0:00 I've spent over 1,000 hours studying the best founders in the world. And I found seven patterns that most founders will never notice. Today, I will go through all seven patterns. And I'm going to leverage seven people. So, founders and athletes who I see as winners, people who dominate their industries. And so, my question to you is going to be, which of these seven patterns do you already possess? And which of these are you quietly missing from your pitch and from your ability to dominate your industry? [music]
0:48 >> Pattern number one is founder mode. Founder mode was started by Brian Chesy who's the CEO of Airbnb who is famous about being all up in the details. Brian Chesy, we know how he originally started the business started in their living room came out of necessity of having a air bed and breakfast right in their living room and it was a crazy idea. No one ever thought that people will come and stay at your apartment or let people into their world. But Brian had a different thought process, a different solution. One last takeaway here is that as your company grows and becomes successful. As a founder, you typically hire people to free you up. Sometimes that won't be good for the business.
1:33 Sometimes you want to know exactly what's going on in marketing. Sometimes you want to know exactly what's going on in engineering. Sometimes you still want to be on the forefront of sales. Why? Because you can find the unique nuggets. You understand the full context of the last 5, 10, 15, 20 years of information. You have all the relationships. You have the clarity to say no to something. And if you can do those things over and over again, that can compound the business. That can grow the business exponentially. The other part here is that you understand what to say yes to. almost like what you say no to is very important, but also what you say yes to is very important and you know how to tackle new horizons when you are
2:21 extremely in the weeds understanding exactly what's going on in a business. So I do think that founder mode within the right reasons is really good for business. You always want a founder who is so close to the white hot middle of exactly what's going on in a business because typically they have the most context to make the best decisions to help grow the company over time. Pattern number two is patience. Play the decadel long game. I also have a fun saying of play long-term games with long-term people. In this pattern, I am focused on Daniel Ek of Spotify. He historically ran Spotify at thin margins for well over a decade so that he can really
3:09 figure out how to scale the music business. No one had ever did it in history going against all the music labels which are essentially banks that have the entire industry in a lock code. He still overcame and by building this in Europe most startups are built mainly in the US, New York, San Francisco, LA etc. He built this out of a small country in Europe. And in the patients game, you have to have conviction on exactly what the goal is for Spotify. Their goal was expand the catalog, expand the catalog, expand the catalog, find ways for people to find value in this subscription. Similar to Netflix, right? people still will they'll cut
3:55 other things off before they cut off their Netflix because it gives that much value for that $15 or $20. I think Spotify did that same thing and they focus on the algorithm. One of the only algorithms that I've seen that have been that successful that have nothing to do with visual content, if you will. Had everything to do with audio content. And if you ever watch any of the content from Spotify on Netflix, there's a Netflix show. It just really showed his grind and how he believed and has so much conviction and the small nugget of how people should be able to listen to music. That is something only a founder who has something deep in his heart can bring to fruition. And in that Netflix
4:40 documentary on Spotify, you could see how Daniel never wavered. Even when the company was at the brink of running out of capital, he thought in decades, not in funding cycles. So I asked you, what type of pitch are you giving to investors? What type of timeline are you thinking in? Are you thinking in short timelines or you thinking in long timelines? Bill Gates even said, "It's easy to overestimate what you can do in one year, but it's easy to underestimate what you can do in well over a decade." So, how can you start to think in long-term metrics instead of thinking in short funding cycles? One other thing I'll bring up is Jeff Bezos of Amazon. He was
5:26 a great component of being patient. They were unprofitable for so long. Investors, private and public markets were so mad at Jeff Bezos. But Bezos said, "Had patience with me. Have patience with me. Going with books and then going with e-commerce and all these other things. We're going to build economies of scale where we become the everything store." And now looking back at that, true Jeff was so patient, was so smart, and he had this thing called the bar raiser where every single person he had to hire had to be better than all the people on the previous team. So if I have a team of 10 people and I'm hiring 11th, that 11 person has to raise the bar of everyone.
