Podcast Notes Playlist: Startup

• 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

Produced by Benny Beausoleil

Music by Yung Spielberg

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.

• 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

• Prominent people are shifting to the right because they never signed up for the left’s intellectual straight-jacket
• The 2024 presidential election marked a collapse of liberalism and the Democratic Party; it is too narrow of thinking to blame it on a senile Biden or a goofy Kamala 
• If the machine always wins, then you no longer have a democracy nor a democratic process: If Trump would have lost to the machine in 2024, who would have ever been able to defeat it?  
• If we are going to avoid World War III, we must learn the lessons of WWI and WWII; we cannot have excessive appeasement to dictators, but also, we cannot sleepwalk into armageddon 
• On the elite Ivy League institutions: “Maybe they’re good places for training conservatives. If you go to Yale Law School and you’re one of five people in the class who are still conservative at the end, you’ll be pretty good at understanding what’s wrong with liberalism.” 
• Populism and democracy may be a Russell conjugate: It is democracy when people vote the right way and it is populism when they vote the wrong way
• Both extreme dogmatism and extreme skepticism are incompatible with science 
• If you make something into God, you make it into a scapegoat for all the problems too 
• If you’re addicted to the 140 characters on your shiny iPhone screen, you may not realize that the New York Subway and your decrepit apartment building are collapsing around you 
• It matters what people do; there is room for human agency and human thought in the trajectory of the future 

On Tuesday night, president-elect Donald Trump announced that the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, along with entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy will head a new department in the Trump administration: the Department of Government Efficiency, or “DOGE.”

Aside from the very strange fact that internet meme culture has now landed in the White House—Dogecoin is a memecoin—more importantly, what the announcement solidifies is the triumph of the counter-elite. A bunch of oddball outsiders ran against an insular band of out-of-touch elites supported by every celebrity in Hollywood—and they won. And they are about to reshape not just the government but also the culture in ways we can’t imagine.

And there was one person I wanted to discuss it with. He is the vanguard of those antiestablishment counter-elites: Peter Thiel. People describe the billionaire venture capitalist in very colorful terms. He’s been called the most successful tech investor in the world. A political kingmaker. The bogeyman of the left. The center of gravity in Silicon Valley. There’s the “Thielverse,” “Thielbucks,” and “Thielists.” To say he has an obsessive cult following would be an understatement.

If you listened to my last conversation with Thiel a year and a half ago on Honestly, you’ll remember that Peter was the first guy in Silicon Valley to publicly embrace Trump in 2016. That year, he gave a memorable speech at the RNC, and many in his orbit thought it was simply a step too far. He lost business at Y Combinator, the start-up incubator where he was a partner. Many prominent tech leaders criticized him publicly, like VC and Twitter investor Chris Sacca, who called Thiel’s endorsement of Trump “one of the most dangerous things” he had ever seen. 

Well, a lot has changed since then. For one, Thiel has taken a step back from politics—at least publicly. He didn’t donate to Trump’s 2024 campaign. There was no big RNC speech this year. But the bigger change is a cultural one. He’s no longer the pariah of Silicon Valley for supporting Trump.

On the surface, Thiel is someone who seems full of contradictions. He is a libertarian who has found common cause with nationalists and populists. He likes investing in companies that have the ability to become monopolies, and yet Trump’s White House wants to break up Big Tech. He is a gay American immigrant, but he hates identity politics and the culture wars. He pays people to drop out of college, but, in this conversation at least, still seems to venerate the way that the Ivy Leagues are an indicator of intelligence.

But perhaps that’s the secret to his success: He’s beholden to no tribe but himself, no ideology but his own. And why wouldn’t you be when you make so many winning bets? From co-founding the e-payment behemoth PayPal and the data analytics firm Palantir (which was used to find Osama bin Laden) to being the first outside investor in Facebook, Thiel’s investments—in companies like LinkedIn, Palantir, and SpaceX, to name a few—have paid off big time.

His most recent bet—helping his mentee J.D. Vance get elected as senator and then on the Trump ticket as vice president—seems also to have paid off. The next four years will determine just how high Thiel’s profit margin will be.

