My conversation with @PeterRahal, one of the best CPG founders on the planet. 0:00 Life after selling RXBAR for $600 million 7:29 Going all in and burning the boats 11:48 Building the most important food company of the 21st century 13:49 How a brand is like a human being 21:07 Why Peter always chooses the hard path 28:17 From zero to $300 million in two years 29:59 Why Peter started selling frozen cod 32:51 The organization is the product 36:56 Why he recruits former founders 41:15 Buying his supplier and victimizing his competitors 51:56 How Neil Mehta and Greenoaks earned a spot on the cap table 55:47 How Peter fundraises 1:00:31 Running a business is like a river 1:04:16 Why the company is named Medici 1:06:28 Bureaucracy is not inevitable 1:11:48 Why Peter has 25 direct reports 1:16:06 Peter's principle of reactionary leadership support 1:17:45 On divine discontent and loving the fight Includes paid partnerships.

My conversation with @PeterRahal, one of the best CPG founders on the planet. 0:00 Life after selling RXBAR for $600 million 7:29 Going all in and burning the boats 11:48 Building the most important food company of the 21st century 13:49 How a brand is like a human being 21:07 Why Peter always chooses the hard path 28:17 From zero to $300 million in two years 29:59 Why Peter started selling frozen cod 32:51 The organization is the product 36:56 Why he recruits former founders 41:15 Buying his supplier and victimizing his competitors 51:56 How Neil Mehta and Greenoaks earned a spot on the cap table 55:47 How Peter fundraises 1:00:31 Running a business is like a river 1:04:16 Why the company is named Medici 1:06:28 Bureaucracy is not inevitable 1:11:48 Why Peter has 25 direct reports 1:16:06 Peter's principle of reactionary leadership support 1:17:45 On divine discontent and loving the fight Includes paid partnerships.

My conversation with @PeterRahal, one of the best CPG founders on the planet. 0:00 Life after selling RXBAR for $600 million 7:29 Going all in and burning the boats 11:48 Building the most important food company of the 21st century 13:49 How a brand is like a human being 21:07 Why Peter always chooses the hard path 28:17 From zero to $300 million in two years 29:59 Why Peter started selling frozen cod 32:51 The organization is the product 36:56 Why he recruits former founders 41:15 Buying his supplier and victimizing his competitors 51:56 How Neil Mehta and Greenoaks earned a spot on the cap table 55:47 How Peter fundraises 1:00:31 Running a business is like a river 1:04:16 Why the company is named Medici 1:06:28 Bureaucracy is not inevitable 1:11:48 Why Peter has 25 direct reports 1:16:06 Peter's principle of reactionary leadership support 1:17:45 On divine discontent and loving the fight Includes paid partnerships.

Today is the 10 year anniversary of Founders. It’s my life’s work. Thank you for listening.

Charlie Rose once asked Michael Moritz what made Sequoia so successful.

I've always hated public speaking, especially in cases where I'm giving some type of "important" talk. To combat anxiety, I write out my talk verbatim and practice it over and over so it's practically memorized. Even when my nerves get the better of me, I still can usually say the words I've written.

