I recently spoke with an employee who wants mentorship to become a CEO. Lots of people see themselves as senior leaders, and many can grow into the CEO role. But senior executives come in different types:
Caretaker CEOs manage and hold the ground that their predecessors took.
Chief Excuses Officers explain a lot (or too much).
Founder CEOs own it: the wins, the losses, the glory and the agony. Founder CEOs embody both the "father" and the "orphan" in JFK's aphorism that "success has many fathers, but defeat is always an orphan."
Founding a company means signing up for years of getting punched in the face. The steely-eyed founder takes them, gets up, and keeps building. Founders know how the sausage is made. Oftentimes things don't go your way. But you have to believe that things can change or evolve and get back on track, and that your vision can be realized.
Over time, the business becomes part of your identity. It's who you are and what you care about. It's in your DNA, especially when you have momentum, and you're on the cusp of building something truly great.
I love being a founder CEO. Other than working for McDonald's (flipping burgers) and Kroger (sacking groceries) when I was 15, nobody has ever given me a paycheck. That's how I was built. And I love it!
I love being a founder CEO.
Today's @WSJ headline, “California Voters Reject Unprecedented Tax on Billionaires,” misses the story from my perspective.
Voters didn’t necessarily rescue billionaires. I think they saw a Trojan horse. Today’s billionaire tax is tomorrow’s tax on everyone else!
I always believed that California politicians look at residents the way a seal looks at a baitfish. With an unyielding appetite to devour them (or in this analogy, the financial fruit of their labor).
When I lived in California, I never minded paying taxes. What miffed me was not getting value for my money.
So, like so many, I moved my family, my business, and my energy to the great state of Tennessee. I loved California for nearly 25 years. I love Tennessee even more.
This baitfish got away!
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We're all in this together.
The midterm elections are done, and that's a great thing for our country. At the most basic level, we showed the world that power belongs to the people.
Whatever side you're on, Americans should be proud today to be part of this wonderful experiment in self-governance.
Those who lost will rise again if they listen more and do the work of the people. And those who won will surely fall if they fail to govern well.
I pray our leaders fulfill the will of our fellow Americans with wisdom, courage, economy, humility, and faith in the equal application of the rule of law.
Here’s to greatest strength of America - it’s PEOPLE!
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One of my favorite aphorisms is “the bitterness of poor quality lingers long after the satisfaction of low price.”
cnbctv18.com/business/india-…
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Trump Accounts are the most truly American policy I’ve seen come out of Washington in a long time. Every beautiful American child gets a stake in our country’s growth on day one. Many thanks to @altcap for his tenacity to get this done. Other smart countries will copy this, and 50 years from now people will still be talking about it.
For those young people growing up without access and privilege, they will now get to see, experience, and benefit from a simple formula I have seen work in my life and at Harrow: Patience + Compounding + Work or Understanding What You Own = Ownership of Something Very Valuable. Ownership changes how you see everything.
That’s how you build a country and a company.
I am enjoying reading Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography. Notably, at 16, in addition to trying vegetarianism, he became committed to being a great writer. He copied essays from memory, turned prose into verse and back, and scrambled his notes to force himself to put them back in order. His dedication, ambition, and patience remains incredibly impressive, especially given his stage of maturity. Nevertheless, he desired and did become a "tolerable" writer. Today, modern tools, like SI, produce outcomes in seconds. I use it. I love it. But these tools allow us to skip the struggle of the process … the education and the understanding. If we skip the struggle, do we still get the education and understanding? It’s hard to believe we do. Patience and commitment, even with and to oneself, is in short supply these days.
Harrow closed on TYRVAYA this morning.
Dry eye means your eyes don't make enough tears. Most treatments add moisture from the outside. TYRVAYA is different. It's a nasal spray that helps the body make its own tears. And it works incredibly fast!
Tens of millions of Americans have dry eye. Harrow now has two very different prescription tools: VEVYE and TYRVAYA. One disease, two approaches, one company that makes sure patients can actually get the medicine.
Right product. Right price. Now with the right team.
Good for doctors. Good for patients. Good for Harrow stockholders.
globenewswire.com/news-relea…
In this week's @barronsonline, Andy Serwer quotes Geoffrey Hinton on the need for federal SI regulation. Hinton's point, essentially: nobody thinks drug companies should regulate themselves. They have to prove their products are safe before release. So SI should too.
I run a drug company. Hitching the SI regulatory wagon to the FDA's approach to drugs is the wrong move. Here's why.
The FDA began in 1938 asking "is it safe?" In 1962, Congress added a second question: "does it work?" The efficacy question is where drug companies spend most of their time and money. If we stood up a federal SI safety agency and in 20 years it ended up grading whether a chatbot works "as labeled," would that be a good outcome? I suspect not.
Why do drug companies jump through these hoops? First, for the opportunity to save and extend lives. And second, the financial reward … the potential for years of market exclusivity. Is the same financial reward the plan for SI? Or is it the quiet ask?
Here's what happens to SI companies without exclusivity: a washout. Remember the roaring late '90s? A sock puppet with a Super Bowl ad. A year later they were listed on fuckedcompany.com, right next to a few hundred other dotcom high flyers. Some of today's SI headliners will survive. Most get rolled up and smoked, and their assets get picked up cheap and redeployed by the next entrepreneur. Somebody should register fuckedaicompany.com now because failure is our system working!
Unless you're the one about to get smoked. Then an edifice of fear is a wonderful thing to build. SI is not likely the end of humanity. But scare tactics are wonderful if you need regulatory protection just as the competition closes in, early investors want out, and the bond payments come due.
Here's where the drug analogy actually works. Drug companies cure diseases that kill people. Drug companies extend lives. Lots of them. SI has the same shot at enriching and extending all our lives. Both are worth protecting from abuse, and neither is worth strangling in the crib.
Regulate the abuse. Not the ambition.
Built a @bot that thinks like Greenwald, Munger, Buffett, and Marks mashed together. Talk about Super Intelligence! Cheapest consultant I've ever had!
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