I think my biggest struggle right now is I’m so obsessed with what I’m doing that I think I don’t make enough space for the people I care about and people who care about me.
I think humans are tribal. If you look back at the origins of society, even if you look at what Rousseau was writing, the origin of society really reduces to the family unit. We live in a highly individualistic society, where we tend to try to rationalize a lot of our relationships. Fundamentally, I think things like unconditional love, I think they’re evolutionarily baked into us and they drive our actions in ways we can’t understand
people who have really moved society forward, developed new institutions. It doesn’t necessarily have to be like that, I don’t feel as though I need to create a revolution in order to be a great leader. A great leader can be a restaurant manager, or a waiter, or a bartender. It really comes down to the interactions you have and whether you’re constantly investing in other peoples’ growth or not
Porto Velho, Brazil, which is a place like nobody’s ever heard of, which is in the far north of Brazil, and he’s just really managed to discipline himself and accomplish a lot and make great contributions to society. I really credit him. He created opportunities for his family. I really have a lot of admiration for him
What I’ve found is they’re either incredibly creative, incredibly hard-working, or incredibly intelligent
People tend to describe me as being very intense. I generally don’t engage in small talk. I’m not that type of person, which is both to my credit and detriment
There’s a last breath, as a necessary fact, and to think about that it puts everything else in perspective in a certain way. I don’t have a single thing where I’ve really felt like, “Wow, this is great. I’m so great.” That doesn’t exist.
As a consequence, when I feel as though somebody has a lot of potential and they’re squandering it, whether I’m realizing it or I’m not doing a good enough job developing it and eliciting it, I take it personally
On that — how do you think about standards and evaluation for people and for yourself?
Can you give a story to put that into context for me?
. I think there’s probably two paths I could take with it. If I’m being totally honest, I don’t know which one I would take. I think there’s the selfless path. I have the selfish path and the selfless path
Honestly, I think there is a world in which I operate it for the rest of my life.
I just tell them, “If I can’t offer you a differentiated path there, then there’s no point in continuing.” A lot of young people want to be part of building something important and serious. I think part of that is definitely financial, but I think that fundamentally, it’s not purely financial. I think part of that is a desire for adventure.
Carol Dweck has done a great job capturing. She studied it and calls it the entity theory of intelligence versus the quantity theory of intelligence. In other words, the belief that you can improve and get smarter actually drives better outcomes in individuals if you test them over time
How have you maximized learning over your life?
To your earlier question on power, knowledge is certainly a form of power, and knowledge doesn’t have to be academic. You have knowledge of people. Seeing the way that doctors are interacting with patients, seeing the small cues from the families waiting out in the waiting rooms and the patients, and the ways they reacted to subtle cues from doctors when they were doing rounds … All of these things, they teach you so much about the world and about human beings, and just certain ways, the pursuit of knowledge and curiosity for knowledge, but that knowledge itself, in a certain way, gives you power to understand what’s going on around you.
Yeah. One of the things I look for in candidates is mentorship. Do they have an appreciation for mentorship, both as it relates to learning from other people, but especially for the first people in the company, as it relates to teaching other people.
I think having that guidance makes us uniquely capable. First of all, we understand how technology works, which I would never … I think that’s something that people in Silicon Valley really dismiss as an advantage. When you go outside of Silicon Valley, people don’t understand a lot of the way that technology works and is evolving and value creation is moving. Hell, go 100 miles east of San Francisco, and try to explain AI to somebody and how that has implications for workflows. It’s not something that’s on their radar.
our team are from Northwestern, and I actually didn’t realize this, but apparently Breakout List is a massive resource for the Northwestern engineering community that’s interested in going into technology companies
The way I see it being manifested is the ability to understand what the core levers of value creation are within an organization, what workflows essentially drive value for the organization, and then be able to add value even externally to demonstrate that you understand those
