Founder/Chairman @thumbtack & @athenago & Powerset.co I always dreamed of having 48 hours in a day: Athena.com
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Elon runs six multi billion-dollar companies simultaneously (SpaceX, Tesla, X, xAI, Neuralink, and Boring Company)
Most founders can’t run one.
Walter Isaacson (who spent a year shadowing Elon and wrote his biography) explains ‘How Elon does it’ on a podcast
Thread 🧵
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Peter Thiel is a kingmaker in the shadows
He backed Trump in 2016 and now 7 of his ex-colleagues(JD Vance, David Sacks, Elon, Vivek) are running the US government
Once you understand how Thiel spots winners before anyone else, you'll build influential networks like no other🧵
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Nvidia keeps crushing because Jensen runs it unlike other CEOs:
- No 1:1s
- No 1 or 5-year plans
- No status reports
- 60 direct reports
Once you see why he does it, you can't unsee it
And it explains everything wrong with the traditional way of running a company🧵
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1. Elon runs his companies with a strict no BS policy. No BS meetings, teams, processes, rules, or projects.
Removes all excess so teams can focus on the only thing that matters - building a great product.
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But why does he do that?
Because he understands Parkinson's Law better than anyone in the world.
Parkinson's law states that work expands to fill the time available for its completion.
The tighter the deadline, the more work gets done in a shorter time
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The coolest company you've never heard of:
- $70B conglomerate that acquires 100 companies/year.
- On the way to produce 500 millionaire employees
- Acquired 1000+ companies to date.
Founder refuses any media interviews.
Here's a deep dive on how he does it🧵
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Elon doesn't juggle Tesla, X, SpaceX simultaneously, but rather in cycles of extreme focus.
Here's how he does it 👇
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In 2018, Sam Altman simultaneously managed YC(a $30B+ Startup Accelerator) , invested >$400M in startups on the side, and built the world’s best team of frontier AI researchers with Elon for Open AI.
His answer to ‘How do you get so much done?’ is powerful.
A thread 🧵
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2. Elon hates large teams
Small team = Small meetings = More work done.
He believes small teams have the intensity and focus which big teams lack.
Andrej Karpathy, who worked directly under Elon, explains how he by default wants to fire low performers:
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3. Chase speed
Elon frequently kicks off intense efforts he calls stunts, where he sets a impossible deadline and forces the team to achieve it
My favorite snippet from Walter's biography on Elon where he tells how Elon completed work worth 6 months in 6 days 👇
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4. Accountability
Elon would write names of the engineers on the car/rocket components they were responsible to design.
This gives them a sense of pride, responsibility and ownership that’s very difficult to achieve any other way.
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Elon understands that entrepreneurship is just effective delegation at scale.
All his teams and companies operate at Level 5.
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Effective delegation requires cultivating this type of culture.
Most founders struggle to even comprehend how Elon manages six billion-dollar companies.
This is because they don’t understand how to delegate at scale. They commit the cardinal sin of delegation.
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Yes, he doesn't assemble the rockets himself but he has
1. Assembled highly inspired people on the team
2. Set the precedent that only the top performs will stay, rest will be fired
3. Instilled the culture of intense accountability
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In >60 years, Singapore went from:
・$517 -> $85K per capita income
・70% people in slums -> Most powerful passport in the world
Success leaves clues and the founder of Singapore left some invaluable lessons that even China gave orders to copy.
Here’s the story🧵
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In 1958, Toyota was bleeding money in America, losing $500 on every car they sold.
By 1975, they'd conquered the US market as the #1 import brand.
Their secret?
It was so brilliantly simple, it became the blueprint Harvard Business School still studies today🧵
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Thiel values substance over status.
Status and prestige are zero-sum games.
In a world where real value can be created, substance and true knowers are the people to look for.
To assess winners before anyone else, he came up with 4 questions...
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Most people cannot freely delegate because they feel their team will slack off.
To become a Tier 1 founder, you need to understand that delegation at scale is about culture and intensity.
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Jensen points out the more direct reports the CEO has, the fewer layers in the company.
And when you have 60 people in the room who know what moves the needle for the company, it unleashes faster speed.
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The only reason he can run Nvidia this way is because he understands level 5 delegation.
- Direct communication with ground staff
- Extreme autonomy and responsibility
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Elon Musk once said:
"If I make slightly better decisions, I could affect the outcome of my companies by a billion dollars."
The marginal value of his time is >$100M/hour.
