People don't resent billionaires. People want to become billionaires. People resent billionaires when they forget that the purpose of business is to create happiness, not who dies with the most toys.
The thing that started as like Elon sort of being like I want to buy Twitter is now like a Neol with a massive supercomputer data center and a coding agent and code review for the age of AI because don't forget they own graphite now or potentially will uh and and and a social the space review
getting there required more than better models. It meant building a complete system for training, evaluating, and deploying a driver in the real world.
Boult's core advice is to treat every significant new idea as if it were a venture‑backed startup inside your organisation. That means giving it a dedicated budget, a finite runway, clear deliverables, and hard stage gates where the project must "earn" the right to continue.
When people have to pitch a story, not a fifty page business case, and justify why their ideas deserve another few million dollars, they suddenly start thinking like founders instead of managers.
for innovation to work in a corporate but has to look and feel like a real startup. It needs its own budget, a clear, finite time span, specific deliverables, and tough stage gates where ideas are reviewed and must earn the right to keep going exactly as they would if a founding team was pitching for the next funding round.
Elon has uh always had multiple irons in the fire, one project that's working and producing cash flow and and growing uh to finance the next uh piece of innovation.
There were so many things I loved about working at the Wall Street Journal and there were so many things that I thought I'm never going to be able to leave this. But then there were so many things that I also saw happening in media, you know, places like you guys uh included that I was jealous of.
How could we develop a system that produced far more protein per hectare of land at a much lower environmental impact, and can we weave those things together into a business, which is what we have done.
What I realized what she was doing was she was kind of testing my conviction, right? And she probably got a lot of calls from people who said, "Oh, I want to do this. I want to do that." And she's like, "Well, if you have the conviction in yourself to move out with no job, that shows you really kind of want it."
It's possible to build a product that doesn't just provide real value to people's lives but is tapped into how people feel and how people want to feel.
I left private equity because my view was has to have, you know, a very long term approach, and I had suffered a personal tragedy in my life which made me reexamine what I wanted to do, and I decided that I wanted to try and build a school group.
I was a partner at a private equity firm and they used to invest in the education sector. And as I spent time looking at the sector, I really fell in love with the school sector and I looked more closely at the opportunity and my view was how nice would it be to have a group of the best schools around the world that maintain the ethos and values of the schools that are part of the group, but yet share global best practices.
if I was stuck strictly as a kung fu star, that my career would be very limited and I wouldn't be able to grow. So I started working more into the action orientation of my films with martial arts or karate integrated into the action.
You got to be rich in both camps. And a lot of companies are jumping in to fill this gap. Agents, and a lot of this is because of agents. Agents need CPUs.
What I find super interesting is that that mission of taking advanced technologies and trying to put it in everybody's hands hasn't changed in 50 years.
I was a partner at a private equity firm and they used to invest in the education sector. And as I spent time looking at the sector, I really fell in love with the school sector.
I think wanting to make money and help people are not mutually exclusive. I think there are a lot of people who do really good work and make a really good living doing it.
These are companies that sit at the intersection of very very advanced software uh as well as hardware. So it's where atoms meets bits um which historically has not been I would say in vogue for the venture capital uh industry certainly over the last 25 years.
We cannot miss this moment because we are distracted by side quests. Side quests is the key. We really have to nail productivity in general and particularly productivity on the business front.
Being able to come on board to a company like Wizards has been such a big part of my life. D&D also helped inspire me to get into the video game industry in the late '90s. Back in 1999, after playing the original Baldur's Gate, I joined a secret project at Microsoft called Xbox.
You also got Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross. These guys have backed a lot of founders. They've worked with a lot of AI startups. They can understand the team that they're trying to build over there.
Being able to come on board to a company like Wizards has been such a big part of my life. D&D also helped inspire me to get into the video game industry in the late '90s.
He thinks about markets and businesses constantly, and has built a career entirely around that obsession.
1mo ago
What would you do if your bank, your supplier, and your government all turned against you at the same time? Phil Knight didn't have to imagine it. He lived on the edge of insolvency for nearly two decades.
1mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
