The Power of Founders

We started talking about billion dollar businesses. Let me now end by talking about trillion dollar businesses. Okay, so we had those four examples, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft and Google or Alphabet that are now trillion dollar companies. And there are a lot of companies that have, you know, there are a lot of companies that have a lot of smart minds that can learn everything that I'm saying and hire the best smartest minds and don't become trillion dollar companies. And I think one thing that's hard to argue with is that all four of those companies, besides just having and going after network effects, they all. And this is informed from a piece of deeper analysis that Jeff Moore did about five years ago on Apple and Amazon. But all four of those companies had founders at the helm as CEOs when they were publicly traded companies for a long period of time. And I think that is not a coincidence because there is something about a founder that has the earned authority of its employees and its constituents and its stakeholders that can move companies in directions that even the smartest minds can't. And there's something about the founder experience of starting from 0 to 1 where you go through your own journey of getting knocked down and knowing who you are and being able to actually get in touch and with that core inviolable spirit that exists in bad times are good. And this is sort of a time of reflection. It's sort of a time of really getting actually in touch with that spirit that becomes an indomitable power even when you become famous and big. And really these companies aren't just companies, these are companies that build other companies. And I think that's if you think about how Apple has moved from a desktop company to all these, becoming the biggest music company, the biggest phone company, now the biggest payments company, or how Amazon went from an online bookstore to the biggest utility cloud computing company, now the biggest home AI company. That is not a simple linear academic map. There is something else going on. And what I want you to understand is that the essence of all this, there is an entrepreneur behind these great big fictitious seeming companies that are unicorns or trillion corns. That is the indomitable spirit that is impossible to replicate or copy. And so really the lesson that I would have for you today is to get in touch with what that means for you. Because anybody can copy your technology, nobody can copy you. And so don't worry about trying to be somebody else. Just get in touch with what your best sel self is and then curry the resources around you to have that vision be realized.