VP @SpectrumReach. I love to read and learn. Continuous improvement is the goal.
Tampa, FL
Joined December 2009
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This was great. Excited to read the book. We are living in some wild times.
The first excerpt from The AGI Chronicles is out in @TheAtlantic!
It's the story of the central beef of the AI era: the feud between Dario Amodei and Sam Altman, who have hated each other for years.
Amodei and six of his colleagues left OpenAI in 2020 to start Anthropic, but nobody knew exactly why. After a year of digging and more than 150 interviews, I figured it out.
It involves Microsoft, Kanye West, a secret plan to sell AGI to Russia and China, and a Slack channel called BATNA.
Most of all, it involves two people who didn't trust each other to build the most powerful technology either of them could imagine -- a mutual enmity that still fuels the AI race today.
theatlantic.com/technology/2…
Ben Van Horn retweeted
My favorite essay from The Manual.
There are a lot of things you can practice in life, but the more you practice this, the better off you’re going to be in nearly any situation.
a.co/d/0fOxKczP
From his great book, “This is Strategy”
a.co/d/03iYGEwe
Ben Van Horn retweeted
Michael Moritz on the importance of storytelling in business.
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
Ben Van Horn retweeted
The Texas locker room at halftime vs Ohio State
“What’s in your mind right now? Is it on what happened? Is it on the 10 percent or the 90 percent what we’re gonna do about it? I need you living in the 90 percent man”
So cool to see this kind of stuff
Ben Van Horn retweeted
Q2 is in, and it was a monster quarter.
→ $116B in merchant sales, up 32% YoY
→ $3.6B revenue, up 34% YoY
→ $654M free cash flow, 18% margin
Five quarters running, GMV has grown more than 30%.
The bigger story is underneath the numbers: every shift AI is creating happens to play to @Shopify's strengths.
Ben Van Horn retweeted
The people who can hold the whole system in their head are gonna run circles around everyone else. Been true forever, just way more obvious now.
nitter.cf/lennysan/status/207927…
My biggest takeaways from @Netflix's Chief Product and Technology Officer Elizabeth Stone:
1. Elizabeth believes that “systems thinking” is becoming the most important skill in the AI era. In engineering and product, this means people who can see across business domains and build the common capabilities that let many teams move quickly. In design, it means experience designers who create templates and design systems so that non-designers can ship work that stays coherent and on-brand. The underlying driver is velocity: when more people are doing more types of work at higher speed, you need to be good at building common scaffolding.
2. Systems thinking is learnable: zoom out one level from your specific problem. Given a task, step back one click—what bigger problem does this serve the business, will it scale across the product surface areas, should it become a platform capability? The companion habit: do your job in a way that helps your manager do theirs. This will force you to think about how all the pieces fit together.
3. Expect a storming phase before a forming phase. The role confusion people feel right now (“What is my job anymore?”) is the predictable middle of any transformative technology. Elizabeth’s advice: focus on high-quality source-of-truth data, guardrails on what ships, and constant internal reinforcement that humans own what they create.
4. The top AI labs converged on Netflix’s culture. High agency, high talent density, top-of-market pay, bottom-up thinking, fast experiments—the traits Lenny hears constantly from AI labs were in Netflix’s early culture deck. Elizabeth’s explanation: excellence comes from hiring exceptional people, trusting them to do great work, and holding them accountable.
5. Netflix’s culture is centered around building “excellence as an operating system.” High talent density, radical transparency, context not control, and the keeper’s test. These work together to create an environment of trust and accountability, without bureaucracy. But it’s also uncomfortable. It requires tolerating people making decisions you’d make differently, resisting the reflex to add process when things go wrong, and letting people carry the weight of their own choices. Elizabeth describes the hardest part as “being comfortable in that discomfort.”
6. The keeper’s test is as much about recognizing great people as it is about removing the wrong ones. The test—“If this person told me they were leaving, would I fight to keep them?”—is often cited in its difficult form: the moment you realize someone isn’t the right fit. But Elizabeth uses it predominantly as an entry point for honest performance conversations that are deeply positive. Most of the time the answer is “I would fight so hard to keep you,” which creates the opening to articulate strengths, discuss impact, and name what’s working. Good feedback hygiene needs a forcing function; the keeper’s test provides one.
7. Specialization is trending down—adaptable generalists are trending up. We’re shifting away from narrow stack-layer specialists (pure frontend, pure backend) toward people who can navigate fluidly across layers. The same logic applies to business domain knowledge: the mindset of “I’m a payments expert, full stop” is less valuable than “I know payments well enough and I’m willing to imagine what the future version of this looks like.” The meta-skill is learning to learn, not locking into a single lane.
