The Method

Peter Thiel says the most valuable lesson PayPal taught its future founders was that building a great company is hard, but possible. “A lot of companies bias towards having people who just drink the Kool-Aid. We were less smoothly functioning, but a lot of people did feel ownership of the product and would raise their voices if they felt things were off track.” “The overarching lesson you learned going through a business like PayPal, which had a lot of challenges but ended up succeeding, was you can build a great company, but it's hard.” “If you're at a startup that fails, you learn the lesson it's impossible to build a great company. If you're at a startup where things work too easily, you learn the lesson that it's actually easy to build a great company.” “Easy and impossible converge to not working hard. Hard tells you you should have to work hard.”

Zipline CEO @keller explains how robotics went from the dumbest startup you could build to one of Silicon Valley's hottest bets once AI threatened SaaS: "When we were building Zipline from 2013 to 2020, the idea of building a robotics company was the dumbest thing you could possibly do. Every venture capital firm was only interested in social media and SaaS business models." "Now, 5 years later, everybody's like, oh, never mind, AI's gonna one-shot those business models. So now we need to focus on hard things like infrastructure, hardware, where you actually have competitive advantages." "Companies like Google and Facebook and Microsoft now almost look like PG&E in terms of their percentage of CapEx spend relative to their company financials. Infrastructure's suddenly no longer a bad word in the eyes of investors. CapEx is no longer a bad word."

Sam Altman thinks founders spend too much time worrying about someone stealing their idea when the reality is that almost nobody cares. “Everybody else is so distracted that you could probably go put that idea, and exact instructions for how to implement it, on Tim Cook's desk and take no risk.” “Extreme secrecy among founders is a bad sign. You wanna keep some things secret for sure, but you should be willing to talk about the broad sketches of what you're doing.” “You need that to recruit people, to get investors, to get customers. And you don't have to fear, because the big companies are distracted fighting each other. They're not gonna come do your thing.” @sama

Zipline CEO @keller says that if you're building something genuinely new, you should expect a decade of people calling you an idiot and rooting for you to fail: "Life is short. Why not go work on things that are gonna be epic?" "I was generally not that scared of what people thought of me, and I think that that’s valuable because if you're building something new, everyone will generally hate you in the world." "Most of media, most of Hollywood, most of politics, is actually being actively trained to resent scientists and builders and entrepreneurs in my opinion. It’s kind of scary. I don’t think it's good for the US." "You kind of have to be willing to have people tell you you're an idiot and tell you you’re gonna fail, and resent you or root against you for a decade." "Part of me is stubborn and contrarian, and again, chip on my shoulder, and I was happy to fail. I didn't care if we failed. I wanted to have an adventure and work on something that seemed epic and challenging and huge if true." @zipline

Marc Andreessen says he spends virtually no time thinking about past decisions. His reasoning: startups operate in complex, unpredictable environments, and dwelling on what could have happened is a waste of time. “The one thing I know about the past is I can't change it. I spend virtually no time revisiting old decisions.” “People I know who spend a lot of time revisiting old decisions are less effective because they mire themselves in what-ifs and counterfactuals.” “You run the same scenario, start with point A, one time you end up at point B, one time you end up at point Z. There's a million reasons why the branches fork.” @pmarca

What if foreign aid is actually holding developing countries back? Zipline CEO @keller argues that aid can crowd out local businesses, and what developing countries really need isn't more handouts. It's trade, not aid. "There's just been this assumption that these countries aren't deserving of real companies or real infrastructure or real investment, and that is a huge problem. If you look at the forces that have actually lifted billions of humans out of poverty, it’s free markets and capitalism." "If you talk to the leaders of these countries, they are saying so clearly that they want trade, not aid. They are largely sick of low quality services provided for free by donors." "These kinds of services actually prevent economic growth in the countries that they’re serving, because there’s not gonna be a private industry springing up to serve a need that’s being satisfied for free." "The thing that these countries are asking for is 100% the thing that the US could and should be providing. If we don't, somebody else will. It's a very binary decision for a lot of the developing world, whether they're gonna build on top of the US technology stack or build on top of someone else’s technology stack." @zipline

Zipline CEO @keller explains why no amount of IQ can prepare you for what happens when your technology meets the real world: "There are a thousand little things that Zipline had to learn by doing that we never would have guessed." "We could sit in this ivory tower, research and development bunker, trying to figure out what’s gonna be important about the product. We were wrong about everything." "No amount of expertise or IQ will replace the fundamental pain of launching something into the real world and learning by doing. You will always be humiliated by the things that you realize that you missed." "You see companies raising like $500 million seed rounds and scaling really fast before they’re actually deploying hardware. Zipline was like 25 people when we initially launched the service at national scale." "Weather on the sun has a big impact on the radiation that is hitting the Earth. A couple years ago, that cycle reached a peak, and GPS became way less reliable on Earth. This is just not something that you would think, oh yeah, we’re gonna become experts in solar weather." @zipline

Zipline CEO @keller argues that Disney movies always portray technologists and entrepreneurs as villains, and Silicon Valley is failing to tell a better story about the future: "A normal person in Kentucky is not excited about AI. They're like, well, you're telling me it's gonna kill my kids, so I should just do whatever I can to vote against it." "But there are so many other versions of this abundant future that we can go be building. We can make the cost of building houses... we can reduce that cost by 90%. We can provide abundant energy by using things like nuclear fission and nuclear fusion. We can enable universal access to healthcare." "I watch Disney movies with my kids. We've watched every single one 5 times over at this point. And you realize all of the villains in these movies are the technologists and the entrepreneurs. Always, the villain is the one who’s trying to build a new kind of a world." "It doesn't feel like the people who are building the future are doing a good enough job out there talking about their vision." "Believing in a solarpunk version of the future, being willing to build out the core components of it, and describing it clearly for people so that people understand the role that they can play in it." @zipline

Steve Jobs on how he managed brilliant people at Apple: "If you wanna hire and keep really bright people, then you can't tell them what to do very often." "Like once a year, maybe twice, you get to do that." "You have a silver bullet now and then, but basically you don't do that. At Apple, it's about ideas, and we argue about ideas constantly."

Zipline CEO @keller says the US has demand for 50 billion instant deliveries, but only 5.5 billion happen today, and explains what's holding back the other 44.5 billion: "For the last 100 years, we have built this entire really complex, really important global layer of infrastructure based on an inflationary cost model. It's all based on these fundamental cost inputs of labor and gasoline, and the cost of those things is going up every year." "It's a really good thing, by the way, that the cost of labor is going up. We should be celebrating that. Some companies are obviously fighting it, and it’s almost like they’re trying to get people to work for less than minimum wage." "Instead of having one person drive a 4,000-pound gas combustion vehicle to deliver something to your home that weighs 5 pounds, let's upskill that person and let them be a fleet commander where they can now oversee 10 or 50 or 100 vehicles. That is a way higher paying job." "There are 5.5 billion instant deliveries happening in the US right now. There's actually demand for 50 billion. If you can design a new layer of infrastructure that’s actually magically fast, reliable, and always safe, people will consume a lot more of it."

Documenting the extraordinary: Zipline