IGNORE NOISE

“In the logistics business, you don't get credit for the 99 times you were right. Trust resets every time a customer places a new order. If we fail one delivery, the previous ten thousand successful deliveries don't matter to that customer in that moment. You have to earn your place on their phone every single day.”

“Data can tell you what is happening, but stories tell you why. I still spend time doing customer support and delivering because one anecdote can change an entire product strategy. If you only look at the aggregate dashboard, you lose the signal of the individual merchant's pain point or the driver's friction in the field.”

“We put up a website in 43 minutes. We called it Palo Alto Delivery dot com. We weren't looking for a business model; we were just seeing if people would use it. We went to a few restaurants, put their menus on the site, and within half an hour, we got our first order. We were just students skipping class to deliver food ourselves.”

“Everyone was focused on San Francisco because it was the dense urban center. We realized the suburbs were where the actual need was because the opportunity cost of time was higher for families. We decided to win Palo Alto and the surrounding areas first, which gave us a unit economic advantage that the city-only players didn't have.”

“Majority of American banks derive a disproportionate percentage of their income from late fees. A late fee was obviously conceived as a means of slapping your wrist and saying, like, if you're going to be late, I'm going to remind you. At some point, someone said, wait a second, that's 100% gross margin product. It's better if you're late a lot, because then I'll make more money, and it cost me nothing to create that revenue line. Affirm was founded in many ways to fight all of that and destroy the ridiculous and the exploitive.”

“We run two different operating systems within the company. One is for the core business where we focus on efficiency and incremental gains. The other is for internal ventures, where we use stage-gates. We treat new products like startups that have to earn their next round of funding based on hitting specific milestones, rather than just getting a blank check.”

“A couple of months later, Sam gave me access to the Chat Ship deep review, which is all it was meant to be. It wasn't meant to be the product that has captivated the world. It was really meant to be something that could show the world what these models were ultimately capable of. I just couldn't unsee it. One night, I was sitting at our kitchen table. It was probably one or 02:00 in the morning, and Carly had woken up, and she came to the kitchen and asked what I was doing. And I showed her, and I expressed to her that I thought that this was gonna change the world.”

“The key is distinguishing between temporary geopolitical noise and fundamental business changes.”

“My mom was a licensed doctor in China, but when we moved here, she had to wait tables. I worked right beside her, washing dishes for years. That experience became the animating idea behind everything we built at DoorDash. I saw firsthand how hard it was for a small business owner to succeed and the tools they lacked to grow.”

“I think companies that have built software poorly and just sell that software are very vulnerable. The bar for quality of software is going up rapidly. If you really hate some piece of software that you're using and it's just software, it doesn't have some deep sort of proprietary data, proprietary source of value, it will get replaced. Like, there's no reason why not. It's long overdue to get rid of bad software.”

“At the moment, I'm investing in iShares S&P 500 ETF and Apple. Leo, you're a gem, mate. Well done and good start. The iShares ETF will look after you beautifully. Hopefully, Apple will as well. And a really good question.”

“John Winker Reed, who's now the CEO of TPG, who was spending time with us after his time at Goldman Sachs, called me as a 26, 27 year old who had just done a transaction that was on the cover of The Wall Street Journal. I was expecting to get a congratulations. And John said to me, I'm gonna give you the greatest lesson that you'll ever get from me, which is never believe your own bullshit. And I remember how piercing that was in the moment, but taking a step back, it was the right advice. I actually wrote it on Post it notes. I think Thrive is only 10 people at that time, and I put it on every single person's computer so that when they got into the office on Monday morning, they saw it.”

“Socialism sucks. It is terrible. The only people who do well in redistribution of wealth are the ones doing redistribution. It's fundamentally corrupt and there's not enough bad things I can say about socialism. So I think capitalism works exceedingly well, especially when the competition is encouraged and allowed to flourish. We've had thousands of years to evolve a fairly good economic model, and the US is most certainly 1A in the right way to do it.”

“We invested in GitHub in 2014. We were fortunate enough to participate in the initial round with what was the big check for us at the time, which was $20,000,000. Almost a month into our investment, Chris Womstrah, who is the CEO, decided to move on from a disproportionate amount of his leadership team. The outside perspective of the business was considered to be troubled, but our general view is the only way to truly develop context on businesses is suspend meaningful time. Some of the earlier founders associated with the business wanted to get liquidity. Thryv was the only person who wanted to buy the shares, and we feel very grateful for the outcome. Thrive owned about 10%, and no one knew.”

“Read the market, not the noise.”

“I bought these shares in 1973, and now they're worth $10 million. And I was like, I didn't really do anything. It's just like classic bottom draw stuff. Some of them didn't work out. Some of them worked out incredibly well. And on average, I've just made out like an absolute bandit because I just let compounding do its thing.”

“True power doesn't shout, it acts quietly and decisively. There's this great line from Denzel Washington from American Gangster, the loudest person in the room is always the weakest person in the room.”

