flâneur

Vedant Nair

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on the atlas — 31

highlights — 12

  • As former Stripe employee Patrick McKenzie put it: “Stripe is a celebration of the written word which happens to be incorporated in the state of Delaware.”
    How Stripe Creates the Best Documentation in the Tech Industry - Mintlify
  • Almost everyone I’ve ever met would be well-served by spending more time thinking about what to focus on. It is much more important to work on the right thing than it is to work many hours. Most people waste most of their time on stuff that doesn’t matter. Once you have figured out what to do, be unstoppable about getting your small handful of priorities accomplished quickly. I have yet to meet a slow-moving person who is very successful.
    The Unrelenting Ambition of Sam Altman
  • Minimize your own cognitive load from distracting things that don’t really matter. It’s hard to overstate how important this is, and how bad most people are at it. Get rid of distractions in your life. Develop very strong ways to avoid letting crap you don’t like doing pile up and take your mental cycles, especially in your work life.
    The Unrelenting Ambition of Sam Altman
  • I absolutely could do a better job at managing the organization—it was my chief weakness at Loopt, and I still have some learned helplessness about it. I don’t want to do weekly one-on-ones and let’s-talk-about-your-career-paths. But I think it’s O.K. to have a little mess at the organizational level if we’re making the big decisions right, since those are the ones that bring us all our returns.
    The Unrelenting Ambition of Sam Altman
  • “We had limited our projected revenue to thirty million dollars,” Chesky said. “Sam said, ‘Take all the “M”s and make them “B”s.’ ” Altman recalls telling them, “Either you don’t believe everything you said in the rest of the deck, or you’re ashamed, or I can’t do math.
    The Unrelenting Ambition of Sam Altman
  • “It’s useful to focus on adding another zero to whatever you define as your success metric—money, status, impact on the world, or whatever. I am willing to take as much time as needed between projects to find my next thing. But I always want it to be a project that, if successful, will make the rest of my career look like a footnote.”
    The Unrelenting Ambition of Sam Altman
  • What I learned most from the whole process is there is no way to passively build a successful business. You’re either all in or you’re not. There is no in between.
    Tope Awotona's Unwavering Determination
  • It opened my eyes that people who start great companies are very human and very ordinary in most ways. What is extraordinary about them is they take action. They see something and they grab it rather than wait for someone else to come fix it. And then of course, there is a lot of uncertainty along the way and they learn fast and they adjust and they just figure it out. That was an aha moment for me. That was the first time where I was like, you know what, entrepreneurship is attainable for me. These people are smart and I think I’m just as smart as they are and I can do it as well.
    Tope Awotona's Unwavering Determination
  • Ellison insisted that his recruiters hire only the finest, and cockiest, new college graduates. "When they were recruiting from universities, they'd ask people, 'Are you the smartest person you know?' And then if they said yes, they'd hire them. If they said no, they'd say, 'Who is?' And they'd go hire that guy instead," Oracle engineer Roger Bamford said. "I don't know if you got the smartest people that way, but you definitely got the most arrogant." Ellison's swaggering, combative style became a part of the company's identity. This arrogant culture had a lot to do with Oracle's success. But…
    The Ruthless Determination of Larry Ellison
  • How much does it cost Pepsi to get one half of one percent of the market from Coke once the market has been established? It's very expensive. This market is being established. If we don't run as hard as we can as fast as we can, and then do it again twice as fast, it'll be cost-prohibitive for us to increase market share.
    The Ruthless Determination of Larry Ellison
  • Ellison was sizzle, and Miner was steak. In the coming years Ellison peddled the product and Miner built it— always in that order.
    The Ruthless Determination of Larry Ellison
  • On one of his first days at SDL, Scott was trying to connect SDL's computer terminals to the Precision Instrument computer. There was a problem: A Sheetrock wall stood between the SDL offices and the computer room. Scott said, "Larry, we need to hook up these terminals. How are we going to hook them up?" "I'll show you how," Ellison replied. He grabbed a hammer and smashed a hole through the wall. Bruce Scott came to believe that Ellison’s entire business philosophy could be summed up in that single act. "Find a way or make one. Just do it," Scott said.
    The Ruthless Determination of Larry Ellison