idea because if you poll 1,000 people who are successful, they’ll all say they love what they do. And so the broad conclusion of the world is that if you do what you love, then you’ll be successful.’ But we’re engineers, so we know that might be true. It also might be the case that if you’re successful, you love what you do — you just love being successful, everybody loves you, it’s awesome. So which one is it?”

He continues:

“The first tricky thing about passions is they’re hard to prioritize. Are you more passionate about math or engineering? Are you more passionate about history or literature? Are you more passionate about video games or K-pop? These are tough decisions. How do you even know? On the other hand, what are you good at? Are you better at math or writing? That’s a much easier thing to figure out.

The second thing that’s tricky if you’re going forward in time with this ‘follow your passion’ idea is that what you’re passionate about at 21 is not necessarily what you’re going to be passionate about at 40. Now this is true for boyfriends, as well as career choices.

The third issue with following your passion is that you’re not necessarily good at your passion. Has anybody ever watched American Idol? So you know what I’m talking about. Just because you love singing doesn’t mean you should be a professional singer.

And then finally, and most importantly, following your passion is a very ‘me-centered’ view of the world. And when you go through life, what you’ll find is that what you take out of the world — money, cars, stuff, accolades — is much less important than what you put into the world. And so my recommendation would be to follow your contribution. Find the thing that you’re great at, put that into the world, contribute to others, help the world be better. That is the thing to follow.”

Video source: @a16z (2015)

[Mindset Machine  @mindsetmachine]

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