Peter Thiel on the importance of a powerful story When asked what he looks for in an entrepreneur to back, Thiel responds: “We’re looking for companies where there is a very powerful narrative around the company. Obviously you want people who are very smart, very talented… But beyond that, there has to be an ability to attract a number of other talented people. And that’s how you really build the critical mass that builds these great businesses.” He continues: “Normally when we find talented people with a powerful story, that’s almost enough for us to invest. I think that’s actually very rare at this point. But you have to ask the question, what will motivate the 20th or 30th or 40th employee to join this company? It’s probably not financial and it’s probably not fame or anything like that. It has to be that they believe that there’s something incredibly powerful and valuable about what it’s doing.” Video source: @cwclub (2011)

Vlad Tenev on why he created a community for Robinhood’s top 150 employees “We very much concentrate rewards with our top performers. So if you’re one of the best people in the company, you get rewarded very, very well. Promotions are zeroed in on those people. I have a founders community too, which isn’t just the people that report to me.” In most companies, the the people at the top of the org chart are most important. However, Vlad’s goal for this founders community is to fight against that. As he explains it consists of the top 150 people at Robinhood by impact, across all levels: “It started out as being compensation-centered. For the best people, we have a discretionary budget that we allocate towards them. But over time it has grown into an actual community. If I go through the updated strategy or vision, we get those folks together. We get their feedback. We do events — we have events in each city and get them together for dinners.” When he inducts people into this community, Vlad tells them: “If there was a disaster and we had to rebuild Robinhood with 150 people, you would be in that group.” He explains: “You always have to be aware of who your best people are.” Video source: @stripe (2025)

Elon Musk explains his favorite interview question “When I interview somebody, I really just ask them to tell me the story of their career. What are some of the tougher problems that they dealt with? How they dealt with those. And how they made decisions at key transition points. Usually that’s enough for me to get a very good gut feel about someone.” Elon continues: “And what I’m really looking for is evidence of exceptional ability. Did they face really difficult problems and overcome them?” He will also try to make sure that the person is actually responsible for the accomplishments they claim. And the best way to do this is by asking detailed questions: “Usually the person who has had to struggle with the problem, they really understand it, and they don’t forget.” One thing Elon does not look for is a college degree - or even a high school diploma: “If somebody graduated from a great university, that may be an indication that they will be capable of great things, but it’s not necessarily the case. If you look at people like Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs - they didn’t graduate from college, but if you had a chance to hire them, of course that would be a good idea.” He concludes: “[I’m] just looking for evidence of exceptional ability. If there’s a track record of exceptional achievement, then it’s likely that that will continue into the future.”

“I regretted that pretty much immediately” - Vlad Tenev on Robinhood’s remote-first policy “We announced we were a remote-first company in 2022, and I regretted that pretty much immediately,” the Robinhood founder admits. “That was the wrong decision.” Vlad continues: “Everyone said it was a one-way door, but it turns out it’s a two-way door. You can reverse pretty much anything.” Robinhood isn’t 100% in-office today, but they require senior leaders and executives to be in-office 5 days per week. Managers must be in-person 4 days, and individual contributors 3 days. Vlad explains his reasoning as follows: “If you’re an individual contributor and you’re doing work, it’s very nice to know that your manager is going through more pain than you. I think that’s also a general principle for shipping fast and motivating [employees]. It has to start at the top, and you have to be willing to do yourself to a higher degree what you ask of everyone else.” Video source: @stripe (2025)

Paul Graham’s 6 principles for making new things

Jeff Bezos explains why he didn’t take additional equity building Amazon Jeff is asked why he only paid himself $80,000 per year and never took additional equity during his tenure as CEO of Amazon. He responds: “I asked the comp committee of the board not to give me any comp. My view was I was a founder. I already owned a significant amount of the company, and I just didn’t feel good about taking more. I felt I had plenty of incentive. I owned more than 10% of the company, and earlier — before it was diluted by various things — more than 20% of the company. I just felt how could I possibly need more incentive?” Jeff continues: “Most founders own big chunks of the company. They’re more like owner-operators. The way they increase their wealth is not by getting more equity. They just want to make the equity they have more valuable. And so I just would have felt icky about it. And I’m actually very proud of that decision.” Jeff is especially proud of how much wealth he’s created for other people: “Somebody needs to make a list where they rank people by how much wealth they’ve created for other people — instead of the Forbes list where it ranks you by your own wealth. Amazon’s market cap is $2.3 trillion today. I own about $200 billion-ish of it. So if you take $2.3 trillion and subtract out the piece I kept for myself, then I’ve created something like $2.1 trillion of wealth for other people. That should put me pretty high on some kind of list. And that’s a better list — how much wealth have you created for other people?” Video source: @nytimesevents (2024)

