TLDR: This week’s read, something is up at OpenAI, and working like a lion
One read, one thought, one follow-up.
One Read
Scaling Through Chaos: The Founder’s Guide to Building and Leading Teams from 0 to 1,000
Recently published by Index Ventures; link here.
One Thought
Something is going on at OpenAI.
That Mira Murati interview, not having a well-prepared answer to the training data, that’s just odd. I’m talking the preparedness and comms prep, not the approach to the training data itself
The governance structure, and when Microsoft was asked about how reliant they are on OpenAI; their response was essentially ‘we own the technology, talent, and distribution, if it vanished tomorrow it wouldn’t matter at all’
Microsoft recently subsumed Inflection in a ‘non-acquisition acquisition’ and then you think about Figure’s humanoid robots, and their recent funding by OpenAI, and you start to see a different world…
Let me touch on that last one just a little bit further.
AI will be far more productive on science, math, and its understanding of the physical world. Now add that into a humanoid and give it Inflection’s compassion engine. Then stick a bunch of robots in traditional jobs, but watch them work 24/7/365 to do things like cure cancer, improve manufacturing, build other machines, and so on.
Now think about the largest company in the world owning all of the necessary components to building all future companies in the world.
Things are getting a little strange, I’d say.
One Follow-Up
The last few weeks I’ve gone pretty hard on my commitment to what I do, sharing my calendar more publicly, posting about my expectations, and being unapologetic.
I can’t tell if it’s coming across well, but it is without a doubt having the intended effect—attracting the most maniacally obsessed founders.
The conversations I’m having recently with founders is more “I’ve read what you wrote and we should work together” and less “Tell my why I should join Antler.”
It’s a noticeable shift, so I’m going to double down again today.
You’ve probably heard this before…
Work like a lion
I think it’s originally a Naval concept, further popularized by a friend, Sahil Bloom.
Essentially the idea is that working 9-5 encourages a steady state of average output.
In other words, the marathon of monotony is an enabler of uninspired work.
Instead, what if you sprinted hard, the way a lion does when it hunts, and then rested long enough to regain full strength for your next one?
Lately, I’ve been sharing more of my calendar and being more open with my general principle that no founder should want to work with me if I’m not working at least as hard as they are.
Like Fred Kofman says, a leader should not only set the standard, but they also need to demonstrate the standard, as well as hold others accountable to that standard too.
Importantly, I have something to prove. To myself mostly, but also to the industry and to the world.
That bodes well for the founders I work with because accepting money from me is not only an investment in the business, but it’s the equivalent of hiring me too.
I am 24-7-365 for the people I invest in. Ask any of them.
I’m often up at 6am responding to email or reading whatever historical article has been posted about YC.
I stack my days, often without lunch, 14 meetings in a row followed by an industry event at night.
To those in my prioritize zone, I will text, Slack, WhatsApp, and email near instantly. This is a feature, not a bug. The general principle is that if someone is waiting on a response for me to make progress, then I am slowing them and their business down, and that’s unacceptable. From the best founders, reciprocity without even asking is near 100% too.
I don’t care if I’m eating dinner, at an event, with friends, or 35,000 feet in the air, I am always on.
Compared to my peers putting in eight hour days, or taking their time to respond, I am stacking progress every single minute of every single day, and my output is compounding because of it.
There’s a sense of urgency for what I do because when you know something is true and working, the only reasonable thing to do is be all-in, front-loading your time, and compounding your progress.
I used to hide from that because some cultures are very alienated by even the mere the thought of hustle culture. Big tech, people less obsessed with their work, you name it. But the more I am surrounded by the top operators, the more I am at home.
Unsurprisingly, a lot people actually pity me for that. Not being married yet or having kids, for example. Or just as common, people who actually hate their jobs who project on me that there’s more to life than working hard.
Of course there is, and family is clearly more important too, but lately I’ve realized that some people just simply won’t understand the obsession either, and that’s ok.
Waking up at 6am to read about venture capital, working until 8pm, having dinner, and then flipping through my social channels that are filled with startup content until 12am is just a level I enjoy being at—and like I said last week, it’s ok if you can’t or don’t want to compete.
But all of that said, you might be surprised to hear that I subscribe to working like a lion.
We shut down the fund for 2.5 weeks over the Christmas and New Years. We do the same around July 4th.
Now compare that to the past 12 weeks. We’ve triaged 7,000 applicants for our April residency and admitted just 3% of founders, of which we’ll probably invest in about ~10% or 0.3% total.
We don’t automate it, we do the work.
But I also needed a rest, so Thursday night I left the office late, took a reverse redeye with two portfolio company founders, landed after midnight, slept in a crappy hotel, woke up to go meet investors with them, and then went to Deer Valley for the weekend.
We’re still talking about work of course, but we’re on vacation too.
Next week I’ll take a couple half days to go to Disney with my nephews, and then we have a long weekend for Easter. Tuesday we’re welcoming over 200 new founders to Antler, and we’ll be back in it for 8 weeks building the next generation of world-changing companies.
People have different definitions of sprinting and resting, but in my opinion it’s just not worth doing anything in life that you’re not willing and excited to obsess over.
See you Monday.