ravi.eth (he/him)

Founder/CEO, XTechbuzz;
Tweets on business & personal growth

[Mark Zuckerberg @finkd]

I believe everyone should have access to superintelligence, and I wrote a long piece about Meta's philosophy and values for building a positive future for everyone. https://t.co/2ZoNZXZ39T

[ravi.eth (he/him) @productlessons]

Proud of the community infra my team has been able to build.

[ravi.eth (he/him) @productlessons]

“OpenAI’s nascent hardware business now rests on the shakiest of foundations, rotten to its core by its illegal reliance on misappropriated trade secrets,” - Apple's lawsuit charges

[MindBranches @MindBranches]

Article Summary: How to fix your entire life in 1 day

[ravi.eth (he/him) @productlessons]

@GetBitDotMoney I am here to just listen in. New here.

[ravi.eth (he/him) @productlessons]

Xtechbuzz Inc will be a billion dollar company.
Many of you will tag this post when we become one.

[Des Traynor @destraynor]

In startup commentary don’t confuse the cost of the ante with the cost of playing out the hand.

There’s a common post-AI trope: “I could build a clone of <Product> in a weekend, so why do they need $$$ to succeed?”

For sure cost/time to build has decreased (Cursor,etc.) but a huge difference remains between "v 1.0" and necessities like

* Iterating to PMF with real customer feedback
* Maintaining product advantage, defending against competitors etc.
* Bringing it to market (whether sales-led, or via SEO, SEM, Content, whatever, it all costs)

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

😂

[Michael Mignano @mignano]

The chat interface is the new hamburger menu.

[Michael Mignano @mignano]

Raising venture capital from famous celebrities is almost always a waste of time and equity. Most (but not all):

Move too slowly during the fundraise process

Don’t actually help after the deal closes

Limit their communication with you and push you off to handlers

Overvalue their impact on the business and ask for unreasonable warrants, side letters, etc

Are the first to ask for their money back when things go south

There are for sure exceptions but it’s just not worth your time.

[Michael Mignano @mignano]

“Wrapper” isn’t a dirty word.

It means a product build on top of a technology.

Startups that focus on the opposite are far less durable.

I’m looking forward to seeding more simple wrappers that consumers love but overly intellectual VCs hate.

[Logan Kilpatrick @OfficialLoganK]

If you are not planning for the price of intelligence to go to zero, the next 3-5 years are going to incredibly disruptive to your business / life.

This is the main idea for the rest of the decade, buckle up.

[Dom Cooke @domcooke]

65 ideas from over 200 Colossus episodes this year:

1/ Work ethic eliminates fear. — Michael Jordan

2/ Only dead fish go with the flow. — David Ogilvy

3/ Scale is information, information is knowledge, and knowledge is power. — Michael Ovitz

4/ All great events hang by a single thread. The clever man takes advantage of everything and neglects nothing that may give him some added opportunity. The less clever man, by neglecting one thing, sometimes misses everything. — Napoleon

5/ Gentlemen, you have undertaken to cheat me. I won't sue you for the law is too slow. I'll ruin you. Yours truly, Cornelius Vanderbilt. — Vanderbilt

6/ Rolex watches are sold to people who climb mountains. Patek Philippe watches are sold to people who own mountains. — Patek Philippe

7/ As an investor, only two states exist: you're either humble or about to get run over. That's it. — Katie Koch

8/ Relentless is really hard to compete with. — Jay Bilas

9/ You won't conquer the oceans if you stay within sight of the shore. — Oliver Thomas

10/ The most important ingredient is the one that's left out. — Sean Feeney

11/ Find what feeds your passion. Align your personality with your purpose. Now, no one can touch you. — Oprah

12/ Life and business is a repeat game. — Ken Langone

13/ I don't wait for things to cross my desk. I go out and look for them. I made 250 calls a day. — Michael Ovitz

14/ Patek Philippe's greatest competition isn't Rolex. It's Patek Philippe from the past. — Patek Philippe

15/ We have evolved to walk and make stuff. If you don't do those things, problems tend to surface. — Tim Ferriss

16/ People perform to the degree of inspection, not expectation. — Dev Ittycheria

