This happening today 😁 swing by if your not too busy with #LCM events eventbrite.co.uk/e/rb-winter… #graduatelife 🎓

How to outperform competitors without copying what they do.

Peter Thiel on pivoting and PayPal’s early failure “When we started PayPal, the initial product was an infrared-beaming device on Palm Pilots for sending money. It was voted one of the 10 worst business ideas in 1999. And 1999 was a year when there were many bad ideas in technology… But the team was good… It’s not like you only get one chance. You get many chances so long as you keep trying. If you get hung up on failure, and if you think you don’t have another chance, that’s when you really don’t.” One lesser-known fact about the PayPal pivot is that the idea didn’t come from the cofounders, Peter Thiel and Max Levchin. It came from David Sacks who was fresh out of Stanford Law School and a one year stint at McKinsey. Sacks was the one who finally persuaded a reluctant Levchin that beaming money between Palm Pilots was a bad idea. Instead, he argued, they should focus on sending money via email. A talented team and getting multiple shots on goal turned out to be the difference between startup failure and a $1.5 billion exit to eBay. Video source: @CBSNews (2012)

Elon Musk’s message to young entrepreneurs, CEOs, and startups: "Try to be as useful as possible. I think if you aspire to do true work, your probability of success is much higher. Do whatever it takes to succeed. Smash your ego, be humble. It's a super big deal."

I’m addicted to winning. The more you win, the more you want to win. —Larry Ellison

Elon Musk on how PayPal got its first 100,000 customers in one month “I didn’t expect PayPal’s growth rate to be what it was, and that actually created major problems,” Elon explains. “We started PayPal on University Avenue [in Palo Alto], and after the first month or so of the website being active, we had 100,000 customers.” As Elon explains, the key to PayPal’s viral growth was it referral program: “We started off first by offering people $20 if they opened account and $20 if they referred anyone. Then we dropped it to $10, and then we dropped it to $5. As the network got bigger and bigger, the value of the network itself exceeded any sort of carrot that we could offer.” He continues: “And then we just did a bunch of things to decrease the friction. It’s like bacteria in a petri dish. What you want to do is try to have one customer generate two customers, or three customers ideally. And then you want that to happen really fast.” Elon estimates that PayPal spent $60-70 million to fuel this growth, before the company was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion. Video source: @khanacademy (2013)

secrets of new media (from internal deck) in particular, building channel bibles, inhouse world class creatives (hire well), then forward deploy into portcos

The biggest reason the rich get richer (besides compounding) is they avoid things that don't make enough money. The more money you have, the more selective you are about which things are worth doing because fewer things move the needle for you. If you make decisions like you have a lot of money, you make more faster. This rich selection bias is arguably one of the most important because it denotes where they allocate their attention - and as a result - get more for what they put in. Opportunity vehicle selection, rather than pure effort, is why they get such high returns.

I’ve fallen down a Jeremy Irons rabbit hole & I can’t fucking get out man. I can’t stop watching Irons’ films- including Margin Call. I’ve said it before & I’ll say it again: Irons is always interesting. Does he always make sense?? No. But he is incapable of boring an audience.

Naval Ravikant: You can always recognize first-time founders.

MAGIC: “I am happy for myself cause that's 18 championship rings." 😂

Before filming The Big Short (2015), Christian Bale spent days with Michael Burry in his office, studying his speech, movements, and glass eye. Bale later recreated every detail with uncanny precision, leaving the real Burry deeply impressed.

"Routine, in an intelligent man, is a sign of ambition."

Perplexity CEO tells the story of how OpenAi Cofounder, Ilya Sutskever planned on creating AGI:

Marc Andreessen on handling a crisis: “There are no silver bullets, only lead bullets” Marc reflects on his partner Ben Horowitz’s essay “Lead Bullets”: “There’s this temptation - especially when you get into crisis - to think there must be a magic answer or some stroke of genius [similar to Sherlock Holmes]…. There’s this really strong tendency to think that that’s out there. And we see a lot of entrepreneurs cycle through different silver bullets that don’t work. Ben’s point is the answer is probably in firing a whole bunch of lead bullets.” Marc explains: “The answer is probably the engineers working later at night for six months and getting the next version of the product out. And the answer is probably for the sales reps to go call on twice as many customers and try to close more deals… I’ve certainly come around to that point of view a lot.” In other words, there rarely a silver bullet that solves all your problems. So don’t waste a lot of time looking for one. Instead, identify the few key drivers of success for your business and do them extremely well. Here’s a brief excerpt from Ben’s essay: “There may be nothing scarier in business than facing an existential threat. So scary that many in the organization will do anything to avoid it. They will look for any alternative, any way out, any excuse not to live or die in a single battle… There comes a time in every company’s life where it must fight for its life. If you find yourself running when you should be fighting, you need to ask yourself: ‘If our company isn’t good enough to win, then do we need to exist at all?’” Video source: @StanfordGSB (2014)

Charlie Munger: “You become what you pretend to be, to some considerable extent.” “I've known a lot of roguish people who made a fair amount of money and they start giving a little money to show off. And, 20 years later, they are actually real philanthropists.”

Elon Musk explains how to get startup ideas When asked how he comes up with startup ideas, Elon responds: “I tend to think of things from a sort of physics standpoint… what’s the best way to accomplish something? And then pursue that. That’s also a good way to determine if something’s far from its optimum.” He gives rockets as an example: “You could reason by analogy and say the rocket is going to cost a certain amount because that’s what prior rockets have cost. Or you can say, well, what is a rocket made of? What are the material constituents? What do they weigh? What’s the cost per unit mass? And that sets the limit asymptotically for what a rocket can be. So if you can figure out some creative way to rearrange those elements into a rocket shape, then you can achieve a much better outcome.” He also thinks combining ideas from different industries is really helpful for innovation: “What have people discovered in one industry and can that be applied to other industries? That’s I think also a great source of ideas. But usually you just struggle on a solution and try a bunch of things. Most of them don’t work and occasionally one does.” Video source: @VanityFair (2014)

Jensen Huang - NVIDIA! From cleaning toilets in his teens to nearly losing NVIDIA multiple times, Jensen Huang’s journey proves that true greatness is forged through setbacks and relentless belief.

Whenever I feel lost, I watch this.

Burnaboy couldn't believe it when he heard Kai Cenat made $10M 🤯 in a month via streaming 😂😂

"Anything can be turned into positivity and success, even if it starts in a bad place." —Brad Jacobs