Founders has been a university of its own for me.
It is hosted by David Senra, a visionary madman who’s devoured hundreds of biographies and distilled them into pure, audible fire.
I studied Management Information Systems and left it after two years because next to Founders, the way my university taught it was like a joke.
In my opinion, this is one of the new generation of universities.
It teaches what truly matters.
“Most business education is fake. This isn’t.” David Senra
The best way to learn how to build a great business is to listen to people who have actually built it in the past.Learn from history’s greatest founders and builders so you can become one.
"There are thousands of years of history in which lots and lots of very smart people worked very hard and ran all types of experiments on how to create new businesses, invent new technology, new ways to manage, etc. They ran these experiments throughout their entire lives. At some point, somebody put these lessons down in a book. For very little money and a few hours of time, you can learn from someone’s accumulated experience. There is so much more to learn from the past than we often realize. You could productively spend your time reading the experiences of great people who have come before, and you learn every time." Marc Andreessen
“People who are interested in what they are doing will do what is necessary to get the job done.” Edwin Land
“My interest is not in what might happen, but in what ought to happen.” Edwin Land
“They didn’t diversify their lives. They concentrated them. Once they commit, they don’t renegotiate. The work becomes the organizing principle of their life.” David Senra
What makes a good manifesto?
A good manifesto looks at the world and says, "The people that we're fighting or trying to replace, they have more numbers than us. They have more money than us. They have more force than us. Today, they have more legitimacy than us, but we are going to beat all of that with more intensity."
There's a quote that says, "One man plus the truth is a majority." I think that applies to insurgent movements where a small number of people who are willing to die for the cause (in this case, literally) and have that intensity can overcome everything. There is no amount of money or incumbency that can overcome somebody who wants it so much more.
The purpose of a manifesto is to make concrete that intensity and paint for people a vision of what the world could be, such that when they see it, they are willing to leave their jobs, families, security, everything to go and make that happen. A good manifesto is, once you see it, you can't get it out of your head. You have to go do it.
The manifesto is the magnet, and if you don't have that, you have no right to go up to someone and say, "Leave your comfortable job, and leave your beautiful family, and come with me on what is probably a death mission." Who do you think you are? You have no right unless you have articulated that.
#432 The Mind of Napoleon
- Combine energy of thought with energy of action. Clear thought should terminate in decisive action.
- Plan pessimistically, then execute boldly. Napoleon's boldness was not carelessness. During planning, he deliberately imagined every danger, failure, and catastrophe, but once he decided, he stopped revisiting the decision and concentrated every faculty on victory.
He has this very powerful operating principle: before deciding, doubt, investigate, and exaggerate the downsides. After deciding, eliminate hesitation and act with complete commitment. The practical lesson is not that you can control everything, but that you can prepare yourself to capitalize on what you cannot control.
Evan Spiegel and Senra discuss the legendary meeting between Steve Jobs and Edwin Land:
“It was a fascinating afternoon, because we were sitting in this big conference room and Land and Steve were both looking at the center of the table the whole time they were talking. Dr. Land was saying, ‘I could see what the Polaroid camera should be. It was just as real to me as if it was sitting in front of me before I had ever built one.’ And Steve said, ‘Yeah, that’s exactly the way I saw the Macintosh.’
The two inventors described to each other a singular experience: each had imagined a perfect new product, whole, already manufactured and sitting before him, and then spent years prodding executives, engineers, and factories to create it with as few compromises as possible.”
As I review the nature of the creative drive in inventive scientists, I find that the exhilaration of discovery, the sudden rush of ideas, and the struggle to articulate them as soon as possible after the conceptual moment seem to have been intuitively known to Land at seventeen. To suspect that such moments lay ahead of him generated an urgency to narrow the choice to the domain most likely to yield great insight. It could not be trivial. It must be significant. It must also be tangible. So much in science had been accomplished! Faraday had moved the world forward a hundred years, a hundred years earlier.
I find the first event is an urge to make a significant intellectual contribution that can be tangibly embodied in a product or process. This owes more to Edison than to Faraday, the great experimenter. The urge, as pure urge, precedes the specific contribution in a perfectly generalized way, so that the individual hunts for a domain in which to use the urge.
Land said, “At the age at which each week seems like a year, I picked field after field before I decided that the great opportunity was polarized light.”
