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I believe in tiny, elite teams.
At our Series A, Flow was valued at $100M. We were 7 people.
At our Series B, Flow was valued at $750M. We were 25 people.
We’ve modeled Flow on Skunk Works. This = maximum ownership, minimum bureaucracy. An engineer who understands a problem should have the authority to make the call.
A few beliefs that follow from that:
1) A small team needs a short list of priorities. Five people working on ten priorities is ten understaffed projects. Part of my job is deciding what we can stop doing so people can concentrate on the problems that matter.
2) Make the goal simple enough that your subconscious works on it in the shower. Everyone should understand what we’re trying to achieve well enough to think through a solution without opening a slide deck.
3) Leaders should be able to show you their work. What did you build, test or figure out this week? I expect the people leading teams at Flow to have an answer. That includes me.
4) Changing your mind quickly is a skill we should reward. I trust someone more when they can explain which evidence changed their view. One question I like asking is “What did we believe last week that we now know is wrong?”
5) The cost of an experiment should determine how much permission it needs. If something is cheap to try and easy to reverse, people should be able to get on with it. That’s how you get to daily iteration.
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Stanley Druckenmiller:
“The people that love [investing] like me are so addicted to it and so intellectually stimulated by it.
If you’re not passionate about it and only in it for the money, you have no chance of competing…”
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Warren Buffett: “Never invest in a business you don’t understand.”
If you don't understand a company, you can't understand its risks. If you can't understand its risks, you're speculating, not investing.
A simple test: If you can't explain it, you don't understand it yet.
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At 23, Evan Spiegel turned down $3 billion from Zuckerberg.
His app had never made a dollar. He was living at his dad's house.
His reason: "There are very few people in the world who get to build a business like this. Trading that for some short-term gain isn't something that interested me."
That's not arrogance. That's a clear-eyed understanding of what's actually rare.
Capital is replaceable. The opportunity to build a category-defining product, and the specific moment in time when that's possible, is not.
Most founders underestimate how singular their window is. They take the exit, call it a win, and spend the next decade watching someone else build what they almost built.
Spiegel held because he understood the asymmetry: $3B is finite. Snapchat's potential ceiling wasn't.
More founder lessons like this in Product Market Fit: productmarketfit.tech/
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Given the up-front cost of training models, AI’s advantage is best realized when production occurs at a large scale. As a result, bigger enterprises are far more likely to be early adopters than smaller companies with fewer resources. @ProfNeilT @DanialLashkari @MITFutureTech
mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-…
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African IPOs are having... a spicy few weeks 🥹🥵
Africa’s richest man Aliko Dangote pulls London listing ft.trib.al/sojdkBs
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Jensen Huang asks a 104-year-old for the secret to longevity.
Jensen: What's your secret?
Centenarian: Look at beautiful women.
Jensen:📝✍️
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You need to push through and that requires self-discipline to follow your script. It's important to remember the connections between your tasks and the goals that they are meant to achieve.
When you feel yourself losing sight of that, stop and ask yourself "why?" Lose sight of the why and you will surely lose sight of your goals. #principleoftheday
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Doug Leone on VCs who sit on boards: maybe 30% are incompetent.
Another 40% are "no-ops." They just nod along with the group.
Maybe 20-30% know what they're doing.
1. Founders pick board members like a date at a bar. It's a 5-7 year marriage
2. Don't add your own skill set: an engineer founder gains nothing from an engineer on the board
3. Watch for the "shadow": the partner thinking about his firm, his status, his next exit
4. Inexperience + same background + covering their ass + incompetence = the worst board member there is
Architect your board the way you architect your product.
Picking the right people around the founder is half of Sequoia's playbook.
Full breakdown here:
theaiopportunities.com/p/the…
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Anyone with a laptop and a hundred dollars a month can change the world now. While on holiday.
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The best hedge funds / trading firms are all just talent agencies.
Ken, Steve, Izzy and Dimitri all say over and over again that "we hire the best people".
On the surface, the businesses appear complex, with sophisticated hedging and trade construction, but at the end of the day it's really just:
"Hire smart people and help them make money."
Point72's founder Steve Cohen on the key to 30-plus years in business:
"I'm considered part of a group called multi-managers. We have 200 portfolio managers working for us around the world."
"I want to bring in the best talent I can. I want to support them."
"They don't owe me their life. As long as they're at the firm, I want them to have an incredible experience."
"If they leave, I want them to be ambassadors for the firm. I want them to say great things."
"Those are my principles, and I operate out of those. And so far, so good."
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Point72's founder Steve Cohen on the key to 30-plus years in business:
"I'm considered part of a group called multi-managers. We have 200 portfolio managers working for us around the world."
"I want to bring in the best talent I can. I want to support them."
"They don't owe me their life. As long as they're at the firm, I want them to have an incredible experience."
"If they leave, I want them to be ambassadors for the firm. I want them to say great things."
"Those are my principles, and I operate out of those. And so far, so good."
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Citadel's CEO Ken Griffin on what he would tell his kids if they wanted to start a hedge fund:
"Are you willing to surround yourself with people who are just extraordinary, who are going to push you in ways that you may not be comfortable with?"
"We're competing globally with the best investors around the world."
"The demands of the job are not the demands imposed upon you by myself and my colleagues, it's the demands imposed upon you by the markets themselves."
"It's 24-7, 365, and every day you've got to be forward leaning in how you view the world."
"I've worked with many incredibly gifted people who just don't have great determination, and not much comes with that. You need to be willing to put in the effort."
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Bridgewater Co-CIO Karen Karniol-Tambour is leaving the firm to run Canada’s new sovereign wealth fund, the Canada Strong Fund. The fund is part of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s push to strengthen key Canadian industries and reduce economic reliance on the United States, and it will invest only in Canadian companies and projects.
Karniol-Tambour, 41, originally wanted to pursue academia but has worked at Bridgewater since graduating from Princeton in 2006. She rose to lead a 150-person investment research team that turned macroeconomic insights into systematic strategies, and her team wrote the firm’s signature market commentary, “Daily Observations.”
She was named co-CIO in 2023, alongside Greg Jensen and Bob Prince, and oversees Bridgewater’s Asia strategies.
The firm will not hire or promote a successor.
She holds Canadian, U.S. and Israeli citizenship.
Starting in early 2027, Canadian citizens will be able to invest directly in the fund through principal-protected securities called Canada Strong Notes.
Source: Bloomberg
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Capital Group portfolio manager Alex Popa and Goldman Sachs global head of machine learning Charles Elkan are raising money for a stock-picking hedge fund run by AI agents. The Menlo Park, CA-based investment firm Poesis will open its first strategy, AI Clarity, to external clients in early 2027.
Bloomberg's Katherine Burton has the scoop: bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