Andrej Karpathy explains what makes Elon Musk unique “I don’t think people appreciate how unique [Elon’s style] is. You read about it, but you don’t understand it—it’s hard to describe.” The first principle Karpathy — who led the computer vision team of Tesla Autopilot — has observed is that Musk likes small, strong, highly-technical teams: “At companies by default, teams grow and get large. Elon was always a force against growth… I would have to basically plead to hire people. And then the other thing is that at big companies it’s hard to get rid of low performers. Elon is very friendly by default to getting rid of low performers. I actually had to fight to keep people on the team because he would by default want to remove people… So keep a small, strong, highly technical team. No middle management that is non-technical for sure. That’s number one.” Number two is that Elon wants the office to be a vibrant place where everyone is working on exciting stuff: “He doesn’t like stagnation… He doesn’t like large meetings. He always encourages people to leave meetings if they’re not being useful. You actually do see this where it’s a large meeting and if you’re not contributing or learning, just walk out. This is fully encouraged… I think a lot of big companies pamper employees, but there’s much less of that. The culture of it is that you’re there to do your best technical work and there’s intensity.” Elon is also unusual in terms of how closely connected he is to the team: “Usually the CEO of a company is a remote person, five layers up, who only talks to their VPs… Normally people spend 99% of the time talking to the VPs. [Elon] spends maybe 50% of the time. And he just wants to talk to the engineers. If the team is small and strong, then engineers and the code are the source of truth… not some manager. And he wants to talk to them to understand the actual state of things and what should be done to improve it.” And lastly, Karpathy believes the extent to which Musk is involved day-to-day operations and removing company bottlenecks is not appreciated. He gives an example of engineers telling Elon they don’t have enough GPUs. As Karpathy explains, if Elon hears this twice he’ll get the person in charge of the GPU cluster on the phone. If NVIDIA is the bottleneck, he’ll get Jensen Huang on the phone. Video source: @sequoia (2024)

Naval Ravikant on why you don’t need to be secretive with your startup idea “You can always recognize the first-timers because they’re too secretive. And you can always recognize the experienced ones because they don’t care. Once you’ve done these a few times, you realize how much execution, difficulty, and risk there is, and how hard it is to get people to listen to you and believe you. Eventually you end up shouting your idea from the rooftops, just in the hope that somebody will actually use the product. So you end up with the opposite problem.” Video source:@gigaom (2010)

David Sacks on why founders get distribution wrong “The biggest mistake I see these days is brilliant founders who are brilliant product people, but they haven't thought about how they're going to make their product grow. They launch their product and it's like crickets chirping.” Having a technique that gets you to scale is very important. “If you're going to have a breakout startup, you've really got to think about how you're going to innovate on distribution, not just product.” What’s tricky about this is what he calls The Law of Distribution Arbitrage: “Successful distribution techniques are copied until they are no longer effective. Think about SEO. The first people to use that technique got a lot of traffic from Google. Then, a whole bunch of people started doing it and they started gaming the system. Eventually, Google did their notorious Panda release and everyone using SEO basically lost traffic.” Friend virality is another example: “If you look at Facebook, the friend virality was very powerful in the early days. Then people got sick of the spam and stopped paying attention… So the techniques that work initially to get distribution don't stay working because everyone copies them until the channels are spammed to death.” Video source: @draper_u (2014)

Elon Musk on the most important lesson he learned at PayPal “The initial thought with PayPal was to create an agglomeration of financial services. So you’d have one place where all of your financial services needs would be seamlessly integrated and work smoothly. And then we had a little feature for email payments. And whenever we’d show the system off to someone, we’d show the hard part — the agglomeration of financial services, which was quite difficult to put together. Nobody was interested. Then we’d show people email payments, which was actually quite easy, and everybody was interested.” Elon continues: “I think it’s important to take feedback from your environment. You want to be as closed-loop as possible. And so we focused on email payments and really tried to make that work. And that’s what really got things to take off. But if we hadn’t responded to what people said, then we probably would not have been successful. So it’s important to look for things like that and focus on them when you see them and correct your prior assumptions.”