That search for a domain of science to call his own began before Land was seventeen and continued throughout his life. He precisely described the nuances of his search: “This early stage need not be early in life; it can occur intermittently throughout life. The hunting process is fascinating to contemplate, because during it there may be many abortive first approaches at the verbal level to fields which are then rejected as being either not significant enough or not feasible enough. And then, quite suddenly, a field will emerge conceptually so full-blown in the creator’s mind that the words can scarcely come from his mouth fast enough to describe the new field in its full implications and elaborateness.”
To transcend the influence of your heroes, copy them shamelessly, like a student, until you get them out of your system. That is the way of all masters.
Pretend to be completely in control, and people will assume that you are.
Expand your mind by thinking with your feet on a walk or with your hand in a notebook. Think outside of your brain.
The vision has to be so clear that everyone inside the company can make decisions without asking you.
The most important decision a founder makes is who they work with. Everything else is fixable. The team is not.
A small team of obsessed people beats a large team of the merely interested every time.
The best people don’t want a job. They want a mission. Give them the mission, or lose them to someone who will.
Jobs could make people believe the impossible was inevitable. That is the most dangerous skill in business.
Edison had compressed genius and energy enough for three lifetimes into his span.
“Every problem has a solution. You just have to be willing to think about it long enough.” Henry Ford
“You’re not on this planet to be average, to be mediocre. Rules direct us to average behaviors. If we’re aiming to create works that are exceptional, most rules don’t apply. Average is nothing to aspire to. The goal is not to fit in. If anything, it’s to amplify your differences.” Rick Rubin
“It’s through deliberate action and repetition that we gain deeper insight. Patience is required for the nuanced development of your craft.” R.R.
“To make it really great, all it takes is a little more time and a willingness to persevere until it’s really great. It takes more time. Impatience is an argument with reality.” S.J.
Meraklarını bastırırsan maaş alırsın. Birleştirirsen miras bırakırsın. Robert Greene is obsessed with this idea: the thing that makes you weird is the thing that makes you valuable, but only if you develop it to an extreme. You don’t find your life’s work by choosing. You find it by combining. The work reveals the way as you go… “If it’s not a hell yes, it’s a no. The only way to know what you want is to see what you do. If you keep doing it, you’re that kind of person.” Derek Sivers
“Work that matters is never assigned. It is accepted. When purpose is clear, strategy is simple. Simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex, intelligent behavior. The most important question is not what you do, but why you do it.” Dee Hock
Merak devrimcinin en büyük silahıdır.
Excellence is the capacity to take pain.
You open your eyes wide and shut them again to see. Discovery consists of seeing what everyone else has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.
You cannot rely upon what you have been taught. All you have learned from history is the old ways of making mistakes. There is nothing history can tell you about what we must do tomorrow, only what we must not do.
Don’t do anything that someone else can do. Don’t undertake a project unless it is manifestly important or nearly impossible.
Anything worth doing is worth doing to excess.
“Most business education is fake. This isn’t.” David Senra
“Those who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.” Steve Jobs
“Profundity and originality are attributes of single, if not singular, minds.” Edwin Land
“The most valuable kind of learning is learning how to think. And the best way to learn how to think is to study people who think well.” Paul Graham
“The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get the old ones out.” Dee Hock
“When you read about someone else’s path, you’re really learning what’s possible.” Derek Sivers
“You want to gather as much evidence as possible from other people’s experiences before you bet years of your life.” Elon Musk
“I learned early on that studying great businesses teaches you how to build one.” Michael Dell
“Nothing ever happens unless someone pursues a vision fanatically.” Todd Graves
An academic education too easily prepares one to make a living at the expense of life, to be narrowly expert while broadly ignorant, to know much and understand little.
The thing we cannot realize in university life is the extent to which our natural concern with the past in what we teach has tied us to the past in how we teach. It is essential for the faculties of our universities to realize that we have not created this problem; we have inherited it.
The young hurl themselves into vast problems that have troubled the world’s best thinkers, believing that they can find a solution. It is well that they should, for from time to time one of them does. That is a description of Edwin Land. That’s remarkable.
Dr. Edwin Land was a troublemaker. He dropped out of Harvard and founded Polaroid. Not only was he one of the great inventors of our time, but more importantly, he saw the intersection of art, science, and business and built an organization to reflect that.
Over the years, I have learned that every significant invention has several characteristics. By definition it must be startling, unexpected, and must come into a world that is not prepared for it. If the world were prepared for it, it would not be much of an invention.
We didn’t build the Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build. When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.
If you have the intimate knowledge of a product that comes with dreaming it up and designing it, then you will be better able to sell it, and to go back and improve it. From there you are in the best possible position to convince others of its greatness, to inspire others to give their very best efforts to developing it, to remain true to it, and to see it through all the way to its optimum point.
