there's an idea in this book where it says Jensen prioritized technical skill and maximum effort above all and as I was reading I noticed a lot of similarities between the way Jensen thought and ran his company with the way that Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos thought and ran their companies as well in fact from day one in Jeff basel's very first shareholder letter Jeff wrote about the importance and emphasized the importance
of having the very best team he wrote setting the bar high in our approach to hiring has been and will continue to be the single most important element of Amazon's success Jeff's focus on Talent is very similar to this quote that I found from Steve Jobs in an interview that Steve gave that very same year in 1997 and this is what Steve Jobs said he said that I think I've consistently figured out who the really smart people
were to hang around with you must find Extraordinary People the key observation is that in most things in life the dynamic range between average quality and the best quality is at most 2: one but in the field that I was interested in I noticed that the dynamic range between what an average person could accomplish and what the best person could accomplish was 50 or 100 to one given that you're well advised to go
after the cream of the cream he says you want to build a team that pursues the A+ players and this is exactly what ramp did ramp has the most talented technical team in their industry becoming an engineer at ramp is nearly impossible in the last 12 months they hired only. 23% of the people that applied when you use ramp you now have top tier technical talent and some of the best AI Engineers working on your behalf 24/7 to automate
and improve all of your business's Financial operations and they do this all on a single platform that means the longer that you use ramp the more efficient your company becomes this is important because as Sam Walton said in his autography you can make a lot of different mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation or you can be brilliant and still go out of business if you're too inefficient ramp
helps you run an efficient organization in the end of that interview that Steve Jobs gave he added a small team of A+ players can run circles around a giant team of B and C players from a customer's perspective what is it sound like when you have a small team of A+ players it sounds like this customer review that I read which said that ramp is like having a teammate who you never need to check in on because they have it
handled ramp gives you everything you need to optimize all your fin operations on a single platform ramp's website is incredible make History's Greatest entrepreneurs Proud by going to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business today that is ramp.com so the book that I want to talk to you about today is the Nidia way Jensen Wong and the making of a Tech Giant and it was written by Tay Kim the book is a company history of
Nvidia but that is not what I want to talk to you about I want to talk to you about how the founder Jensen has learned to run his company after Decades of experience and learning and practice and failure and pain and so there is 19 different ideas that popped out to me and they're like reoccurring themes and I think they to steal an idea from from Charlie Munger Charlie Munger has this idea that he talks about over
and over he talked about over and over again for decades he talked about the laa paloa effect and how there's these economic and social implications of these different ideas inside of a company that interplay with one another and the combination of them actually make the the traits more powerful and in typical Charlie merer fashion he said the person the man who doesn't understand this is a damn fool and so I
organized my notes into this list of 19 ideas that I learned from Jensen specifically how he runs his company from reading the book before I get there though I got to take another idea from Munger where he talks about the importance of why he read so many biographies and he says that when you're trying to teach the great Concepts that work I think it helps to tie them into the lives and personalities of the people who developed them so I before I
get to my list of 19 ideas I want to give you this brief overview of Jensen Wong's early life and then the pre history of Nidia and I think doing so will add context because Jensen runs Nidia in a very unique way he has built which I think all of he has in common with a lot of hist Cas entrepreneurs he built a company building philosophy that is natural and authentic to him he's been running the video for over three
decades and I think it's impossible to do something for such a long period of time unless it is natural and authentic to you so the the one of the most important things that happened in Jensen's life happened when he was four years old he was born in Taiwan his father visits America he goes to New York City and he realizes oh this is the land of opportunity I want if I want the best opportunity for my two sons I need
to get them to America and doing so had to feel like a daunting task to his father Jensen's family did not have money in fact they didn't even have a lot of stability they had to move around Taiwan depending on where his father could find work they did not the the two brothers Jensen and his brother did not speak English in fact I thought it was very fascinating how Jensen's mother decided hey the kids need to go to
America and if they're going to America they need to to learn English and so she would select 10 random words from the dictionary every day she'd make her sons uh memorize the definition and learn how to spell the words so 10 English words every single day and so in addition to reading this book I watched a bunch of interviews with Jensen and he talks about the fact that he has he feels a great debt the fact that sacrifices that
his parents made to give him access to essentially unlimited opportunity one of the great things about reading you know this is not technically a biography of Jensen but it can function as one and one of the the reason I become an evangelist for uh you know reading biographies I try to get people to read as many as possible is because you're not really yes we're studying and we're learning about the lives of other people
but it is natural it's human nature to put yourself in their shoes and think about how their story or their ideas relate to your own and this was you know actually surprisingly hit me in like an emotional point because I was just thinking about the fact that you know this is outside of Jensen's control he's 4 years old when this is happening and yet the decisions that were made before Jensen even had a memory affected the entire
trajectory of his life and I I thought about the fact that my paternal grandfather was born in Cuba he died before I have no memory of him he died when I was really young I think I was actually Four as a matter of fact maybe even younger and yet I owe the like the entire trajectory of my life was changed by a decision of an uneducated relatively poor man who was living in Cuba he was 38 years old he was working
any kind of job he worked as a butcher and in a in a factory that made shoes you know was not a prosperous man he was not an educated man he was married he had a baby okay a 2-year-old that's my dad and he cast her takes over and he decides somehow he knew he's like this is really bad I have to get out of here he winds up imagine living your entire life in a country you're 30 years old you have a wife and a kid you don't have
any money you don't speak the language and you just and you take that risk and you come to America and that decision based on somebody I don't have any memory of change the entire directory of my of my life is UN the luckiest the kindest thing that ever anybody's ever done for me the luckiest break ever had in my life and I think there's a lot of similarities between the what his parents are willing to do what Jensen's
parents are willing to do the fact that they send their their sons imagine sending your kids they send Jenson and his brother to Washington to Tacoma Washington to live with their aunt and uncle before they can get over to America themselves and then what happens they decide okay my my our boys are here we know they need to get a good education we're going to send them to an American boarding school okay so they
think would they find this place called onita Baptist Institute which is located in Kentucky to pay the tuition Jensen's parents sell off all their possessions now here's the problem it's not a prep school it's not a boarding school I mean technically boarding school but they thought the family thought it was a prep school it is a school a reform school for troubled young people so really the reason I I want to add this like extra
context for Jensen's early life for you is because I think this entire section and all the notes and stuff that I want to talk to you about before the the founding of Nvidia and really the first like 10 years of Nvidia too you could really summarize it by one of my favorite maximums in the history of Entrepreneurship and that is Excellence is the capacity to take pain Jensen has unfathomable levels I can't I I have not
discovered the end of his capacity to take pain he talks about this a lot so there's two things that actually happen at at the reform school I think are really important one the school holds the students to a very strict routine and you have to work every single day which Jensen does and loves to do now uh the other thing that was beneficial to him that probably didn't feel beneficial the time is that the first few months
Jensen was smaller than smaller and younger than than all of his classmates and they beat the crap out of him his roommate at the boarding school was eight years older than Jensen and they said there's a great description of him in the book that he's covered in in tattoos and and scars from stab wounds and so after getting his ass kicked a bunch they wind up like finding his footing G gaining respect he's
obviously somebody that's that's not going to back down from fight and Jensen much later on life is talking about this formative experience uh going to the school and he says as a result of this experience I don't get scared often I don't worry about going places I haven't gone before I can tolerate a lot of discomfort so then the other the next thing I want to talk to you about is I want to fast forward and at this point
we find Jensen is already graduated college he is working for a microchip company it's AMD Advanced Micro Devices and this is just his capacity to take pain his uh he's got large uh I would say he's got a lot of endurance and you know he's got a phenomenal work ethic and so by day he's designing microchips at AMD and at night and on weekends he's married and has two kids by the way so he's got a young family he's got a a
full-time job and he decides he wants to go to Stanford he wants to get a master's degree it's going to take him eight years to finish his master's degree because he can only go on nights and weekends and and spare time while he's working then raising his very young family but again he took away a very valuable lesson he says I have a very long-term Horizon I can be impatient about certain things but infinitely
patient about others I plug away and so here's another example that Excellence is a capacity to take pain everywhere that Jensen works everywhere he goes people realize he's really smart and then he winds up getting promoted rapidly almost everywhere he's at and he there's this line in the book that's fantastic it talks about like why does he think that he was able to be propelled from scrubbing toilet to managing entire divisions of microchip
of a microchip company and he believes it's his willingness and ability to put in more effort and tolerate more suffering than anyone else and again this is something he repeats in a bunch of the interviews I watched with him as well he says people with very high expectations have very low resilience resilience matters in success Jensen said greatness is not intelligence greatness comes from character and in
character in Jensen's view is can only be gained and actually earned as a result of overcoming problems setbacks adversities and refusing to quit perseverance is one of I think Jensen's most valued traits and it is also advice that he dos out so if you were to ask Jensen what is your advice on how to achieve success his answer is relatively consistent over the years he says I wish upon you ample doses of pain and
suffering so I want to get into a very important part of like the prehistory of Nvidia and Jensen is working at this company called LSI logic and there's a few actually there's three important things that jumped out of me that I think were important for the time that Jensen's uh that Jensen spent at LSI logic one he's going to pick up this maximum that he'll repeat throughout as he's building Nvidia it's called honing
The Sword and it's the idea that again this is something that Jensen has in common with Jeff Bezos Steve Jobs and a bunch of other people but I want to give you two examples there that you should seek conflict if you're working on something you care about care about don't avoid conf confrontation you actually seek conflict and Jeff basos said the greatest example of this he says if I have to choose between agreement and conflict I'll take
