Humberto Fereira

Abogado. Sapere Aude.

[Asdrúbal R. Oliveros @aroliveros]

Hay otro tema que ojalá pueda incorporarse a la negociación entre gobierno y oposición: el Banco Central de Venezuela. Sería una señal extraordinariamente poderosa que las partes pudieran acordar el nombramiento de una nueva junta directiva independiente, integrada por profesionales con credenciales técnicas y verdadera autonomía frente al Ejecutivo.
Recuperar la credibilidad de la política monetaria exige reconstruir la institucionalidad del BCV, fortalecer su autonomía, recuperar la calidad y oportunidad de las estadísticas económicas y establecer límites claros al financiamiento monetario del gasto público. No se trata simplemente de cambiar nombres. Se trata de recuperar una institución fundamental para cualquier programa serio de estabilización.

[Daniel @growing_daniel]

Starting a company is awesome if you want to feel like a piece of shit one day and king of the universe next day and just keep alternating back and forth forever and ever

[David Senra @FoundersPodcast]

Marc Andreessen on the entrepreneurial emotional roller coaster:

[José Miguel Farías @Jmfariasu]

Uno de los problemas más consistentes que veo en mis consultorías a empresas venezolanas no es externo, es interno: La adicción a la microgestión. Es alarmante ver líderes ahogados en decisiones operativas mientras las decisiones estratégicas esperan. Mientras la mayoría de empresarios se enorgullece de que 'todo pase por sus manos', los negocios que realmente escalan están obsesionados con construir equipos autónomos y procesos robustos. En un mercado donde el control se confunde con liderazgo y la delegación se ve como pérdida de poder, la capacidad de construir una organización que funcione sin depender de una sola persona se ha convertido en la ventaja competitiva más difícil de replicar. No es lo que el ego quiere escuchar, pero es lo que construye empresas sostenibles.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Precisely

[Walter Isaacson @WalterIsaacson]

This is the inside story of how Musk used Starlink to help Ukraine, then pulled back one tense Friday night, and how he finally resolved his role — including the secret encrypted messages with Ukrainian minister Federov and the deal he made with the US. https://t.co/gufgWtRUfH

[Codie Sanchez @Codie_Sanchez]

The greatest muscle you can build is urgency.

Decrease the time between having an idea and getting it done. Everything changes.

[unusual_whales @unusual_whales]

People who choose to work from home are actually less-productive when they do so, per BI.

[Asdrúbal R. Oliveros @aroliveros]

Una frase pertinente hoy:

“Solo hay una manera de guiar a un pueblo: mostrándole un porvenir. El líder es un mercader de esperanza".
Napoleón Bonaparte

[David Perell @david_perell]

How do you build a high-performing company?

Frank Slootman has answers. He’s led three companies to their IPOs: Data Domain, Service Now, and Snowflake. Slootman turned around these high-potential companies by implementing his “Amp It Up” philosophy.

Amp It Up has three pillars: increase the tempo, raise the standards, and narrow the focus.

— —

Point #1: Increase the Tempo

Without effective leadership, companies become sluggish as they grow. Malaise sets in. People become risk-averse. “I’ll do it right now” turns into “I’ll do it tomorrow,” which turns into “I’ll get it to you next week,” which turns into “Oops, I forgot about that.”

It’s a leader’s job to prevent stasis. You have to inject the organization with energy and intensity.

When people say they’ll get back to you in a week, ask them why not tomorrow or the next day? It doesn’t matter if your request is unreasonable. The point of the question is to increase people’s sense of urgency. When you change an organization’s tempo, people demand more from each other, which is the essence of a high-performing organization.

Increasing the tempo isn’t just about speed. It’s also about rejecting incrementalism.

People who work incrementally inch forward instead of taking bold leaps. They make timid decisions because they’re risk-averse. They work from a place of fear because screw-ups at most companies are so severely punished. But if you only aim for marginal improvements, you’ll only make marginal progress.

Incrementalism will kill your company, gradually sinking it into stasis and stagnation.

Avoiding risk is the riskiest strategy of all. Companies, like living organisms, need to constantly reinvent themselves.

Push people to achieve their goals way faster than they think is possible. The need for speed inspires innovation. Ask somebody to do something 20% faster, and they’ll use conventional strategies. Linear progress is the best you’ll get. But if you ask them to do something 2,000% faster, they’ll have to question all their base-level assumptions and innovate.

— —

Point #2: Raise the Standards

When people present projects to Slootman, he asks questions like: “Are you thrilled with this? Do you absolutely love it?” If people don’t respond with raging enthusiasm, he asks them to try again.

Most managers set a low bar with murky expectations. Slootman sets a high bar with clear standards of success and failure.

Slootman’s compensation philosophy reflected his performance culture. All of his employees have a compensation review at the end of every quarter. Bonuses are divided into a pool, depending on how well the company performs. His managers aren’t allowed to pass out an equal share. He insists on a bell-shaped distribution curve to reflect the delta between high and low performers. The problem is that, at most companies, the A-players are under-paid. To pay your top performers more, you have to pay low-performing ones less.

At most companies, employees can receive bonuses without earning them. Bonuses are paid so predictably that people effectively see them as base pay. This, Slootman says, is the sure sign of an “Entitlement Culture.”

Bonuses aren’t guaranteed because the company’s success isn’t either. Market forces are always shifting. Upstarts are trying to displace you. Competitors are gunning for your market share. If instability makes people uncomfortable, they belong at the California DMV, not at an Amp’d Up organization.

— —

Point #3: Narrow the Focus

You can’t increase the tempo and raise standards unless you also narrow the focus.

This principle is the most misunderstood. If you don’t take it seriously, you’ll think Slootman is telling you to work so hard that you become a slave, which isn’t the case.