6:12 And he has the six-page memos where you have to write an entire six-page memo to get your clarity and pitch an idea. And then when you get to the meeting, you got to read the six-page memo. Everyone has to read it for 15 minutes and then we discuss. That's patience. Putting premium and priority on patience. How are you doing that for your business? Pattern number three is compounding advantage. The best person for this pattern is Sam Alman of Open AI. My opinion, arguably the best salesperson of all time. You got to think about it. This guy went from being in YC as a founder to running YC to being a co-founder of OpenAI to actually convincing everyone at OpenAI that he
6:59 would be a better CEO than Elon Musk and then launching Chad GBT, the best consumer product that has ever been created in the history of mankind. So, he understands compound advantage really well. And it started super early in his career. And when I say it happened early in Sam Alman's career, I think what he realized is that writing was going to be a compound advantage over time. There are a few prolific writers in the tech space. Fred Wilson, Square Ventures, Paul Graham who was a big writer and founder of Y Comer and Sam Alman. You can go back years and see all the super clear distilled thoughts and perspectives of Sam Alman on his personal vlog. So, one thing that I
7:46 would say is start to write to clear up your mind to understand where you're going to be going in the future and let that compound and be an advantage for you cuz now in this AI world, no one's writing or if people are writing, it's a lot of slop. The other thing I want to talk about with Sam Alman is his ability to hire extremely amazing people. There is some history and some stories around how he got Ilia Scutzenberg, who was the best kind of researcher of all time at the point to leave Google Deep Mind and come to OpenAI. And many people just said that he bet on people wanting to invest in mission over money. And once you got the best researchers and the best hardware, you can recruit the best
8:31 talent. Then you can come up with the best ideas. You can just play around, come up with the best ideas. And I think that's exactly what Sam Albing did. So, how can this work for you? How do you figure out how to get crystal clear? How do you figure out to be around the right organizations? And then, how do you figure out the right offer? Your job is to figure out compounding offers where every single thing that you do stacks on top of each other to make it inevitable for you to be successful and to be so successful that everyone wants to be a part of your superstar rocket ship that's going to the moon. So my takeaway here with this pattern is how do you get 1% better every day? How do you level up and stack your years? Because someone like Sam Almond has continually been
9:18 consistent year over year and then he had his chat GBT moment. How do you stay consistent with innovation year over year, day by day, so that you can have your own chat GBT moment? And then how do you scale that even more and make it a unique selling proposition to get the best people in the world to work on your idea? That is a unique pattern that I see from some of the top CEOs. Pattern four, manufactured urgency. In this one, we're going to be talking about Jensen Wong from Nvidia. He always talks about the early days of Nvidia when he was 30 days from bankruptcy. He always talks about having 60 plus direct reports, probably 10x most CEOs. And everyone I've spoken to that works
10:05 in Nvidia talks about his intensity even 30 years later after starting Nvidia. And so I call this agency. Like we want to invest in founders who have high agency. They have a bias for action. They have a high bar. One time I was talking to someone from Nvidia. He mentioned something that was really interesting. One he said, "Hey, you know Apple and Google etc. they have hundreds of thousands of employees. Nvidia only has 40 to 50,000 even if that on a good day and people stay at Nvidia for life." Then he went as far to say, "Guess what? Nvidia has never done a layoff in the history of the company." And I was like, dang. Thinking about like Google, Apple,
10:52 Microsoft, Facebook, they're have all done layoffs. And now Nvidia, the most valuable company in the world, the most integral company with their chips to AI, have never done a layoff. Why is that? Because it is patterned. When you manufacture urgency, when you create an ecosystem that always has a bias for action, you won't have to worry about hiring a new person because the current person one is invested in a mission, two has a bias for action, and three holds each other accountable and iron sharpens iron to get out the best possible outcomes. So, the last thing to
11:38 point out here that is really interesting about Jensen in this pattern is that Jensen does not do one-on ones. So, even though he has 60 direct reports, he has no one-on-one meetings. All of his meetings are in group sessions and he gives feedback and correction live during group sessions. So, what do I think that does? Like, for my opinion, when you're a leader and you're CEO, you're a founder, you have to lead by example. And so if you don't have 101 ons and if you make corrections live and you don't let anything fester, all your employees follow. So that means the entire organization is super flat. Even at 50,000 people, everyone has access. Everyone can pitch you. Everyone understands exactly what's going on in a
12:24 business. And when someone makes a misstep or when someone doesn't have the right knowledge, the right framework, they are corrected instantaneously. And that is a standard that everyone is held by. That's an amazing pattern. So I want to ask you, do you have this pattern in your business? How flat is your organization? How many direct reports do you have? How many corrections can you give in group settings that are actually kind of like iterated on and perfected in the wild? Pattern number five, move fast and break things. Very famous from Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. But I want to think a little bit more intentional. I think his new mantra is win at all cost. And it's a dangerous double-edged
13:10 sword mantra, but in the world that he's going after, it's how you win. It's how you beat an anthropic, a Google, and Gemini, and an open AAI or even compete against Microsoft. And so early days to move fast and break things is just do whatever you need to do to get the product out the door. today. This win at all cost, it's acquire Instagram. It's acquire WhatsApp. This is a really interesting one that I recently saw on a podcast. Peter Thiel said, "If you don't copy your competitors, someone else will." Peter Thiel was famous early investor in Facebook. That's why Mark Zuckerberg copies everything. He's like, "Someone has to do it. It's a moral thing that you have to think about and it's a dilemma, but if you don't do it, one of your competitors is going to do it." And I think Mark Zuckerberg does