conflict every time why because it always yields a better result so they're having these explosive fights and arguments inside of like what what to build what direction how to run the company and he realizes that out like it might be temporarily uncomfortable to go through that experience when it's happening but on the other side of that is a better idea a more refined idea so the reading reason it's obvious called
honing the sword honing the sword how do you sharpen a sword you you hit it against a wet a Wet Zone and doing that over and over and over again um creates a sharper and a better sword this winds up becoming one of his main philosophies one of the 19 things I want to talk to you about when we get there but again every time I read anything uh it could be a book uh an article a tweet I always think about like how does what I'm
reading now relate to all the other you know 375 other books that you and I have studied on this podcast together and so honing the sword actually reminded me of Steve Jobs rock tumbler story so there's this great interview I think it's called Steve Jobs the Lost interview I think it occurred right before he went back to Apple so right right around 1997 so he tells a great metaphor Steve you know Master Storyteller has a great metaphor
for teams working on a product that they are passionate about and this is what Steve said there was an 80-year-old man that lived on my street one day he showed me a Dusty old rock Tumbl we took regular old ugly rocks and some liquid and powder and put them in the tumbler and he said to me come back tomorrow the next day we opened the can we took out these amazingly beautiful polished rocks the same common stones
that had gone in they rubbing up against each other creating a little friction creating a little noise had come out these beautiful polished rocks it is through a group of incredibly talented people bumping up against each other working together they polish each other they polish their ideas so the first thing that happen when he's working at Els logic he grabs this one philosophy he's going to use you know for multiple
decades into the future the second thing which is arguably the most important thing is this is where he's going to meet his future co-founders and there's another maximum I want to put into your brain that reappears over and over again in the books all time opportunity handled well leads to more opportunity so Jensen is working at LSI right and he's assigned the sun Microsystems account he is going to meet there's two
gifted programmers and Engineers uh Jensen said this you know this is one of the luckiest things ever happened to him the fact that he met Chris malachowski and Curtis PR these are going to be his co-founders so he is their lion between Sun Microsystems where they work and LSI where jensa works and so Chris and Curtis actually get upset at Sun micro assessments they decide to leave and they have this idea that they want want
to be consultants and advisers they want to tell they want to essentially pitch Samsung on taking one of their ideas and they're like hey we'll just you know design it we'll be consultants for them and they're like wait a minute we're like really good technologists we might have a lot of technical Brilliance but we don't know anything about contracts or business really we need to get somebody to help us and they're like
who's the best person that could help us and they loved working with Jensen so much and they thought he was so brilliant they're like oh we immediately reach out to Jensen so originally Curtis and Chris are like hey can can you help us like write this contract for this idea that we want to pitch Samsung we want to make sure we don't get screwed over they start meeting and eventually Jensen's just like well why are we doing
this for them why don't we start our own company and that's why I think it's so important to repeat over and over again that opportunity handled well leads to more unexpected opportunity you can never possibly predict the fact that you know every single job that Jensen does he does the best possible job he can and that that as the time passes as you as you read the book as you go as his life unfolds that the fact that he handled
the opportunity the best he did the best possible job he did unlocks all these other opportunities I remember there's actually a great way to to to think about this in one way I think about this all the time and like if you hear my own inner monologue um there's this basketball player he's a young basketball player named Anthony Edwards and he plays for the timber rules and they were like really outperforming what
people thought they were going to do in the playoffs and I heard one of his I saw a clip of one of his postgame interviews and I thought what he said was fantastic and he had a very Anthony Edwards had a very simple like oper like modus operandi or a way to approach thing he's like hey I'm just trying to kill everything in front of me I'm just trying to kill every thing in front of me is another way of saying that
whatever opportunity is in in front of me I'm going to do the best damn job possible and if I do that every day that opportunity handle well is going to lead to more unexpected opportunity now that's also combines with another Maxim that you and I talk about that relationships around the world so Jensen's working for LSI okay he goes to the CEO Wilfred Corgan and he's like hey I'm going to leave I'm going to do this
this business with Curtis and Chris and what is lsco the first thing he says can I invest because he's like you're you're brilliant you're one of the smartest people at this company and this this is the third reason that I wanted to talk about Jensen's time at LSI logic and how it was so important to the prehistory of Nidia because what does Corgan do Corgan actually introduces Jensen to Don Valentine the founder of seoa and seoa
and Valentine had invested in LSI now here's the reason I say opportunity handle well at Leisa more opportunity and relationships on the world when Wilford Corgan calls Valentine he's not saying hey you should these guys want to make graphics cards or they want to do he didn't pitch them the startup idea he pitched Jensen he's like hey this guy wants to start his own company he's really smart he is really good you guys
should go talk to him now this is the fascinating thing uh because not only did like Jensen gets this gets this introduction based off his reputation Jensen talks about this and and something you and I will talk about later too and I think again another trait I hate to repeat myself but I have to because I think it's a repetition is persuasive it's really important Jensen has so many traits he fits right in with
all the people that you and I study and one of them is this Fierce habit of self criticism of never thinking anything is good enough and so gen there's there's tons of highlights or quotes of the book where Jensen's just like I I suck I cannot believe I did that and he talks about the fact that when he goes and pitches what's gonna be Nvidia to Don Valentine he's like my pitch was horrendous uh I I couldn't explain what
I was building I couldn't say who I was building it for I couldn't even tell him why I was going to be successful and yet the end of the meeting Soria decides to invest and there's a great quote on Don Valentine in this he goes against my better judgment based on what you just told me obviously it's a crappy pitch I'm going to give you my money but if you lose my money I will kill you Valentine told him and so Jensen's like
listen the important takeaway here again he goes to school on everybody so your reputation reputation will pred you he's like they succeeded on the strength of your reputation not their business plan not their pitch and this is a very important point because I always think of what there there's a line where like B if if you go and read Buffett letters and you go and watch his the way he answers questions of the AGM and you can
go see these YouTube videos where he actually testifies in front front of Congress you'll see the buffet for probably four over four decades talks about the fact that you're you you have to be very in you should be making all your decisions that protect your long-term reputation in mind in fact when Buffett is testifying in front of Congress when that he was going to the Salomon Brothers Scandal he talks about
the fact that he told he's telling the congressman that he told everybody inside the the organ organization that if you lose you can lose money for the firm I will be understanding you lose a single shred of reputation and I will be ruthless he put that into the Congressional Record and he again I I think he talks about the fact that you know the reason is is because if you're making decisions with the importance of
your long-term reputation in mind that's going to pay dividends and it can also destroy and and and abort o future opportunities if you have a bad reputation Jens says the same thing it's like is a lesson that Jensen would never forget your reputation will pred you obviously it it pays dividends in business I was thinking about this with Brad Jacobs I became friends with Brad Jacobs as a result of this podcast Brad
is on his I've lost count eight nine I think he's on his ninth separate billion dollar company and when I'm reading this part when I got to this part about about Jensen I was like you know what Brad Jacobs could do a horrible job with a pitch too yet because of his track record because of his reputation the fact that his great reputation precedes him if he's starting a new project or he wants to raise money for his new company
he's going to have a line out the door around the block and down the street waiting for people to invest in him in his next idea because of that track record because of that reputation so there's just a few more things before we get to this list of 19 ideas that I want to spend hopefully the bulk of the conversation you and I are going to have today but I do have to get to the beginning of Nidia because it's funny he
describes this cuz I went went back and actually looked at like the financial performance of Nidan and the market cap it is almost like this harshness that that that Jensen applies to himself which I think is a good idea if you're listening to this you probably do this I definitely do this to myself but he kind of describes the first F five to 15 years of the company is like just a series of fuckups and I just want to get
to this idea of well I'll just give you some background quick their first PL product right is a flop and it's called the nv1 and so Jensen is actually doing like this postmortem and he realized they they made several critical mistakes with the mv1 and so I'm going to read the section from the book to you so some of these critical mistakes from the mv1 starts from positioning to product strategy says they had overdesigned the
card stuffing it with features no one cared about the market simply wanted the fastest fastest graphics performance for the best games at a decent price and nothing else the nv1 could simply could simply not stack up against other cards that were more narrowly designed this is what Jensen said we learned it was better to do fewer things well than to do too many things nobody goes to the store to buy a Swiss army knife it is
something that you get for Christmas so that's an idea that James Dyson realized so my number one recommendation for all out of every single book that I've read is still James Dyson's first autobiography it's called against the odds because the entire ire book is just 14 years of struggle it's James making every single mistake the possible that a young entrepreneur can make it's him persevering and enduring through 5,127
failed prototypes but James realized the same thing when he started building products he's a great line in that book that describes what Jensen's teaching us at this point in the video's history and he says people this what Dyson said people do not want all purpose they want high tech specificity another lesson Jensen learned from this he was embarrassed the fact of how little he did not know again he is ruthless like
the self-criticism he's really ruthless himself but I think there's a there's a benefit because it's it's forcing himself to learn and this is something he's going to apply this public criticism that he's known for in
building Nidia so he was talking about the fact that one of the first board meetings you know this nv1 almost killed the company and yet at the board one of the board members was asking he's like well how are you going to position this
and this is what Jensen said he goes he asked me a simple question and I had no idea how simple it was and it was impossible for me to answer because I didn't understand it the answer is supremely deep you'll spend your whole career answering that question and again the issue was that nvidia's message with the mv1 was far too complicated he didn't put enough thought into how you position it what's very weird about
product positioning is everybody comes up with their own definition of it I think David oggy's definition that he wrote in like 1965 has not been approved on improved on I still think it's the best simple way simple way to think about how to position your product and so David oggy's definition of product positioning simple it's what the product does and who is it for there's a great line that the author T Kim wrote in this
