A janitor making $4/hour walked into a Fortune 500 company boardroom. Shaking, he took a seat opposite the CEO. "So I had an idea..." he nervously began. Years later, that idea would become an iconic consumer brand and make him worth ~$20M. Here's how that meeting went 🧶👇

13) Flamin’ Hot Cheetos became one of the most successful launches in Frito-Lay history. They went on to become a viral, pop-culture sensation. Richard became a VP and amassed a $20M fortune. Not bad for a boy from Cucamonga.

Sharing some sources here for those who want to read more! cnbc.com/2018/03/27/a-janito… thehustle.co/hot-cheetos-inv… newsweek.com/flamin-hot-chee…

12) He’d even sealed the bags with a clothing iron, and had hand drawn a logo on each one. The room went silent. After a few moments, the CEO spoke, “Put that mop away, you’re coming with us”

In 1959, a Swedish engineer at Volvo patented what would become one of the greatest inventions of all time Volvo stood to make billions But after a meeting with Volvo's President, he decided to give it away for free - and it changed the world Here’s how that meeting went 🧶👇

Imagine trying to compete with YouTube and Netflix at the same time. That's what Anjali Sud faced when she joined Vimeo 6 years ago. She quickly felt their strategy was wrong, and brought it up in a meeting. Today, as CEO, she took Vimeo public. Here's what happened 🧵👇

4) As he was getting ready for his first day of work, his grandfather pulled him aside and said: “Make sure that floor shines. And let them know that a Montañez mopped it.”

7) Then, he called the CEO. “Mr. Enrico’s office. Who is this?” “Richard Montañez, in California” “You’re the VP overseeing CA?” “No, I work at the Rancho Cucamonga plant.” “Oh, so you’re the VP of Ops?” “No, I work inside the plant.” “You’re the manager?” “No. I’m the janitor.”

9) 2 weeks later, he entered that boardroom. After taking a moment to catch his breath, he started telling them what he'd learned about Frito-Lay and the idea he'd been working on.

10) “I saw there was no product catering to Latinos.” On the sales trips he shadowed he saw that in Latino neighborhoods Lays, Fritos, Ruffles, and Cheetos, were stocked right next to a shelf of Mexican spices. Frito-Lay had nothing spicy or hot.

8) The CEO got on the line. Loving the initiative, he told Richard to prepare a presentation, and he set a meeting in 2 weeks time. Stunned, Richard ran to the library and picked up a book on marketing strategies. Then, he started prepping.

6) In the mid-1980s Frito-Lay started to struggle. The CEO announced a new initiative to all 300,000 employees. “Act like an owner” Trying to empower them to work more creatively and efficiently. Montañez listened.

5) Richard made it his mission to be the best janitor Frito-Lay had ever seen. He spent his off-time learning about the company's products, manufacturing, marketing and more. He even asked salesmen to tag along and watch them sell.

11) The Latino market was ready to explode, Monteñez explained. Inspired by elote - a Mexican street corn covered in spices - Richard had created his own snack He pulled out 100 plastic baggies. He had taken Cheetos from the factory and coated them in his own mix of spices

1) Richard Montañez grew up in Cucamonga Valley, California, sharing a one-room cinderblock hut with 14 family members. He dreaded school. Barely able to speak English, he’d cry to his mother as she was getting him ready for class.

2) When asked, all other students in class would eagerly shout out their dream job: Astronaut, Doctor, Racecar driver. Richard had nothing to say. “There was no dream where I came from.”

3) He dropped out of school in 4th grade and took odd jobs at farms and factories to help make ends meet. Some years later in 1976, a neighbor let him know of a job opening for a factory janitor at the Frito-Lay plant down the road. The $4/hour pay was more than he'd ever made.

13) Nils and Volvo chose the greater good over profit. For his contribution, Nils received a gold medal from Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences. He was later on inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame. “There’s a little bit of Nils Bohlin in every car.”

