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Usually secretaries of defense do everything they can to sort of protect the military from our sort of divisive politics and those culture wars. And Hegseth was really the first secretary of defense I've seen in my lifetime who invited that into the Pentagon and made it a central plank of his identity and leadership.

— Fresh Air
2d ago

Relationship skills and relational intelligence, even in the workplace, has always been considered soft skills. And soft skills used to be seen as feminine skills. And feminine skills are often highly regarded in principle and disregarded in reality.

2d ago

The great businesses that we've all admired and that have created enormous wealth for shareholders are ones that have been run by people who are relentlessly focused on the needs of customers, who don't spend a lot of time worrying about competitors, who don't spend a lot of time worrying about Wall Street, who don't spend a lot of time worrying about the press.

3d ago

The great companies are able to attract people who are very good at what they do but who, if they weren't working at the company, would be doing something very similar outside the company. And I think that's the mark of a great company — when you get people who are just so consumed by what they're doing that the boundaries between work and non-work just dissolve.

5d ago

You can take your roided up macho w you know WWE e you know warrior and give me a 90 lb man or woman in thick glasses with a drone and a hellfire missile and a command module. Let's see who wins. We fight wars now not as much with brawn but with brains and with people who have a certain level of discipline, a certain level of respect for each other.

5d ago

I didn't have the skillset, I didn't have the knowledge. Well, David Lynch had left the series during the second season. And he was the sensibility behind the show. So with him gone, there were new writers. And you felt as like the person whose point of view we most often see, and as someone who was very close to Lynch, that you should be an anchor and you should help keep the ship afloat.

6d ago

The ones that have succeeded enormously are the ones that have had a very simple and easily expressible mission that everybody in the company understands — whether that's somebody who's answering the phones, whether it's somebody who's writing code, whether it's the chief executive. The ones that lose their way are the ones where that clarity of mission has been lost.

6d ago

I think the world will move from where do you work in an office, to which time zone you work in. And that's something we've been living with. We've had offices in a dozen countries or more. So we've had that for a very long time. And so the transition hasn't been that difficult for us.

1w ago

One day they will be out of office and eventually dead, while Zuckerberg, whose majority control of Meta's voting power makes his removal effectively impossible, could in fifty years still be ruler of his empire.

1w ago

I thought to myself, would I be the only one in this room who would disagree with a launch decision? I asked myself in my mind, do I have the courage to say that?

1w ago

"One day they will be out of office and eventually dead, while Zuckerberg, whose majority control of Meta's voting power makes his removal effectively impossible, could in fifty years still be ruler of his empire."

1w ago
Decoder with Nilay Patel
Can Cloudflare save the web from AI?

Over the last decade, Matthew has had to make the call when to stop providing service to websites like those, even as he's championed Cloudflare as a bastion of free speech and a tool used by journalists, activists, and dissidents in authoritarian regimes. It is a profound balancing act, and you'll hear me ask Matthew how he thinks about making those types of decisions and the company values he says drives them.

1w ago

The thing that's really hard to appreciate unless you've been involved in it is how difficult it is to build a great company. People on the outside assume that it's a lot easier than it actually is, and most people who've tried to build great companies will tell you that it's one of the most excruciating, painful, difficult things they've ever attempted.

2w ago

Facebook's motto was once, famously, 'Move fast and break things.' Its new one might be closer to Move fast, break things, move on.

2w ago

What we saw was China received the full force of American economic coercion, and for the first time, could completely turn that force back against the U.S. and get the U.S. to back down. President Xi wasn't just playing his cards. He was playing the player, as we might say in poker, and he figured out Trump's number.

2w ago

The one thing I will say that did feel slightly different is that Ternus came out swinging with a point of view on AI. The first thing he came out with was about the intelligent personal hub. Now, here's the big difference between Tim Cook and John Ternus in terms of their management style. You're inside Apple, you're an executive, you'll come to him with an idea, you'll come to him with a viewpoint, a decision, an opinion, and he'll just pepper you with more questions. He won't make a singular decision in many cases. It's very much communal decision-making, collaborative decision-making. John Ternus, if you come to him and you want him to make a decision, he'll make a decision.