section that I think is beautiful it says seduction requires a simple message the the marketing and the positioning of the mv1 was far too complicated and also Taye I I gotta thank Taye as well he he sent me a bunch of supplemental material to help me make this podcast and Tay wrote an absolutely fantastic book because it gives you this sight into the unique mind of Jensen Jensen does not shy away from how bad he was during this
this period he talks about this here's another quote from the book on the early days of Nidia we were just bad at our jobs the first 5 years of our company we had really talented people working super super hard but building a company is a new skill and that is why you know the the value the main value I got of the poy say we we're able to benefit in the fact that Jensen learns he's going to adjust you'll see in future his maniacal
working habits he picks up all these ideas about the dangers of complacency the importance of having a flat fast organization he's got a lot of new ideas on how to run Nvidia and he wouldn't have had them had he not gone through the painful and tumultuous time in the company's early history so their first two products fail they got Mass layoffs they're in a cash crunch uh go goes back to again do you want to be great well
then I wish you pain and suffering he's speaking he's giving advice that that benefited him and again I I think all this this these failures that happen is like you see him developing his endurance you see him de developing his pain tolerance because it's impossible to run a company for 30 years and not confront endure and overcome ADV adversity and discomfort it's just not going to happen so at this point in the
company history Jensen has to lay off he has to do Mass layoffs he goes down from over 100 employees to down to 40 and Jensen also realizes that Nvidia is not going to be ble to raise more money so in the words of Jeff basos what do they have to do they have to invent their way out they need to create a great product and sell it the third product they're making is called Reva 128 and since he's
running out of money he realized hey I we have to shorten the amount of time it usually takes us to build a new product one way to do that is to actually shorten the testing cycle so let me read this from the book Jensen heard about a company I think it's called ecos Uh that made machines that enabled Engineers to run tests on digital chip prototypes by passing the need to make an actual chip for testing and thus saving time but an
EOS machine cost a million dollar and would cut nvidia's Runway from 9 months down to 6 months but Jensen realized it would speed up the testing process by significantly more time that saved time actually saved the company because this third product was a success and then you see that Jensen's has he's a very good salesperson he's very charismatic he's got a Showman ship to him and so let me give you an example once they they they
build the Reva 128 he gathers all of the entire company which not many people left in the company cafeteria he pulls out a piece of paper from his pocket and he reads off a dollar amount it is a small dollar amount and then he folds the paper back puts in his pocket he's like hey that's how much money we have in the bank that's not good the room was like oh we're in big big trouble then he pulls out another piece of paper
from his pocket he opens it up and he goes one purchase order from stb systems for 30,000 units of Reva 128 and the entire company erupted in cheers okay so I say all that really to say this this is now those list of 19 reoccurring ideas that I think connect and interplay with each other and it's really like again how Jensen what is Jensen learned uh on how to run a company and how to build a company after
decades and Decades of experience and learning practice and failure and pain and the Very idea number one out of the 19 is Jensen as a teacher so I want to start here because the very first sentence in the book is in another life Jensen might have been a teacher that of course is going to mean a lot to you and I because a common trait of hist G Founders is the fact that they spend a lot of their time teaching their
organization so I actually went and talked with sage about this or prompted Sage about this and there's a great a lot of great examples so many of the Great Founders saw themselves primarily as teachers yeah people like Soul price Henry Singleton Warren Buffett Bill Walsh Steve Jobs in fact Jim Sagle the founder of Costco who was a mentee of Soul price has the best quote on this he says if you're not as a leader of the
company if you're not spending 90% of your time teaching you're not doing your job and so one of the ideas that Sage reminded me of that I forgot is that the Syle learn from Soul price Soul price had this idea of what like why are you teaching what are you actually doing and he says you actually the best leaders create alra egos through teaching the end result of the leader teaching all their employees to become alter egos now
you have somebody that can understand and perform their jobs as well as well as are better than the owner or the leader of the company would this is why I think distilling things down to a list of principles or a handful of maximums is so common and so important because essentially what the leader of the company is doing what Jensen's doing is you're continuously teaching and reinforcing your company Philosophy and
the values over time by repeating the principles and the maxims the great Founders essentially become evangelists who relentlessly teach about the company's Mission and their values and in fact the people that work with Jensen they call him professor professor Jensen and they talk about the fact that he has a very he's he's really good at explaining complicated Concepts in a way that almost anybody can understand and
the way he does this he has a tool for this actually he likes to use his preferred me medium for teaching is the Whiteboard and so in the book it says at many of the meetings that he attends at Nvidia he will leap up with marker in hand and diagram a problem or sketch an idea even if someone else is speaking or whiteboarding themselves at the same time okay so idea number two Nidia is Jensen with 29,000 lives right now
Nvidia has 29,000 employees so one of the first sentences or the first sentence in the book is that in another life Jensen might have been a teacher one of the last sentences in the book is the most succinct definition of the Nidia way is that it's Jensen's way or that it is simply Jensen himself there's a lot of simulators between Steve Jobs and Jensen in one of the 10 or 15 books I've read about Steve Jobs and apple there's a line that's
stuck in my brain that I never forgot and it's talking about how he built apple he said he's made and remade Apple in his own image apple is Steve Jobs with 10,000 lives what Jensen and Steve Jobs both learned the importance of managing learning how to manage your company as an extension of yourself says everyone at the company shared Jensen's singular focus on the mission everyone shared his work ethic everyone worked as
fast as humanly possible in order to keep Nvidia one step ahead of the competition he is NVIDIA and the company is Jensen the way I think about this there's another not I left myself you could say you know J Nvidia is Jensen with 29,000 lives or you can say you need to build an F1 organization because he has a great line about this this he says ultimately my eaff which is his direct reports which we'll talk about
later is something that I have to know how to work with the company's organization is like a race car it has to be a machine that the CEO knows how to drive Michael Moritz wrote this book called The Little Kingdom and it is about the first few years of the history of apple he updated the book in I think 2009 2010 that that book is called the return to Little Kingdom and and he wrote a forward and there's a line in
that book where he's describing in the introduction or in the forward he's describing Steve Jobs I think is very appropriate here he said Founders at least the very best of them are unstoppable irrepressible forces of
nature that is certainly true for jobs that is certainly true for Jensen and I think what he said there is very smart the company's organization is like a race car it has to be a machine that the CEO knows how to drive and that's why he
has built a company in His image he has made and remade Nvidia In His Image so let's go to the third idea the Whiteboard I already gave hint at Nvidia the Whiteboard is a primary form of communication at meetings it's very fascinating how you know again there's no right one right way to do it it should be right for you you know some people like basos wants a six-page you know uh memo jobs wants a demo Jensen
wants the Whiteboard so the Whiteboard represents both possibility and and F for Morality I can't pronounce that word I'm sorry the belief that a successful idea no matter how brilliant must eventually be erased and a new one must take its place Place one of the reasons Jensen likes to use the Whiteboard as the primary form of communication in meetings says Everybody Must demonstrate their thought process in real time in
front of an audience with the Whiteboard there is no hiding I lost count how many times in the book they're talking about how Central like how important whiteboarding is to running Nidia and actually uh one of the things that t Kim was gracious to send me he uh sent me this this Wall Street Journal like write up or review of the book written by this guy named Ben Cohen Ben has some great writing here uh in terms of like what he
learned from reading the book and the importance of of the Whiteboard it says instead of cloistering himself in a private office Jensen prefers to work from conference rooms he does his best thinking at the Whiteboard which he uses so frequently that he has a favorite brand of marker that is only sold in Taiwan and so even when he's traveling they have to travel with this this specific brand of marker and they have
to travel with whiteboards he's going to use this everywhere else this again I think explains why this is so important to J to Jensen whiteboarding forces people to be both rigorous and transparent it requires them to s from scratch every time they step up to the board and therefore lay out their thinking as thoroughly and clearly as possible it becomes immediately apparent when someone hasn't thought something
through at the Whiteboard there is no place to hide idea number four flat organizational structure so Jensen's famous or inFAMOUS the fact that he has 60 direct reports and he refuses to do one-onone so Jensen I think the one of the main reasons he designed a flat organization is a flat structure fights against the danger of slow decision- making Jeff Bezos has this great uh thinking about how dangerous making decisions slowly
inside an organization could be this is what Jeff said about this you can drive great people away by making the speed of decision- making really slow why would great people stay in an organization where they can't get things done they look around after a while and they say hey look I love the mission but I can't get my job done because speed of decision making is too slow this is something that Jensen learned in through
you know through trial and error and through failure he says when we were a small company we were really bureaucratic and really political and so as a result of that Jensen thought about how we create this ideal organization from scratch and he realized he would choose a much flatter structure so that employees could act with more Independence he also saw that a flat structure would weed out lower performers who were unaccustomed to
thinking for themselves and acting without being told what to do and he just said flat out I want to create a company that naturally attracts amazing people and so Jensen describes this flat organizational structure the first layer is the senior people this is his eaff you would think that they need to lease amount of management he said they know what they're doing they're experts in their field he did not want to spend
time on Career coaching because the majority of them had already reach the Pinnacle of their careers he rarely held one-on-one meetings with his direct reports instead he focused on providing them collectively with information from across the organization as well as his own strategic guidance and what I love about this is that he's adamant about running the company based on the best way to do it for him and he refuses to
change his management philosophy he is insistent on a flat structure says he steadfastly refused to change his management philosophy even when new board members joined and recommended that he hire Chief Operating Officer to reduce his his administrative burden no thanks he replied this is a great way talking about the way he runs the company in this flat organizational structure it's a great way to make sure
everybody knows what's going on really think about what he's doing here what he's saying you create a company building philosophy that fits you it does not matter what other people are doing what is natural authentic to you and do and are you going to enjoy doing that so you can do it for a long period of time Jensen created a company that he can manage directly there is a vast cultural difference between Nvidia and