In 2003, Jeff Bezos invited his former chief-of-staff to a corporate retreat at his home. One 30min meeting on the schedule ended up going on for hours... That former chief-of-staff is now worth $400M. Oh, and he’s Amazon's new CEO. Here’s what happened in that meeting 🧶👇

After his dad was tragically killed, a Nigerian teenager made a vow to fulfill his father’s entrepreneurial dreams. One critical meeting set him on the course to make that a reality. Today, his Atlanta-based company pulls in $60M/year. Here’s what happened in that meeting 🧶👇

11) She was named CEO of Vimeo. Today, 4 years after becoming the company's chief executive, Anjali and her team took Vimeo public.

After following his girlfriend to Canada, a young snowboarding enthusiast was ready to start his life anew. One final meeting with a potential employer took an unexpected turn… Fast forward to today - he’s created a net worth of $10B. Here’s what happened in that meeting 🧶👇

12) It was decided. Volvo gave away the patent for Nils’s three-point seatbelt design. Their seatbelts would go on to become the industry standard and, in doing so, save millions of lives.

11) Nils began to articulate an option to give the seatbelts patent away for free, and Gunnar began to smile. Years ago, Gunnar had lost a family member in a traffic accident, partly because of the shortcomings of two-point seatbelts. This was what Gunnar wanted all along.

After the global success of the iPod, Steve Jobs wasn’t used to hearing the word “no.” But when looking for the iPhone launch partner, that’s all he heard. He had one last meeting with the only company who hadn't rejected him yet. Here’s how he negotiated in that meeting 🧶👇

10) Volvo had already been using these seatbelts in their cars for 2 years. Nils and Gunnar poured over the data on their effectiveness. The results were remarkable. The new seatbelts were multiple orders of magnitude more effective at preventing injury and death.

1) After receiving his mechanical engineering degree from a University in his hometown of Härnösand, Sweden, Nils Bohlin joined aircraft maker Saab to work on ejector seats. For 16 years, he continued to focus on safety and was eventually designing complete pilot rescue systems.

4) “I realized both the upper and lower body must be held securely in place with one strap across the chest and one across the hips” In just one short year of applying his aircraft safety experience to cars, Nils invented the V-Type three point safety belt.

In April 2001 after his company ran out of money, a casual DJ and former Philips executive secured a last-ditch meeting to pitch Steve Jobs. Fast forward 20 years, and he’s now worth ~$800M. Here’s how one meeting changed his life 🧶👇

6) On July 10th, 1962, the US Patent Office granted Nils patent #3043625 for the three-point seat belt safety design. Volvo now had to decide, how was it going to use this patent?

7) In a management meeting, Nils and the Volvo’s President at the time, Gunnar Engellau, looked over the numbers. Volvo could keep it to themselves. These seatbelts could join their arsenal of safety features and win consumers over to the Volvo brand.

2) Nils was anchored to the idea of safety above all else, and brought this same mentality to a welcoming team at Volvo. There, he focused his attention on all the driver and passenger safety systems, starting with seatbelts.

8) They could also license the patent and collect royalties from other manufacturers making their designs. Or, they could manufacture these seatbelts themselves, and sell them to every other car maker in the world.

9) Each option was extremely lucrative. Volvo would easily net hundreds of millions in revenue and dominate the competition. But before deciding, they did something else.

5) Following standard company procedure, Nils applied for a patent. As the US Patent Office took time to review his work, Nils didn’t stand idly by. He worked with the rest of the Volvo team to get these new seat belts into their cars as fast as possible.

3) Seatbelts weren’t a standard feature in cars at the time. Upgrading would get you seatbelts consisting of a simple lap band, like those used in airplanes today. While better than nothing, these two-point seat belts didn’t adequately protect the human body in collisions.

13) 26 years after founding Amazon, and 15 years after launching AWS, Bezos had decided it was time for a change. Yesterday, after reporting Amazon's first $100B sales quarter, Jeff Bezos announced that he’d be stepping down as CEO. Andy Jassy will be taking over the reigns.