Today: Thiel explains why so many of his peers have finally come around to Trump; why he thinks Kamala—and liberalism more broadly—lost the election; and why the Trump 2.0 team will be better than last time, with antiestablishment figures who are willing to rethink the system. We talk about the border, trade deals, student debt, Israel and foreign policy, the rise of historical revisionism, the blurry line between skepticism and conspiracy, and his contrarian ideas about what we might face in a dreaded World War III.

If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today.

• “If Steve Jobs studied Edwin Land, I think every other founder should as well.” – David Senra 
• Optimize for breadth as well as depth; hire the chemist who does photography on the side! 
• Something magical exists at the intersection of the humanities and the sciences 
• “Missionaries make better products.” – Jeff Bezos 
  • Missionaries and mercenaries are the two types of people that will be attracted to a company
  • While the mercenaries are there for the perks, status, and money, the missionaries are there to make better products because they believe in what the company is doing
• Leverage the power of demonstration: No argument in the world can compare with one dramatic demonstration
• A first-class product needs first-class packaging and marketing! 
• The founder is the guardian of the company’s soul 
• If you are lucky enough to find your life’s work, why would you quit? 
• You should take yourself seriously, but don’t make yourself miserable; none of us get out of this alive 

What I learned from rereading Instant: The Story of Polaroid by Christopher Bonanos. 

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Episode Outline: 

— The most obvious parallel is to Apple Computer. Both companies specialized in relentless, obsessive refinement of their technologies. Both were established close to great research universities to attract talent. Both fetishized superior, elegant, covetable product design. And both companies exploded in size and wealth under an in-house visionary-godhead-inventor-genius. At Apple, that man was Steve Jobs. At Polaroid, the genius was Edwin Land. Just as Apple stories almost all lead back to Jobs, Polaroid lore always seems to focus on Land.

— Both men were college dropouts; both became as rich as anyone could ever wish to be; and both insisted that their inventions would change the fundamental nature of human interaction.

— Jobs expressed his deep admiration for Edwin Land. He called him a national treasure.

— Books on Edwin Land:

Land's Polaroid: A Company and the Man Who Invented It by Peter C. Wensberg (Founders #263)

A Triumph of Genius: Edwin Land, Polaroid, and the Kodak Patent War by Ronald Fierstein (Founders #134)

Land's Polaroid: A Company and the Man Who Invented It by Peter C. Wensberg (Founders #133)

The Instant Image: Edwin Land and the Polaroid Experience by Mark Olshaker (Founders #132)

Insisting On The Impossible: The Life of Edwin Land and Instant: The Story of Polaroid(Founders #40)

— Biography about Steve Jobs: Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli

— Edwin Land of Polaroid talked about the intersection of the humanities and science. I like that intersection. There's something magical about that place. There are a lot of people innovating, and that's not the main distinction of my career. The reason Apple resonates with people is that there's a deep current of humanity in our innovation. I think great artists and great engineers are similar, in that they both have a  desire to express themselves. In fact some of the best people working on the original Mac were poets and musicians on the side. In the seventies computers became a way for people to express their creativity. Great artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were also great at science. Michelangelo knew a lot about how to quarry stone, not just how to be a sculptor. —  Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography by Walter Isaacson (Founders #214)

— Book on Henry Ford:

I Invented the Modern Age: The Rise of Henry Ford by Richard Snow (Founders #9)

The Autobiography of Henry Ford by Henry Ford (Founders #26) 

Today and Tomorrow Henry Ford (Founders #80) 

My Forty Years With Ford by Charles Sorensen  (Founders #118)

The Story of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison's Ten Year Road Trip by Jeff Guinn (Founders #190) 

— Another parallel to Jobs: Land's control over his company was nearly absolute, and he exercised it to a degree that was compelling and sometimes exhausting.

— When you read a biography of Edwin land you see an incredibly smart, gifted, driven, focused person endure decade after decade of struggle. And more importantly —finally work his way through.