Ali Ghodsi never wanted to be CEO. In 2015, he was interviewing for a professor job at Berkeley when the @Databricks board handed him the interim title. Revenue that year was $1.5M. This episode with @alighodsi will go down as one of my favorites. 10 things I took away: 1. Focus the entire company, orders of magnitude of attention, on its single biggest bottleneck. Like a laser, almost to an extreme. The cycle is 1-3 years, not weeks. If your focus changes weekly, then you’re just in firefighting mode. 2. There is nothing worse than a conflict-averse CEO. They are wonderful people, but they are in the wrong job. Conflict is the gym for a CEO: nobody likes it, but everyone has to go. 3. Study your enemy carefully, understand their weaknesses and apply your strengths to those weaknesses. Snowflake had 2x his revenue. He didn’t copy them. He found three weaknesses (proprietary, no AI, expensive) and hammered them account by account for four years. Watch the competition, never follow it. 4. The concept of a Lakehouse was ridiculed internally and online. No one wanted to market with this new term. So he made the whole company religious about it anyway, killed the ads that converted better without the word, and put it in the sales comp plan. It worked. All hands on deck, no exceptions. 5. Be willing to take a step back for a much bigger vision, even when the company is already succeeding. At multiple hundreds of millions in ARR, he was unhappy, because the vision he pitched investors wasn’t the company he was running. So he took one step back to go ten forward. 6. On the flat org, player-coach model that a lot of people have talked about this year: “it’s BS.” Separate how the company thinks (AI, ontology) from how the humans get managed (they are after all, still humans). His staff meets 3x a week. I asked if it could just be coordinated in a Google doc. His answer: do you meet your wife and kids, or coordinate that in a Google doc? 7. His test for a sales leader: can they build the car, or just drive it? Ron Gabrisko, the Databricks CRO, had seen $0→50M and $50→100M+, and hadn’t changed jobs in 10 years prior to joining. Now he has been the CRO for over a decade. He built and drove the car the whole way. That almost never happens. 8. Hire execs ahead of the curve because by the time you need them, it’s too late. A real search takes 6-12 months. The extra time helps you increase false negatives and decrease false positives. Do an insane number of backdoor references because 80% of ‘front door’ references are bs. 9. The best salespeople are not super technical, so stop trying to force them to be. Square peg, round hole. The best win with professional aggression, high EQ, and mapping the real power base (how decisions get made high up in an organization), not technical depth. 10. Yes, your best AEs will annoy people. One of the first at Databricks got a meeting nobody could get, but got banned from the customer’s building for it. He told Ali, “what are you complaining about? I got the meeting.” Professionally aggressive is the bar. One bottleneck, zero wussing out. He reminds me of @elonmusk that way. Chapters 0:00 – Introduction 1:22 – The secret CEO search and why the board bet on a founder 4:11 – Professor or CEO? Always taking the harder option 8:18 – Pour everything into one bottleneck 12:16 – Killing PLG and learning what great enterprise sellers actually have 19:09 – Hiring ahead of the curve: sales leaders, execs, and back-door references 27:02 – The Snowflake rivalry: study your enemy, never copy them 33:22 – Lakehouse: conviction, ridicule, and the case for second acts 41:02 – The killer instinct and why conflict-averse CEOs fail 44:10 – Dunbar's number and rethinking the org chart around AI 48:00 – AGI is already here — enterprises just use it as a chatbot 52:55 – Does he still code? Two days for a connector vs. three quarters 57:18 – A day in the life, and why the Monday meeting isn't theater 1:04:53 – Why Databricks will go public, just not yet 1:08:09 – Get over conflict aversion, or don't be CEO 1:11:07 – Brian's takeaways Link to more in the comments.

