48 korrents from this recording
Every claim below is a statement made in this recording, quoted word for word and linked to the second it was said, so you can hear it rather than take our word for it. The wording comes from the transcript published alongside the recording; the sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording.
0:01:37 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsWhat a company fundamentally allows you to do is like just run the counterfactual to the world you see around you, right? Like, you get to try to build the thing that you think ought to be there, and then you means test it against the market.
0:04:38 · watch on youtube.com↗
Our reading
Being impressed by your own old work is a sad sign, because it means you have stopped progressing.
Their wordsAnd one of the saddest days of my life was when I opened the old code and I was like really impressed with how good it was. Like, that was one of the saddest days of my life because I mean, like, holy shit, the implication of this just hit me like a train, right?
0:05:09 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsI think someone, like, if you don't read books, you live a lifetime. If you read books, you live a thousand, right?
0:05:43 · watch on youtube.com↗
Our reading
The one weird trick seems to be simply making a habit of reading books, almost whatever they are.
Their wordsThe one weird trick seems to be just read books, right? it kind of doesn't matter. At least make a habit of reading books
0:05:52 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsideally change genre every 3 books or so, at least for one book. And then that alone will give you a range that you can draw on for basically everything you'll ever do.
0:06:16 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsI got really dismayed with the quality of the business books pretty quickly because frankly, I think the business books are largely written by the people who have time, well, not the people who actually build companies, frankly.
0:06:30 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsDepends on like, if a person who started a company or a person writing a book is a salesperson, every problem can be solved with sales. If a person is a marketer, clearly every problem can be solved with marketing.
0:06:48 · watch on youtube.com↗
Our reading
A founder who sees everything as an engineering problem is blinded, and that caps what they can do.
Their wordsSo I was determined to not be the engineering type founder who is going to see everything as an engineering problem because that would be called blindness. And like, I would— this would cap my capabilities.
0:07:32 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsIt was a time we didn't have a lot of competition, so which is also really, really hard for businesses. It's not a good thing at all because again, you don't get, you don't have good rivalry and you can't sort of like, even if something seems really good, you don't know because there's no one else to keep you honest about it.
0:09:02 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsWhereas if you treat someone like other companies in your space as rivals, much easier to have a positive-sum outcome there because rivalries inspire you to be best.
0:17:11 · watch on youtube.com↗
Our reading
The people who adapt fastest in a crisis are largely the ones who have started a company before.
Their wordsI think at the end of the day, the thing that I have found is people who can adapt the fastest actually quite self-identify. And how I would be able to predict it, very simple. Have you started a company before?
0:21:53 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsTrust your gut is sometimes good advice, but it really depends on your gut. So it's like no one is born with intuition for building businesses because first of all, building businesses are completely— every decade is different.
0:22:11 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsYou were describing his frustration with problems in his sales team, which literally I had too. Like, it's like, you know what? I didn't actually have to live that horror. I could have actually, like, there, if I would have read the right—
0:25:39 · watch on youtube.com↗
Our reading
Differentiation requires new ideas, because doing the same thing gets you the same results.
Their wordsYou have to do things differently axiomatically. Like, obviously axiomatically, if you do the same thing, you get the same results. Differentiation requires new ideas.
0:26:27 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsAgain, intuition is your entire life's story rolled out for you to make a snap decision in a moment.
0:40:40 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsthe brain is a, um, uh, retrospective narrative alignment mechanism. Not, uh, it's, it's actually terrible at record keeping, but it, it mostly attempts to, uh, take the most salient, uh, version of our self-identity and reconcile the history with it.
0:45:24 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsLike, the whole project in life is just try to become very, very good at something and ideally cultivate some significant skill, create potentially services, products, and then share them with as many people, right?
0:46:30 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsWhat's really cool? Pursuing the same problem in a changing landscape, right? Like, now I get to reinvent everything I've already done.
0:48:56 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsLike, you can make a 7 out of 10 solution to everything by copying the 7 out of 10 that's already out there in the market. But if you make from tabula rasa axioms your own version of it, you have mastery over, even if this is a 6 out of 10, you can iterate on this. You can take this past the 7 afterwards.
0:49:21 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsvery often, especially in technology, The world belongs to the fast, the people who iterate, the people who adjust, the people who understand what's costly and what's unnecessary, and will prune away the rest.
0:56:21 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsSo the consequences of bad decisions in software engineering are an externality that doesn't accrue back to the engineers who caused it in almost all instances.
0:58:24 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsThe moment zero interest rate phenomena where they're gone, people actually wrote better code all of a sudden.