— Another parallel to Jobs: You may be noticing that none of this has anything to do with instant photography. Polarizers rather than pictures would define the first two decades of lands intellectual life and would establish his company. Instant photos were an idea that came later on, a secondary business around which his company was completely recreated.

— “Missionaries make better products.” —Jeff Bezos

— His letter to shareholders gradually became a particularly dramatic showcase for his language and his thinking. These letters-really more like personal mission statements-are thoughtful and compact, and just eccentric enough to be completely engaging. Instead of discussing earnings and growth they laid out Land's World inviting everyone to join.

— Land gave him a four-word job description: "Keeper of the language.”

— No argument in the world can ever compare with one dramatic demonstration. — My Life in Advertising by Claude Hopkins (Founders #170)

— The leap to Polaroid was like replacing a messenger on horseback with your first telephone.

— Hire a paid critic:

Norio Ohga, who had been a vocal arts student at the Tokyo University of Arts when he saw our first audio tape recorder back in 1950. I had had my eye on him for all those years because of his bold criticism of our first machine.

He was a great champion of the tape recorder, but he was severe with us because he didn't think our early machine was good enough. It had too much wow and flutter, he said. He was right, of course; our first machine was rather primitive. We invited him to be a paid critic even while he was still in school. His ideas were very challenging. He said then, "A ballet dancer needs a mirror to perfect her style, her technique.

— Made in Japan: Akio Morita and Sony by Akio Morita.

— Another parallel to Jobs: Don't kid yourself. Polaroid is a one man company.

— He argued there was no reason that well-designed, wellmade computers couldn't command the same market share and margins as a luxury automobile.

A BMW might get you to where you are going in the same way as a Chevy that costs half the price, but there will always be those who will pay for the better ride in the sexier car. Rather than competing with commodity PC makers like Dell, Compaq and Gateway, why not make only first-class products with high margins so that Apple could continue to develop even better first-class products?

The company could make much bigger profits from selling a $3,000 machine rather than a $500 machine, even if they sold fewer of them.

Why not, then, just concentrate on making the best $3,000 machines around? — Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products by Leander Kahney.

— How To Turn Down A Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story by Billy Gallagher 

— Books on Enzo Ferrari

Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans by A.J. Baime. (Founders #97) 

Enzo Ferrari: Power, Politics, and The Making of an Automotive Empire by Luca Dal Monte (Founders #98) 

Enzo Ferrari: The Man and The Machine by Brock Yates (Founders #220) 

— Soul in the game. Listen to how Edwin Land describes his product:

We would not have known and have only just learned that a new kind of relationship between people in groups is brought into being by SX-70 when the members of a group are photographing and being photographed and sharing the photographs: it turns out that buried within us—

there is latent interest in each other; there is tenderness, curiosity, excitement, affection, companionability and humor; it turns out, in this cold world where man grows distant from man,

and even lovers can reach each other only briefly, that we have a yen for and a primordial competence for a quiet good-humored delight in each other:

we have a prehistoric tribal competence for a non-physical, non-emotional, non-sexual satisfaction in being partners in the lonely exploration of a once empty planet.

—  “Over the very long term, history shows that the chances of any business surviving in a manner agreeable to a company’s owners are slim at best.” —Charlie Munger

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• Check out the episode page

The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk

Full show notes at www.LearningLeader.com

My books:

Welcome to Management - https://amzn.to/3XWyZAH 

The Pursuit of Excellence - https://amzn.to/4eX9vtP 

The Score That Matters - https://amzn.to/3zPub7Z 

Seth Godin is the author of 21 international bestsellers that have changed the way people think about work and art. They have been translated into 38 languages. His breakthrough books include Purple Cow, Tribes, The Dip, Linchpin, and his latest book is called This is Strategy. He writes one of the most popular daily blogs in the world and has given 5 TED talks. He is the founder of the altMBA, and the former VP of Direct Marketing at Yahoo!

