How @elonmusk fixed Starlink: “Starlink was a mess. It was 10X too expensive and they were building 1/10 of how many they needed. Elon’s like I've had it. This is now the bottleneck. I'm fixing this. He grabs a team of engineers that he trusts and they fly up to Seattle. They fire the entire Starlink leadership team. They sit down in a war room and they start running the algorithm. •What is the first principles of satellite design? •How simple can we make this thing? •Why does this exist? •Why are these two things so far apart? •Why do we need this much energy? •Why do we need this manufacturing process? And over the course of a few months they make a two order of magnitude leap. These people had never encountered this design before, but just by applying the algorithm and working with maniacal urgency towards this extremely high design bar, they created this product that's now —if it was a standalone business —would be worth tens of billions of dollars or more.”

A picture of @DHH's desk goes viral every few months, and he says the number one comment he always gets is that it can't be a real office because it’s too clean. His response: "If I have shit all over my desk, I'm not creating work, because my mind will just go to the shit." “It's a bit like that Marie Kondo thing where you go through simplifying your home and throwing out all this stuff. It actually creates free mental space.” “I need this pure cocoon.” “It's actually a form of procrastination, and I need to run out of obvious things to procrastinate on before I'll start the real work.”

.@dhh credits Marc Andreessen @pmarca with helping him the most during the darkest time of his professional life: "It was during that rough going where Andreessen came in. We were a small company of 60 people and 20 took the offer and left. That's almost a third of the company that decided to leave and we got to a point where we were thinking that not many more have to leave before we need to worry about whether we can keep the lights on. And it was actually Tobi who then put me in contact with Marc Andreessen because Marc had been exposed to this phenomenon at some of his portfolio companies. And Marc gave us reassurance and a bunch of contacts. Marc said, "Do you need someone to come in to help do programming or help with operations or whatever?" And I was floored by the generosity because Marc and I haven't always seen eye to eye on things. Especially in terms of venture capital. He's been one of the main faces of venture capital for decades and I've been kind of critical at times. And it was just a realization that all those grievances we might have thought to be so big once upon a time were actually minuscule. We were fighting the white walkers on the other side of the wall and all our internal squabbles were going to be for nothing if those f*ckers got inside the wall and destroyed everything. And that felt like a real threat at the time. That could've happened. They could very well have just ripped the whole thing apart. And Marc clearly saw that that this was a collective, almost existential threat to the entire industry. If these activists were able to take over these institutions in the same way that they have taken over academia we would be f*cked and not just for a little while but potentially for decades. That couldn't stand. And Marc was incredibly helpful not just in terms of these contacts and introductions and so on but it was very powerful. When you have literally 40,000 people on Twitter calling you all the worst things in the world even the strongest individual might go for a second like "Holy sh*t. The mob is coming for me and there's no one else there." And there are other people there. Tobi was there. Marc was there. And it was incredibly helpful to give us the fortitude to go like "No do you know what? We're going to stick with it. We're not going to grovel. We're not going to apologize. We're not going to revert." And then what Marc also did was he gave me a syllabus for understanding the history of wokeness going all the way back to the '60s and beyond. That this didn't just come as lightning from a blue sky. This had an institutional grounding that was set in motion particularly in the '60s and the long march through the institutions, Herbert Marcuse and a lot of The Frankfurt School and all of these groups that had designs on how to reshape society and create the revolution they so dearly wanted, but with a timeline and a roadmap that was demarcated in decades. That it wasn't just like "Well we're going to put something together and then in two years something's going to happen." No they were sitting in the fucking '60s fantasizing about how to overthrow everything in the 2000s. It's actually incredible in a Dr. Evil sense of it but when you're on the receiving end of it it seemed a little less incredible and it was just difficult not knowing where's this coming from? Why is this happening all of a sudden? Well it wasn't happening all of a sudden. There was this long history of it and when you understood that history it made a lot more sense. We weren't just making a rejection for our little corner of the world. We were chipping in in the great civilizational battle of where this country was going to go, whether the white walkers beyond the wall were going to win. And we were like "No they're not going to f*cking win. Get them out of that f*cking wall. Take your goddamn spear and fire it with maximum velocity."

