Passion & Pain

When you read a biography, everybody wants to know the beginning. There's always a part of the biography after they're super rich and famous and they're donating a bunch of money and I'm glad they're doing all that, that's fundamentally not interesting. How many people can relate to that? But everybody can relate to, hey, I have a dream. This is wh... See more

There's a cult. Anybody knows this. Go fly to LA and try to go to In-N-Out. Good luck. I was just in LA two months ago. Tried to go to In-N-Out twice because I read the book. I'm not waiting in that line. There's a cult around In-N-Out because the expression of the founder's soul is manifest in the product. People have In-N-Out tattoos. How many pe... See more

That's another thing too, where I'm only interested in people that do things for a long period of time. There is a subset of people that can start a great business or be a great investor for two years, five years, 10 years. I'm interested in people that, you started the conversation saying about Edwin Land and Estee Lauder. Okay. Two obsessives. Th... See more

There is a filmmaker that worked for Pixar that put this beautifully, and he used the metaphor of doing anything difficult, but for your high purposes of building a company. He says, "If you're sailing across the ocean and your goal is to avoid weather and waves, then why the hell are you sailing?" You have to embrace that sailing means that you ca... See more

Podcasting is the printing press for the spoken word,. The revolution that Gutenberg unleashed when he invented the printing press, may have taken 40, 50 years, 60 years, 100 years to gain steam, even goes faster now, but that is exactly what podcasting is. Everybody's like, "Oh, we have too many podcasts." That's like saying you have too many movi... See more

The reason I say, "Listen, man, you guys should be reading Estee Lauder's autobiography", is because it is my belief that if you were able to bring her back from the dead and let her start a company today, she'd be kicking most entrepreneurs ass, up and down the court, Edwin Land too. Edwin Land started working on what would become Polaroid when he... See more

The only person out of every single person that I've studied on the podcast that I consider my blueprint for, I want that, I want their life in totality is Ed Thorp. Because, history's greatest entrepreneurs, how'd they get there, they're going to over optimize their work to the detriment of everything, their health. In many cases, they die earlier... See more

All these books, there is the decision you can make to compromise on the quality of your product or take a shortcut or do something you would never dare do it. I just read the biography of the guy that started In-N-Out. Compared to his contemporaries, the McDonald's and Carl's Junior and all this explosion of fast food that was happening at that ti... See more

Did Steve jobs ever say, "Hey, I want to make a $100 million company?" That was never in discussion. He said, "I want to make insanely great products. Then I want to get really good at marketing because I want everybody in the world to have an Apple device, and the way to do that is to get really good at marketing."

The best description of a business I ever heard came from Richard Branson. He's like, "All businesses, it's an idea or service that make somebody else's life better. If you make other people's life better, you'll capture that value in return." So I don't find many of these people are moderate.