Difference for the sake of it. Because it must be better. From the moment the idea strikes to the running of the business. Difference, and retention of total control.
Remember that there’s nothing wrong with being persistently dissatisfied or afraid.
Believe, most of all, in the power of enthusiasm.
Stamina and determination, with creativity, are needed to overcome seemingly impossible difficulties.
Invention is a human imperative.
History doesn’t repeat; human nature does.
Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see. Because they think differently, creative masterminds are sometimes considered misfits. But in the words Steve Jobs helped to craft for an Apple advertisement, “While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world are the ones who do.”
It’s a human imperative to make things. We need to encourage young people to become engineers, entrepreneurs, inventors, and manufacturers.
I know this is the next big thing. I cannot predict how it is going to unfold. You don’t know exactly how it’s going to resolve, but you know it’s going to be something very big and very good. Everyone has a sense that right now is one of those moments when we are influencing the future.
The business is not about you. The business does not exist for your pleasure; it exists to serve other people. That is the game you decided to be in.
When you feel the fear, take a step forward.
Mediocrity is always invisible until passion shows up and exposes it.
If you want to accomplish what hasn’t been accomplished before, you have to be relentlessly and unapologetically determined.
Only founders understand founders. Become friends with the eminent dead.
Only an equally ambitious person can be a match for a long-term marriage.
When you’re trying to push the boundaries of things, when you’re trying to move into different frontiers, you have to be surrounded by people who really believe in what you’re doing. Or by no one but yourself.
Most people never pick up the phone and call. That is what separates the people who do things from the people who dream about them.
Our future will be determined by our effort. Only when a man gives his best and lives fully in the present is he truly happy. That man will find success in whatever he does.
You have to protect fragile new ideas from being killed too early. A good idea, not abandoned, will always grow larger than expected. Wise people step on big and growing problems early.
Optimize for positive impact on other people.
The decisions you’re making affect people who aren’t even born yet.
You should limit the number of details, and then make every detail perfect.
Find a simple idea and take it very seriously.
Do not deceive yourself about your actual condition. Excellence is the capacity to take pain.
If you lose your focus, greatness will disappear.
If you don’t guard your time, greatness will disappear.
Know your numbers.
The fastest way to move a dial is to narrow the focus. An intense interest in any subject is indispensable if you want to excel.
Opportunity handled well leads to more opportunity.
Nothing should be left undone to produce the finest results.
Always have a fortress of cash.
Manual compliance is slow and painful; doing everything by hand takes months. History’s greatest founders invest heavily in technology and will not tolerate wasting valuable company time doing something with labor when technology can automate it.
We don’t choose our passions; our passions choose us.
Edwin Land carried a romantic vision of science, developed by omnivorous reading, and the certainty that he would achieve scientific success. He was filled with impatience and frustration, and his mind was focused on the question of which scientific path he should follow.
Experts are often unhelpful. You have to have enthusiasm, curiosity, thirst for knowledge, and determination. Those are the things that will solve all of the world’s problems.
Dreams, premonitions, and gut feelings are all attempts by our unconscious to guide us. We are wiser than we think, and intuition is the art of listening to the guru within us. All of our finest thoughts and best ideas are not the work of the logical mind but gifts from our unconscious.
Leonardo told Duke Ludovico that “creativity requires time for ideas to marinate and intuitions to gel. Men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work the least, for their minds are occupied with ideas and the perfection of their conceptions, to which they afterwards give form.”
Indulge fantasy. Make lists, and be sure to put odd things on them. Leonardo’s to-do list may have been the greatest testament to pure curiosity the world has ever seen.
Take notes on paper. Five hundred years later, Leonardo’s notebooks are around to astonish and inspire us. Fifty years from now, our own notebooks, if we take the initiative to start writing them, will be around to astonish and inspire our grandchildren, unlike our tweets and Facebook posts.
Be open to mystery; not everything needs sharp lines.
Your thoughts construct patterns like scaffolding in your mind. In most cases, people get stuck in those patterns, just like grooves in a record, and they never get out of them. It is a rare person who etches grooves that are other than a specific way of looking at things, a specific way of questioning things.
And so Steve would always ask: “Why does it work that way?” “Is there a way we could do it better?” “Is there a new technology we can introduce?”
The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them, into the impossible.
Mantras of Elon Musk Question every requirement.
A maniacal sense of urgency is our operating principle. The right time is right now.
Know all the details of your part of the business.
Be a frontline general.