Episode #433 How Michael Bloomberg Works 0:00 — "I was fired from the only full-time job I'd ever known and from the high-pressure life I loved." 3:43 — "If we're going to eat, someone's gotta sell." 4:21 — "You're always selling. And if you don't like to sell, here's my advice: get over it." — Ken Griffin 4:48 — "It's the doers, the lean and hungry ones, those with ambition in their eyes and fire in their bellies who go the furthest and achieve the most." 13:56 — "It's said that 80 percent of life is just showing up. I believe that. You can never have complete mastery over your existence. You can't choose the advantages you start out with, and you certainly can't pick your genetic intelligence level. But you can control how hard you work. I'm sure someone, someplace, is smart enough to succeed while “keeping it in perspective" and not working too hard, but I've never met him or her. "The more you work, the better you do. It's that simple. I always outworked the other person (and if I hadn't, he or she would be writing this book)" 15:04 — "I've never let planning get in the way of doing." 15:07 — "Life, I've found, works the following way: Daily, you're presented with many small and surprising opportunities. Sometimes you seize one that takes you to the top. Most, though, if valuable at all, take you only a little way. To succeed, you must string together many small incremental advances-rather than count on hitting the lottery jackpot once. Trusting to great luck is a strategy not likely to work for most people. As a practical matter, constantly enhance your skills, put in as many hours as possible, and make tactical plans for the next few steps. Then, based on what actually occurs, look one more move ahead and adjust the plan. Take lots of chances, and make lots of individual, spur-of-the-moment decisions." 15:51 — "Don't devise a Five-Year Plan. Central planning didn't work for Stalin or Mao, and it won't work for an entrepreneur either." 16:13 — "A reporter asked me what we at Bloomberg had failed at. My answer was, "Nothing; but what we accomplished wasn't always what we set out to do." Often, in the process, things worked that we hadn't planned on; unforeseen uses arose for our products; customers appeared whom we hadn't known existed-and exactly the reverse occurred for those we had been dead sure of. Planning has its place; the actual thought process sometimes leads to great new ideas. But you can only accomplish what’s possible when you get there." 16:45 — "Whatever your idea is you've got to do more of it than anyone else." 17:07 — "I've always loved my work and put in a lot of time which has helped make me successful. I truly pity people who don't like their jobs. They struggle at work, so unhappily, for ultimately so much less success, and thus develop even more reason to hate their occupations. There's too much delightful stuff to do in this short lifetime not to love getting up on a weekday morning." 17:30 — "Did I want to risk an embarrassing and costly failure? Absolutely. Happiness for me has always been the thrill of the unknown. Trying something that everyone says can't be done. Feeling that gnawing pit in my stomach that says: "Danger ahead." I want action, I want challenge. Work was, is, and always will be a very big part of my life. I love it. Even today, after toiling for 50 years, I wake up looking forward to getting in early, practicing my profession, creating something, competing against the best. It's a real high to be a participant rather than a spectator." 19:10 — "Banks and venture capitalists can be the worst enemies of entrepreneurs. They create doubt in entrepreneurs' minds. And worst of all, they think that the originator will be helped by their oh-so-insightful views on how he or she should run the new business. Often, they kill off what's different, special, and full of potential." 20:11 — "We've always built the product first. Selling is the only process we run simultaneously with development from the start." 20:22 — "We acted from day one. Others plan to plan for months." 44:32 — "I don't believe that business battles should be even. At Bloomberg, we don't want fair fights. We want to go into contests with an advantage." 45:20 — "Most fortunes are built by entrepreneurs who started with nothing and generally got fired once or twice in their careers. And throughout history, the vast majority of great writers, artists, musicians, dancers, and athletes have come from the less financially secure families." 48:17 — On never selling his company: "Why swap fun, influence, challenge, and more money than you could ever spend for only a multiple of more money than you can ever spend? Answering to no one is the ultimate situation."

Scientists found that the creatine supplement millions take for muscle gains is quietly raising brain energy levels and slowing early Alzheimer's cognitive decline by 30%

My conversation with Michael Moritz, one of the great venture investors of the last 40 years. Michael joined Sequoia in 1986 and co-led the firm with Doug Leone (@dougleone) from 1995 to 2012. His investments include Google, Yahoo, PayPal, and Stripe. His new book, Ausländer, traces his parents' escape from Nazi Germany and helps explain his lifelong interest in what shapes exceptional people. We discuss: - The infamous Steve Jobs profile - Why Don Valentine hired him - The question he finds most revealing when interviewing people - Monomania and the cost of greatness - Why he has never felt good at anything - Writing, journalism and AI - What he learned about himself writing Ausländer I'd recommend watching this one if you can. Michael was incredibly thoughtful and reflective throughout, particularly when talking about his parents, childhood, and the more difficult parts of his personal story. Enjoy! TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 0:53 Family History & Identity 7:03 Survival & Outsider Instinct 18:53 Studying Exceptional People 33:50 Self-Doubt & Success 41:17 Steve Jobs & Obsession 52:50 Joining Sequoia 1:03:22 Leadership & Alex Ferguson 1:08:25 Elon Musk & AI 1:17:12 Becoming Who You Are

new ep: 8 (stupidly simple) rules for building an audience from zero