1:00:27 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsIf you don't tell them what to do, you might get something you cannot possibly imagine if you have good people. And so this is like actually a really, really important thing. It's much more important to create the environment in which people can be their most excellent self than it is to prescribe here's the precise moves to do.
1:01:38 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsVery often policies and processes are sort of downside protection. You're trying very hard to avoid the people who do things wrong to be causing so much damage. That's like downside protection, but you're also really limiting what the best people can do, right?
1:07:23 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsI love to take the view that like, I'm a corporate raider and Shopify went bankrupt and I bought it on a fire sale and I'm like marching in on day 1 here and previous management was crazy and we need to turn this place around, right?
1:11:28 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsBut the company could have had someone improve it at any point of time, right? It's not yours. It's like we don't allow people to use word ownership over parts of codebase or so. We only allow stewardship as a work,
1:19:38 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsI think there's just too much cross-pollination. You kind of have to sync with companies towards, like, entropy creates equilibria. And so you end up, like, with the companies just being very recognizably similar to each other.
1:31:27 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordswe live fundamentally, most of people spend their entire lives sadly in a, in a, in a vetocracy, right? Like where you need everyone to agree to do something, but you only need one person to vote against it to not do something.
1:31:46 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsOne good argument dismisses the entire idea is a very common way to evaluate options. What people very, very often don't do is reformulate all the arguments against the status quo, right?
1:35:56 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsThis is likely going to be misquoted, but I think the talent eventually takes care of itself. There are not that many good companies to work for.
1:43:06 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsAnd frankly, what we are looking for is like high agency experience. We look at like something went wrong in your story at some point. Well, now let's zoom in. How do you react? Give me minute by minute.
1:43:47 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsThat's, I think, the biggest product any company can deliver to their employees is that every day they're surrounded by people they deeply admire and can learn from.
1:45:14 · watch on youtube.com↗
Our reading
Raising a lot of money usually just gives a startup a whole lot more of what it already was.
Their wordsWhat mainstream money does is it gets you, I mean, sometimes it reveals, but usually it just like makes you get a whole lot more of what you got before. And people did raise early partly because they were not tight with money.
1:46:58 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsthere's a well-documented effect of when companies build monuments to themselves, they usually decline right after.
1:49:35 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsWe increase to 8 sometimes, but we think the best team size is 1. Because a single author can do things that is impossible to do for teams and hit high notes that are unreachable.
1:53:51 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsThis is the most fundamental design error that you can possibly make, is like create affordances in a product that make people predictably do the wrong thing.
1:55:07 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsFrom the perspective of people creating product, product doesn't exist. It's what other people call your work. A product is just details. It's millions and millions of little details that are appreciated if they're composed right.
2:00:20 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsIt was like easy to learn, hard to master, which is exactly, I think, a hallmark of everything that's worth doing.
2:01:15 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsEvery, like, there's no right decision. There's only context in which decisions turn out to be correct.
2:04:28 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsIf we would've recorded this in week 52 of 2025, it would even be different, right? Like, I might not even make this analogy so strongly, but that's how much is happening, that the world changes every 3 weeks right now.
2:07:12 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsYear 21 is like, this is going to be the most interesting year in this company's history, probably in everyone's, I think literally everyone's career. Just everything is lined up.
2:12:31 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsI think we need to move nostalgia into the bad category of words and bias into the good category of words, because bias is actually perfectly fine. It's like, without bias, you actually have no convictions.
2:13:06 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsWell, the people who read it are the people who are very, very good at following lists. So the people that you probably describe are not the people who go look for the cheat sheet. The people you are trying to avoid hiring are the people who would study the cheat sheet very well.
2:13:46 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsIf it can't be put in numbers or can't be written as a list, Companies hate it. Yet almost everything you have to do to build a great company is other things that are these things, and you shouldn't write down. Actively avoiding to write something down is sometimes the most important thing you can possibly do.
2:14:21 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsAgain, people like to be consistent over time. I just don't find that important. I will— I found the cheat code to always being right is just like change your opinion every time you get better information, right?
2:15:04 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsLike, again, what's the job you want to do? Is it want to look good or be good? Right? And so you're going to like just change Like, it needs to be okay to change your mind when better information comes along.
2:15:34 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsThe reason is actually, this is almost the most important thing. It's everything comes in layers. There's like just so many different, like what's the operating, the optimal operating system in some frame of reference is often contradictory on the opposite of a larger frame of reference.
2:21:03 · watch on youtube.com↗
Their wordsthe reason why they are my customers is because they have someone who responds to these questions in 24 hours. It's the other way around. It's causal.