Ramp cofounder @eglyman says AI is reducing the need for specialized expertise and forcing leaders to rethink how they structure their businesses: “ We used to be in a world where skills were very scarce and very hard to find.” “ We're starting to get to a place where a very determined generalist can do much more than they used to be able to do.” “LLMs  have read more lines of code than any engineer alive. More medical case texts than any doctor alive. More company filings than any accountant who's ever lived or probably ever will live.” “In some sense, if I can just ask a good question, I'm the best doctor I've ever been in my life, and I'm not a doctor.” “ It leads you to question—you design organizations with lots of subspecialties, which can lead to walls and barriers and things that get lost between organizations.” “ I think we’ll start seeing fewer types of specialties within organizations, and it's leading a lot of organizations right now to question: do I have the right shape of an organization for the world that we're starting to enter into?”

The two things Ramp Cofounder @eglyman looks for when hiring: 1. Evidence of a spike 2. Exceptional drive “ There’s a whole community of people at Ramp we found because when they were 15 years old, they were playing like 80-100 hours a week on Minecraft.” “I'm less interested in: what is on the resume. I'm far more interested in proof of work. Often I'm really looking for signs of that.” “You can find that by searching: where is the work?” “So part of our hiring process is trying to look for people who are very active on GitHub.” “We're trying to meet people who were leaders in different bizarre fringe communities.”

A conversation with @JonathanRoss321, founder of @GroqInc. This is the first podcast that Jonathan talks about his $20 billion partnership with NVIDIA. In this conversation, we talk about his decade building Groq: why West Coast VCs kept passing on the company, how fast Jensen works, overcoming near-death experiences, and why he thinks the entire AI age turns on a single skill — knowing what to ask. Hope you enjoy this conversation: 0:00 The $20 Billion NVIDIA Deal Closed In 3 Weeks 0:25 Why GPUs And LPUs Are Better Together 1:46 When AI Talks To AI, Speed Wins 3:30 Always Start With A Hobby Project 5:55 Ask The Right Questions, Not Answer Them 8:23 There Are Infinite Ways To Be A Leader 13:00 I Was One Of The World's Worst Leaders 14:34 Fewer Constraints, More Room To Surprise You 16:31 At NVIDIA There Is No Politics 19:44 You Have To Learn Confidence 22:23 East Coast VCs Think, West Coast VCs Follow 23:50 The Keynesian Beauty Contest Of Silicon Valley 26:48 The Autonomy That Created The NVIDIA Deal 30:07 Making A Model Smarter By Making It Faster 34:52 Reality Quotient Beats Intelligence Quotient 35:44 Find The Dominant Game And Play It 37:11 A Founder's Job Is Full-Time Change Management 38:34 Return On Luck: Seize It Better Than Anyone 42:54 You Can't Sell Speed, You Have To Let People Try It 46:32 I Intend To: Intentional Leadership 51:07 Groq Bonds: Trading Salary For Survival 54:13 Hire For Negatives, Grow For Positives 58:46 Loss Aversion And Booking The Win Early 1:00:37 How Michael Jordan Weaponized Humiliation 1:03:13 Manufactured Discontent Drives Everything 1:05:02 Every Day Without Compute Has A Real Cost 1:07:07 Code Was Rationed, Now It's Nearly Free 1:10:04 Teach Kids To Ask Questions, Not Answer Them Includes paid partnerships.

A recurring theme from the history of entrepreneurship: Seeing opportunity where others only see waste. Ivanka (@IvankaTrump) on (1) expanding the secondary market to offset the 40% of produce grown that never makes it off the field, (2) supporting small and medium-size farmers, and (3) connecting their fresh produce with partners like Chobani instead of letting it go to waste: “There was no secondary market for any fruit or vegetable that didn't meet an exact specification in terms of size and color, even though the taste and the quality were in no way compromised.” “Well that makes no sense at all. Let's stimulate the demand side so that we could support these small and medium-sized farmers.” “Why isn't there a secondary market? Why aren't these great strawberries going to a juicer if they can't be displayed at stores because they don't meet cosmetic specification that's really exact?” “We stimulate demand by working with companies and getting offtake for these small and medium-sized farmers that's meaningful. Companies like Chobani. Now all of the fruit that we find in their beautiful yogurt products and smoothies is all sourced by Planet Harvest from small and medium farmers. That would've been 100% waste.”

Ivanka (@IvankaTrump) on escaping competition through authenticity: "@Naval always says escape competition through authenticity. If you're competing it's because you're copying. Build something that fully comes from you and that will feel most right. It’s also the thing that's least replicable. I love the idea of just escaping competition through authenticity but you have to do the hard work of knowing who you are."

