ABANDON TRADITIONAL MANAGEMENT

“One of my beliefs is that really good people figure out a way. They don't need a whole lot of mentorship. So if people on my team if they directly report to me, I never do one on ones. I don't do reviews. If I don't like something they're doing, they know about it in real time via chat. If I like what they're doing, they don't need to know. They they know that I respect them and and and they're good to go. Good people don't need that type of hand holding. And what ends up happening is people who need a lot of development too, those people aren't the people that I want on this team of a players.”

“The benefit of not doing things in these one on one silos and very structured is you can document everything in Slacks or transcripted video calls. If you do that, any new person can come in and go, hey, Claude. Summarize for me what Adam cares about over the last quarter. And write me a book of everything that matters to him. And take the person who's running the best sales calls and summarize what he does or she does for those calls and tell me what I should know on this job. And then, like, you start asking these types of questions. You start getting really good output because all of the information is available to Cloud.”

“if I just went to the core business, our core advertising products are about 400 people. So call it some very, very high percentage of all the company's EBITDA comes from the core business. So if you then calculate the EBITDA per employee over 400, it's a really, really high number. I think it's it's reaching over 10,000,000,000, 10,000,000 ahead now. So the question on, can you have a team full of A players? Not everyone can be an A player in a team. You need some roles that are just there to be processed and keep the lights on.”

“We chose not to have it because we wanted to have exceptional engineers that understood the product. The belief was, if our engineering team is writing the product that delivers revenue, our sales team and all other teams are effectively cheerleading for the engineering team, making sure they have what they need, and then eventually going out and selling their product. But we can only sell the product if it's good enough to be sold. The engineers, if exceptional, better be good enough at understanding the product that they need to build to go build it. And so I do think the role of product should end up looking a lot like it does at our company over time.”

“I've found and the reason I just reacted a little awkwardly to the kindness point, if you're too kind and not as direct, not as aggressive, you're wasting time. And in a world where time is limited and you can't quantify the loss from sugarcoating things, I'd much rather be aggressive and rub some people the wrong way and surround myself with people that wanna push hard then really be surrounded by people who care so much about kindness that they're willing to slow down. Have you ever rubbed people up the wrong way and you regretted it? Not really. I mean, I guess I just don't think about it much.”

“So I don't invest anymore for a couple reasons. One is, in order to invest, you've got to sell shares in your own business to have liquidity to go invest. And I don't know again, if if I didn't start this business for money, I don't know what I need to invest to create more return on. And if you're you're an investor, hopefully, you really wanna create return or impact or something that is a KPI that you care about. But the second you care about that KPI and you chase it, you're selling from your own core business to go diversify. You're not focused on your day job.”

“If you're fearful of losing or you have a fear of failure, I feel like you're almost certain to be stuck. You're not gonna take shots that are material, and you're gonna protect downside more than go after upside. And I don't tend to believe that's really the founder mentality. If you took a risk once upon a time to start a business where there was nothing, you didn't even know what it was gonna become, and you knew the odds were 99, five nine is likely that you were gonna fail. That in itself has to tell you the founder mentality's gotta be chase winning.”

“Yeah. I mean, 90% probably, but, like, that discounts quality over quantity. So, like, I think what's important is if you just shoot after a percentage of your tokens consumed, you could get to a place where you're just creating slop. If you're incentivizing slop, like, you're not gonna get very far as a business. You're gonna have massive fees to go pay the large language model businesses, but you're not gonna get further as a business. What's important is, are your engineers good enough to use these technologies to accelerate what creates value for the company? And can you measure that?”

“What we instead did was go and say, if you are a seller, please work with us to sell back to the business. And so we went and deployed every dollar that we made and including we raised some debt to deploy even more and took back a lot of the shares on the cap table that we're gonna inevitably sell into the public markets over the coming months. By doing that, we were able to get liquidity to company folks, investors, and old ex cofounders, and other folks on the cap table that needed liquidity. We were able to get them liquidity. No problem. We're happy to do the trade.”

“The rapid rate of product delivery in the large language model space makes a lot of traditional enterprise SaaS companies hard to bet on years into the future. So what happens? Well, terminal value is dicier. So you value the company less. You get out. Their stock based comp was high, but it was an acceptable percentage of total value. Stock tanks, stock based comp becomes too extreme. Now they're in a position where not only are they gonna lose their heads, they're also competitively challenged. So you're in a really bad downward spiral. So in a way, I would say not only is it fair because of the risks that exist, I'm not sure it's actually done yet.”