• Hetty Green’s business maxims: 
  • 1. Seek out every piece of information on an investment before deciding on it
  • 2. Watch your pennies and the dollars will take care of themselves 
  • 3. Generally, in business, do not close a bargain until you have reflected on it overnight
  • 4. Before making a deal, if anyone is foolish enough to offer you the full amount, take it!
  • 5. Buy when everyone wants to sell and sell when everyone wants to buy  
• A defining character trait of Hetty: She lived by her own rules and did not care what other people thought; by casting off the societal norms of her time, she freed herself to do as she pleased and to live a life on her terms   
• The secret to all successful businesses and a simple strategy for wealth generation: Buy when prices are low and nobody wants them, and keep them until they go up and people become crazy to get them 
• Hetty was self-sovereign, very frugal, and very paranoid: She did not tell other people what she owned or how much she was making, and commonly bought property and stocks under fictitious names
• Greed does not drive the world, envy does; cure yourself of envy because envy is a weakness 
• Some things on Hetty Green’s list of things to NOT do in business:
  • 1. Do not cheat in business or you will find yourself in an early grave
  • 2. Do not fail to be fair in all things and do not kick a man when he is down 
  • 3. Do not envy your neighbors 
  • 4. Do not forget to be charitable and never falsify 
• When it comes to living your life, you will inevitably have to neglect some things; if you try to do too much, you will never get anywhere  

Hetty Green bailed out New York City. Her decisions on what interest rates to charge moved markets and were reported in major newspapers. She was a one woman bank and the single biggest individual financier in the world. She took no partners and ran her own money. She built a financial empire of stocks, bonds, railroads, and real estate. She battled the great men of her day and kept a gun on her desk. She did all of this alone. Defiantly independent and ferociously intelligent she built a vast, liquid fortune at a time when women couldn't even vote. She used her intelligence to increase her wealth, her independence to live as she wished, and her strength to battle anyone who stood in her way.

This episode is what I learned from reading Hetty: The Genius and Madness of America’s First Female Tycoon by Charles Slack and The Richest Woman in America: Hetty Green in the Gilded Age by Janet Wallach. 

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Ramp gives you everything you need to control spend, watch your costs, and optimize your financial operations —all on a single platform. Make history's greatest entrepreneurs proud by going to Ramp and learning how they can help your business control your costs and save more. 

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Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here. 

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“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth

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Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here. 

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“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth

Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

• “Get away from our sons and away from our daughters. It’s not left or right. I don’t have a Republican bone in my body. Get the crazy people who do not understand human development away from our children.” – Eric Weinstein 
• “Everything worth doing is hard – and the more worth doing it is, the harder it is. The greater the payoff, the greater the hardship. If it’s hard, good. It means no one else will do it. More for you.” – Alex Hormozi 
• Dr. Mike Israetel –  Focus on getting tension in the muscle that you are targeting; getting tension in the muscle you are trying to grow is more significant than focusing on which exercise movement is best 
• Dr. Andrew Huberman – You can become a morning person in three days: Set your alarm to 5 AM, wake up and get out of bed when it goes off, get outside and safely view sunlight, do some form of exercise or movement while viewing the sunlight, ingest caffeine 60-90 mins after waking, and engage in some form of social interaction 
• “The only way that you cannot be humble in old age is when you refuse to look at the reality of your life up to today.” – Dry Creek Dewayne 
• Implement more exercise snacks, such as air squats, into your daily life; the positive effects of short bursts of vigorous energy expenditure through“non-exercise” methods will compound over time and can dramatically improve your health 
• Oliver Burkeman – We often try to attain an impossible level of control over our lives; accept that you will never get life completely sorted out
• Tim Ferriss – Develop identity diversification so that your self-worth is never dependent on just one thing, such as your job; this increases the resiliency and robustness of your mental health
• Joe Hudson – The more you are willing to welcome the range of emotions that you will inevitably experience as a human, the more you are likely to welcome joy as a natural part of existence 

2024 is nearly over, so I decided to put together a compilation of some of my favourite moments from the show over the last year. It was going to be a top 10, but I couldn't choose, so it's 11.