An important element in launching a new product is showmanship. Publicity is critical. Showmanship is salesmanship.
Make sure that you have failures. The people who succeed the most also have the most failures.
Go to where the problem is. Fly to the source.
Constantly teach and train everybody around you.
You are not friends with the people on your team. Wanting to be everyone’s friend leads you to care too much about the emotions of the individual in front of you rather than the success of the entire enterprise. If you don’t hold to this, far more people can end up hurt. Demand excellence from everybody on your team. Demand, demand, demand. The mission comes before personal feelings. B or C players can jeopardize the fate of the entire mission. A players don’t want to be around fuzzy thinkers.
Delete, simplify, compare.
If you’re going through hell, just keep going.
If a timeline is long, it’s wrong.
If you care to make it precise, you can make it precise.
If there is such a thing as good leadership, it is to give a good example.
Simplicity and common sense should characterize planning and strategic direction.
The word impossible has been, and must remain, deleted from our dictionary.
Everything we earn we need as a reserve.
A golden rule of IKEA: regard every problem as a possibility.
You can do so much in ten minutes. Ten minutes, once gone, are gone for good. Divide your life into ten-minute units and sacrifice as few of them as possible in meaningless activity.
My most fundamental piece of advice is to follow your instincts. If you have the wrong instincts for what you are trying to do, that will become evident soon, and it may require you to change, but being blown back and forth by the wind of conflicting opinions will get you nowhere.
I don’t give a f*ck what anyone thinks. When you are a racehorse, the reason they put blinders on is that if you look at the horse on the right, you’re going to miss a step. That’s why those horses have f*cking blinders. And that’s what people should have. When you’re running after something, you should not look left and right. What does this person think? What does that person think? No. Go.
We are working to build something that matters to our customers, something we can tell our grandchildren about. Such things aren’t meant to be easy.
High standards are contagious.
Be intensely private.
Be different and retain total control.
Do not sell a half-finished product.
As long as it works and it’s exciting, people will follow you.
Extreme success comes from doing something no one else is doing.
People do not want all-purpose; they want high-tech specificity.
Appeal to a specific need. Don’t make your product too wide. Narrow it down.
You want a single message, expressed clearly.
Don’t copy the opposition. Don’t worry about market research. Follow your own star. This is what successful entrepreneurs do. The opposite of following your own star is following the herd, and that is a path to dull conformity.
For innovative, intrinsically excellent products, the markets are often larger than you can predict.
Founder-led sales is the most powerful tool.
If you have an idea for a new product, engineer, prototype, manufacture, market, and sell it yourself. Retain total control.
If it’s not beautiful, you’re not done.
A clever person doesn’t spend 14 years building 5,127 prototypes of the world’s first cyclonic vacuum cleaner. A determined person does.
People buy stories. Invest heavily in storytelling: why your product exists, how it is made, who made it.
A project will die if the original mule doesn’t stay on it. Without that self-belief, no one presses through the hard times.
There’s nothing wrong with being persistently dissatisfied or afraid.
You need the confidence, and the stupidity, to do things differently.
Difference for the sake of difference, and the continuous improvement of products simply for improvement’s sake.
You are more likely to solve a problem by being unconventional and determined than by being brilliant.
Never sacrifice quality for speed.
Do one thing and do it better than anyone else.
Overpay for talent. Exceptional talent creates disproportionate value.
Napoleon: he knows that men have always been the same, that nothing can change their nature. It is from the past that he will draw his lessons in order to shape the present.
One of the best ideas I learned from Kobe Bryant: “Don’t copy the what. Copy the how.” Kobe would study greatness in any domain: sports, music, business, art, whatever. This is why: “No matter what discipline you are in, there’s a common denominator in how we approach our craft. The attention to detail. The level of commitment. Those things are the same across the board. That is my message: don’t look at what I did, but how I did it. The how. And then you can transfer that over to any profession and any discipline.”
Great work usually entails spending what would seem to most people an unreasonable amount of time on a problem.
Something that grows exponentially can become so valuable that it’s worth making an extraordinary effort to get it started.
Your curiosity never lies, and it knows more than you do about what’s worth paying attention to.
We underestimate the cumulative effect of work. Writing a page a day doesn’t sound like much, but if you do it every day, you’ll write a book a year. That’s the key: consistency.
Following your interests may sound like a rather passive strategy, but in practice it usually means following them past all sorts of obstacles. You usually have to risk rejection and failure. So it does take a good deal of boldness.
But while you need boldness, you don’t usually need much planning. In most cases the recipe for doing great work is simply: work hard on excitingly ambitious projects, and something good will come of it. Instead of making a plan and then executing it, you just try to preserve certain invariants.