2w ago

The hardest thing about building harvey is doing what's best for our customers despite immense pressure to do what's easy the easy thing would have been to force our customers into consumption pricing before they were ready and serve them worse models to protect our margins We chose to help our customers transition on a timeline that works for them and give them the best models in the meantime, even though it hurt our margins.

2w ago

AI workers are becoming more capable than human workers in many aspects. So one must plan for that. And in the future as AI workers swarm into the company and is uh taking over and doing a better job than human workers. The organization needs to change.

3w ago

Because if wise people, if good people, if people who try to live and act with virtue, if they don't seek public office, if they don't participate in public life, if they don't vote, if they don't speak out, you know what is happening? They're ceding that floor to the people who are not.

3w ago

Every fiber in my being was screaming at me to get out of this building. Every second that we wasted was one second closer to us not getting out of the building. But that's not what firemen do. We were there to save people's lives. And that culture, that firefighter culture, overtook whatever personal need I felt to get out of the building.

4w ago
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How Sonos rebooted itself

When I came in the door, one of my earliest observations was that the company behaved like it was 100 percent hardware, but we're really 100 percent hardware and 100 percent software. And if you get either one of those even a little bit wrong, the impact is tremendous.

4w ago

A consecutive series of great actions never is the result of chance and luck; it always is a product of planning and genius. Is it because they are lucky that [great men] become great? No, but being great, they have been able to master luck. What is luck? The ability to exploit accidents: The vulgar would call this luck, but in fact it is the characteristic of genius.

4w ago
Decoder with Nilay Patel
How Sonos rebooted itself

Tom was on the board at Sonos during the disastrous 2024 app redesign that threatened to crash the entire brand, and he took over as interim CEO to right the ship during that period.

1mo ago

If you are a boss and people get more out of working for you than maybe you get out of them or you pay them above market, that's a win. That's a victory. If you're a better spouse to your — if it is really hard for your spouse to figure out ways to be as good to you as you are to them, that's a win. That's the whole [ __ ] shooting match.

1mo ago

"Henry Singleton has the best operating and capital deployment record in American business. If one took the hundred top business school graduates and made a composite of their triumphs, their record would not be as good as Singleton's."

1mo ago

When the board coup happened in 2023, Brockman was so incensed that he quit immediately. He and Altman were going to start their own thing, or were potentially going to lead a department at Microsoft. Brockman said, 'Okay, if Sam goes, I go.' That's when he became Sam's right hand in a new way. Before that, he was just one of the many execs. They were close, but the board coup made them closer than ever. That's also what made Sam know that he could trust him in a new way and thereby later greenlight him getting more power.

1mo ago

Henry Singleton has the best operating and capital deployment record in American business. If one took the hundred top business school graduates and made a composite of their triumphs, their record would not be as good as Singleton's.

1mo ago

But when Sam Altman got fired by the board, Brockman was so incensed that he quit immediately. He and Altman were going to start their own thing, or were potentially going to lead a department at Microsoft. That's when he was making waves in a new way because he was hellbent on the drama.

1mo ago

While Sam Altman is the CEO and still OpenAI's most public face, Brockman has amassed enormous power and influence within the top ranks of the company as other senior leaders have left in rapid succession.

1mo ago

The average salesman seeks favors. He seeks profit for himself. His plea is, 'Buy my goods.' He makes a selfish appeal to selfish people, and of course, he meets resistance. I was selling service.

1mo ago

I keep hearing, 'Well, they signed up for this.' They didn't sign up to be on a ship in the middle of the ocean with no port calls, no feet on the ground. That wasn't in the brochure when they signed up.

1mo ago

I think there's a third category, and this is the category that I would put Microsoft into. This is the category of companies, big western companies that dared to dream the dream but never managed to realize it.

1mo ago

So the first band director in middle school made me the drum major, right? So my job was to keep time with my gate, right? Which was a terrible idea, right? So then in high school they moved that to we're going to put the tuba on the field and you'll march in place while everybody else goes in planetary orbit around you.

1mo ago

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