David Senra

This is a tiny story but I love it because I think it's an example. It's a thing that happens in every single company that usually takes two weeks that he does in an hour right? So he's like interviewing a machinist. And 20-minute 30-minute interview. He wants to hire the guy so he asks him how much he costs. Haggles right there. Come to terms. Somebody's like standing beside him with a offer. He's like "All right fill in the blanks here you go" signs it goes to work. The same day? Same day. And by the way it's Saturday at like 6:00 p.m. So like your description of like how he uses time is like he uses all of it immediately.

Like that's such an important insight and he is it's why these not just he but also these companies move so quickly. Like when you combine I feel like a lot of people talk about the tactics. They're like "Yes he moves fast. Yes he is first-principles thinking. Yes he works on the bottleneck." But when you combine these things it's like a Lollapalooza from Charlie Munger right? It is like this is not a 10% on a 10% on a 10%. If you're working on the most important thing with manic intensity and you're doing that 100 hours a week instead of 40 hours a week you are orders of magnitude beyond the productivity of somebody else.

And he's been doing this for decades. So no wonder he's so far ahead. Yes he's smart yes he's intense but he's not superhuman. He's not orders of magnitude smarter than his competitors but the way that he works and the the methods that he uses the mindset that he has puts him orders of magnitude ahead.

This is how Elon thinks about money and, this, I've never heard anywhere else. "In early SpaceX, I told the team everything we did was a function of our burn rate. We were burning through $100,000 per day. In the same way I expected the revenue in 10 years to be $10 million a day, every day we were slower to achieve our goals was a day of missing out on that revenue." So there's a story in the Ashlee Vance book where they're like, "I don't get Elon." It's like, "I just went to him and tried to get him to spend, you know, $25,000 on a part." He said, "No," because he thinks, "I could build it for 2,000," 'cause the idiot index, that part should be 2,000 and figure out how to do it.

Yet he just let us use his jet and burn $60,000 of jet fuel to get a part to Hawaii that would save us a workday. Yeah. And so, that makes perfect sense if you spend 60 grand because, that day, 10 years from now is 10 million And you unlock an entire team and all the infrastructure value. So a thing that's underrated about Elon in my view is like this hyper fluency across domains. Like, this is a simple example, but he studied both physics and economics as an undergraduate. He has been like running his business and functionally being head of product at all of his companies. It's an extremely wide like multivariate set of trade-offs that he's looking at and he deeply understands, to your point, the zoomed out view of opportunity cost and compounding.

So thinking about where a business could be in 10 years, where the bottleneck is today, where the burn rate is of all the money and equipment and time and attention, and what gets unlocked, not just today, but the potential future value of that is really, really interesting, and that's why I think a powerful source of the maniacal urgency is 'cause he's like hair on fire all the time, there's billions of dollars at stake every single hour of the day. Like, we can be working with such greater intensity and the rewards for doing it go up every time we are able to move faster.

I think Elon has demonstrated this in various times in his career, where you just have a small, incredibly cracked, highly technical team that's very flat. And if you do that, you can accomplish a lot very, very quickly. That ended up becoming one of the tent poles of our overall strategy. It's like small, very flat, highly technical team, very high talent density. How quickly can you move if you have those ingredients? From an outside perspective, it just seems like Mark empties the clip, is the way I think about this, right? Have you ever read this book called The Mind of Napoleon? No. Okay, so Mind of Napoleon, published in 1957.

I found it because I saw this interview. I think Tyler Cowen interviewed Sam Altman. And it takes this to 2019. And he asked him, like, what's the most important book that you read this year? And he said The Mind of Napoleon. So it's very hard to find. I buy the book. It's 300 pages of just Napoleon's own words organized by topic. And in that, he talks about over and over again that hesitation is fatal. But he says before you engage in a course of action, there's a lot of deliberation. He'll, like, study from every angle, make sure he's making the right decision. I feel there's, like, an echo with the way Mark operates.