13:57 that the best in history. So much so that Evan Spiegel at Snapchat has Facebook VP of product in his LinkedIn, right? Just because of how much Mark Zuckerberg has copied him. And so in my opinion, what moral dilemmas do you have competing against your competitors that you still have to just be like, you know what, this has to be done because it's either you or it's me. Are you okay overcoming those dilemmas? The other thought around win at all costs. I think Mark is still actually top of the line at this. For example, he bought out scale AI for $14 billion. Bought him out for 49% so that it wasn't actually an acquisition. And he did all
14:42 that just so that he can get Alexander Wang to come over and be the head of AI for him so that he can build out a model ad. And you know what I heard? I heard that Zuck cleared out and moved his entire office so that he sits next to Alexander Wang and the rest of the super intelligence lab. He wants to be less than a twominute walk away from being able to win at the frontier of AI. What are you going to do in your business? Are you going to move from New York to San Francisco? Are you going to move everyone into office? Are you going to pay a high dollar to acquire an expert or a person or some type of product so that you can take your company to the next level? What risk are you willing to
15:29 take? What things are you willing to break? What moral dilemma are you willing to overcome so that you can win and dominate your industry? All right, guys. These next two are actually athletes. I believe that business is the biggest sport that you can play or longest sport. You can play it from your early teens into your 90s like Warren Buffett. So pattern number six is protect the instrument that is your body. Novak Djokovic is the perfect example. He's changed everything to protect this right here. Changed his sleep schedule. He also started focusing on being vegan. He changed the way he thinks about meditation. He hired a mental coach. He has all types of different things that he does. He has, I
16:16 believe, the pickle juice and the beet juice. All these different things that he does to get his competitive edge. I was actually listening to podcast talking about mental coaches in the tennis space and this person had sat down with a mental coach and they said the difference between the number three player and the number four player ranked in the world is bigger than the difference between the number four and a number 200 ranked player mentally. That is insane. How do you get to that type of mental level? You get to that type of mental level by protecting this by changing your body and changing your mindset to get to that upper level of
17:03 thinking. My opinion, most of sports, most of business is mental. It's not that physical. But you have to think about it. The physical world is just a representation of here. So we got to lock in and really understand that we should leverage experts to understand exactly what we need to change, what we need to evolve, what we need to test and iterate on so that we can get to the mental capacity to bring every single thing in here to the physical world. The last thing on this pattern that I have to give to NovakJokovich is his recovery and his routine. He is someone who does not break the routine. He is someone who's focused highly on recovery. That is how you can play till almost 40 and
17:49 still run grand slams. Still be one of the tops at Wimbledon and other places. Still be people who you are 15 years older than. And one book that I will suggest here, the inner game of tennis, if you have a chance, pick this book up. It is so good. And the too long don't read is that there are two selves. There's your mental self and there's your physical self. Typically, your mental and physical self, they're always going at it talking negatively to each other. And when you do that, you can't focus on playing naturally. When you are able to actually control and understand and have the two cells work together, you can do this oneliner which is called playing out of your mind. You hear that said in sports all the time. He's
18:35 playing out of his mind. He's on fire. Blah blah blah. This whole book is purely focused on how do you play that inner game between the mental self and the physical self. Please go and check out that book. It's a game changer. Pattern seven is study the game. And when I say study the game, study it better than anyone else. And the person that comes to mind on this pattern is LeBron James. I know I know I'm from Cleveland. I'm from Ohio. And I could be biased but I think everyone would agree that LeBron James is one of the biggest students of the game in any type of sports or business. He has been so disciplined
19:21 with the recovery, with the routine, with the level and bar, with his off the court details around business, entrepreneurship, and investing. He is a true professional. Why is he a true professional? He's a true professional because he has studied and surrounded himself by the best of the best of the best. He probably got a little bit of this from Kobe Bryant. Like Kobe was historically known for calling people up in the middle of night to understand how they're best in class at X, Y, and Z. You would just hear Kobe like getting in touch with people, calling them at 2 a.m. like asking, "How do you do this? How do you do that? How did you get through this?" I believe that LeBron is doing the same thing, right? LeBron has
20:07 been linked with Jay-Z. He's been linked with Warren Buffett. He's been linked with all these other top business leaders in the world. He's an owner of sports teams. He has just been so involved. And the one thing that I really have to admire from LeBron is that he keeps first things first. That is the number one mantra here at Harlem Capitals, FTF. No matter how many meetings he goes out to Omaha to have of Warren Buffett, no matter how many times he's hanging out with Jay-Z, no matter how many things he's doing with Drake or Kendrick or whoever else now, he does not let any of that get in the middle of his training and being great. That's how he's been able to play till 42 years old
20:54 in the league. That's how he's overcome Kareem Abdul Jabbar's scoring record. Like it's it's all because he's a student of the game. And my opinion, when you become a student of the game, you love the game too much to cut corners. And so, how do you think about this in your business? You have to have a mission, a driving mission in love for the game and study for the game so big that you wouldn't even let yourself cut corners. And because you won't cut corners, no one at your company's going to cut corners. And that is the bar. And then hopefully one day you get a chance to play far beyond your time. You get to work with some of the best people in the world and you get a chance to own your
21:41 sports teams, if you will. So you get a chance to have all the offc court relationships and sponsorships and you get to have that second part of your career that is just compounding on you being excellent in the first part. You being focused and just really letting first things be first in the first half of your career. So I'm curious. I'm curious now that we've went through all of these patterns. Let me know in the comments what patterns are super clear and you're living in those patterns today. But what patterns were you quietly missing? And what are you going to do to add that pattern to your pitch, to your tool belt, so that you can be great? So that you can build a generational company.