7) She pitched him her idea. Pivot Vimeo from an entertainment and content source, to providing tools for small businesses to create video. It didn't matter where the video ended up (YouTube, etc), Vimeo would help them *make* it.

1) 12 years after the company's founding, Anjali Sud joined Vimeo as Director of Marketing. Vimeo was on a mission to create a higher quality alternative to YouTube.

No one thought it was a good idea. The founder quit and the company was bankrupt. But after one dinner meeting, Caryn Becker decided to go all in on this crumbling business. Just last month, she took the company public at $5.8B Here's how that meeting went 🧶👇

10) She wasted no time and quickly made Vimeo a one-stop shop to film, edit, and share video. Sales, profit, subscribers - all the numbers surged significantly higher than they'd been the previous year. The results were clear.

Jeff Bezos's new superyacht - the one they're dismantling the Rotterdam bridge for - reportedly cost $500M But it really cost him $0. In fact, it may even make him money. Here's how he did it:

2) In an attempt to do so, not only was Vimeo highly curating the content on its platform, they were also heavily investing in their own content. They were to go-to spot for filmmakers and professional video creators.

Arc hard pivoting after 4x daily user growth is interesting. My bet on what they realized: 1. The personalized software market is small. Volume-wise. Normies really don’t care about customizing their browser (design twit as an audience doesn’t scale) 2. Building for a small audience can work if you have high LTV and spend velocity but they couldn’t figure out how to monetize 3. They raised $50M and need to justify their $550M valuation, so going for scale was the play 4. They’re genuinely excited about LLMs changing the way people use the internet / access information We learned the first few points when we built customizable zoom skins at Macro. Regardless, super excited about what they do next. Arc was delightful product and the team is incredibly talented

After bombing the LSAT twice, a young college grad started selling fax machines door-to-door to pay her bills. 15 years later, she became the youngest self-made female billionaire ($1.1B) One meeting with the right person helped turn her life around, and here's how it went 🧶👇

15) Today, Shopify is a ~$140B company, with Tobi at the helm. Tobi and Shopify have enabled millions of small business owners to make a living doing what they love, while taking on the e-commerce giants. Their mission has stayed true since their founding: “arming the rebels”

In a do-or-die meeting to discuss his failing video game, a young founder decided to scrap almost everything he’d been working on and try something new. Yesterday, news broke that big tech co's are now trying to buy his company for $10B+ Here’s what happened in that meeting🧶👇

8) Small, mom-and-pop, businesses were realizing that video and the internet were core to their growth. But they didn't have the resources or expertise to create high quality content. That's where Vimeo could come in.

3) She quickly had thoughts on Vimeo's strategy "I developed a point of view, myself and a few others within the company, that we probably weren’t going to compete well with Netflix in original content because we probably weren’t going to have $17 billion to spend on it"

9) Levin was fascinated by the idea. Vimeo was struggling and losing money. What's the worst that could happen if they gave this a try? He decided to give her a shot. Anjali assembled a small team and started to pilot her idea.

I started a new company with @nitinrajini ! We’ve raised $2.3M led by @a16zGames SPEEDRUN for Closing Theory Studios - a new, independent game studio. Games have traditionally been all about fantasy, a hard fork from the real world. We started Closing Theory because we believe there’s an opportunity for fun that’s closer to the world we live in. Our first two titles, HOUSE RUSH! and NEIGHBORHOOD RUSH!, are for the 70M+ people who browse Zillow just for fun. And we’ve been incredibly deliberate about our team and investors. No one has ever brought together this strategic mix of gaming experts and real estate operators + influencers before… We’re grateful to be backed by: @a16zGames - @JoshLu from Zynga, Scopely, Disney, Blizzard, and Meta @PowerhouseCap - Playtika, Scopely, and more @sjsivak - founder of Proletariat (acquired by Blizzard), and Zynga @spencerrascoff - Co-founder and former CEO of Zillow, @75SunnyVentures Keller Capital, LLC - John Keller and Mitch Johnson, of the Keller Williams family office Josh Altman and Matthew Altman - The Altman Brothers, Celebrity stars of Million Dollar Listing LA @tomferry - Top real estate coach We’re further supported by the best tech investors, operators, and angels out there: @pearvc , @Liquid2V , Common Metal (@tkendall former President of Pinterest), @William_Collis, @AlexPattis5, @ChrisZarou, @benzises, @anmolm_ , @vedicakant, Phoenix Fund, @nickcandito, @JuliaLipton, @RohunJauhar, @DavidScacco, @BobbyThakkar and more. This is our third time making a game for non-gamers. We successfully sold our first two companies. Come join us: closingtheory.com/

