Ben Brown

Jensen Huang has a message for the UK

Major life hack: Don't complain, ever. Nobody likes a complainer. They drain the energy of everyone around them. It's exhausting spending time around someone who constantly complains about things outside their control. If it’s within your control, go do something about it. If it’s not, you’re just wasting energy thinking about it. Complaining gives too much power to the thing. Take back that power.

Never quit as a founder. I’m begging you. It’s 0 for longer than you’ll ever expect. No momentum. Soul-crushing doubts. Nobody seems to care. Even when it looks like it’s working, it’s not. You keep trying new things. You don’t lose hope. Then it snaps to 100. You finally find the one thing that resonates. You wake up with more customers than you can handle. Everything is breaking. Momentum keeps building even when you’re not pushing. Something changed. You didn’t get lucky, you just didn’t leave.

Tony Xu has a test for every candidate who made it to his final interview at DoorDash. He'd hand them $20 and an exit clause. "Here's $20. Go get 100 customers in 8 hours. And if you want to leave right now, there's a plane ticket waiting." This wasn't about closing deals. It was about separating two types of people: The ones who'd actually go knock on doors, talk to restaurant owners, figure it out in the messy real world. And the ones who'd sit at a desk, pull some data, create a model, and call it a plan. "Someone who's going to do something to go and collect information as opposed to someone who's going to collect data, scrape information from some internet protocol and then do some magical analysis on it." The difference is ruthless. One person figures out that coffee shops between 7-9am have owners who have 15 minutes to listen. Another person builds a spreadsheet of optimal outreach times. One learns by doing. The other learns by analyzing. At a startup with 1,000 days of survival on the line, you can't afford the second person. Tony knew that the people who'd actually go out, talk to humans, get rejected, adapt, and come back with 50 customers (not 100) were the ones who'd build something. The rest would optimize their way into irrelevance. From: @davidsenra conversation with @t_xu

Jensen securing a decade of DRAM while crushing Korean fried chicken and chugging Soju and beer with the Chairman of Samsung in Seoul a month ago was the business move of the year

I used to phrase it as: Startup CEOs can’t share their troubles with their employees because they’ll quit. They can’t share with their investors because they’ll get fired. And they can’t share with their spouse because she will say “You never should have quit that job at the phone company!”

Ben Horowitz with another banger On fear and self-belief: “If your guts aren’t boiling, you’re not even trying.”

Jung said: “The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate.” Founders on their journey must overcome their inner situation and integrate their shadow. Only then will they have a chance at altering fate itself.