davidlee

There is a tremendous amount of progress happening in World Models. Multiple labs have raised more than $1B. WMs were the star of GTC. They are a real path to embodied AI. So @PimDeWitte & I wrote a comprehensive 19k word overview of World Models. notboring.co/p/world-models

Keith Rabois on how to identify great talent “What you want to do with every single employee every single day is expand the scope of their responsibilities until it breaks… and that’s the role they should stay in.” Keith tells the story of giving an intern the task of getting smoothies to arrive at the office at 9pm to reward Square’s engineering team. And once the intern proved they could solve this task that had stumped multiple people at the company, he gave them something more important and consequential to do. Everybody has some level of complexity that they can handle, and you want to keep expanding their responsibility until you see where it breaks—as Keith points out, some people will surprise you: “There will be some people who you don’t expect—with different backgrounds, without a lot of experience—who can just handle enormously complicated tasks. So keep testing that and pushing the envelope.” Keith also argues that you should monitor who is going up to other people's desks. If you see people frequently going up to a person's desk, it's a sign that that person can help them. Promote these people and give them more responsibility as fast as you can. Video source: @ycombinator (2014)

x.com/i/article/2034…

In this clip @MattMahanSJ explains what the "billionaire tax" will end up being. A middle class tax increase. If you vote yes on this, you're basically screwing yourself.

In this clip @MattMahanSJ explains what the "billionaire tax" will end up being. A middle class tax increase. If you vote yes on this, you're basically screwing yourself.

"I don't think many tech companies execute M&A well." Palo Alto Networks CEO @nikesharora breaks down his strategy for successful M&A: "Purchase price is an irrelevant artifact. If it's going to work, it's going to work phenomenally well, or you're going to screw it up. It's not what you paid, it's what you're able to do with it." "You could say that Instagram was expensive, or YouTube was expensive, or DoubleClick was expensive. They all worked perfectly. AOL Time Warner is a different story. So it boils down to how you execute past the price you pay for it." "In tech, when you buy a company, you buy a team, you buy an existing product, and you buy a roadmap for the future. The question is: can you deliver on that roadmap? Can you accelerate that roadmap? Does it work?" "We sign a term sheet, and we ask the founders to sit with our team and redesign the product roadmap so we like it and they like it. And if they don't agree with our expectations and we don't agree with theirs, we don't buy the company." "We make them in charge. My teams have to work for them, which makes them really unhappy. And not many of them like it. But I'm like, look, these guys went out there, raised money, kicked your ass in your category, and you want them to work for you? That makes no sense to me. You're going to work for them. Learn from them." "So our job is to enable these people. We look at them and say, whatever your business plan was when you were a small private company, find me a business plan that's twice as assertive and bold as the one you had then." "We've built a phenomenal system to take them to market. I have 3,000 people in the field... 3,000 people go out there and see 10,000 customers. So that's where the secret sauce kicks in." "We've bought 34 companies so far. I think our hit rate on things that have worked is over 70%."