8. Netflix’s approach to AI fluency is a universal principle, not a level-specific expectation. Rather than rewriting career ladders to specify what AI competence looks like at each level, Netflix added a single aspiration across all roles and levels: AI fluency. What fluency means varies by function and seniority, but the non-negotiable minimum is the same everywhere—an open-minded, experimental mindset, genuine curiosity, and comfort with ambiguity.
Ben Van Horn retweeted
The people who still read won't just be better informed. They'll be (with a couple exceptions) the only ones who can think well. You can't think well without writing well, and you can't write well without reading well.
Ben Van Horn retweeted
"@naval said this thing like, 'It's really hard to build a restaurant that's really successful. It's also really hard to build a billion-dollar unicorn.' They're both going to be 80-hour weeks."
@alexhormozi on his advice for young people:
Ben Van Horn retweeted
The Kool-Aid Must Flow
When Apple launched Think Different in 1998, Steve Jobs wrote this in an address to employees:
“The most admired companies in the world have one thing in common: They stand for something. The world can change. Their products can change - but their core beliefs remain the same.”
How many startups would you claim to know the core beliefs of?
Try to name them and you realize the list is actually quite short. Everyone agrees who makes the list and who doesn’t.
OpenAI and Anthropic. Any Elon company. Midjourney. Ramp. Palantir. Stripe. Figma. Notion. Coinbase. Anduril. Like them or not, these companies stand for something. And they’re impossible to ignore.
Startups should be working very hard to get on this list.
If you're not, your company feels soulless. Toothless. Spineless. Boring.
Launches are forgettable. Talent bumbles. It’s all just spaghetti on the wall.
In the long run, no one cares who invested or where you worked before. People care when they feel something.
This is why the world erupted with hope for the future when a bootstrapped image generation company announced their medical imaging device and accompanying spa. Midjourney stands for something.
This is why when a payments company funds a cure for the common cold, publishes books, or puts a team on climate action, we celebrate the breadth of their ambition. Stripe stands for something.
This is why two 21-year-olds could convince the world’s best chip designers to come out of retirement to build a new one from scratch. In the most supply-constrained environment in history. Going up against the most valuable companies in the world. When most experts said it couldn’t be done. Etched stands for something.
Founders, do you know what your company stands for? Does your team? Candidates? Customers? If not, it’s time for everyone to find out.
Now here’s the open secret about belief: it isn’t automatic. It’s constructed.
Ask any of the teams on the list and they’ll tell you the same thing; serving up company Kool-Aid isn’t about perks like it used to be. It’s about giving people reasons to commit to your mission and each other.
Steve Jobs constantly told the Macintosh team they were rebels. He put a sign up in their office that said “it's better to be a pirate than join the Navy" and flew a skull and crossbones flag over their building.
Elon Musk posted rocket launch schedules above the urinals in every bathroom.
A bunch of artists at Facebook built a studio and churned out posters that went up in every office (they’re the reason there are posters on the walls of your startup). Most of us know about “Move Fast and Break Things.” Fewer people know about the one that was hung on Mark’s door the day of the IPO that said “Stay Focused and Keep Shipping.”
The desks at Valve have wheels on them because “you should always be considering where you could move yourself to be more valuable.” This is not symbolic. People literally move to be close to the teams they’re working with. When there’s density around a project, everyone knows there’s magic brewing.
Netflix employees were told “adequate performance gets a generous severance package.” Everyone could work with confidence that the person across the table was excellent at their job.
Etched moved half their team to Bangalore to be closer to a critical vendor.
Dario shares his contemplations about our future with AI in Anthropic’s Slack for the entire team to read. When a new post appears, employees huddle around laptops to read the latest together. One employee told me “it’s the closest I’ve been to church.”
This is how your team loves their jobs so much they can’t stop talking about it.
This is how you compete for talent with companies that can pay them 50x as much.
This is how people root for you.
This is how you get to do it your way with your people.
And if we aren’t doing that, what’s the freakin’ point?
The Kool-Aid must flow.
Ben Van Horn retweeted
My favorite thing @om wrote was actually an interview with Brunello Cucinelli in 2015. And to this day, I think it’s the single best thing you can read on running a business. Better than any book, better than any article.
Read it:
om.co/2015/04/27/brunello-cu…
Ben Van Horn retweeted
These Swedish dudes are tenacious as hell.
James J. Hill was the only founder in American history to build a railroad and not go bankrupt. He said “Give me Swedes and a bottle of whiskey and I’ll build you a railroad through hell.”
Steve Jobs wanted us dead:
“In their internal meetings they literally said: We’re going to kill you.”
“Imagine that you're a small startup and then the most respected product company in the world —and the person you look up to the most— Steve Jobs says that he's coming after you.”
“But not only that, later they go and buy Beats Music and bring in Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine!”
“We're going to kill you. That's what they literally said in their internal meetings. They gave us six months to live.”