Here's how Elon makes decisions and innovates 10x better than everyone else 🧵
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1. "Tell me something that's true that very few people agree with you on."
- It's psychologically hard to disagree with the masses.
"Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius."
- Having a sound contrarian conviction requires being well-read.
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The main purpose of having 60 direct reports and discussing the problems in front of everyone was to make everyone learn the thought process.
Jensen believes CEOs should spend most of their time to cultivate new leaders👇
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Elon used to spend most of his time interviewing every Zip2 engineer
At SpaceX and Tesla, he used the same 2 questions from 1995
Today he has spotted the top performers for running his six multi-billion dollar companies using the exact questions
Test yourself with this🧵
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Madeleine Albright had her first real *job* at age 37.
Michael Bloomberg started his company at age 39.
Charles Darwin published “Origin of Species" at age 50.
There's still time to do something big.
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Peter Thiel today is at the center of all talent in Trump's cabinet.
He has quietly built a Peter Thiel Cinematic Universe.
The kind of power that could transform the US government and Silicon Valley.
But how did Peter Thiel orchestrate this?
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1/ We recently celebrated a decade (!) of building Thumbtack so I’m sharing a few of the lessons we’ve learned along the way.
Zero to $1B - 8 Lessons Scaling a Startup: medium.com/@swaaanson/zero-t…
And for the lazy web, here's some highlights:
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2. How successful are you going to be?
Thiel believes that only the most successful people have a definite view of the future.
Those who have thought through their ambitions in detail are the ones who will answer the question most compellingly.
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Sam boils down his ability to accomplish more to three things:
1. Focus
2. Personal Connections
3. Self Belief
Master these, and you'll unlock a new level of productivity and impact.
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An employee sent Dalio an email that read, "Ray - you deserve a D- for your performance today"
It's the type of note that could hardly pass in other organizations
Ray forwarded the email to the ENTIRE COMPANY as an example of ideal feedback and even included it in his TED talk
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Jensen also avoids status updates as he believes they often lose their "ground truth" (original essence) before it reaches him.
Instead, people at Nvidia can email him their "Top five things" regarding whatever is at the top of their mind.
He reads 100s of these every morning.
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1/ Hiring execs is one of the highest leverage things you will do as a founder. It’s also the thing that founders most consistently mess up.
If you do it right, it will transform your trajectory. If you mess it up, it will set you back months or years — or worse.
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Peter's decision to hire David Sacks at PayPal is the perfect example of this.
Sacks walked into his interview, called their core product dumb, and walked out with a job.
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4. Do they have Zen-like opposites?
Exceptional people are living contradictions with a combination of unusual traits.
- Stubborn and open-minded
- Idiosyncratic yet work well in teams
Thiel calls this "The Founders Paradox" and I think it's his best idea.
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After an intense decade of scaling Thumbtack to $1 billion+, I realized I wanted to taste complete freedom.
So I shed it all: my operating role, apartment, possessions.
Everything I owned would fit in carry-on luggage.
Here's how it changed my life🧵
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Mark runs Constellation at level 5 of delegation
Something which most founders today struggle with or don't even know exists
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If you found this thread valuable:
1. Follow me @swaaanson for more threads on entrepreneurship and delegation.
2. RT the first tweet
Elon runs six multi billion-dollar companies simultaneously (SpaceX, Tesla, X, xAI, Neuralink, and Boring Company)
Most founders can’t run one.
Walter Isaacson (who spent a year shadowing Elon and wrote his biography) explains ‘How Elon does it’ on a podcast
Thread 🧵
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All of the greats have bet their company on a contrarian belief:
Jobs and Gates: Computers will sit on desks, not warehouses.
Elon: Self-driving and Electric is the future.
Jensen: GPUs are the future, not CPUs.
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Not so coincidentally 😉, I started a company to help ambitious founders and execs with exactly this.
athena.com/
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1. Ruthless Focus
For an early-stage startup, the definition of focus could be acquiring customers and shipping on a constant basis.
Working on anything else is pretence, not impactful work.
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Thiel's ability to identify exceptional people by focusing on the right things helps him build extraordinary teams.
He creates the conditions that enable them to do their life's work.
And Peter does so by using a very peculiar system:
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But here's some real talk:
Newbie founders often fail to understand that great personal connections are a byproduct of great work.
Just "networking" doesn't do shit.
Naval said this best:
Networking is overrated. Become first and foremost a person of value and the network will be available whenever you need it.