17/ The best leaders are exothermic. Every atom jiggles faster around them. There is no chance for stasis. — Tobi Lütke

18/ Even today, the CEO and CFO sleep in the same room when they travel. It sends a message from the top down that you should act as an owner of this business. — Fastenal

19/ When most people give presentations, they try to squeeze two megabytes of data into a pipe that carries 128 kilobytes. — Steve Jobs

20/ The best predictor of your mental and physical well-being, even how long you will live, is the quality of your five closest friends. — Robin Dunbar

21/ We got a letter in the mail from KFC rejecting us as franchisees. They said we had no money, no experience, and were too young. Other than that, they loved us. — Matt Perelman & Alex Sloane

22/ How many days of your life do you have a sense of calm, peacefulness, purpose, and are in a good place? To me, that's what really matters and the pursuit of more robs you of that. You can't take it with you. — Ric Elias

23/ Everything is a choice. I try to not let the world happen to me. It's taken a long time to get good at saying no, and it still feels painful, but I've gotten better at it. — Bret Taylor

24/ I will never build a purely digital business. They're too hard. Your failure rate is astronomical. I like things that are messy and complicated because the average person can't tolerate the pain. I like that barrier. — Adam Sandow

25/ It's too easy to be cool and hedge your bets, but true greatness requires being all in. — Glue Guys

26/ There are two error types in Venture Capital but only one of them matters—missing the big one is the whole game. — Bill Gurley

27/ Venture Capital is like taking the best Olympic athletes, giving them money, and saying 'See you at the Olympics.' That's crazy. — Dave Fontenot

28/ If people come at you with anything but love, remember, it's not about you. — Cyan Banister

29/ Marketing is our core competency. We're going to outsource everything else. Red Bull has no production facilities or warehouses. — Dietrich Mateschitz

30/ The market determines how big the company can get, and the people determine how big the company will get. — Pat Grady

31/ Rules are opportunities, not constraints. — Gabe Whaley

32/ As a leader, if you're not spending 90% of your time teaching, you're not doing your job. A business achieves long-term success by continuously replenishing leaders inside the organization. — Robert Kierlin

33/ Once you accept and embrace that you're not perfectly rational, that you are a little insecure, that you do have a little bit of an ego, then you can manage decisions around that reality rather than pretending they don't exist. — Morgan Housel

34/ If you don't stop repeating a mantra, you won't survive. — Haruki Murakami

35/ There are only two reasons companies behave well: because they want to and because they have to. Our preference is to invest in those that want to. — Nick Sleep

36/ I learned this from Schwarzman. People don't give money to the investors they think are going to make the most money, they allocate to people they like. — Eric Serrano

37/ Most investors are more willing to pay a lot of money for something with no problems than to pay the right amount of money for something with problems. — Ali Hamed

38/ If you want to get to the promised land, which is 100x on your investment, you need 20 to 30 years to do it. And if you can't get to 10x in 10 years, you have no chance to get to 100x in 20 to 30 years. — Mitch Rales

39/ The willingness of markets to continually put multiples on temporary surpluses is a constant source of confusion. — Modest Proposal

40/ Natural gas is this incredibly versatile little molecule... if you shut this off overnight, we're going to be fighting the next war with sticks and stones very quickly. — CNX Resources

41/ The trouble with this business is that everybody expects to find oil on the surface. If it were near the top, there wouldn't be any trick to it. You've got to drill deep for oil. There's essentially an inexhaustible supply of people who want to get the most for doing the least, and so in my own life, I want to get the most by doing the most. — Monty Moncrief

42/ A person can have the greatest idea in the world but if they can't convince enough other people, it doesn't matter. — Steve Jobs
43/ Every great creator is sharing their DNA and experiences with the world. Some spread it through art, some through music. For me, it's through product. — Ronnie Fieg

44/ The first rocket that went into orbit cost $1 million per kilogram. We're now talking about a rocket that might be commercially active in five years, which will cost $10 per kilogram. That's the same price the post office charges. Think of what is possible if space launches are as cost-competitive as the post office. — SpaceX

45/ Every time public markets and regulation fail to provide an adequate solution, private markets step in. — Armen Panossian