Focus goes against our human nature. Most teams are scatter-brained. They refuse to commit and spread themselves thinly across too many priorities (many of which are ill-defined). Your job as a leader is to direct people to what’s ultimately important.

Narrow focus is also the result of clear thinking. It’s the leadership’s job to distill things down to their essentials. If leaders can’t communicate priorities at the top, how distorted will the thinking be for the rest of the team?

Left to their own devices, people will work on easy and sexy (but incremental) problems. You can’t let this happen. You have to keep people focused on the levers that move the business the most.

People resist focus because they can’t decide what’s important. Prioritization scares them. They get Shiny Object Syndrome, where they flock to the hot new thing instead of doubling, tripling, and quadrupling down on what ultimately matters. Everybody’s scope will expand unless you constrain it with clear and concrete goals.

Anything that departs from your core mission is a distraction.

— —

How Amp It Up Fits Together

Slootman’s system is a triad. Each pillar amplifies the other ones. Slootman asks: “How much faster do you run? How much higher are your standards? How hard do you focus?”

Narrow focus is the hardest one to do. If you try to increase the tempo and raise standards without narrowing your focus, you’ll burn yourself out and ship sloppy work. Do way less, but do it faster and better.

On the topic of focus, I once heard a story about a billionaire who used to share a different message every time he spoke to his company. He employed smart people and thought they wanted novelty.

That changed when one day, a trusted mentor looked him in the eye and said, “You’re doing it totally wrong. Pick a simple message and say it over and over again.”

His next all-hands talk was at the company holiday party. He was so nervous to repeat a simple message and potentially look like an idiot in front of the entire company that he got wasted before he went on stage. But once he got up there, he stuck to the plan. His message was simple enough to summarize in one sentence. People loved it.

Since then, he hasn’t stopped repeating the same message over and over again. 25 years after the holiday party talk, he insists that a key to his success is sloganizing everything and repeating the same basic mantras.

Slootman has three: Increase the tempo, raise the standards, narrow the focus.

[Aleksandr Volodarsky @volodarik]

Hiring corporate executives for a startup is a bad idea.

I can't share stories from founders I know, but here are similar ones:

[Flo Crivello @Altimor]

A memo I sent to the team last month about changing my mind on remote, and moving the team to SF:

https://t.co/K0QoefPNPD

[billboard @billboard]

How the little-known founder of Bad Bunny's label went from a Venezuelan military academy to the top of the U.S. music business – and could exit with as much as $200 million. https://t.co/7EYli7VMQW

[Eugenio Pérez Toledano @eutoniopt]

Palabras llenas de sabiduría.

La rotación de personal es mucho más que un intercambio de cromos, se paga un precio alto al arriesgar la salida de alguien capacitado y adaptado a la dinámica organizacional por alguien nuevo del cual está por verse su competencia y dinámica.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

In 2001, Amazon’s stock fell 90%. In a hail-mary attempt, Bezos invited a book author to Amazon. Together, they created the foundation for trillions in market cap:

The author was Jim Collins, who published Built to Last in 1994. By 2001, Bezos had already adapted several of its concepts into Amazon’s principles:

· Tyranny Of Or → Avoid 1-Way Doors
· Homegrown Leadership → Hire & Develop the Best
· Good Enough Never Is → Insist on the Highest Standards

So, Bezos was intrigued when Jim said, in front of the whole executive team:

"In times like this you want to respond not by reacting to bad news, but by building a flywheel."

Collins had in mind the 5,000 lb old-style flywheels. They took hours to turn at first. But at some point, WHOOSH! Their own momentum kept them going.

Collins had quite a bit of reason to believe in his statement. He had commissioned a large team of Harvard MBA researchers for his new book, Good to Great. They compared companies that had delivered sustainable, S&P 500-beating results to mediocre companies that had flailed.

What the team found is the great companies were spinning flywheels. It wasn’t the first, fifth, or one-hundredth rotation that got them spinning. It was their concentrated effort that led to the breakthrough momentum.

On the other hand, mediocre companies were constantly launching new initiatives. Instead of achieving breakthrough momentum on one flywheel, they tried to create many. But each never achieved breakthrough velocity. They had to keep manually cranking them.

Given the insight, Bezos and Collins began sketching out Amazon’s e-commerce flywheel. They identified that Amazon could generate self-reinforcing momentum in 2 ways:

1. Lower cost structure leading to lower prices leading to more scale and back to lower costs.
2. Greater selection leading to customer experience leading to traffic leading to more sellers and back to greater selection.

These two elements have been the backbone of Amazon’s e-commerce business for the 20+ years since the pair initially founded them.

To this date, the flywheel continues to extract market share for Amazon. Last year, Amazon reached a tremendous 57% of total US e-commerce sales. At $514B in revenue, it has left the competition - like Walmart - in the dust.

So, what can we learn from Amazon’s e-commerce flywheel? As product and business people, we are tempted to start new flywheels constantly. But, it usually pays to focus on spinning our main one with self-reinforcing momentum faster.

Sketch out your flywheel, and go get it.

[David Senra @FoundersPodcast]

Charlie Munger:

Don’t be surprised when you lose to people like this

[Tony Frangie Mawad @TonyFrangieM]

La economía se está desacelerando, la inflación se dispara y los ingresos colapsan, las protestas están de vuelta y el chavismo atraviesa una pugna interna. ¿Reventó la burbuja bodegónica? Mi nota para @CaracasChron traducida al español:
https://t.co/oyz3Dt5GvD

[Paulo De Oliveira-De Jesus @DeOlivP]

No salió bien el experimiento. Buena infografía de @energia21

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

So then why do call yourself “The” Associated Press 😂