other companies Jensen talks again about this I mean these the these ideas you know I organize them all like under topic but they are spread through hundreds of pages in the book so jensa repeats again the benefits of keeping his company flat it turns out by having a lot of direct reports not having one-on ones we made the company flat information travels quickly employees are empowered that algorithm was well
conceived and finally another benefit he says you want a company that's as large as necessary to do the job but as small as possible and not bogged down by over management and process number five and again this is why I think all of these really you know it doesn't really matter what order you take them in Al do I think number one probably has to be the Jensen's a teacher because he's really teaching his philosophy to the entire
organization but very public criticism this is something he's known for this is probably repeated more than any other idea in the book and the reason I put this after number four which is you know build a flat fast organization because turns out very public criticism works very well if you want a flat fast organization so Jensen does not believe you know there's this Maxon like praise publicly criticize privately no he does
not he criticizes publicly so that the entire organization can learn from a single person's mistake there's so many examples throughout the book there's a lot parallels to again Steve Jobs Here I want to read Jensen's words of like why he's doing this over the years I realized that what was happening how people protect their Turf and how they protect their ideas so he's anti you know he does not want bureaucracy to
build up into Aus company so I created a much flatter organization his anecdote to backstabbing to gaming of metrics and to political infighting is public accountability and if need be public embarrassment I just say it out loud I've got no trouble calling people out so let me give you an example of Jensen's public criticism so that the entire company can learn from an individual's mistake and his constant fight against complacency which will be
another idea that you and I will talk about jeds was furious at the poor planning and execution on the Chip he called out its engineers at an all company meeting is this the piece of you intended to build he shouted The Architects did a shitty job putting the product together how could you not see the issue before it happened someone should have raised their hand and said we have a design issue here this is a
product they called the nv30 and so yelling at the people or cursing at them you know some people are like I can't like can can we kind of moderate our language can we be a little you know more kind or more respectful I was reading this uh actually no it's it came from a it's not even from Johnny IV's biography it actually comes from an interview Johnny i g Johnny IV gave after um Steve Jobs pass and he talked
about one of the best criticisms that he ever got from from Steve was the fact that Steve called Johnny Vain and this is what Johnny said he goes I remember asking Steve about this it could be perceived that his critique of a piece of work was a little harsh right doesn't that just sound like what we just the example we just went over with with Jensen seems pretty harsh he's like calling you a piece of call what you did
a piece of I can't believe you did this he's screaming and so Johnny's recounting his conversation with Steve he's like you know you were kind of harsh with your criticism we had put a lot of heart and soul into to this and I asked Steve could we not moderate the things that we said a little and he said why and I said because I care about the team and Steve said this brutally brilliant insightful thing he said no Johnny you're just
really vain you just want people to like you I'm surprised at you I thought you held the work up as the most important not how you believe you were perceived by others and Johnny's response was I was terribly cross because I knew he was right Jensen is not doing this to intentionally hurt people's feelings he's doing this because he puts the work up as the most important he has this great line where he says he tortures
people's I guess St laughing he tortures people into greatness so Jensen offers Nvidia employees direct criticism in large meetings so more people can learn from a single mistake this is what he says feedback is learning for what reason are you the only person who should learn from this we should all learn from that opportunity he says Jensen displays his trademark directness and impatience in all settings he does
this all the time in small meetings too he just can't let go he has to make it punitive a little bit again public criticism is very important to Jensen it's repeated it I don't know a dozen times over and over again in fact I saw it so much I wind up leaving myself the same note over and over again I go oh this is just like Steve Jobs telling Johnny that he's vain that you're putting people's emotions over the work
again Jensen is going to hold up the highest he's going to hold the work as the quality of the work as the most important so I I don't want to seem like a like a like a crazy obsessed person even though I definitely am um I play I play uh the the documentary The Last Dance in the background while I work and the Last Dance is obviously about Michael Jordan and the final season with the bulls and there's
actually that was is going over to the outline and reading the book while this is playing in the background and there's actually a line in the documentary where one of Jordan's teammates is describing Jordan and because of was like eyeballs deep in the world of Jensen the past few weeks at the same time I'm rewatching the documentary I was like oh this this sounds just like Jensen so this is this is Jordan's teammate describing Michael
Michael wanted to be the best player on the best team he's raising his voice he's calling guys out he's talking about how he's treating his teammates right he's raising his voice he's calling guys out so we're not playing well as a team we're lazy he's not worried about hurting your feelings if he did you could leave he would gladly tell you you don't want to play hard fine get out and then right after this Michael is explaining this
leadership style and why he played the game the way he did and I feel like there's an echo of of of Jensen Jensen is not trying to be like oh just you know just another founder he's trying to be the best of the best to create a company that nobody else on the planet could create and he has done that and so he's talking about the fact that he's being really harsh on his teammates he's he's calling out how lazy they are and
not um not working hard enough not not practicing enough not playing well in games and this is a time when the second best player Scotty Pippin was out and he was really worried because they're losing games he goes every this is Michael Jordan speaking now he goes every day that Scotty wasn't playing gave someone else the confidence that they could beat us and if you're trying to maintain dominance over people you
don't want to give them a chance to gain confidence so that drove my energy let's get get this thing rolling that leads into idea number six tortured into greatness this habit of self criticism so jenset is not just public publicly criticizing other people he does this to himself he has a great line about this where he talks about I want to torture people into greatness what you realize is he's tortured himself into greatness
as well so I'll talk about this a little bit later on but Jensen believes that complacency kills and Jensen has this combination uh these traits may even seem contradictory but I would just say that this combination trait I'm about to subcribe to is very common for a lot of history great printers and as a result of the podcast I get to meet a lot of worldclass entrepreneurs today that listen to the podcast and they have
these traits too uh so Jensen has this combination of extreme self-confidence and Charisma matched with this inner voice that says he sucks an inner voice that says nothing he ever does is good enough and that inner voice typically is impossible to to satisfy uh so he tortures his team into greatness but he tortures himself into greatness as well and so let me talk about this intense habit of
self-criticism this is much later in video's history they just they smash this quarter the financial performance the products are great there's like we just blew the doors off this quarter we're having a meeting with Jensen I figure is we're going to like congratulate ourselves and he stands up in front Jensen stands up in front of the room and he goes I wake up every morning morning I look at myself in the mirror and I say you suck and so the
person working in the video just could not understand it's like this guy's why all counts one of the most successful people in the world how could he still think in such terms and my answer to that by spending eight years and four months and reading 375s for hist so of course he does of course he does uh Jensen has a great line in the book he says I don't like giving up on people I'd rather torture them into greatness
idea number seven this is very fascinating I I don't think I've ever heard this idea before it's Jensen's speed of light idea so the speed of light idea is the only Benchmark that we're going to judge oursel and how fast we move will be the absolute maximum speed possible what the hell does that mean so he wants all of the work done in Nidia to be contained by only one thing and that's the law of physics so the
speed of light means that you have to take every single project inside your company you break it down into into its component tasks and then each task have must have a Target time to completion that assumes no delays no cues or no downtime why of course you're going to have some kind of unexpected things pop up because he wants to set the theoretical maximum which he calls the speed of light he wants to know what is
the phys like the fastest this could be done and you know it's the fastest it could be done because it's physically impossible to to exceed that time and then he says we're not going to judge ourselves on what we used to do we're not going to judge ourselves on what other companies do I don't give a what other companies are doing we are going to judge ourselves against the speed of life so or speed of Life speed
of light says Genson would reprimand subordinates who set goals that referred to what the company had already done before or what the comp competitors were doing at that moment as he saw it he needed to prevent that kind of Eternal rot that he observed at other companies so I'm going to give you an example of Jensen speed of light idea I already gave you a little hint earlier this is about the Reva 128 to save time Jensen
decreed that Nidia would have to develop their driver software for the revo 128 before their prototype chip was completed this was a reversal of the customary process this would say shave nearly a year off the production timeline you have to shave a year off the production timeline because if you remember he's running he's got nine months of cash now he just bought that machine so he's got six months of
cash there is no time so it says uh this was shaved nearly a year off the production timeline but it require the company to find a way to bypass the step of testing the software and physical chips that's why Nidia invested a million dollars in that iOS emul emulator even though every dollar was precious it would allow them to approach the speed of time here's another description of the speed of time Nvidia employees did not think did not let
themselves think about what was likely to work or what they could reasonably achieve they only cared about what would be possible with the maximum amount of effort and minimum amount of wasted time idea number eight Jensen is unapologetically Extreme he's extreme in all things he works all the hours and he says no one will outwork me so these ideas I I grouped all under idea number eight so you know I'm obsessed with
Edwin Lan founder of Polaroid Steve Jobs hero and there's a great line in one of the many biographies of Edwin land I think I've done like five or six podcasts on Edwin land so if you haven't listened to them you should go on the back catalog and definitely listen to as many hital Steve was studying Edmond land when he was 20 Steve was still studying him when he was dying uh just incredible incredible person but Edmond
land is you know one of one and there's a great line in one of his biographies there somebody worked with with Edmond L he goes this man never had an ordinary reaction to anything jet is the same way so there's this hilarious Meme and any any guy knows this like you walk into a public restaurant there's or public restroom there's a series of urinals it is plight it is etiquette if there's a bunch of empty urinals do not stand next
to me like give me some space And so there's this meme you always see where this guy's using Ural there's like 50 empty urals and then guy walks into the bathroom and uses the one right next to him Jensen literally does that he did that this guy is so relentless he will if you work for him he will Grill you at the urinal I gotta read this to you no place in aidia headquarters was safe from a drive by grilling from Jensen let