Notes:

• "If you want word of mouth, you have to create something remarkable, and that means it’s worthy of remark."
• The elegant path is the most useful way forward. “My neighbor is a barefoot runner. He glides without apparent effort.” Elegance is simplicity, efficiency, and effectiveness.
• Dorothy and Her Crew. How did Dorothy persuade the Lion, Tin Man, and Scarecrow to join her on the trip to see the Wizard? Did she make a case about how much she missed home? No. She created the conditions where the others could get what they wanted by joining her.
• Seeing Strategy Clearly. Strategy is a flexible plan that guides us as we seek to create a change. It helps us make decisions over time while working within a system.
• Low-Hanging Fruit Isn’t. It’s all been picked. The easy, direct, obvious paths are unlikely to get you the results you’re working so hard to obtain. In fact, these paths are probably a trap.
• Seth, at one point, got 800 rejection letters. Have to keep going...
• "I wouldn't call Steve Ballmer a good leader."
• An example of Seth making a difference... He went to Kenya and talked with 60 people who started a book club based on his book Linchpin. "They decided to be leaders."
• Make decisions in the moment:
  • Examine the issue
  • Get feedback
  • Look for patterns
• "Taste is knowing what the market wants before it knows it."
• Rick Rubin
  • Reality distortion field
  • Johnny Cash
  • "What do you think?"
• "Objections are your friends."
• What are the commonalities among leaders with whom Seth has worked and who have sustained excellence? They are all different, but the one thing they have in common is they all have chosen to be leaders. And that means that they are here to make a change happen.
• Management doesn’t just exist. It was invented. When you race to the bottom, You see people as resources, not as people.
• Questions That Lead To Strategies. 84 questions. They’ll force you to think through your strategy. By answering them, you’ll be better prepared to make a difference… And make a ruckus. Some of them: Who is this project for? What is my timeline? What systems would need to change for my project to succeed? Where will I cause tension? What resistance should I anticipate? Where is the empathy? What asset would transform my project? What can I learn from comparable projects? Is the change I’m making contagious? Can I make it easier for others to decide? How can I design for network effects? What are common objections I expect to encounter?

• Check out the episode page

Tom Holland is the star of Spider-Man, a nascent entrepreneur, and one of Hollywood’s most grounded young actors.

This conversation traverses the nexus of fame, personal growth, and Tom’s journey toward sobriety, which catalyzed his foray into the non-alcoholic beverage industry. We explore his evolution from child actor to global superstar, his therapeutic relationship with golf, and how he’s remained attuned to his authentic self amidst Hollywood’s gilded chaos.

Tom candidly reflects on navigating the intricacies of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and his recent return to the verité of Shakespearean theatre.

Tom’s infectious enthusiasm is palpable. Enjoy!

Show notes + MORE

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• “The founder has to be accountable for the story. The founder holds this secret knowledge and vision that other people do not.” – Lulu Meservey 
• Go Direct: If the founder’s secret has to go through seven layers of filtering before it is shared with the world, then it will become something that is already familiar to people and that already exists
• The Core Ingredients of Founder Communications:
  • 1. Have a willingness and eagerness to take on the company’s comms 
  • 2. Have a clear vision of the company’s goals 
  • 3. Know your audience
  • 4. Reach people where they intellectually hang out
• “Communication is a vector, not a scalar. It only matters if there is a direction attached to it.” – Lulu Meservey 
• Know your audience; if you are talking to the wrong people, then you would be better off talking to nobody because you may be making new enemies or unwanted friends 
• Do not worry about converting your haters into believers; doing so successfully is so rare that it is probably not worth your scare time
• Know where your target audience intellectually hangs out so that your message can reach them in that medium 
• Do not worry about converting your haters into believers; doing so successfully is so rare that it is probably not worth your scare time 
• Craft your hook and know the erogenous zone of your target audience, then present them with a “gateway drug” that bridges them into the new world that you are creating

My guest today is Lulu Meservey. Lulu is the Founder and CEO of Rostra, a company that partners with founders to level up their communications around all strategic initiatives, from hiring to fundraising. She is also on the board at Shopify. I have been recently fascinated by the challenge of founders telling their story and Lulu is an expert in comms and a believer in creative problem-solving through effective communication and compelling storytelling. We discuss the evolution of media and its pitfalls, innovative methods for managing crises, and the power of going direct with your communication. Please enjoy my conversation with Lulu Meservey.