5) She had an idea... "There was another, much bigger market—businesses. What Squarespace and GoDaddy did for websites, we could do with video.”

6) Rather than sit idly by while 'management' steered the ship, Anjali went right to the top. She called a meeting with Joey Levin, Vimeo's parent company CEO.

4) And people who were seeking entertainment went to YouTube. It was proving to be a hard-to-break habit. “Vimeo had long been a software company for filmmakers, but the market was too small”

A young CEO rushed into his board meeting. As he excitedly began explaining a new product feature, a board member pretended to fall asleep. Mortified, he made a key decision right then and there. Microsoft later bought his company for ~$150M Here’s how that meeting went 🧶👇

16) Tope persisted through personal and professional hardship. After losing the two most important people in his life, he built something that would have made them both beam with pride. He achieved his Dream. #MLKDay “I wish they could see what Calendly is now”

Bill Gates first met Melinda French in a work meeting at Microsoft. One of the first things Melinda said to Bill: "You're not spontaneous enough for me" Here's what happened in that meeting 🧶👇

@timigod @kola_aina @ireaderinokun @OdunEweniyi @WimbartHope @JasonNjoku @SimShagaya @skweird A twitter-friend of mine, @seyitaylor, thought you'd enjoy this thread! Also please lmk if there are other Nigerian/African meeting stories that should be shared with the world🌍

In the 1970s, a young engineer met with the creator of one of the most iconic video games of all time. Their conversation inspired the engineer to invent a technology that revolutionized video gaming into the $200B industry it is today. Here’s what happened in that meeting 🧶👇

1) Andy Jassy joined Amazon just before the dot-com boom and became Jeff Bezos’ “shadow.” He literally followed Bezos around everywhere he went, taking notes in all his meetings and learning directly from the boss himself.

11) Bezos and the Amazon team could have left that retreat and just doubled down on their e-commerce prowess. But they didn’t. They took a bet on Andy and his idea. Amazon Web Services (AWS) was born.

After battling an exhausting personal lawsuit, she was on the brink of giving up. But one meeting with an elusive Russian tech mogul reignited her spirit. Yesterday, she became the youngest woman to take a company public, and a billionaire. Here’s how that meeting went 🧶👇

Today we're introducing the world to @macro_HQ We're also announcing our $4.3M Seed 💰from the incredible people @FirstMarkCap @gcvp @UnderscoreVC After 🧑‍🤝‍🧑25,000+ beta testers 📅50,000+ meetings ⌛️6 months of building Macro is available for download! techcrunch.com/2020/07/14/ma…

15) Against the odds, Steve and AT&T launched one of the most successful products of all time and completely up-ended mobile phone industry. Steve employed one of the oldest negotiating techniques: holding firm, with an unwavering belief in yourself.

Tony Hsieh was as genuine a human as they come. In a 2013 all-hands meeting, he made an announcement that would flip Zappos upside down, literally. 15% of employees quit. What’d he regret the most? That he didn’t do it sooner. Here’s what happened that meeting 🧶👇

12) Once opened up, the worldclass infrastructure services they had built for themselves was used by millions of developers, all building their own things. Profits from AWS allowed their ecommerce biz to grow, and catapulted Amazon to the top spot. The world’s largest retailer.

