Elon Musk on the first thing to do when starting a company “The goal with Tesla was really to try to show what electric cars can do because people had the wrong impression. We had to change people’s perception of an electric vehicle because they used to think of it as something that was slow and ugly with low range, kind of like a golf cart. That’s why we created the Tesla Roadster — to show that it can be fast, attractive, and long range… Until you actually have the physical object and they can drive it, it doesn’t really sink in for people.” Elon believe this principle is something all startup founders should take note of: “If you’re going to create a company, the first thing you should try to do is create a working prototype. Everything looks great on PowerPoint… But if you have an actual demonstration — even if it’s in primitive form — that’s much more effective for convincing people.”

Chamath Palihapitiya on the growth principles that got Facebook to billions of users “The most important thing we did was I teased out virality, and said, ‘You cannot do it. Don’t talk about it. Don’t touch it. I don’t want you to give me any product plans that revolve around this idea of virality. I don’t want to hear it.” Instead, Chamath urged the growth team at Facebook to focus on “the three most difficult and hard problems that any consumer product has to deal with”: 1. How do you get people in the front door? 2. How do you get them to an aha moment as quickly as possible? 3. How do you deliver core product value as often as possible? Chamath warns that focusing on virality is why you see so many startups experience this amazingly steep rise and then fall off a cliff. The second thing he set out to do at Facebook was invalidate all of the lore: “In any given product, there’s always people who strut out around the office like, ‘I have this gut feeling.’ It’s all about gut feeling. And most people’s gut feelings are morons. They don’t know what they’re talking about. Gut feel is not useful because most people can’t predict correctly. We know this. So one of the most important things that we did was just invalidate all of the lore… You can’t believe your own BS. Because when you do, you start to compound these massively structural mistakes that don’t expose core product value… You don’t listen to customers because you think it’s all about your gut. You don’t bother doing any of the traditional, straightforward, obvious things, and you lose yourself.” As Chamath explains, a maniacal focus on delivering core product value as frequently and fast as possible is what led Facebook to its most important realization: “The single biggest thing we realized was to get any individual to 7 friends in 10 days. That was it… There was not much more complexity than that. There’s an entire team now of hundreds of people that have helped ramp this product to a billion users, based on that one simple rule — a very elegant statement of what it was to capture core product value… And then what we did at the company was talk about nothing else. Every Q&A. Every all-hands… It was the single, sole focus.” He continues: “You have to work backwards from: What is the thing that people are here to do? What is the ‘aha moment’ that they want? Why can I not give that to them as fast as possible? That’s how you win.” Chamath recommends starting with a cohort of your most engaged users — What features are they using? What pathways in your product did they take? Then work backwards and try to get all of your other users to that same state.

Jensen Huang: It's easier to fall in love with what you do than to find what you love “A lot of people say, ‘Find something you love.’ I don’t know about that. I guess I’ve fallen in love with many things that I do. I loved it when I was a dishwasher. I loved it when I was a busboy. I loved it when I was delivering papers. I loved it when I was waiting tables.” Jensen continues: “I’ve loved every single job that I’ve ever had, and I’ve loved every single day at Nvidia that I’ve ever had. I just learned to love what I’m doing. It’s hard to find something that you love, but it’s easier to fall in love with what you’re doing. And once you fall in love with what you’re doing because you desperately want to do a good job at it, it’s easier to do it well and work hard.” Video source: @NorgesBank (2023)