• “In life, you learn very little when things go right. You learn a lot when things go wrong.” – Jared Kushner 
• You cannot worry about the things that you cannot change; have radical acceptance and focus on the things that you can do to understand the problem better 
• Focus on being long-term greedy: Create win-wins by convincing your counterparts, who have more leverage, to do something that you want to do by catering to their interests more than their sympathies or fears
  • Focus on the next deal instead of the last dollar
  • To understand what a person wants, you have to listen! 
• Find the smartest people you can who have a vested interest in the situation, and ask them about their perspective
• “I wouldn’t die for my beliefs because my beliefs might be wrong.” – Unknown 
• Practice humility and always recheck your assumptions
• To be successful, you have to make three good decisions per year
• The foundational question Jared asks himself when faced with a challenging problem:“How would you want to be a role model for your children?” 
• “Ultimately, I think the topic that will probably be the most impactful of the next four years will be how President Trump deals with artificial intelligence and what could be AGI or superintelligence, and how this is coming very rapidly.” – Jared Kushner 
• Work should not be distributed; when you find something worthwhile, go all in on it 
• Four investing principles: (1) Identify the big macro trends (2) Back phenomenal people and teams (3) Invest in businesses with structural advantages or moats (4) Be selective in where and who you invest with
• The two most important questions to ask yourself are: What do you want and what are you solving for? 
• Give everyone the benefit of the doubt; you never know what people are going through in a given moment 

My guest today is Jared Kushner. Jared has lived more lives than just about anyone I know his age. He ran Kushner companies for years, investing in real estate in and around New York City. He owned the New York Observer. He was a senior advisor to President Trump in his first term. He now runs Affinity Partners, which we discuss in detail, a private equity firm built to find and execute unique investments around the world that stem from Jared's unique set of experiences in business and government. This is one of our longest episodes ever because there was so much to discuss. We cover real estate, negotiation, geopolitics, his work in prison reform, Operation Warp Speed, and the Abraham Accords in the Middle East, business, investing, his family, and everything in between. Jared told me I could ask him about anything--and I really enjoyed doing so. Please enjoy my conversation with Jared Kushner.

My guests today For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here.

Show Notes:

• Check out the episode page

David Senra is the host of Founders podcast and an investor.

• Knowledge, money, and power are connecting in ways that we have not seen for the last 500 years 
  • “This moment is probably the most interesting moment of the last 100 years in terms of the opportunity set that is going to come from it.” – Micky Malka 
• There is no winning and losing if you are playing an infinite game; once you are ahead, you have to change the rules of the game so that you will fall behind
• The game is better played when you are trying to get ahead and not when you are ahead and trying to prevent people from passing you 
• Every time money becomes better, people live better lives 
• Burn the bridge that got you here; whatever got you here will not get you to the next phase 
• Be more concentrated and have more conviction 
• Life and business principles from Micky Malka:
  • 1. Never forget where you came from 
  • 2. Fewer decisions is best 
  • 3. Be genuine to yourself and those around you 
• How to build a strong team: Instead of identifying a job title and then looking for a person to fill it, just look for amazing people that you want to work with, then hire them 
• We will need streaming data and streaming money to enable automated services; people who understand both of these fields can build paradigm-shifting technologies 
• Returns are an output metric; focus on the input and let the output take care of itself 
• How to create magical outputs: (1) Create a team that is passionate about meeting others, engaging, and learning, and (2) Ensure that the inputs to the team’s machine will make the world better 

My guest today is Micky Malka. Micky is the founder of Ribbit Capital, a global venture capital firm that focuses exclusively on financial technology investments. He is a renowned investor for his adaptability and visionary approach and a believer in killing the thing that got you to where you are in pursuit of what’s next. We discuss his perspective on fintech’s evolution and why his firm boldly declares that “fintech is dead.” We dive into his theory of the "grid," which examines how knowledge, wealth, and power are being transformed by technological changes, particularly through the rise of AI, cryptocurrency, and network states. And we also explore Micky’s deep interest in digital art and NFTs, which he sees as early indicators of broader cultural and technological shifts. You’ll soon hear how he is truly taking a generative approach on all fronts. Please enjoy this in-depth conversation with Micky Malka. 

My guests today For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here.

• The basics of business strategy: Recognize your structural position in the market, understand where you have permission in the market from your partners and customers who want you to win, and then do those obvious things first 
• “I think the company of this generation has already been created, which is OpenAI.” – Satya Nadella 
• To properly evaluate the AI arms race, you have to analyze it structurally by layer 
• The year 2025 will be the year of infinite AI memory; the next 10x function of ChatGPT is its having a persistent memory combined with it being able to take action on our behalf 
• Increasingly, Mag-7 capital expenditure resembles industrial companies more so than traditional software companies 
• Continued advancements in the AI tier may collapse the traditional application categories 
• How model capability will increase: Pre-training and test-time sampling create the tokens that can go back into pre-training, which creates even more powerful models that can then run on your inference 
• How to be successful in life and business:Pattern-match periods in which you are successful and in which you are not, then do more of the behaviors that you did during your successful periods 

Open Source bi-weekly convo w/ Bill Gurley and Brad Gerstner on all things tech, markets, investing & capitalism. This week they are joined by Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, to discuss becoming Microsoft’s CEO, Advice for CEO’s, Microsoft’s Investment in OpenAI, Legacy Search, Ten Blue Links, Consumer and Enterprise AI, The Future of AI Agents, Infinite Memory, CoPilot, Microsoft’s Capital Expenditure, Open AI’s future, AI safety & more. Enjoy another episode of BG2.