Does a lot of deliberation, make sure he's on the right path. But once he makes that decision, he just goes all in. He won't, like, he just empties the clip. And that's the way I felt about, like, what was occurring right at this point where he comes to get you and then you guys start rebuilding this entire organization. I think he really has internalized that failure doesn't matter. It matters, like, when you win, how big you win. And I think this overall concept, I think, enables him to operate, I think, truly without fear in a lot of circumstances. Because I think he is just very comfortable taking lots of risk.

He's got that great line where it's like, in a world that's changing all the time, the biggest risk is not taking any. Yeah, exactly. I think he's internalized this quite deeply. Like, there's certainly, like, versions of the world where meta looks a lot more like Google in some sense. Like, it's just, like, you know, more slow moving and more bureaucratic and just, like, looks very different as a company. But I think he, because he's internalized some of these lessons so deeply, keeps the thing dynamic and moving and live.

Starlink was, like, a mess. It was 10X too expensive, and they were building 1/10 of how many they needed. So, like, two orders of magnitude off success. He's like, "I've had it. I'm fixing this. This is now the bottleneck." He grabs Mark Juncosa, which is one of his, like, super-talented early hires from SpaceX. This is a rocket scientist. This is not a guy who's ever worked on satellites. He grabs a team that of engineers that he trusts, they fly up to Seattle, they fire the entire starship leadership, or Starlink leadership team, and they sit down in a war room, which I think is an underrated, like, tactic.

And they start running the algorithm. What is the first principles of, like, satellite design? How simple can we make this thing? Why, why, why, why? Why does this exist? Why are these two things so far apart? Why do we need this much energy? Why do we need this manufacturing process? And over the course of, like, a few months, they make this two order of magnitude leap. Like, Mark Juncosa and these people who had never encountered this design before, but just by applying the algorithm and working with maniacal urgency towards this extremely high design bar, they created this product that's now, you know, if it was a standalone business, it would be worth tens of billions of dollars.

My memory is that I think it took like one year to schedule that first meeting. Like from the intro to the meeting being scheduled, I think it was like a full year. Why? Mark obviously has like an insane calendar and like has like a bajillion different things to deal with. And he's also very good at prioritization. Like he will spend a lot of time on the things that are really, really important. In some ways, like too much time on the things that are like really, really important. The only way he's able to do that and like be a good dad and be a good partner and all this other stuff is to just like ruthlessly prioritize.

I had spoken to him a few times kind of after that and had gotten his advice as a founder to get advice from, you know, Mark Zuckerberg, obviously like a really big deal. And I actually remember at that time, like he wrote these like, like I would ask him a question on WhatsApp and then he would write these like really long responses. And I was really confused. I was like, how does he have time to write these like really long responses? But now I realize he like is just like really fast and rigorous at writing to like a lot of WhatsApp messages. He'll like write a very rigorous, like long response very quickly.

It's like a very impressive skill of his. Voice Voice

It sucks to kill good ideas. And no matter how much you think you're going to do it, you people everyone. Like kind of maybe just by the nature of who chooses to be an entrepreneur seems to do terrible at this. I'm terrible at this. I know I'm bad at this. But last year, for example, we killed Sora, which was, you know, good product and fun and cool, but used a lot of compute and not as important as Codex, where we put the compute. We killed our web browser called Atlas, which, again, I think it was a great product. I think it was the best web browser, but not as important for us to focus on as somewhere else we could put that talent.

In a world of limited compute, limited people, limited resources, we thought really hard and we said, you know what? The general intelligence for knowledge work and eventually for science, the most important thing we can do. Anything that goes into making that upstream of generating that intelligence, building our own chip, building our own data centers, writing good infrastructure software, certainly training models, obviously, that's all really important. But then let's just offer this AI as a service and get people to use it for intellectual pursuit, for work, for scientific discovery, to be more productive in their personal life. And let's have the kind of flexible general platform and not do a lot of other things.

If you're stacking a lot of things on top of each other, each one of those things becomes less important. So if you have 10 things, each one of them is one -tenth as important as one by itself. So if you're making something and you want the least amount involved, those things have to be really critically curated because they're doing the work of everything and nothing is hidden. It's why it's not as easy as it sounds to do less. I'll give you an example with guitars. A lot of recordings are made where the guitarist plays and then they double it and triple it and they create this like wall of guitars.

When there's a wall of guitars, you hear guitar, but you don't hear someone playing guitar. You just hear guitar. It becomes more generic. When one person plays it and you can hear their fingers on the strings, it's got more personality. It's more human. And I tend to look for those things where it's the singular essence shows through. I'll give you an example. I'll give you an example. I'll give you an example. I'll give you an example. I'll give you an example.

You don't have any levels of introspection. Yes zero as little as possible. Why? Move forward go. Yeah I don't know. I found people who dwell in the past get stuck in the past. It's just a real problem and it's a problem at work and it's a problem at home. So I've read obviously 400 I think now 10 biographies of 50 case entrepreneurs. And that was one of the most surprising things like what's the most surprising thing that you've learned from this? Is like oh they have little or zero introspection. Yeah. Like Sam Walton didn't wake up thinking about his internal self. He just woke up. He's like I like building Walmart.

I'm going to keep building Walmart. I'm going to make more Walmarts. And just kept doing it over and over again. And you probably know if you go back 400 years ago it never would've occurred to anybody to be introspective. Like it's the whole idea of I mean it just all of the modern conceptions around introspection and therapy and all the things that kind of result from that are you know kind of a manufacture of the 1910s 1920s. Say more about that. Great men of history didn't sit around doing this stuff at any prior point right? It's all a new construct. It was well so first Western civilization had to kind of invent the concept of the individual right.

Which was like a new concept you know several hundred years ago. And then for a long time it was alright the individual runs right? And like does all these things and builds things and you know builds empires and builds companies and builds technology does all these things. And then you know kind of this kind of guilt based whammy you know kind of showed up from Europe. A lot of it from Vienna in 1910 1920s Freud and all that entire movement. And kind of turned all that inward and basically said okay now we need to like you know basically second guess the individual. We need to criticize the individual needs to self criticize right?

The individual needs to feel guilt needs to look backwards needs to dwell in the past it never resonated with me.

I think if you don't know who you are, the world will tell you. And it may not be an answer you want, right? So the world is noisy, especially when you have a certain level of visibility, it projects onto you as much as it receives you. So I think you have to do the work of really getting to know yourself and what feels right. Some of the hardest decisions I've taken, and sometimes it's really about saying no and setting boundaries or changing course. When those decisions, regardless of how hard they are, align with your values, it always feels good. Like, it's hard. It can be difficult, but you never question it.

You never second guess, and you don't look back and wonder, what if? It's the decisions you take that don't fully feel right, that don't align with your true self, with those core values that you hold. Those are the things that I think you always regret. Oftentimes people get there because they sort of forum shop decisions. They'll ask people about their life, what should I do? What should I do? And they almost make it like a process to make tough choices. And there's something very important about, you know, speaking to people who are knowledgeable and getting perspective and feedback, but ultimately, like you can't outsource decision-making as it pertains to major decisions in your personal or professional life.

You really have to like sit with it. Actually, you know, Dana, I think is a great example of somebody who he knows himself so well. He's so authentically who he is. Like he would be wildly uncomfortable like wearing a mask and performing as in some other role. I think Rick Rubin, I think so many great people, Dolly Parton, I love her. She's like, is who she is and she's always been the same and she really owns it. And I think we're drawn as people, if you look at sort of pop culture, I think we're naturally drawn to people who are extremely authentic, especially over time. I think if somebody's in the public eye for a long period of time, and yet so many people I know are really afraid to be themselves.

The reality is you're gonna get criticized either way. You might as well be the best version of you possible.