It’s TestFlight Friday! After 6 months of building House Rush and playtesting in person, we’re ready to start sharing it more widely. TestFlight details and what to expect: House Rush is a real estate fantasy game with real houses. We’re building for all of you who love to browse Zillow just for fun. - Earn cash guessing the price of active listings in your city. - Use your cash to make offers on houses in the market. - Build your real estate portfolio, accept or reject offers on your houses from other players, visit vacation houses, and work up to a mega mansion. - Unlock more slots in your portfolio, rank up, and earn the top spot on the leaderboards. We’re in TestFlight for a reason. House Rush is still super early. There will be bugs, and lots of room for improvement! We’ve taken a quick first pass at onboarding for this alpha, and have many more things on our roadmap like proper balancing, sharing, social features, sound, offline mode, loading optimization, and a finalized art style. I’m immensely proud of the creativity and shipping speed of our small team, and can’t wait to hear what you think of it. Working our way through inviting folks off of our waitlist. If you’ve signed up you should get an email within the next ~ week. I've got 20 invites for twitter folks who are dying to try this out right now. If that’s you, let me know!

9) From working with the infrastructure services team, he explained how they’d standardized backend requirements. Now, each new project that came down the pipeline was completed ahead of schedule. Database, compute, and storage no longer took months to develop.

This is the fastest i’ve ever shipped product in my entire career. We went from having no game dev experience and a simple web app to a refined game concept and full fledged unity mobile app in 4 weeks. Our first live playtest is in 5 days! What they told us in SPEEDRUN that helped us move fast: 1. Speed is our only advantage As a startup, we generally can’t compete on quality or cost 2. AI accelerates everything Using tools like chatGPT, midjourney, scenario and more help make our 2 person team (we’re trying to grow!) output like a 10 person team. 3. Games are derivative Truly new games are rare. Most games are riffs on previous successful titles/mechanics. Find a relevant concept + add a twist = easy way to test if the twist is compelling enough for a new game to succeed 4. Start with core loop first Game can be broken down into a series of stacking loops from core (most repetitive) > outer > meta. We design, build, and validate in that order. If the core loop isn’t compelling, most people won’t stick around just for the higher order stuff 5. Free to play games ride or die by retention Hard D1/7/30/60/90, etc. If you can’t make playing the game habitual, players won’t stick around long enough to monetize. For our first few playtests we’re focusing on a ‘core loop health check’, how many times a player goes through our core loop during their first play session.

6) Tony and Apple would go on to sell over 400M units of the iPod. After also working on the iPhone, Tony would leave Apple to found Nest Labs, which he eventually sold to Google for $3.2 billion 🤯

2) Around the same time, Amazon was working on merchant.com Merchant was aimed at helping stores like Target setup their online shopping portals, without dealing with any of the technical infrastructure. Technology wasn’t Target’s specialty, but it was Amazon’s.

1) Tope Awotona was raised by a pharmacist and microbiologist in Lagos, Nigeria, with 3 other brothers. His mom came from wealth, but his dad grew up poor. As a parental team they continually reminded the young Awotona brothers to be forever grateful for what they had.

It’s insane how often people feel like a failure *right before* they find massive success.

10) Engineers were using off-the-shelf components and churning out projects faster than ever. Jassy posed, could they expand this even further? Every new project, or perhaps even company, didn’t have to re-invent the wheel.

5) They were spending a lot of $$$ attracting the absolute best and brightest. Something was wrong. Bezos asked Jassy to go fix it. Jassy started digging and found a lot more than he expected.

If you failed at something 8 times, would you try a 9th? One last failed pitch meeting left this young engineer with no other choice but to go out on his own. Today, he’s one of the world’s most recognizable and successful CEOs. Here’s how that meeting went🧶👇

4) Amazon had built an amazing API-based infrastructure for other companies to use, and even started using it themselves. As their offering got more complex, they needed to move faster. They started hiring more software engineers, but it didn’t seem to help.