Timestamps:

(00:00) Intro

(01:31) Becoming Microsoft CEO

(06:42) Satya’s Memo to CEO Committee 

(10:42) Satya’s Advantage as a CEO

(11:34) Advice for CEOs

(15:01) Microsoft’s Investment in OpenAI

(19:42) AI Arms Race

(23:55) Legacy Search and Consumer AI

(28:07) The Future of AI Agents

(38:32) Near-Infinite Memory

(39:47) Copilot Approach to AI Adoption

(50:26) Leveraging AI within Microsoft

(56:03) CapX

(01:00:20) The Cost of Model Scaling and Inference

(01:15:15) Open AI Conversion to Profit

(01:18:05) Next Steps for OpenAI

(01:19:43) Open vs. Closed and Safe AI

Available on Apple, Spotify, www.bg2pod.com

Follow:

Brad Gerstner @altcap

Bill Gurley @bgurley

BG2 Pod @bg2pod

#BillGurley #BradGerstner #Bg2Pod

• A brand is not a logo; it is a promise and what the customer expects from your product 
• The goal is not to make the product perfect for you, it is to delight your customer 
• The key to building a brand: Make a promise and keep it 
• Do not sacrifice your agency over the four most crucial things that you should be choosing: your customers, competition, source of validation, and distribution
• On the role of tension in strategy: The customer should consider what their life would be like if your product delivers on what it promises to do 
• “If it scares you, it might be a good thing to try.” – Seth Godin 
• Better waves make better surfers: Much of your success is determined by choosing the wave and not the skills that you have  
• Professionals do their work in a non-narcissistic way: You can’t paint a picture of where you want to go; instead, you should paint a picture of where theywant to go
• Be of service to others! 
• “It is very difficult to change what people want, but it is helpful to offer people a chance to get where they always wanted to go in the first place.” – Seth Godin  

Seth Godin is a legend. He’s a marketer, teacher, entrepreneur, and author of more than 20 books, including Purple Cow, Permission Marketing, and Linchpin. He also writes one of the most popular and longest-running blogs in the world (approaching publishing 10,000 in a row!) and continues to shape how we think about marketing, brand, product, and creating lasting change in the world. In our conversation, we discuss:

• How to build remarkable products that spread

• The four critical strategic choices that determine your future

• How to develop good taste and high standards

• The role of tension in great strategy

• How Seth used Claude to write his newest book

• Much more

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Find the transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/seth-godins-tactics-for-building-remarkable-products

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Where to find Seth Godin:

• Blog: http://seths.blog/

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sethgodin

• Website: https://www.sethgodin.com

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Where to find Lenny:

• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com

• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/

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In this episode, we cover:

(00:00) Seth’s background

(05:17) Understanding good taste and upholding high standards

(08:09) Become the best at whatever you do

(09:48) Seth’s journey as a product manager

(14:09) What people often get wrong when building products

(16:00) Building a brand in the age of AI

(19:04) Using AI to enhance writing

(22:40) Four critical elements for an effective strategy

(27:38) The role of tension in strategy

(29:15) The concept of the purple cow

(33:11) "Safe is risky"

(34:56) The power of systems

(37:07) Better waves make better surfers

(38:10) Rebranding vs. re-logoing

(43:07) Empathetic leadership

(44:14) Conclusion and farewell

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Referenced:

• Seth Godin on the Tim Ferriss Show: https://tim.blog/2024/03/20/seth-godin-3/

• Persuasive communication and managing up | Wes Kao (Maven, Seth Godin, Section4): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/persuasive-communication-wes-kao

• Spinnaker: https://spinnaker.io

• Ray Bradbury: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Bradbury

• Arthur C. Clarke: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_C._Clarke

• Isaac Asimov: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Asimov

• Roger Zelazny: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Zelazny

• Herbie Hancock: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbie_Hancock

• Fahrenheit 451 (game): https://www.filfre.net/2013/09/fahrenheit-451-the-game/

• RTFM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTFM#

• Intercom: https://www.intercom.com

• Claude: https://claude.ai

• ChatGPT: https://chatgpt.com

• Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com

• Steam: https://store.steampowered.com

• P.F. Flyers: https://pfflyers.com

• Steve Blank’s website: https://steveblank.com

• Marissa Mayer on X: https://x.com/marissamayer

• Jaguar unveils new logo ahead of electric relaunch: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgr0pw00n7qo