46/ The dirty secret about owning a sports team is you go into it assuming you're going to make money and then you find out that if you want to win, you've got to spend all the money. — Marc Lasry

47/ Japan today is basically what the U.S. market was in the 1980s. — Japan Activism

48/ My five-word business book for Japanese internet entrepreneurs is: please don't go to America. — Rakuten

49/ Where do you want me to spend my time as CEO; on a conference call with analysts or finding the next market? I've never met a shareholder who doesn't want me to spend my time on the business. So we don't do a lot of IR and no analyst calls. — Winmark

50/ You talk about the economy, you can write, you can have beautiful charts, you can wax away poetically, you can study stuff and post on Twitter...If you don't put capital at risk, I don't care. It just doesn't matter. — Eric Golden

51/ InterDigital's technology has been licensed to more than 7 billion devices over the last decade. For every iPhone that's sold, they get 60 cents. — InterDigital

52/ Vulcan has 400 quarries across 22 states. That gives them about 16 billion tons of aggregate reserves, or 60 years worth of supply. — Vulcan Materials

53/ I tried to hire a very senior researcher from Meta. They said, come back to me when you have 10,000 H100 GPUs. That would cost billions of dollars and take 5-10 years to get from Nvidia. — Aravind Srinivas

54/ Since the Mendelsons took over HEICO in 1990, sales have compounded annually at 15%, net income at 18%, and that's driven a 21% annual return in the share price. Not too shabby. — HEICO

55/ Accounting for the cost of failures and inflation, the pharmaceutical industry now spends about $2.5 billion per approved drug, compared to $40 million (in today's dollars) in 1953. — Alex Telford

56/ Patek Philippe sells around 70,000 watches annually and earns about $1.2 billion. But, interestingly, the secondary market for Patek watches does about $8 billion in turnover each year. — Patek Philippe

57/ In 2011, 3i invested ~£106 million into discount retailer, Action. It has since received back £2.9 billion, or 25 times what it put in, and the value of its investment today is £14 billion, a return of over 100 times the original investment. — 3i

58/ If the world wants to keep the Olympics, the most rational way to do it is to have one designated site to host the Summer Games every four years and another to host the Winter Games so we don't have to rebuild the entire Olympic infrastructure every time. — The Olympics

59/ Chase Coleman had a really interesting statistic. He said ChatGPT, which launched in 2022, was to AI as Netscape Navigator was to the internet in 1994. Less than 1% of current global internet market cap was founded in the 2 years after Netscape Navigator came out. — Gavin Baker

60/ Hans' vision is still being executed at Rolex on a daily basis despite the fact that he passed away more than half a century ago. How many people can you think of that build a world-class business and 50 years after they pass away, the company keeps going as if they were still running it? — Hans Wilsdorf, Rolex

61/ It's a literal rags to riches story, founded by circus performers in the Great Depression as a rag cleaning business. Today it is America's largest uniform rental business and its growth, profitability, and shareholder returns are among the highest in the S&P 500 over virtually any time period. — Cintas

62/ I was not willing to listen to other people's ideas. I wanted everything to be my way. I fought for many years to make sure no one could tell me what to do. — George Lucas

63/ Every advance in the complexity of the economy puts an added premium upon superior ability. — The Lessons of History

64/ Everybody just assumes you want to be part of a growing market, but there are different ways to go about it. Just look at AMETEK, TransDigm, HEICO, Motorola, or Axon. — Matt Reustle

65/ If you take the top five energy companies in the world and the top five technology companies, the tech names are spending twice as much on Capex today. — Michael Mauboussin

[ravi.eth (he/him) @productlessons]

Google Ads promoted on Linkedin. Things getting crazier!

[ravi.eth (he/him) @productlessons]

At @proptechbuzz we chase greatness.
Greatness is doing the smallest of things with love and care.

[PropTechBuzz @proptechbuzz]

Hurray!
Introducing the most comprehensive database of global proptech conferences only on https://t.co/zSTz9k8nlJ.
No where else would you find better price deals to the conferences than us.

[ravi.eth (he/him) @productlessons]

@thesamparr and @ShaanVP

[ravi.eth (he/him) @productlessons]

@DarrellLerner Send