me pause there actually I just thought about this I didn't think about this earlier there's a line again another pair of L drops uh talks about how intense his focus and like he he'll stare at you and he like he should completely focus on you it's kind of like would scare some of the employees at Apple and if they found him in like an elevator or something they would like try to skip the elevator because you
don't want his attention I think there was an example where like you get in the elevator by the time you get off you've lost your job because he was like focused on what you're doing you couldn't explain what you're working on I was very upset so there's there's an element to that with Jensen as well so Jensen this a guy named Kenneth Hurley's out of Ural Jensen walks up and SE using the one next to him and Hurley
goes I'm not the kind of guy who likes to talk in the bathroom and Jensen had other ideas he goes hey what's up and Hurley replied with not much which earned him a sidelong glance from Jensen hurly panicked thinking I'm going to get fired cuz he thinks I'm not doing anything Hurley proceeded to list 20 things he was working on okay Jensen replied satisfied with the answer when I first read that I absolutely lost it
just heard laughing uh go back to this idea like no one's going to outw workk me he's unapologetically streaming says there may be people smarter than me but no one is ever going to work harder than me when part of e staff mentioned to Jensen that some employees were griping about the long work hours Jensen's response was typically direct people who train for the Olympics Grumble about training early in the morning too Jensen
was sending a message long hours were a necessary prerequisite for excellence over and over again these these these examples of Jensen just being completely unapologetically extreme there's like some kind of like uh like award given by a magazine or some kind of like uh industry you know publication and they thought they were happy like oh look we finished second this is the early days of Nvidia and Jensen sternly tells them
second place is the first loser Jensen's guidance was direct just go win the idea was whoever could run faster is going to grab all the land Jensen's unapologetically extreme when he was recruiting he invites this guy working at he's a chief engineer at silicon Graphics he invites him to lunch he goes listen John you should really think about coming to Nvidia because ultimately I'm going to put s gii out of
business Jensen is completely Relentless about work he says you have to allow yourself to be obsessed with your work I work every day there's not a day that goes by that I don't work if I'm not working I'm thinking about working working is relaxing for me and so here's an example of how just being unapologetically extreme actually created a lot of value for Nidia and some might call this story like how do you work three times as hard and three
times as fast as your competitors but there's just a lot of anecdotes in the book where there's people that used to work in a video they got used to the culture and then they leave and they go work at other like tech companies they're like wait why is everybody like everybody else is moving like slow motion there's like way their culture is a lot less intense so it's not just to be on apologetic extreme for the sake of
being on apologetic extreme or throwing a lot of a lot of like hours at something it's like doing this you have an advantage other people don't and so Jensen this is this is before the AI boom nid is just a PC graphics uh still just in the PC graphics industry and and he's trying to figure out he's like okay like the the top of this industry there's like a lot of turnover I've gotten to the top I want to stay here
how do I do that and one way he does this is by being unapologetically extreme so he says if you look at the PC graphic industry why is it that one company can never hold a lead for more than two years now that Nvidia was the
market leader Jens became obsessed with this problem he realized the whole industry moved according to the rhythms of the computer manufacturers who refresh their product launches twice a year chip makers Nvidia included took 18
mons to design and launch a new chip and typically only worked on one chip at a time which means chips were functionally obsolete long before chipmakers could come out with a new product Jensen had figure out figured out how to keep Nvidia ahead of its compet competition he said we were going to fundamentally restructure the engineering department to line up with the refresh Cycles which how how do you do this Nidia would split
the design team into three groups the first would design a new chip architecture while the other two worked in parallel to the first to develop faster derivatives based on the new chip what is that why why would you do that because this allows the company to release a new chip every six months the competitors are releasing a chip every 18 months and he has a line for this he says this was called three teams two
seasons now the company would have three times as many chips on the market even if a competitor offered a slightly better product PC makers would have no motivation to switch away from Nvidia knowing that a faster part would arrive within six months idea number nine this is one of my favorite ideas I've never heard this either it's Jensen's top five email idea really this is just a genius way to get unfiltered information from
the entire company so Jensen asks every employee in Nidia at all levels you have to send an email and they're called like t5t so you need the top five things that you're working on or what you've recently observed in the market uh things like customer pain points what some competitors doing any kind of new development of techn techology uh if there's any kind of project delays and so the ideal top five email is five
bullet points where the first word is an action word and so something like finalize build or secure and to make it easier for Jensen to filter these emails he has each department tagged them by the topic in the subject line so let's say he wants to get all the recent emails on hyperscaler accounts he can just easily do keyword search see all that and then read through all these bullet points now top five emails is a
crucial they are crucial feedback channel for Jensen and and he would tell his employees why he uh why he the the top five Emos are so important he says it's easy to pick up on the strong signals but I want to intercept them when they are weak which he winds up doing which I'll tell you back in one second but again I think all these ideas are combined unapologetically extreme top five emails so he's like you know I
want to pick up on these weak these signals when they're weak and then we can develop into something they're strong but to his eaff he said it this way don't take this the wrong way but you might not have the brain power power or the wherewithal to detect something that I think is pretty significant so every day he reads you know over a 100 top five emails to get a snapshot at what's happening inside of the company
and so I want to read from That Wall Street Journal article that was written by Ben Cohen that tay Kim sent me he says employees have been sending notes known as t5ts top five things uh that they're working on things they're thinking about or things they're noticing in the corners of the business and for decades Jensen has been reading them all of them if you send it Jensen says I'll read it top five things emails
have become his preferred method of of flattening hierarchy strategy isn't what I say it's what they do Jensen said that's a good line strategy isn't what I say it's what they do so it's really important that I understand what everybody is doing he does that by reading top five thing emails he doesn't want information that has already made its way through layers of management what he wants is information from the
edge that's a direct quote from Jensen he says I want information from the edge he's looking for the next Z billion Doll Market a frontier that has not been explored because it barely exists one day could be a thing one of the weak signals that he intercepted years ago was a wonky but exciting development in machine learning that kept popping up in t5t emails Jensen decided that Nvidia needed to invest more in tools for
accelerating workloads on its gpus this is why they're a $3 trillion company today that decision clearly paid off these days those gpus are the brains of artificial intelligence and again the the the the hilarious part part about him being unapologetically extreme he says this is what he does for fun he's like I drink a scotch and I do emails and the one one funny thing there's an anecdote in the book that's
pretty funny where people hate when Jensen goes on vacation because he emails them more they're like what are you supposed to be on vacation's like no no I'm doing emails I'm like watching my kids play or whatever when they were younger they have there's a very intense email culture at uh they say the email culture in N videoid is like unrelenting there's nothing he he doesn't let anything stare anything Fester if you get in email from
him you need to act on it right away he does not want anything to fester and in fact I finished reading this book quite a while ago and I working on outline and organizing the ideas for way longer than I normally do because I I really do think it's you know he's probably he is one of the most important founders of life right now and I think there's just a lot of good ideas that you and I could hopefully use in our work too so I've
been like having non-stop conversations with a bunch of my founder friends about this and I was actually telling a friend about this intense email culture described in the book and I didn't know that Nvidia in invested in my friend's compy this company called together Ai and the company's again this is just an investment from Nvidia and he's like oh yeah like he's like that in real life like what do you mean he goes like he
invest in our company and we'll send emails and the response is super fast and at the same lunch when we're having lunch I met a young kid young guy I shouldn't say kid uh but a few years ago he was a kid he was probably like 19 at the time and he was working for like some chip company after I can't remember the name but he heard that what we were talking about he's like oh yeah I emailed Jen what do you mean email J
he's like well I was at intern at the ship company and inside that company they kept talking about they developing like the Nvidia killer or whatever and so this intern and another chip company cold emails Jensen and within you know a few minutes Jensen writes back with like his perspective on is there like is it true what their company saying is it possible is an Nvidia killer but again he just wants to know what's going on he
wants information from the edge idea number 10 this won't come as a surprise jens's communication Style blunt concise and direct uh he says over and over again he he believes in direct truthful blunt communication we're not worried about people's feelings we're putting the work above everything else but I just have to read one line that I absolutely loved Jensen's emails are short and sweet like a Haik coup this is
something that even outside of work that he has in common with a lot of History's Greatest leaders Napoleon was the same way let me read this this line from this biography Napoleon uh that I read says long orders which require much time to prepare to read and to understand are the enemies of speed Napoleon could issue orders of a few sentences which clearly expressed his intentions and required little time to issue and to
understand Winston Churchill uh during World War when he's fighting the Nazis he would limit the size of the memos that you could write him and he would tell his staff it is slothful not to compress your thoughts one of my favorite examples of this what did it just say Napoleon could issue an order in a few sentences which is clearly expressed his intentions and only required little time to issue and to
understand if you have not read the book creative selection highly recommend that you do it's written by a programmer that would demo and work with Steve Jobs you could also listen to the episode which is episode 281 called working with Steve Jobs which is on that book here's a line from the book it's going to sound just like Jensen just going to sound just like Napoleon just like Churchill Steve was always easy to understand he would
either approve a demo or he would request to see something different next time whenever Steve reviewed a demo he would often say with highly detailed specificity what he wanted to happen next he was always trying to ensure the products were as intuitive and straightforward as possible and he was willing to invest his own time effort and influence to see that they were I chuckle to myself over how much time
I've spent thinking about this iPad demo and how much Steve taught me in one meeting where he spoke just four sentences idea number 11 Lua again all these ideas interact with each other I think they build upon one each other we just talked about how important being Direct important of doing you know having a flat organization structure and going really fast so if you start rambling jensa will just say Lua okay this is a Maxim in a Shand it's an