“We look for people who are what I call Rhodes Scholar Navy SEALs. You need the brainpower to solve complex logistics, but you really need the grit to do the work. We hire for a bias toward action. I'd rather have someone who tries ten things and fails at five than someone who analyzes one thing for six months and never ships.”

“Read the market, not the noise.”

“Will Samsung's next product release be very successful and put the share price up? No clue. I wouldn't have the foggiest. But just the old Buffett quote, don't look for six-foot bars to jump over, look for one-foot bars to step over. And if you can keep that as your North Star, I think you will be very well-served.”

“My grandmother was a very special person to me. She was an absolute hero in my eyes. Her story is really one of impossibility and resilience and perseverance. She grew up in a small town in Belarus, was put into a ghetto with a bunch of other Jews, dug a tunnel with other people in her town to escape with a spoon 600 feet after experiencing and witnessing her sister get murdered, her mother get murdered before her eyes, to escape into the forest to live with the Bielski partisans, to come to America with my grandfather and nothing, with the exception of the shirts on their back.”

“Insecurity is the greatest driver of innovation. It's the greatest driver of progress. It's the thing that jump starts everything, but it can't be the end goal. If that is the place that you're operating from in perpetuity, it's a very dangerous thing because it's a never winning game. There can always be more.”

“The most important lesson is always the team. It is sort of the Alpha and Omega success or failure of a company is the team. And there's an art form to building a company with it. The corollary to the team is the fact that just having a bunch of brilliant people is not actually enough. You need to organize them, you need to give them a mission, you need to give them a way to pursue that mission that feels true to them, but also aligns them all together, which is kind of what leadership is all about.”

“I think the net IQ of the world is about to go up like 50 points. Like we're surrounded by people—not in Silicon Valley, of course—where the average IQ is still 100. I think the average IQ with AI in your ear at all times is about to go up to 150, which is like north of the genius definition. Very, very soon, the willingness to put up with random, obnoxious things like low quality or crappy terms or products that pretend to be something they're not is just going to get flushed out very quickly.”

“I called Stan up, and I said, Stan, I need to see you today. And he says, of course, come by. I drove uptown. And I said to him, Stan, we've been doing the exact same thing for a long time. We've always been concentrated in the businesses that we believe have the generational characteristics to compound on themselves for a very long period of time. We sold a lot in '21, and we've leaned in very meaningfully in this moment. And I feel like I'm running into a burning building taking my most favorite possessions, and everyone thinks I'm crazy. And his response, which I'll never forget, is, That's always the right decision. You just better fucking pick right.”

“I've worn the same swatch skin since college. The story of it is I went to Latin America at the end of my freshman year. Had a really wonderful time with my college roommate at the time. We were riding in a car through Guatemala City. Someone in a motorbike pulled up next to us and put a gun to my head. My window was open and started screaming in Spanish. My friend took off his watch, took his phone and handed it to him, and he said to me, give him everything you have. I took off my watch, and I handed it to him. And he looked at it, and he handed it back, and he drove away. I'll never wear another watch.”

“So we had agreed to terms with John and Patrick at a $50,000,000,000 price, which is 50% discount to what they had done a year prior. For us, it was very obvious. It's much easier to predict what is going to happen in the long term than it is in the short term. If there's one thing that I could predict between now and the day that I die, it's that people buy more stuff on the Internet every year. It was the largest check that we had ever written at that point. I think we invested about $1,800,000,000. But as a result of the moment in the market, but also the size of check that we were writing, everyone asked to speak to us. And I think what was most interesting was the fact that everyone was so focused on the now.”

“There's so many ifs, ands or buts that are in all of that. It's diabolically difficult to predict because you're predicting two things. You're predicting the outcome that even the company itself doesn't know. They've invested a lot of money and time and effort to create a product that they hope consumers will like and will buy a lot of, but they don't know.”

“The key is distinguishing between temporary geopolitical noise and fundamental business changes.”

“Instagram raised at $500,000,000. We had a $40,000,000 fund. We put in $12,000,000 between our fund and co investment. It sold two days later. When the investment was announced, people were giving us a very hard time for investing in a company at a half $1,000,000,000 valuation. But when a billion dollars was a lot for a company to sell for, we were starting to get recognized.”

“With LLMs, the barrier to entry into an area of programming that you've never done before is nil. This time around, I'm like, well, I can just ask my favorite agent to go research this stuff and set it up for me, and then I can just focus on exactly the functionality that I want and the implementation quirks that I'm interested in. Reconciling this opportunity where coding is fun again and easy again with the need to run a big company is a lot of fun.”

“The stock price is just a distraction and a reflection of the market's mood, not the company's value today. If you build the best product for local merchants and solve the logistics puzzle, the value will eventually reflect in the market. You cannot let the ticker symbol dictate how you treat your customers or your long-term roadmap.”

“If you're not making any mistakes, you're not taking enough risk. But just continue on the path. So when you do have the failure and you do have the embarrassing blow up—and I'm not saying you might, I'm saying you will—and the people who are never going to make it are the people who go in with unrealistic expectations and give up at the first sign of failure.”