“only the paranoid survive”—was

My key insight at this time was one that would become the core of how I run my businesses today: It’s not enough to do what you love. You also have to stop doing what you hate. The goal isn’t—as many people think—to not work at all; it’s to only work on things that you enjoy doing. The stuff that you’d do even if you didn’t get paid for it.

“It’s a mistake to be deeply ideological about almost anything,” he said. “It’s better to have doubt.”

Over and over, he’d build elaborate charts and graphs, trying to underscore just how much money I was blowing trying to launch these goofy side businesses.

“You can always understand the son by the story of his father. The story of the father is embedded in the son.”

At conferences, I quickly started to learn that the most important business connections were made in bars, gossiping with drunk executives. Buying a round of drinks often generated a huge return on investment. For instance, there was a big Facebook party in Austin, where I got a crowd of startup founders wasted on my credit card. I must have bought

This had led me to the epiphany that there is always somebody else who loves the job you hate. You might find accounting boring, for example, but I promise you there is somebody whose idea of a great night is eight hours of pivot tables in Excel.

businesses are like tapeworms—they have to grow in order to stay alive. Without growth, there’s no additional revenue to increase salaries over time. If a star employee came to me asking for a promotion and I told them, “Oh, we decided to stop growing this year, so I can’t,” would they stay? Unlikely.

I was embracing what I came to call Lazy Leadership: the idea that a CEO’s job is not to do all the work, but more importantly to design the machine and systems. Not a player on the field. Not the coach. But the owner, sitting up in a little box at the top of the arena, passively observing until the next critical fifty-thousand-foot decision had to