acronym it means listen to the question understand the question answer the question so if he says Lua he wants you to stop and just do those three things in order listen to the question understand the question answer the question number 12 this is so cool again I love there's a bunch of ideas in this book that are truly novel and unique so number 12 the mission is the boss and pilot in command I think he
really picked up on the fact that as you build an organization over time as it grows it starts to exist for the sake of perpetuating itself and he's like no no no we want a flat organization one like we want to just focus on the mission but as the mission changes and if you read the book and obviously clearly like they they start on the video game industry what are they doing now they're dominating the artificial intelligence
in indry like that is because he had this flat fast reactive culture and organization and he can switch the mission and then take all the resources onto that new Mission this is what jensa says the concept of the mission is the boss makes a lot of sense because ultimately we're here to realize a particular Mission not in service of some organization under the mission is the boss philosophy Jensen starts every
new project by designing a leader and I love what they call their leader they call the leader a pilot in command this pilot in command now is the one accountable for that that that Miss and is directly uh reports directly to
Jensen he says we have a pic a pilot in command for every project nobody can hide behind such and such team is working on that no it's a person there's a goddamn name attached to it the pilot in command is accountable uh Jensen
organized nid employees into groups centralized by function sales engineering operations and so on they're treated as a general pool of talent and not divided by business units or divisions why because when you have a new mission and you take all these these uh functions sales you know engineering operations whatever and now you can turn them or Point them at a new Mission and now they're under the direction of a
pilot and command and then that pilot and command it directly reports to Jensen um again I think this is really really important I dedicated an entire episode to this there's episode 360 if you haven't listened to it it's on Bob kierin the founder of fenol he wrote a book that that book has one really one idea that you that the leader's job is to keep everyone inside the organization working for the company's core objective
that is very natural in human nature to drift and later's like no no no back over here back on the company's core objective uh one other section from this he gives Jensen gives his employees a high degree of Independence over their individual projects but only if they can keep those projects perfectly aligned with the company's core objectives after you're done listening to this if you want I think you should spend an hour
really digging into episode 360 the book is almost impossible to find uh I had a friend of mine actually write to the company and that's how we were able to get like 20 or 30 copies of the book I don't even know if you can buy it anymore but episode 360 again you can summarize that by it's the leader's job to keep everyone working towards the company's core objective number 13 it's one of my favorite lines in the book
John Johnson Jensen says strategy is not words strategy is action strategy is not words strategy is action Jens and said we don't do periodic planning the reason for that is because the world is a living breathing thing we just plan continuously there is no Five-Year Plan okay so again I'm going to read that paragraph and I'm going to filter that paragraph through every other thing that I've read for this podcast and every
other thing that you and I have talked about that line strategy is not word strategy action it's one of my favorite lines in the book and immediately I think of Henry Singleton so Henry Singleton had a very distinct philosophy around planning um I I did I think one or two episodes on him years ago I got to redo this he's too important and I didn't know how to podcast back then so I got to do another episode on him but
Charlie merer for example said Henry Singleton was the smartest person you ever met okay Buffett says that it is a crime that Business Schools don't study Singleton and I think he said you could take the top 100 Business School uh graduates and combine their record and still wouldn't compare to Singleton's record there's a lot of ideas because I discovered Buffett and Monger before I discovered Singleton
that I thought were buff and Anders and they were actually they learned from Singleton cuz he was building a very successful conglomerate called tadine so I go and I ask Sage for these ideas like how did what did Henry Singleton say about planning and Sage did an excellent job summarizing Singleton's philosophy which to me sounds a lot like Jensen's philosophy so number one F flexibility over rigid plants Singleton said I know
a lot of people who have very definitive plants they follow assiduously but we're subject to a great number of outside influences on our business and most of them can't be predicted so my plan is to stay flexible SS a lot like what Jensen just said number two daily steering steering versus long-term planning uh Singleton's approach was summed up in the quote where he says my only plan is to keep coming to work every day I like
to steer the boat each day rather than play plan way ahead into the future number three rather than getting caught up in detailed strategic plans Singleton focus on retaining flexibility and keeping options open he believed excessive planning constrains freedom of action number four recognition of complexity which is exactly what Jensen said the fact that the world is a living breathing changing thing Singleton
understood that businesses are subject to numerous outside influences that cannot be predicted making detailed long-term planning potentially counterproductive and then this is I think what Jens I would agree with number five independent thinking when others were doing something Singleton was often skeptical for example late in his career when many companies were doing share repurchases Singleton said if everyone's doing them there must be
something wrong with them and so when Jensen also said hey there's another line that popped up to me he's like we don't have a 5-year plan that is exactly the same kind of thinking that Michael Bloomberg used to build his company in fact in Bloomberg's autobiography this is what he wrote I never let planning get in the way of doing don't devise A Five-Year Plan central planning didn't work for Stalin or Ma and it won't work
for an entrepreneur either okay idea number 14 choke you with gold this is a very very old idea um Brad Jacobs his book how to make a few billion dollars talks about the fact that you know between all his companies there's like 140,000 employees or something he goes listen money animates people everywhere you really should overpay for top talent because it's nearly impossible to overpay for top talent and the reason I
distill this down to the maximum choke you with gold is because I was reading this old book of David Oggy and David Oggy talks about this he says the Michi family persuaded this very famous sculptor in Florence to enter their service where they wrote him a letter which concluded come I will choke you with gold if you are talented in contributing to nvidia's Mission Jensen will choke you with gold Jensen pours
over the stock allocation reports managers can refer an employee for special consideration to senior Executives Jensen will review this list of top contributor which they call TC list okay Jensen viiew the list of top contributor candidates and give out special oneoff grants of stock that vest over a 4-year period once such a grant is approved the employee receives an email from a senior executive with Jensen copied on the email the subject
line will say special Grant which authorizes the RSU Grant in recognition of your extraordinary contributions with a clear description of the rationale behind the award this is really important I think too about when you do this thing when you when you decide to to Grant these Jensen also reaches down into the organization anytime and awards stock directly without waiting for an annual compensation review this allows
him to ensure that people who are doing great work feel appreciated in the moment it is another sign of his interest in every single aspect and every level of his company which leads us to idea number 15 which is a quote from Walt Disney Walt Disney said if we lose the detail we lose it all Jensen is in the details I'm sure people would accuse him of being a micromanager just like they would accuse Walt Disney of
being a micromanager Steve Jobs and so on and so forth uh for his entire Jensen is keep in mind Jensen has run Nida for over three decades and the way he's done that is he manages the company directly he involves himself D deeply in product decisions sales negotiations investor relations and more he does not work in a private office he involves himself in everything at Nvidia and so all of these company
building philosophies that he has learned and imp implemented really allow him to get out of the get the most out of the organization that he built and he built that organization in the bet that in the way that makes it the best for him to run remember Michael Mor said on Steve Jobs and the great Founders Founders at least the very best of them are unstoppable irrepressible forces of nature Walt Disney fall into that
category Steve Jobs would fall into that category Jensen falls into that category number 16 idea number 16 complacency kills no looking back no resting on our Laurels Innovation is a necessity not an option and paranoia and so there's a line in the book that says Jensen runs the company the way he does because he believes that nvidia's worst enemy is not the competition but itself the complacency that grips any successful
company and this is he applies this to complacency that is both real and imagined remember he is ruthlessly self-critical and blunt about his failures and his mistakes and so you know people are looking at video now it's like one of the best companies I've ever created but but he it's very fascinating that he doesn't like looking back and when you do look back it says he resists overly positive accounts of
nvidia's startup period and his own missteps when we were younger we sucked at a lot of things Nvidia wasn't a great company on day one we made it great over 31 years it did not come out great you don't build nv1 because you're great you don't build nv2 because you were great the the failure of those nearly killed the company in its INF and so he has a great line about this he says we survived ourselves we were Our
Own Worst Enemy Jensen believes that for the first 15 years when he was CEOs he sucked he says this he he actually says it in third person he goes if Jensen meaning himself wasn't even involved in the first 15 years of the company I would really like that he was not proud how he managed the company and he says I don't love talking about our past but I don't want to like I think this is an important thing too it's like yeah he
doesn't love talking about about his past he's not just talking about his past failures he he applies that even after a massive success remember that one story when they're smashing the quarter and he tells his team that he woke up that morning and wakes up most morning mornings looks at himself in the mirror and like you suck and I actually think there's a very productive way to do this so this idea of not looking back
not resting on your Loyals again this is something he has common with Steve Jobs and he has a great way I think summarizes what Jensen's doing here not arting Laurels not like he I think later on the book Jensen says something like you know wasting there's nothing worse than like looking back at your own accomplishments or um just not good use of your time and so what Steve says is I say he says I think if you do something
and it turns out pretty good then you should go do something else that's wonderful and not dwell on it for too long just figure out what's next the The reason I think this is important that that it also fits into like Steve Jobs overall philosophy if you go back and ask if Steve was asked one time like what his favorite quote is and it was actually a quote by aristot where it says we are what we repeatedly do
Excellence then is not a act but a habit and so I think Steve would tell you the key is keep pushing forward stay hungry and continuing continue to create really wonderful things rather than than dwelling on past achievements and so throughout this book is this this theme just reoccurs to again that complacency kills I went back and searched all my notes and highlights and you just see this over and over again Andy gr he had
this Mantra success death breeds complacency complacency breeds failure only the paranoid survive herb kellerer the founder of Southwest said a company's never more vulnerable to complacency than when it's at the height of its success we must not let success breed complacency Cockiness greediness laziness indifference preoccupation with bureaucracy hierarchy or obliviousness to threats posed by the outside world there a great line from one of the