6) The executive team would routinely scope out a project and set a deadline of 3 months. After 3 months, they’d get a report back that it wasn’t ready. For each new project, engineers were building the backend from scratch. It was taking forever. Jassy got to work.

8) Most of the team elaborated on Amazon’s excellence in ecommerce. Fulfilling. Shipping. Pricing. They were the absolute best. But Andy thought Amazon had started to become great at something else too.

7) In the summer of 2003, Bezos gathered his executive team at his house to align on Amazon’s future strategy. Among the many meetings on the itinerary, Bezos carved out 30 minutes to discuss Amazon’s strengths.

12) Tope’s first three startup ideas failed. A dating website that never launched. A projector company that had lackluster sales. An outdoor grill brand that he didn’t have a passion for. But he didn't give up.

3) Target (and others) didn’t have to worry about the rapid pace of technological improvements either, as Amazon promised they’d handle all future requirements as well. That’s when the struggles started.

15) Through his grieving, Tope again chose to push forward. And over the next 7 years he built Calendly into an industry leader, with over 20M customers and revenues of $60M+.

9) “It made entrepreneurship all of a sudden more attainable. I knew if they could do it, I could too.” Tope left that meeting thoroughly inspired. He didn’t need to wait for the perfect time to start a company. His moment was now.

Not taking the meeting can cost you

As @camp4 likes to say, it's a classic money move: Borrow against appreciating assets to buy more assets. And use the depreciation of those assets to offset other gains. A yacht's a lifestyle purchase. But what if he instead borrowed to buy an *appreciating* asset?

On October 5, 2015, Jack Dorsey had a meeting that would go on to become infamous. Immediately after, many called for his resignation as CEO. Here’s what went down in that meeting 🧶👇

5) After graduating from university, Tope explored a few jobs before settling in at Perceptive Software, a growing startup in Kansas City, as a salesperson. Tope climbed the sales leaderboards, but was still keen on starting his own company when the time was right.

18) Last month, after more than a decade at the helm, Caryn took Clear public under the ticker “YOU”. -$30M to $5.8B As the world opens back up, Caryn's bet looks even more like the clear winner.

13) Tope eventually stumbled upon an idea to get rid of the back and forth emails when scheduling a meeting. Calendly was born. “I went for broke and put every single dollar I had ever made into it, I literally put everything on the line”

8) But chiefly, Scott emphasized the team’s persistence. They had fought through the slumps, learned from their mistakes, and eventually things turned around. This was the first time Tope realized that companies did not always have a straight path to success.

4) He received an offer to attend a US college early, at the age of 15. But his mother thought he was too young. Instead, she moved the whole family from Lagos to Marietta, GA, so he could attend an American high school for 2 years before college.

14) He chose the latter. Shopify was born - a platform where anyone, anywhere could setup their own online store and be an entrepreneur.

My job right now 1) hire brilliant people 2) get out of their way

7) He used the meeting to tell the story of Perceptive. Scott dove into the details of how he came up with the idea for the company. He even elaborated on the many twists and turns that the company went through, and mistakes he’d made.

2) One day, when Tope was just 12 years old, he saw his father come home being followed by a group of men. As Tope watched on, the men demanded the keys to the car. As his father threw them the keys, they shot and killed him.

14) In 2012, Sara got a call from Forbes and was officially named the youngest self-made female billionaire. Sara made it past her failures, and now she’s made it her mission to make the path easier for other women all over the world. Nothing’s going to stop her.

3) His world was shattered. Tope couldn’t eat or sleep for 6 months. A few years ago, his father had quit his job at Unilever to build his own company. Tope decided he would now take up the torch. For the time being, he focused his attention back to where he excelled - school.

There's not a lot of info out there for startup founders considering an early exit. Here are the 4 ways we evaluated our acquisition offers before taking one:

6) One afternoon, Tope attended a staff meeting where Perceptive’s founder, Scott Coons, led the discussion. Instead of talking about revenue growth, staffing plans, or quarterly roadmaps, Scott did something different.