The trouble with planning is that it only works for achievements you can describe in advance. You can win a gold medal or get rich by deciding to as a child and then tenaciously pursuing that goal, but you can’t discover natural selection that way.
I think for most people who want to do great work, the right strategy is not to plan too much. At each stage, do whatever seems most interesting and gives you the best options for the future. I call this approach “staying upwind.” This is how most people who’ve done great work seem to have done it.
Use the advantages of youth when you have them, and the advantages of age once you have those. The advantages of youth are energy, time, optimism, and freedom. The advantages of age are knowledge, efficiency, money, and power. With effort you can acquire some of the latter when young and keep some of the former when old.
The old also have the advantage of knowing which advantages they have. The young often have them without realizing it. The biggest is probably time. The young have no idea how rich they are in time. The best way to turn this time to advantage is to use it in slightly frivolous ways: to learn about something you don’t need to know about, just out of curiosity, or to try building something just because it would be cool, or to become freakishly good at something.
One of the most valuable kinds of knowledge you get from experience is knowing what you don’t have to worry about. The young know all the things that could matter, but not their relative importance. So they worry equally about everything, when they should worry much more about a few things and hardly at all about the rest.
If a lot of the best people in your field are collected in one place, it’s usually a good idea to visit for a while. It will increase your ambition, and also, by showing you that these people are human, increase your self-confidence.
If you’re earnest, you’ll probably get a warmer welcome than you might expect. Most people who are very good at something are happy to talk about it with anyone who’s genuinely interested. If they’re really good at their work, then they probably have a hobbyist’s interest in it, and hobbyists always want to talk about their hobbies.
It may take some effort to find the people who are really good, though. Doing great work has such prestige that in some places, particularly universities, there’s a polite fiction that everyone is engaged in it. And that is far from true. People within universities can’t say so openly, but the quality of the work being done in different departments varies immensely. Some departments have people doing great work; others have in the past; others never have.
There are many reasons curious people are more likely to do great work, but one of the more subtle is that, by casting a wide net, they’re more likely to find the right thing to work on in the first place.
Brad Jacobs’ research process is a great example of “the good ones know more.” The good ones do more research. They read more. They talk to more people. They just know more about what they’re doing. This is not a matter of intelligence or talent. It’s a matter of effort.
“I’m talentless. It’s why I became an agent, because I didn’t need a skill set other than intelligence, persuasion, intensity, and curiosity. I didn’t know how to make anything, because I am not capable of it. I am talentless. I can’t write. I can’t act. I can’t sculpt. I can’t direct. I invest in people, not in rules. A lot of my friends who are venture capitalists put up guardrails they won’t go outside of. I’ve never seen a guardrail I don’t try to jump.”
Big Think: History has no shortage of people who made fortunes by doing awful things. How do you navigate this?
Senra: Will and Ariel Durant, two of my favorite historians and the authors of a book called The Lessons of History, wrote: “In every age we have found men to be dishonest and governments corrupt.” So when I see something happening, whether in my own country or another, my reaction isn’t “Oh my God, how can this be?” so much as “Yep. That’s how it’s always been.”
Senra: Brunello Cucinelli wrote a book, I don’t even remember the name, something about Solomeo. Essentially, he sells $5,000 sweaters. He sells sweaters that cost more than my first car, but he grew up in very rural Italy.
At the time, his community was being hollowed out. Everybody had moved to the cities. He is a very soulful guy. Brunello bounds his life: you work from 9:00 to 5:00. You are not allowed to send an email to the company after 5:00. You have to take a break for lunch, and they have this great Italian food.
Then he spends his nights reading, going on long walks, and sitting in the cafés of this little town that he essentially rebuilt and reinvested in. He likes having cappuccino and debating philosophy. He’s a really soulful guy. The one criticism people have is that the business model works when you have 70 percent margins and your sweaters cost as much as a Honda Civic, but it was very intentional. I don’t care what people do. It’s very intentional.
James Dyson on why failure is the only honest path to invention:
“At school or university, the thing is to be brilliant and to get the answer right the first time. And there are brilliant people who can do that, but the rest of us are not brilliant.
And to get there, we have to strive, and we have to go through failure.
In my case, and I counted it, it’s 5,127 times.
The debt was mounting, and I had three children, a wife, a home, and a mortgage to pay, like everybody else.
But I had a real point in life. I had a real aim, and I had to get there.
And the failures were interesting, because I learned from every single one of them.”