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Sequoia's track record is mind-numbing:
- Funded three (AAPL, GOOGL, NVDA) out of the top five $1T+ companies
- 1400 investments with 460 successful exits
- Their portfolio companies account for >25% of NASDAQ's value
Having raised $100M+ from them, here's what I've learned🧵
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3. Would you grab a beer with them?
Many people think that working with others you don't like is a sacrifice required for doing business.
But you can choose who you work with.
Look at Berkshire Hathaway.
Warren has only partnered with people he liked, and it really worked.
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In 2008, Intel was about to end Nvidia:
• Announced dedicated graphics chips
• Would make Nvidia's gaming cards worthless
• Stock in free fall (-80% from its peak)
But Nvidia was saved by Stanford research labs.
A crazy story no one has heard of🧵
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At level 5 delegation, your core focus is creating a culture where your team does their life's work.
And that starts with empowering people, and solving complicated problems.
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Here's what Nvidia's culture looks like with Jensen Huang's hands-on leadership style:
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Sam talks about how taking a year off between jobs helped him pick the right project to work on.
He was on a break for a year before picking his latest project: OpenAI.
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Most entrepreneurs can only aspire to be as good as Peter at recruiting and enforcing focus.
This stops them from operating at a high level of leverage.
While most founders operate at Level 2 or 3, Peter comfortably rests at 5. (maybe higher)
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These sabbaticals help Sam choose projects that constantly outdo his past achievements.
He co-founded Loopt in 2005.
It became a thing of the past after he became the president of YCombinator in 2014.
Today, OpenAI is what Sam's known for.
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1/ Favorite books from 2019:
-Nexus (best sci fi💊)
-Churchill: A Life (best biography🇬🇧)
-Accidental Superpower (best geopolitics🌎)
-The Party (best China🇨🇳)
-The Grand Design (best physics⚡️)
-Elephant in the Brain (best neuroscience🧠)
-Rise and Kill First (best jaw drop😱)
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This is a result of years of refining the culture at Bridgewater and coming up with tools that 25% of people can't handle😆
Let's see how he used these tools to build a $140B hedge fund and whether it's worth implementing at your company too👇
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Trump applied this within his own cabinet.
He made every person responsible for doing just one thing.
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Had you been a part of PayPal's early team, you would practically have access to every successful entrepreneur in the Valley.
When SpaceX was on the brink of failure, Elon's Paypal buddies
swooped in to save the company.
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Constellation software, a company like no other:
- Debuted in 1996 with a valuation of $70M (~ increased value by 100,000%)
- Generates a free cash flow of ~$1.6B on $8.4B in revenue
- Acquired 52 companies from Apr to Nov 2024.
Here's how Mark Leonard(founder) does it 👇
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2. Baseball cards
Ray then invented baseball cards that analyzed via computerized algorithms based on stress-tested logic in order to create pointillist pictures of what people are like.
That logic is typically shared with and vetted by the people in the company.
ALT This is only an example, not actual baseball cards used at Bridgewater
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2. Personal Connections
Sam is well known as one of the best network builders in Silicon Valley history
Having a wealth of personal connections allowed him to hire the best talent and close amazing deals
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Nvidia’s numbers are so huge, it’s mind melting.
In it's latest quarter, they generated $35B in revenue, averaging $211.2M in daily net profit
That’s ~$1 billion in profit every week.
A result of Nvidia's decade long culture (and of course right time/place with AI wave)
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Employees who are 15 minutes late receive automated texts: "Punctuality issue logged. Pattern recognition alert: This is your 3rd late arrival. Dot scores impacted."
The system tracks behavioral patterns and enforces accountability without human intervention.
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1. Dot collector
Everyone rates each other in real-time on dozens of attributes, with scores visible to the whole room.
This has made executives break down when seeing how others truly view them.
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Tony uses "Who Not How" system.
Most entrepreneurs ask: "How do I solve this problem?"
Tony asks: "WHO can solve this problem for me?"
As soon as a new idea or project emerges, he immediately identifies someone to own it rather than doing it himself.
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Steve Job's most fundamental skill wasn't design or technology.
It was team building.
When asked about his proudest creation, he didn't say the iPhone or Mac. He said the Apple team.
Last night, I found his 90-second-clip on hiring truly gifted people: 🧵
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3. Have almost too much self-belief
The most successful have an almost delusional level of self-belief. Contrarian ideas create value, but you need self-belief to have them when others doubt you.
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The key insight from Dalio's experiment:
Most organizations operate with tremendous inefficiency because employees spend most of their time managing other people's perceptions rather than solving actual problems.
