Startup Academy

Reddit Founder Alexis Ohanian explains why he's investing in women's sports: "I am certain 5-10 years from now, we will still watch, no matter how good the AI generated highlights get, watching the AI version of that Knicks final would do nothing for the human soul. Even if it was pixel perfect, if it didn't actually happen, it is irrelevant and worthless. So live sports has to be fundamentally human. No one is going to line up to see a bunch of robots play 18 holes of golf against each other where everyone hits a hole in one. The end state of this technology is some version of this perfection that no one's going to want to watch because sport has to be human. So I've been saying this for 5-6 years now. I'm only more confident about it. And I think what this technology does is it makes these assets more valuable. It makes them more engaging for fans. It improves training. It improves so many elements, but it does not replace by any means." – @alexisohanian with @daniburgz on @BloombergTV

🏆 The co-founder of $1B startup Daytona has a hiring rule most founders get backwards: "You actually want people that have won more rather than have lost more... When you fail, you learn how to fail... If you fail all the time, all you know is how to brush it off. You've never figured out how to unlock and win... You don't learn from failure, but you do learn how to fail." — @IvanBurazin, co-founder & CEO of @daytonaio, with @TurnerNovak on The Peel

💰 Scott Galloway on how to know when it's time to sell your company: "Simply put, do not trust your emotions. As a matter of fact, go the opposite... Business is awesome. Let's hold on and ride this out... Oh, wait. Things are wobbly... Oh, God. We should sell. The opposite. Acquirers are smart. When you're jamming and it's so bright outside you got to wear shades, if you get an inbound offer, that's when you hire a banker." — @profgalloway with @davidsenra on The Prof G Pod

💸 As a young energy trader, Bill Perkins was making his firm a fortune. His one regret: "Had I been smarter about it, I would have made a lot more money by having a lot of my money invested in the fund... What I didn't take into account is that I was very young, and maximizing risk at that age is probably the way to go. I should have been fully concentrated and just bet the farm, because I was always going to be able to get another job." — @bp22, author of Die With Zero, with @ShaanVP and @theSamParr on My First Million

🚗 Before he'd even started at Tesla, Jon McNeill went looking for why it was missing its sales number: "Can you look up for me how many people have done a test drive in the last 30 days who haven't been called back?... He called me back and said, 10,000?... The hardest thing in sales is asking for the sale... Then I went, oh, gosh, I don't work for Elon yet. And I just made a decision in his company... So I called Elon up and I said, hey, look, I'm really sorry... There was this long silence on the other end of the phone. And then he finally came on, and he said, that was a great decision. You're going to fit in here just fine." — Jon McNeill, former President of @Tesla, with @ShaneAParrish on The Knowledge Project

🖼️ Bill Perkins walked into an art auction with a simple plan. A stranger two seats ahead had other ideas: "I figured, okay, I'll just bid up $3 million, take it, scare everybody off, and walk out the building with this painting... Then it's just I and this other bidder going back and forth on this painting... During the middle of bidding... he turns around to me, he goes, 'I'm not going to stop.' And then I said to him, 'Well, then I'm going to make you pay.'" — @bp22, author of Die With Zero, with @ShaanVP and @theSamParr on My First Million

📊 One chart from Microsoft's earnings had Chamath doing a double take: "This is from Microsoft's earnings, it's really quite incredible. Microsoft's revenue went from $198 billion to $332 billion in the last four years, while staff only increased by 2,000 people. Isn't that stunning? You would have thought, before AI, that if somebody said, 'Great, we're going to get close to doubling revenues at this kind of scale,' you probably would have thought that headcount would have doubled too. And the reality is headcount stayed flat..." — @chamath, Social Capital founder, on @theallinpod

💼 An ex-Amazon VP on the kind of leader Jeff Bezos made rich: "He made a ton of money from Amazon, from Jeff rewarding him, not for him being the smartest guy, but for him being the 'I will just take on any mess you give me'... In a business as big as Amazon, sometimes all you need is a B... I need a guy who's going to go take a D or an F and get it to a B. And that's better than the high beta leader who's going to try and make that thing an A, but might not get there." — Ethan Evans, former Amazon VP, with @thesamparr on @mfmpod

🧠 @PalantirTech CEO Alex Karp on the move that gets people to the top: "Look, the CEOs I deal with, not all of them are technical. They're all shrewd, and they're all intelligent. In fact, by and large, one of the ways you make it to the top is you hide how smart you are... Every single person who's, sure, intelligent, tells you how stupid they are." — Alex Karp, CEO of @PalantirTech, with Leon Kalvaria of @Citi

💰 David Friedberg followed one dollar of Nvidia spending through the AI stack: "I took a look at the AI value stack to try and identify who's making money, where, and it turns out everyone's making money... For every dollar that NVIDIA spends, that turns into $4 of revenue for NVIDIA, 75% margin. And then that gets sold to SpaceX... they spent $10 billion on Colossus 1, five-year life, $2 billion a year depreciation. But then they're making $1.25 billion a month on Colossus. And then Anthropic is showing in this S1... about 85% incremental gross margin on every incremental dollar coming in. So at the end of the day, a dollar that NVIDIA spends turns into $18 that Anthropic is making, selling to customers." — @friedberg, CEO of @ohalo , on @theallinpod

🚪 @ShaanVP on what people are really after when they ask for advice: "All requests for advice are actually requests for permission. They don't want information. They want a short-term loan on courage... You ask five people for advice. What are you really doing? You're really looking for somebody to say the thing that you actually want... What holds us back from having the things we want in life is courage. It's not intelligence. The world is not intelligence-gated. The gates in your life don't require intelligence to break through. The world is courage-gated. It's action-gated. It's wisdom-gated... It takes courage to go do it, to try, to make a fool of yourself, to be a beginner." — @ShaanVP with @ChrisWillx on Modern Wisdom

🎓 @profgalloway on what he tells NYU students who want to turn down Google to start a business: "'I have offers from J.P. Morgan and Google, but I'm thinking about starting my own business.' And I say the following: Don't be f***ing stupid. Go to work for Google. They know how much drudgery and bulls*** is involved in any corporation. They know it. So they figure out a way to make it worth it." — @profgalloway with Dave Meyer on @BiggerPockets