I’m excited to announce that we are hiring an Editor in Chief at Colossus. This will be a critical and central role in our growing media platform and in our quest to find and showcase the best people, businesses, and ideas in the world. This person will work on existing shows like Invest Like the Best and Founders, our soon-to-be-announced print publication, and more. We aim to be the dominant media company exploring business and investing frontiers, so this person needs to be obsessed with these topics and bring serious operational chops. I firmly believe this role can help define someone’s career. Go to joincolossus.com/eic to apply.

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• “Every tap on a mobile app is a miracle for you as a product developer.” – Nikita Bier 
• Teens see each other everyday; this is one of the most important factors for why teen consumer apps have a higher probability of going viral 
• If you are building a product with network effects and that is a communication tool, then you want to be positioned on that upward curve of adding connections to your social graph, because there is a higher urgency to connect 
• Search for product ideas by using the concept “latent demand”: Identify the user’s motivation, clear up what they are actually trying to do, and then crystalize the process for them; this leads to intense adoption
• The most important thing to increase your probability of success: Develop a reproducible testing process 
• You will know when your product is working; if there is any uncertainty, then your product is not working 
• People download apps to make or save money, find a mate, or unplug from reality 
• How to take a product from Zero to One: Execute at 100% for the thing you are trying to validate at that specific stage of the product development cycle
• Always do right by users; if you do wrong to users, the internet will eventually find a way to seek its revenge on you 
• While discovering a new communication product is a once-in-a-decade black swan event, growing a product can be more of a science 
• Your app must demonstrate value in the first three seconds or it is not going to work  
• “Consumer products live and die in the pixels.” – Nikita Bier 

Nikita Bier is one of the most in-demand consumer, social, and growth experts in the world. He’s the co-founder of TBH (sold to Meta for more than $30 million) and Gas (sold to Discord for millions more) and has helped more consumer apps that have hit #1 in the app stores than any other person I’ve come across. He currently spends his time advising founders on growth, product, and design and is an investor and advisor to some of the best consumer tech companies, including Flo, Locket, Eight Sleep, Citizen, BeReal, Captions, and more. In our conversation, we discuss:

• The inside story of how TBH and Gas achieved explosive growth

• Strategies for building viral consumer apps

• Why teens are such a great audience

• Fighting the human trafficking hoax at Gas

• The challenge of creating durable social products

• His experience working as a PM at Facebook

• Advice for founders on building consumer apps

• Much more

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Brought to you by:

• Webflow—The web experience platform

• Vanta—Automate compliance. Simplify security

• Explo—Embed customer-facing analytics in your product

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Book Nikita for 1:1 consultation/mentoring: https://intro.co/NikitaBier

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Find the transcript and show notes at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-consistently-go-viral-nikita-bier

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Where to find Nikita Bier:

• X: https://x.com/nikitabier 

• Threads: https://www.threads.net/@nikitabier

• Website: https://intro.co/NikitaBier

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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) Nikita’s background 

(06:08) Nikita’s early ventures: Politify and Outline

(08:42) Transition to consumer apps

(13:45) The birth of TBH

(16:43) Building for teens vs. adults

(20:00) TBH’s viral success

(32:18) Leveraging live chat

(34:08) Lasting lessons from TBH

(37:00) Selling TBH to Facebook

(42:19) Big-tech product management

(48:46) Nikita on why “product management is not real”

(51:49) The Tim Cook painting story

(53:53) Leaving Facebook and starting a new venture

(58:02) Rebuilding TBH and overcoming challenges

(59:46) Addressing criticism

(01:04:24) The human trafficking hoax

(01:09:51) Selling to Discord and lessons learned

(01:11:36) Lasting lessons from Gas

(01:13:14) Building durable consumer apps

(01:22:35) The VC route

(01:23:27) Contact permissions in iOS 18

(01:26:53) The success of Dupe

(01:31:53) Advice for startup founders

(01:34:14) Work with Nikita

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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.