Fede Femia

Nerd / Product Manager

[Jaynit @jaynitx]

Steve Jobs did not become a billionaire from Apple. He became one from a company he spent years trying to get rid of.

The company was Pixar.

In 1986, nine months after Apple forced him out, Jobs bought a small computer graphics division off George Lucas for ten million dollars. Five million to Lucas, five million in working capital. He renamed it Pixar and set out to sell high-end graphics computers.

The computers did not sell. The flagship machine cost a hundred and thirty five thousand dollars and found almost no buyers outside a few hospitals and government labs. The hardware business lost money, and Jobs eventually sold it off cheap.

What was left was a small group of animators making short films that won awards, including an Oscar, and earned almost nothing.

So Jobs paid for it himself. Year after year he covered Pixar's losses out of his own pocket, writing personal checks to keep the doors open. Over roughly nine years it came to an estimated fifty million dollars of his own money, poured into a company that lost money almost every single year.

He tried to get out. He shopped Pixar to Microsoft. To Paul Allen. To Hallmark. To Larry Ellison. He came within days of shutting the whole thing down.

He said it plainly later. "If I knew in 1986 how much it was going to cost to keep Pixar going, I doubt if I would have bought the company."

This is the man we now hold up as the great visionary, the one who could see what was coming. For nine years he could not tell whether the thing in his hands was worth anything, and most of the time he bet it wasn't.

In 1991, Disney agreed to fund and distribute a few of Pixar's films. The first one took four years to make.

It came out in November 1995. Toy Story. The first full-length computer-animated film ever made, and an enormous hit.

A week later, Pixar went public. Jobs had pushed the bankers to price the stock higher than they wanted. It opened at forty seven dollars a share, the largest public offering of the year. By the end of the first day, his stake was worth about one and a quarter billion dollars.

He owned roughly eighty percent of a company he had spent a decade trying to give away.

One of the men he'd tried to sell Pixar to was Larry Ellison. The night of the IPO, Jobs called him and said, "I made it."

Eleven years later Disney bought Pixar outright for seven and a half billion dollars, and Jobs became the largest single shareholder in Disney.

You can't tell your best decision from your worst while you're still paying for it. The bill comes first. The verdict comes years later, and it rarely matches what you believed while you were signing the checks.

[ain @ainponce]

che este mes empece a organizar eventos en @crecimientoar los días martes, que serian como los días Tech/AI.

si alguno quiere dar un workshop, charla o algún tipo de evento mándenme un DM y coordinamos.

📩

[Forbes @Forbes]

Quote of the day. #qotd

[Alfred Lin @Alfred_Lin]

This quote from Peter Thiel in 2014 has always resonated with me. Finite and infinite games aren’t only for business; they also apply to life generally.

“People always say they want to live every day as though it will be their last. I always have this contrasting view that I think I’d like to live every day as though it will go on forever. If we had an indefinite life span, we would continue to work and start great new projects, we would be very careful about how we treated the people around us because we would encounter them again.”

[Fede Femia @federfemia]

@arielmathov Éxitos

[Prompter @PromptLLM]

Incredible advice from Claude

[Fede Femia @federfemia]

@sachuaragon El sueño de todo pm

[Daniel A. Saedi (DataManDan) @TheRealDanSaedi]

The singular red dot is causing a massive compute shortage and you think memory stocks have topped?

[Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan]

Love this reminder from @tfadell

"Makers often focus on the shiny object—the product they’re building—and forget about the rest of the journey until they’re almost ready to deliver it to the customer. But customers see it all, experience it all. They’re the ones taking the journey, step-by-step."

[Shreyas Doshi @shreyas]

I’m a huge fan of High Agency. But 2 things I now understand about it:

1) Not everyone can develop High Agency—and High Agency people will find it hard to accept this

2) It has major professional upsides, but also creates chronic anxiety in life situations you can’t control

[Startup Archive @StartupArchive_]

LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman: Founders have no work-life balance

“I actually think founders have no balance… If I ever hear a founder talking about how ‘this is how I have a balanced life’ and so forth, they’re not committed to winning… The really great founders are like: ‘I am going to literally pour everything into doing this. Now it only may be for a couple of years… But while I’m doing this, I am unbalanced at this thing.’ It’s not to say that you don’t take breaks or you don’t go on dates or whatever else. But you’re super focused on this because it’s really hard and there’s lots of ways to die.”

Elon Musk emphasizes this as well:

“If other people are putting in 40-hour work weeks, and you’re putting in 80 hour work weeks, you will achieve in 6 months what takes them a year to achieve, which will greatly improve your odds of success”

Why make such extreme sacrifices?

Well, as Paul Graham puts it in his essay How To Make Wealth:

“Economically, you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole working life into a few years. Instead of working at a low intensity for forty years, you work as hard as you possibly can for four.”

In the early years, you will have to make lots of sacrifices and shouldn’t really expect much work-life balance if you want your startup to be successful.

But you can view it as an opportunity to compress your whole working life into a few years.

And hopefully excitement about what you’re building and the extremely-talented team you’re building it with make those long hours way more fun and rewarding than a normal 9-to-5 job.

Source: @ycombinator (Oct 2014)

[Fede Femia @federfemia]

@arielmathov @nicoproducto La recomiendan? Mañana tenemos call con ellos

[Christian Buteler @cbuteler]

Piccaso pintó el Guernica en 5 semanas.
Adorni lleva 8 y todavía no pudo terminar de dibujar su declaración jurada.-

[Shuga @shuga_vibes]

Desde que arranqué a trabajar en una empresa de ~2000 personas venía llevándome MUCHO estar al día en lo importante en Slack y Notion. Así que hice un grupo de agentes PMs que me ayudan bastante y acá les comparto el template plug and play para que lo hagan ustedes también 👇

[Fede Femia @federfemia]

@israelwegierski @nicoproducto @jorjerojas @AlvaroEchazu @nays1_ Hay fecha?

[Fede Femia @federfemia]

@nicoproducto @anabellag7_ Además que tenes acceso a todos sus datos de movimientos, consumos, etc porque podes medir donde navegan en su celu. Son datos que valen oro para scoring, ejemplo que celular tiene Apple o androide

[Fede Femia @federfemia]

@nicoproducto @anabellag7_ Personal Pay tiene acceso directo a venderle a todos los usuarios de Telecom y el el corto plazo Movistar. Es el 66% de los usuarios del país