• IHOP Becomes IHOb, the International House of ... Burgers: https://www.npr.org/2018/06/11/618844977/ihop-becomes-ihob-the-international-house-of-burgers

• Oreo’s Super Bowl Power-Outage Tweet Was 18 Months in the Making: https://www.businessinsider.com/oreos-super-bowl-power-outage-tweet-was-18-months-in-the-making-2013-3

• Tesla’s New ‘Ludicrous Mode’ Makes the Model S a Supercar: https://www.wired.com/2015/07/teslas-new-ludicrous-mode-makes-model-s-supercar

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Recommended books:

• This Is Strategy: Make Better Plans (Create a Strategy to Elevate Your Career, Community & Life): https://www.amazon.com/This-Strategy-Better-Elevate-Community/dp/B0D47T8S7N• Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable: https://www.amazon.com/Purple-Cow-New-Transform-Remarkable/dp/1591843170

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Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].

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Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.

• As of late 2024, the AI industry is shifting from a pre-training compute approach to test-time compute 
• Understanding the difference between pre-training and test-time compute: Pre-training occurs before testing and involves more complex, resource-intensive computation, whereas test-time compute is typically faster and focuses only on making inferences
• Moving from pre-training to inference-time is a powerful paradigm shift for the AI industry
  • 1. It better aligns revenue generation and expenditures; this is beneficial for the industry at-large  
  • 2. Having to re-architect the computing network creates new opportunities and considerations related to power generation and grid design
• Test-time compute better aligns the compute and expenditures of the model, relative to pre-training; this is better for the hyperscalers from an efficiency perspective 
• The plateau in pre-training has enabled small teams to catch up to the state-of-the-art models; the proliferation of open source models, specifically what Meta has done with Llama, has been an extraordinary force for AI scaling  
• If the plateau in pre-training continues, small teams will be able to “jump to the frontier” of model training for a specific AI use case; this allows reduces competition amongst the hyperscalers 
• It is likely for two of the Mag7 companies, such as Google and Meta, to give away an AI search product similar to ChatGPT for free 
• OpenAI is “very serious about achieving AGI”; that is the company’s mission, and everything else the company does is in service of that 
• Stability at the model layer will enable optimization at the various layers above it; when the industry is in “land-grab” mode, there is not any time to optimize! 
• Over the long-term, technology is deflationary because it is a matter of optimization 
• When technology unlocks, distribution also unlocks; this means that startups can now acquire customers that were previously too expensive to get 
• “I imagine that we’ll be pretty close to or at AGI in 2025.” – Chetan Puttagunta 

My guests today are Chetan Puttagunta and Modest Proposal. Chetan is a General Partner at venture firm Benchmark, while Modest Proposal is an anonymous guest who manages a large pool of capital in the public markets. Both are good friends and frequent guests on the show, but this is the first time they have appeared together. And the timing couldn’t be better - we might be witnessing a pivotal shift in AI development as leading labs hit scaling limits and transition from pre-training to test-time compute. Together, we explore how this change could democratize AI development while reshaping the investment landscape across both public and private markets. Please enjoy this discussion with Chetan Puttagunta and Modest Proposal.

My guests today For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here.

• Check out the episode page

Episode 653: Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) talks to Furqan Rydhan ( https://x.com/FurqanR ) about the biggest opportunities in AI right now. 

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My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by The HubSpot Podcast Network // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano

• Instead of focusing on how something might fail, consider how big the idea could be if everything worked out 
• You don’t always want to sit behind a defensive moat; sometimes, a high-velocity attack is the best way to win 
• Mental models from one discipline are often applicable in another discipline; cross-pollinate ideas and concepts across disciplines and you may discover something novel 
• The key to success is dumb competition; competing against knuckleheads increases your chances of success
• Focusing on making money will cause you to make less money; nobody wants to give money to people who are too focused on making money 
• It is fine to want money, but wealth is a paradox; the more of it you want, the less of it you get 
  • It is better to focus on things that are upstream of making money, such as solving problems and developing skills that are valuable to other people 
• The greatest returns in investing come from allowing the compounding machine to run; do not make decisions or engage in behavior that interrupts the compounding machine 
• You have a massive arbitrage opportunity if you can avoid mimetic desire in venture capital investing 
• In life and business, you can just do things! You don’t always need permission 

Episode 648: Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) talks to Flexport founder Ryan Petersen ( https://x.com/typesfast ) about playing both games: bootstrapping a startup to millions and raising venture capital to build a multi-billion dollar company. 

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My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by The HubSpot Podcast Network // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano