How I Built This is a popular NPR podcast featuring founders of world-class companies like Spanx, Southwest Airlines, and Starbucks. Each episode covers one founder’s story at a high level - how they arrived at the company idea, how they started the company, and how they struggled through calamity to break into success. How I Built This features a wonderful diversity of companies, along multiple…
(Update 2023-03: I wrote this in 2020 when GPT-3 was highly hyped, but ultimately made only 1% of the splash that the monstrous ChatGPT made 3 years later. If I had to rewrite this today, I d 1) think more kindly about defensibility, especially through deep product, user experience, and marketing/distribution (see Elad Gil article); 2) be more pessimistic about how much value foundation models can…
Remember how this company Birchbox was everywhere 3 years ago? And how today it’s...not? Turns out after raising $90 million at a peak valuation of $500 million, and after a few years of struggle, in 2018 Birchbox sold a majority stake to a hedge fund for only $15 million . This means after a journey of 8 years, its investors were totally wiped out. Employees who had exercised stock options came…
Earlier this year, Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathaway), and Jamie Dimon (JP Morgan Chase) announced a joint venture to tackle healthcare costs. Recently, they named famed medical writer and surgeon Atul Gawande to be the venture's first CEO. Very few details about what the venture is actually doing have been announced, leading some to speculate . The more obvious low-hanging…
If you live with someone, see if this sounds familiar: These tensions are common between people living together, whether that’s between roommates, romantic partners, or families. If you’ve had lingering issues about this, they’ve probably heightened by the COVID-19 quarantine. A year ago, we solved all of our arguments about chores by making one simple spreadsheet. It tracks all of our household…
I got questions from a high school student about the Ivy League. My response are below. I build businesses, mainly in online education. Brief bio here. No I was pre-med and went into an MD-PhD program, but decided to drop out to build businesses. I explain why here. Yes mainly with classmates. Some became my best friends, wife, business partners, and thinking partners. Like with high school, you…
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