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1. Autonomous
The company is structured around numerous small, autonomous business units that are encouraged to make decisions independently.
Subsidiary CEOs have full authority over their operations, including having mergers and acquisitions up to $20M without approval from the corporate headquarters
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4. Recording every meeting
To eliminate office politics, Bridgewater records nearly every meeting and stores them in a library accessible to any employee.
Dalio's reasoning: "Nobody can say 'this is what happened in the meeting' because everyone can watch the tape."
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Elon vs Travis is officially here:
tesla.com/blog/master-plan-p…
The ultimate entrepreneur death match is going to have approximately 7B winners
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When we first started Thumbtack in 2009, we had no customers, no product, no money.
Our first “office” was a house, and I slept in a closet
By 2019, we scaled it to $1B.
Here are my 5 real-talk lessons I learned building Thumbtack from 0 to $1B starting from a CLOSET! 🧵
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3. Pain button
Ray then built an app for employees to document emotional triggers during work.
Later, they analyze: Why did that comment hurt? What weakness does it reveal?
His formula: Pain + Reflection = Progress.
Even emotions become data points for improvement.
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But there's a caveat to this.
Self-belief maxing needs to be paired with deep humility.
It's the combination of extreme self belief + humility that is so powerful.
This is a lesson I learned while building Thumbtack
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I asked ChatGPT to map all of the important connections Sam's built over the years working in the Valley.
He's connected to everyone in some way or other, from Elon to Brian Chesky
A network like this unlocks talent, money, partnerships -- and a path to build a $100B+ company
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Love this new Thumbtack swag. True for our small business owners as well as aspiring tech entrepreneurs:
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Leonard maintains a lean corporate team, with fewer than 30 executives overseeing the entire organization.
Constellation encourages employees to become shareholders, aligning their financial success with that of the company.
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There’s speed of light, and there’s speed of Elon:
- xAI doubled to 200K NVIDIA Hopper GPUs
- Deployed 3200 satellites in 3 years
- Produced ~1.8M vehicles in 2024
Once you study how he does it, you'll understand how broken traditional ways of running a company are 🧵
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The only reason it succeed because Toyota owners understood level 5 delegation:
- Direct communication with ground staff
- Extreme autonomy and responsibility
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Sam Corcos is the biggest maniac about delegation and personal tracking I've ever met.
He time tracked every waking hour of his last two years while scaling his 4th startup. No CEO has ever shared this before.
Here's what every founder should learn from him 🧵
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Delegating at scale is only possible when the right people are empowered with all the knowledge that you have and the authority to make decisions.
That is why open access to information and decision-making is important.
And Nvidia's growth is a living proof.
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1/ Silicon Valley is good at covering the fundraises, the product launches, the acquisitions. 🍾 Those are important things but represent <0.1% of what building a company is about.
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Jeff Bezos disrupted every industry he entered: Books, Retail, Cloud (AWS), Smart Home (Alexa) and created a $2T company.
Most startups die trying to win one market
Bezos has a completely differently approach to entrepreneurship and every serious entrepreneur should study it🧵
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Last mile = hard: We can ship a TV around the world for the same price as postmates delivering a burrito across town
Dang. "Right now it costs under $10 to ship a flat screen television across the Pacific." bit.ly/1RKF4tZ #2MA
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The average CEO/Founder wastes 16 hours/weekly on tasks they should delegate, costing companies millions.
But true delegation requires the same principles Dalio discovered: radical clarity about who excels at what.
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This helps the company avoids the risk of “yes-men” telling bosses only what they want to hear.
The diversity of views is captured in tools like the Dot Collector, so contrarian warnings (like the minority “no”) get amplified rather than silenced.
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My friend Fabrice is a legendary angel investor with >$300M in exits.
He's invested in 1000+ companies such as SpaceX, Stripe, and Spotify.
He singlehandedly does more than most $1B VC funds. How?
Ruthless delegation of his personal tasks 👇🏻
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When the cord was pulled, the entire production line would stop immediately.
Supervisors would then come over to assess the problem, and the team would work together to resolve it before the production line resumed.
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1. Tell me the most difficult problem you worked on and how you solved it.
The rationale is that it takes exceptional ability to solve very difficult problems.
It is difficult to fake an answer to this question if probed for details, as Musk does when evaluating a candidate's response.
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To summarize, Sam Atlman believes that a strong personal belief and focus, combined with personal connections is how you can accomplish something truly great
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