Alexander A. Morgan, MD PhD

Ken Griffin, founder of Citadel, has a $10 plaque behind his desk that reads: "If we're all going to eat, someone has to sell." Of all the things this man could surround himself with, he chose a cheap plaque with a blunt truth about business. "You're always selling. You're selling to candidates. You're selling to vendors, you're selling to counterparties, you're selling to customers." And if you're always selling, you know what you're going to hear a lot of? "No." Griffin doesn't sugarcoat it. He tells two stories that illustrate just how brutal rejection can be. 1994 was a rough year, with Citadel losing ~4% of its capital. Griffin flew to Switzerland for a crucial lunch meeting, sat down, and his guest arrived only to say: "Oh, I thought you were John Griffin from Fen Church. I got to go." His lunch date got up and left the table. Later that afternoon, a Swiss banker spent 45 minutes with him in a beautiful office, smoking a cigar, before closing with: "Such a pity that such a bright young man picked the wrong career." Two rejections in one day for the founder of one of the most successful hedge funds in history — and his takeaway was simply this: "You just have to tolerate. You're going to hear no a lot, but you need to become accustomed to having to market your ideas and market what you represent and what you stand for." Absorbing rejection and continuing anyway is the actual skill, whether you're hiring, raising capital, or winning customers. Most people avoid selling because they're afraid of no. The ones who build great things have learned to expect it.

Elon Musk on how choosing the wrong VC almost killed Tesla "If you have a choice of a lower valuation with someone you really like or a higher valuation with someone you have a question mark about, take the lower valuation." Elon tells part of the story of how he got this wrong when Tesla raised its Series C in 2006. He was choosing between two competing bids from Kleiner Perkins and VantagePoint. Kleiner offered a $50 million pre-money valuation. VantagePoint offered $70 million. Musk told Kleiner that if John Doerr joined the board, Tesla would do it at $50 million. However, John had too many other obligations at the time and couldn't commit to another board seat. Tesla ended up going with VantagePoint, which Musk says, "was probably a mistake". In November 2007, VantagePoint tried to lead a deal that would have seriously diluted Musk's control of the company. That attempt ended up failing. But a year later, VantagePoint almost blocked the deal that saved the company from bankruptcy. In December 2008, Musk needed to raise $40M. One week from running out of money and bouncing payroll, Musk managed to cobble together $20M and asked Tesla's other investors to match it. They agreed, but Musk noticed a problem while finalizing the paperwork. VantagePoint had signed all of the paperwork except for one crucial page. When Musk phoned up Alan Salzman, VantagePoint's cofounder and managing partner, Salzman informed Musk that the firm had a problem with the investment round because it undervalued Tesla. They then backed out of the deal. Musk believed that Salzman's tactics were part of a mission to bankrupt Tesla, oust him as CEO, recapitalize Tesla, and emerge as the major owner of the carmaker. This forced Musk to take another huge risk: Tesla recharacterized the funding as a debt round rather than an equity round, knowing that VantagePoint could not interfere with a debt deal. The deal ended up closing on Christmas Eve, hours before Tesla would have gone bankrupt. Musk had just a few hundred thousand dollars left and could not have made payroll the next day. Musk ultimately put in $12M personally, and the investment firms put up the rest. As for Salzman, Musk said, "He should be ashamed of himself." Musk compares choosing a VC to getting married. It's incredibly important to work with people you respect and trust. Valuation shouldn't be the only thing founders optimize for.

This 1992 lecture at MIT from Steve Jobs will teach you more about product and sales than most 2 year MBA programs Crazy just how ahead of his time this man truly was