Ivanka @IvankaTrump and @eladgil are working on a project that uses Al to translate the world's great public-domain books into every major language, making them accessible for free to anyone: “What are some of the positive use cases for AI? And we started talking about how so much of history's great works of information and literature are not accessible to so many people due to lack of access. AI has gotten so good that we could create high-fidelity translations of these incredible literary works. So you think about Dostoevsky, you think about Bronte, you think about Marcus Aurelius, or Epictetus. All of these works are available in the public domain. We can use AI to translate them into all the world's commonly spoken languages and make them accessible and available for free if you have internet access. So we're democratizing access to this incredible knowledge. We're calling it Alexandria Library”

My conversation with @IvankaTrump 0:00 Knowing What Excites You 2:00 The Sazan Island Project 6:00 Knowing Who You Are 9:00 Avoid Competition Through Authenticity 11:00 Creating Stillness 14:30 Finding Mentors In Books 17:00 Reading As An X-Ray Of The Soul 21:00 Phil Knight’s Shoe Dog 25:00 Meaning Redeemed By Hardship 28:00 The Call To Government 33:00 Handing Back The Keys 38:00 The Reset In Miami 42:00 Less And Better 46:00 Finding The One Thread 55:00 Turning Waste Into An Asset 1:02:00 Democratizing The World's Great Books 1:12:00 Marry The Right Person 1:18:00 Deciding What To Build 1:22:00 No Contract Protects A Bad Partner 1:24:00 Opportunity Where Others See Nothing 1:27:00 Backing Fragile New Ideas Includes paid partnerships.

Rick Rubin’s House on the Mountain test: Create according to your own taste, not for applause, critics, algorithms, or market demand. “Imagine going to live on a mountaintop by yourself, forever. You build a home that no one will ever visit. Still, you invest the time and effort to shape the space in which you’ll spend your days. The wood, the plates, the pillows—all magnificent. Curated to your taste.” “This is the essence of great art. We create our art so we may inhabit it ourselves.” “I'm willing to go to extremes to make the thing that I want to inhabit and it's not for anyone else. it's just for me.”

.@EricJorgenson on why Elon risks everything: "How many entrepreneurs that you know have risked going back to zero and public humiliation once they reach a nine-figure net worth? He's the only one I can name. He was all in before he asked anybody else to put in any money. $200 million into these own companies. That ability to not give up and not even think about giving up and just burn the boats and keep pushing and keep pushing comes from this maniacal devotion to the mission. Getting us to a new planet could mean the difference between consciousness continuing or not continuing. If you are truly in on that mission, of course it's worth risking public humiliation, of course it's worth risking $200 million, of course it's worth working 100 hour weeks and living in the factory. It's a really incredible test to give yourself: if you can imagine giving up on what you're doing, should you even start?"

Rick Rubin describes his daily struggle: “There is a part of me that doesn't want to show up for anything and I have to overcome that every day.” “I'm lazy. It's a real part of it. I'm telling you an honest piece of this which is every day it's not like "Let's go!” Every day it's like "Oh no. I've got to go work.”

My conversation with @RickRubin 0:00 Less Is More But Harder 2:00 Def Jam From The Dorm Room 4:00 Capturing Club Energy On Record 6:00 Going Deep On Influences 12:30 Why Reduced By Rick Rubin 14:00 Beatles Structure Meets Rap 16:00 The Ruthless Edit 19:30 Eminem: The Most Obsessive Artist 22:00 Lazy Workaholic 25:30 Protecting The Moment Of Magic 29:00 Dana White And Becoming A Podcaster 32:30 Professional Listener 44:00 Fishing And Showing Up 47:00 Johnny Cash And Constraints 55:30 Church Business vs. Banking Business 58:50 Run On Intuition Alone 1:01:00 Jay-Z vs. Eminem Process 1:04:30 In Service Of The Artist 1:09:00 Work As Diary Entries 1:13:30 Four Ways Success Destroys You 1:16:00 How To Sustain Success 1:21:00 The House On The Mountain Includes paid partnerships.

The loudest boos come from the cheapest seats. Dana White on ignoring criticism from those that can’t do: “These people are fucking zeros. They've never done anything in their life except talk. All the same guys talking shit now are the same ones who said the UFC peaked in 2016 and look where we are 10 years later: -Spike $35 million deal -Fox $100 million deal -ESPN $3 billion deal -Paramount $7.7 billion deal It's just crazy. You have to block all this noise out. Everybody that talks about this business and has an opinion on it are zeroes. They have no vision and they have no clue. They've never done anything in their fucking life except talk.”