biographies of Bernard orol founder of el H that I read he abhor complacency so much Les Schwab who's one of Charlie monger's favorite Founders he said we must constantly remind ourselves as to why we are successful and what we must do to continue to be successful because if we become complacent brother it's all over with Warren buffit you need to fight off the ABCs of business Decay arrogance bureaucracy and complacency
when these corporate cancers metastasize even the strongest of companies falter and so that combines with the fact that ad n video Innovation is a necessity it's not an option and so really you can think about this is really how you avoid the innovators dilemma so one of Jensen's favorite F favorite books is the innovator's Dilemma one of the main takeaways he took from reading the book is that the threat is actually going to
come from the low end of the market and I absolutely love what he did here so number one the threat comes from the low end of the market number two ship the whole cow and this is going to be fascinating so this is Jensen talking about how to avoid the Invaders dilemma that Innovation is a necessity it's not an option for them at Nidia he says we build Ferraris all of our chips were designed for the high-end the best
performance the best triangle rate the best polygons I don't want to let someone come in and be the price leaders and lock me out of the bottom and climb their way to the top see said that that theme reappears throughout history obviously Clayton Christen talks a lot about that in the innovator LMA Jenza saw that Nvidia could stop throwing away parts that failed quality tests this is fascinating ship whole cow is his idea
here okay we're building Ferraris our chips are the best of the best of the best best performance really high prices fat margins right so what if I wanted to attack myself what would I do and then I'll just go do that before somebody else does it to me right so Jenson saw that Nvidia could stop throwing away parts that failed quality tests they failed quality test if you're building a Ferrari but not if you're building you
know a Ford Fusion right so true these parts were not suitable for the company's Ferrari gr ships but if they were otherwise functional at lower speeds Nvidia could repackage them into a l less capable and therefore cheaper version of the company's Mainline products this looked like a clear opportunity to make something out of nothing rejected parts were generating no revenue for NVIDIA they were thrown
out think about how many different products byproducts that Rockefeller made from materials that were waste waste materials from the refining of kerosene that he wind up turning turning into products and these massive profitable product lines that again he was just throwing in the garbage now he's like no we need to find uses for our waste materials package them up as and sell our byproducts the exact same thing that Jensen is doing here Nidia
could create a whole new derivative product line that could turn a profit without the expensive time and consuming process of research and development this line would serve as a defense against competitors For Whom the lowcost chip was their main product Nvidia could easily for for to price his ship down so much that the competitors would be forced to sell at a loss this strategy was dubbed ship the whole cow a
reference to how butchers find ways to use almost every part of the carcass not just the Prime Cuts idea number 17 Jensen goes to school on everybody I already mentioned this earlier this is somebody this is this idea going to school on everybody was described in one of the biographies I read about a young Jeff Bezos he said he went to school on everybody obviously before he found on Amazon and during and after um but
Jensen has the exact same you know tendency same idea so this's is this conference on neuroinformation processing systems essentially an academic conference where all the machine learning and Neuroscience experts present their latest findings okay and so there's an actual Nvidia employee who's there and he runs into Jensen unexpectedly he's like well Jensen like what are you doing here you're not you're not you're not
scheduled to speak to speak what are you doing at the conference and Jensen told him I'm here to learn and what he noticed was that Jensen was sitting towards the front row and it's not like he hired somebody to take notes on he's sitting there taking notes showing up himself and trying to absor absorb all the recent developments in artificial intelligence because again it goes back to Jensen wanting to be involved in
every aspect of Nidia he's not trying to Outsource things he's trying to be in the details Jensen also talks about the fact that you know at conferences like this he meets a lot of smart people and winds up and recruiting and and um they become employees and assets of Nvidia so this again I think is a a reoccurring theme the importance of going to school on everybody there's this guy named Mitch rails Mitch rails co-founder of
this company called danir Mitch rails goes to school on everybody danir is like $170 billion company today and a friend of mine was just at the small intimate conference with Mitch recently and he was blown away by how focused Mitch was and the entire time Mitch was you know sitting towards the front listening to speakers and he was taking pages and pages of notes and my friend had this thought where he's like I don't
get this Mitch you're more successful than anybody else here why are you taking notes and when my friend told me this story I go no wrong answer so there's a great line in Bill Walsh's book The Score takes care of itself and he says Champions behave like Champions before they're Champions I guarantee you Mitch rails did not build a$1 170 billion company and then start taking notes he was going to school on
everybody and taking notes and learning from every single experience way before he built $170 billion company way before he is quote unquote the most successful person in the room because this goes back to the Max and the David Overby said the good ones no more there's another example of Jensen being one of the good ones that know more Jensen shows up to this party at Nvidia it's a party for new hires introduced this guy
named Peter Young Jensen already knew who he was he says you're Peter young you've been here for a year from Sony PlayStation and then you worked at 3dfx prior to that Jensen had similar recall of all the biographical details of the other 50 attendees of that party okay idea number 18 create markets don't do anything someone else can do don't do anything someone else can do is the motto of Edwin Lan but what Jensen was
setting out to do he he really believed he was building a company that was unlike any other company and he knew he didn't want to build an undifferentiated commodity product he wanted some kind of pricing power and so it says Nvidia doesn't believe in building commodity products because Commodities are subject to downward pricing pressure as competition increases Jensen has always said that we should be doing things that other people
cannot that is exactly what Edwin Lan said we need to bring unique value to the marketplace and you do that by doing work that's Cutting Edge that's revolutionary work that no one else can do we do not this is really the punch line we don't have a culture of going after market share we would rather create the market okay so all of these ideas leads us up to the final Idea Idea number 19 is swarm your greatest
opportunity and the reason this one is last is because it's can describe the massive historical opportunity that Nidia has pursued in artificial intelligence and it's obvious when you read the book that all the things that you and I just talked about enabled and helped Nvidia sees what is going to be likely the greatest one of the greatest opportunities that Humanity has ever has ever seen and a single company has been
able to especially Corner the market and and reap most of the profits So Far So This is Gonna what the wild thing here and this is going to be probably the longest section is the fact that this this played out over you know multiple decades Jensen is going to recognize the AI trend very early he's going to invest heavily you know when other people are telling him not to do this and he's going to by doing so he's going to
maneuver his company into position to take advantage of it better than anybody else in the world so I'm going to read a couple highlights we're just going to go through obviously this is what mainly the book is about but I'm going to give you what I feel are like the the basic framework of important actions I think that that Jensen did and so there's an idea that reoccurs throughout these these books and say that you have to
stay in the game long enough to get lucky so the idea that's going to turn Nvidia into a multi-trillion dollar company actually came from their customers coming up with unique ways to use their product so the first reference to using Nvidia gpus for non-graphical purposes was in a 2002 research paper on using computers to simulate the movement of clouds you could think of these like really weak signals that that that
Jensen was referencing earlier so it says an increasing number of computer science researchers using gpus uh for non-g graphics applications researchers who ran their simulations on computers with gpus reported significant speed improvements over computers that relied on CPU power only these simulations required computers to learn how to reframe non- Graphics computations in terms that graphical functions or in
terms of graphical functions that a GPU could perform in other words the researchers had hacked Nvidia gpus now Jensen's response here was brilliant he sees this way right this unexpected opportunity as a way to expand the market for his products and he's interested in making it easier for other people to do that so what does he do number one he hires the guy who discovered how to do this number two he picks a mission he wants to make it
easier for people like the guy who discovered this to find more non-graphical applications of gpus why because anytime you make something easier for people to do that will expand the market market and so this guy's name is Harris Harris is the guy that coins the phrase gpgpu which means general purpose Computing on gpus which he's describing this phenomenon that he is witnessing now this is why Jensen's
saying you know I want direct unfiltered information I want information from the edge Jensen quickly grasps that gpgpu had the potential to open up the markets for NVIDIA gpus Way Beyond their existing Market which was just computer graphics and so J next thought is well how do I make this easier the way I make this easier I want to generate more demand I need to make it easier to program these gpus so he they they
create this new programming model for chips that they call the compute unified device architecture it's called cuda Cuda makes it possible and easier for scientists and Engineers to Leverage The gpu's computing power now keep in mind we're like a decade and a half before all this this this huge AI explosion cuz the reason that's important because Jensen believed that this could expand nvidia's reach into every corner of the
tech industry and this next section is why number 19 the idea number 19 is swarm your greatest opportunity so this is happening in 2008 20 2007 2008 is where we are so the era of the GPU would create so many opportunities that Jensen saw and as his mission to prepare Nvidia to take advantage of it even if no one could know exactly what those opportunities would be everything else was secondary so again this is one of
the most mind-blowing parts of the book for me because it's 20072 2008 Jensen's decision to go all in on this is literally going to create trillions of value for the company in the coming decades it's a crazy amount of foresight on his part and it's also going to require him to endure even more pain so Jensen's way to do things is like I'm going to push this everywhere I want to make what I'm doing a foundational
technology and if Jensen has conviction for that this is going to work he's willing to invest heavily for the long term even when other people and the market are telling him not to do that so let me just read the section let's make a lot more sense Jensen understood the importance of saturating the marketing with it the market with it the more people who had Cuda in their hands the faster the technology would established
itself as a standard we should push this everywhere we need to make it a foundational technology Jensen told the C the Cuda team the move was extremely expensive it took four years and the company invested so much in converting its gpus for Cuda compatibility that it's gross margin fell from 45% to 35% as Nvidia increased spending on Cuda the global financial crisis destroyed consumer demand and nvidia's stock price
fell by more than 80% from October 2007 to November 2008 Jensen believed so strongly in cuda's Market potential that he remained committed to the course he had chosen even as his investors demanded a strategic course correction I believe in Cuda Jensen said we were convinced that Exel accelerated Computing would solve problems that normal computers couldn't we had to make that sacrifice I had a deep belief in its potential and then N Video does
something really smart here this is something there's been a couple examples of throughout history of of the importance of doing so when you're doing something brand new you H you have to make a commitment to spend a lot of time and energy and resources into educating the market about this new invention so Intel did this when they invented the microprocessor in fact they knew they were on to the biggest they they swarmed
their greatest opportunity it was very confusing to the market very in some cases scary to the market so they they wind up sending all the founders and the the the the the all the like the executives inside of Intel including their Founders spent the majority of their time educating the market and running classes in fact what Nvidia does here it sounds a lot like what Intel did when they invented the microprocessor so
developers don't know what to do with Cuda that's fine Nidia is going to teach them we going to educate the market so nidia's Chief scientist this guy named David Kirk begins offering and sending uh colleges and universities Cuda capable machines if they committed to teaching a class on the subject uh David Kirk winds up visiting universities he would Ed start educating students professors and department heads on all
on all the changes on how they were teaching computer science because parallel Computing was going to become far more important David Kirk gave over a hundred talks over the course of a year on this he winds up teaching a class himself at the University of Illinois on the subject Nvidia took it upon themselves to go over and spread the religion of GPU Computing before it could it really took off in fact this
was a necessary step for it to take off there was no textbook on this so Kirk decides to write one there's always like this book this foundational book it's hilarious if you're trying to get a movement going I think one step is to write a book on this so Kirk writes the textbook on this that Co that textbook sells tens of thousands of copies winds up getting translated into all these uh different languages and it winds up
being used by hundreds of schools to teach thousands maybe tens of thousands of students again the idea is like we need to educate the market in addition to doing this at universities they would host the the business development and marketing people at Nvidia would host Summits they'd have like these two-day technology Summits at Nvidia where researchers and computer scien scientists and Engineers could come and
talk about like how they're using Cuda and the gpus and so does of researchers from life science Industry chemical Engineers biologists pharmacologists software developers would would attend and then Jensen would show up and he would sit down and get feedback with the real world users of Cuda and then use the insights that he learned from them to inform the development of the product and so again this is where now now we're
in 2012 2013 and Jens just realizes oh my God this is going one to be the biggest opportunities in history we are going to this opportunity of GP U powered deep learning is going to be massive and we need to go all in and so let me read this part from the book for you there was considerable debate within the executive team on this topic several of Jensen's key lieutenants were against investing more in deep learning in the
belief that it was just a passing fad but Jensen overruled them deep learning is going to be really big he said he said this in 2013 we are going all in on it so if you think about everything that you and I have been talking about and highlighting and studying has led up to this Jensen had built a compy in the image of his own focused yet far ranging mind now he would pull every lever at his disposal at his disposal to navigate
Nvidia to the very center of the tech industry as the company whose Hardware could bring about the AI powered future it was definitely not a single day when the entire company changed forever it was a period of several months where Jensen was increasingly interested and started asking increasingly deep questions and then started encouraging the company to swarm to machine learning Jensen announced a change in strategic
focus in a company All Hands meeting we need to consider this work as our highest priority AI was going to be more important than anything else they could possibly be doing again incredible incredible insight and foresight rather on Jensen's part he believed this was going to be the cause and you know now 10 years later obviously true obviously accurate it was going to be the largest Tam expansion within a decade Jensen was
sure that AI would create the largest total addressable Market expansion of software and Hardware that we've seen in decades and so the book does a great job of describing how the interplay of all these ideas the decisions that Jensen and everybody in a video made over the course of three decades allowed them to build this very formidable moat and I thought it was very fascinating that Jensen actually doesn't like the term
moat he he prefers what he's really trying to build and what he has built is a strong self-reinforcing Network and there's a great description of the strong self-reinforcing Network this moat that Nidia has built says it's hard to describe nvidia's action as anything other than the construction of a competitive mode Nvidia made a general purpose GPU that represented the first major Leap Forward in computational
acceleration since the invention of the CPU the gpu's programmable layer Cuda was easy to use and opened up a wide range of functions across scientific Technical and Industrial sectors as more people learn learned Cuda the demand for gpus increase Jensen's strategic Brilliance ensured that competitors would have difficulty breaking into a market that Nidia had created and I think the best way to close is a reminder that the most succinct
definition of the Nvidia way is that it is Jensen's way or it is simply Jensen himself and that is where I'll leave it for the full story highly highly highly recommend it's a no-brainer reading the book everyone I know that's read the book so far far has loved it I know a bunch of people have bought multiple copies for their team if you buy the book using the link that's in the show notes available on your podcast player
or available Founders podcast.com you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time that is 376 books down 1,000 to go and I'll talk to you again soon okay so I have a big update for you for Founders notes I am eight years into this podcast by the end of the year I will have read well over 400 biographies and autobiographies of some offici greatest Founders I'm doing this because my organizing principle my
life's work is I want to organize and distill the collective knowledge of History's Greatest Founders and I want to do that better than anybody else on the planet it's why I work on the podcast seven days a week so as you can imagine eight years into this 375 different 376 different books it's impossible for me to remember and recall everything that I've read so I built a tool that allows me to recall and tap
into this Collective knowledge of History Founders on demand anytime I want and I use this tool every day and it's a tool that I've been telling you about for the past year it's called Founders notes you can subscribe and access the tool that I built and the one that I use this is very important what you see when you subscribe that is the same version that I use I don't have a different version It's the exact same
thing that you can use so the big update that I have for you is that I've been working with the team at readwise uh the founders of readwise and the team at readwise are the ones that have helped me actually build and Design This tool so for the past few months we've been working on this major redesign of Founders notes and that redesign is done and it's available now I need to give you the prehistory just like I spent a
bunch of time in this Nidia episode in this Jensen episode talking about the importance of the prehistory of what was going on before we got to the 19 uh the 19 key ideas I want to talk about so the prehistory of this project is that for the past six years I've been using this app called readwise to store all of my notes and highlights for every book that I've read the podcast that gives me the ability to search it and pull it up
anytime I want it okay and the reason I partner with read wise last year was because a bunch of people listening to the podcast kept saying hey because I would talk about readwise I talk about the app I talk about how valueable was and the fact that I just like it was very helpful and useful to be able to recall and pull everything up and I didn't do it with ever thinking I was going to build a tool around this but so
many people were asking it's like hey is there a way I can actually like read all of your notes and so we built a tool called Founders notes and allows you to do that you can still do that you can still read all my notes all my highlights and I keep adding to them every week and I always do so but over time what I realized because I use this tool every day is like the AI assistant called sage that sits inside a Founders
notes is actually the most valuable feature and there's a line in the book uh that I didn't talk about in the podcast but it's in the book where Jensen's talking about like what we can expect in this this AI this AI enabled world that we all live in right now and he says you'll be able to have a virtual assistant almost like a brilliant intern with near Perfect Memory capable of in instantly recalling any piece of
knowledge stored on computers and the internet Sage is this but for the collective knowledge of History's Greatest entrepreneurs so how I use it is like when I ask Sage a question he reads all of my notes all of my highlights all of my transcripts and then provides a concise summary and answer to the information I'm looking for so and the re the key here is its memory is way better than mine in fact this is why I think you should subscribe
and use Sage as a way to supplement the decisions that you make in your work you just heard me do this multiple times in the episode so think about when Jensen was struggling with figuring out what product positioning is the definition that I recall was just me asking what is product positioning summarizes the best definition gives us examples for every single thing we talked on the podcast when we talked
about how the importance of educating a market uh when you're when you're creating a new technology or a new product like Intel did what I was reading you came directly from Sage when I talked about how Henry Singleton said what did Henry Singleton say about planning that five point I think it was five point bullet list that came directly from Sage when it talked about uh the importance of what's the leader job you think of yourself as a leader
think of yourself as teachers all the examples from Soul price from Henry Singleton from Warren Buffett from Bill Walsh from Steve Jobs that came from sage and so the big update is now when you log into founder notes it looks completely different if you if you haven't used it in a while or if you've never used it the very first thing you see is the ability to ask Sage a question the other update that was
really important to me was was we added the ability to toggle between AI models so we built the thing on chat GPT and you can still use that if you want but the default now is Claude 3.5 Sona because that's the one I use and it's it's spooky because when I ask stage a question it sounds like me except with a much better memory um again you can talk between whichever one you want and you'll find the one that actually you
you feels most helpful but but that's the one I've been using uh another cool thing that we added as well when you in you see all these like suggested questions okay all of the suggested questions that you see when you log in these are questions that I have asked sage and I'm continuing to add to that list of suggested questions because as I keep searching and finding good questions and good answers I add it to
the suggested prompts or the suggested questions list so even if you didn't have a question you wanted to ask it you could log in see what I've been asking it and actually read and learn from that but again I think the main purpose is like to use it as you have any questions in your business you should be asking Sage because then what happens is it's essentially like if you could prompt all of History's Greatest entrepreneurs to
help you solve the problem that you're dealing with inside of your business like I'm going to continue uh getting making it improving it contining adding to it because again this is a tool for myself I literally cannot make the podcast without it I'm constantly adding to it just as a as a byproduct of natural byproduct of the work that I do so every single book every single podcast every single transcript every single note and just
keep adding to it so if you want a way to tap into the collective knowledge of his entrepreneurs on demand and use it to supplement the decisions that you're making in your work highly recommend you go to Founders notes.com that is Founders with an S Founders notes just with an S just like the podcast Founders notes.com and sign up today thank you very much for the extra support thank you for listening and I'll talk to you again soon