Joel Trammell - Founder at CEO-S

Welcome to another CEO Wisdom Podcast. We have Joel Tremblay with us today. Uh, Joel is a very special guy. So he's the founder at COS, he's an author, he's a chairman, he's an investor, he's part of, uh, ATC Hall of Fame, had, uh, fairly big exits, uh, in his career, uh, in companies like Chorus. Um, he managed also, uh, Blackbox at some point and all kinds of company. Crazy story, uh, enough that I had my AIs do an episode on him prior to this podcast. You can watch it at The Greats, down here in the banner. So Joel, welcome to the podcast. Tell us a bit more about yourself and what you're up to nowadays.

Great to be with you, Charles. Well, I'm continuing a long journey of being CEO of organizations and trying to help others learn how to run their organization better.

Maybe I should have started with that, but you started in the nuclear submarine, right?

Teaching at what the Navy calls Naval Nuclear Power School, where they train the people who operate the submarines and aircraft carriers that are nuclear-powered for the US fleet.

Man, that's crazy. So you did 4 years in there. What did that teach you? Is it like the classic military discipline?

That wasn't it so much. I mean, that was fine with me. You know, we weren't deployed, so it wasn't probably as intense. It was an 7:30 to 4:30 kind of job. But the big thing that it taught me from a business and organizational perspective was that the Navy had done a great job recruiting a bunch of really smart engineers. It was the first time in my career I'd been around a bunch of people that were smarter than I was. And you think, you know, as a college athlete, I thought, you know, if you get all the best players on your team, you kind of win. I thought if you get all the smart people in your organization, the organization would run well. And I found out, unfortunately, it didn't. It had a lot of problems organizationally because just putting a bunch of smart engineers in the room doesn't create a synergy or a vision or anything about the organization. And so that really fascinated me and that kind of launched me into wanting to be CEO to learn how to run an organization well. Even if you got all the best people. Wow.

Yeah. Such a lesson, right? Like, even very smart people have emotions and testosterone and want to get on top, right? So you got to have a system to manage them all, even to manage yourself, right? Because power corrupts. Um, UST Computers in 1990, that was your first one. How did that go?

Yeah. So that was crazy. You got to go back, you know, 36 years to the start. And this is really pre-commercial internet. So at the time, Sears, the chain retail store, had made a partnership with IBM and developed an internet-type service called Prodigy. And it was the first time that you kind of had access to a national network of people. You'd log in on your modem, you know, and there would be things like bulletin boards and email. And it was the first time you could take out an ad, a classified ad, and have it seen by people all over the country. And so I— the first business really revolved around being a middleman computer distributor by taking out an ad and attracting people who wanted to resell computers. A lot of the computers in those days, most of the computers in those days were what we called white box, right? They were built from parts. It wasn't bought off the store shelf. And so there were a lot of technical people who liked playing around with that, that wanted to start their own business but didn't have any information about how to do that or any contacts with how to do that. And of course, this is, you know, pre-internet, pre-information age where you didn't— you go down to the local bookstore and try to find a book on how to start a business. So, you know, that kind of information just wasn't available. And so we developed a network of people who are resellers around the country.

And did you have an exit from that one? Also, that was your first stint in the startup world, right? So what did go wrong with that one?

Well, it was hard to scale it to the size. I ended up selling it, but for about $100,000 just and got out of the business. Also price, you know, we were making relatively small margins. We were kind of a 5 or 10%, you know, kind of middleman. Operation. And prices when I got into the business, typical computer was $2,500. When I got out of the business, the typical computer was down to $1,000. So, you know, 5% of $2,500 is a lot better deal than 5% of $1,000.

Um, Moore's Law was in full sail, full action back then. Then you did HomeSmart. Like, why go from, uh, computer advertising to like a HomeSmart type of business?

Yeah, the opportunity I saw there was computers were becoming, you know, common in business, but they weren't being utilized to their full advantage. Color printers, color digital photography was just starting. And I saw an opportunity for home builders to market and sell their product a lot better because I had gone shopping for a home. And we had decided to buy a house and the agent pulled out this contract and started just lining through stuff and you didn't know what you were going to get. I mean, you saw some drawing, hey, we're going to build this house for you, but it was just a black and white ink sketch with a floor plan and you were about to make the biggest purchase of your life. You know, in those days it was $100,000. And I just found this so kind of amateurish, right? Seemed like Big Chief Tab— I called it Big Chief Tablet approach. You know, when there were computers and they had built these homes in other places and why didn't I have color pictures and why couldn't I choose options and look at different brick colors on that style house and do all kinds of things that the computer technology was beginning to allow you to do. And so that was the start of HomeSmart and we built it and sold it to a couple of home builders. But what we found out, of course, was we were ahead of the curve. And one of the things you always find in technology It's kind of easy as a technologist to predict the future, but it's hard to get the timing right, and we were just ahead of the market.

Where does that entrepreneurial flame, uh, come from? And you— why choose like the military and instructor from the get-go? Why not launch your business from the get-go? Or was it like pent-up energy in the military and you just unleashed the beast after going out of that?

I didn't realize I had the entrepreneurial spirit, uh, until being in a, you know, a more rigid organization like the military where I constantly questioned, you know, why do we do things this way? Why? There are better ways to do it. And, you know, my dad was a university professor, so that was really what I was aiming to do was be a university professor. So I took the job teaching to see if I liked teaching, and then the Navy would pay for you to get a master's. And so that was, you know, attractive. I'll see if I like teaching, I'll get the master's. But when I started master's in engineering, I realized I didn't have any interest in kind of theoretical engineering anymore and had met in high school a couple of gentlemen in my town who we would now call entrepreneurs. We didn't use that word in those days, just small business type people. One particularly who bought and sold businesses, you know, he'd buy a business, fix it up, flip it in a year or two and make money doing that. Most of the time then he was, you know, had plenty of recreational time to do what he wanted. And I found that very appealing. So that kind of lit the spark that when I realized no, teaching and getting a PhD wasn't my path, I decided to explore the business part. And then once you start doing it, of course, you become unqualified to do anything else. So you better figure out a way to make it work.

Yeah, yeah. HomeSmart, was it your first failure? Was it like $0 exit. Is that what—

yeah, yeah, that was— yeah, I mean, we sold a little, and, and, uh, but yeah, it kind of just faded away and, and didn't become anything.

Then you accepted a job after that, right? So like walking tail between the legs, sort of.

Yeah, I, I did take one job, um, I worked at AMD, uh, it took about 19 months before they drove me crazy with the bureaucracy, uh, But, uh, that was great in that I got the opportunity. My job was basically to manage the IT vendors, uh, that sold, uh, IT products to, to AMD. And it got— it, it, it let me see how a large company buys IT products and the whole buying process and how many people have to sign off and the budgeting process. And understanding all that was hugely helpful later when we did NetQoS. To understand how the customer bought and how challenging it was to sell to large enterprises.

And AMD is a huge company even up to this day, competing with NVIDIA. Let's say you would have made a career there and got some yourself, some stock that would pan out to, what, $100, $200 million today?

Or—

but that would never happen. It's like not even a question.

It's like Yeah, I mean, I, you know, when I moved to Austin, when I moved to Austin, I should have taken a job at Dell and just built computers and probably would have done great too. But, uh, that, that seemed like a boring job at the time.

Yeah. Yeah. A guy like you can't be under someone. Um, but AMD released you in the dot-com boom and bust, right? So what happened after that?

Yeah. So when I, uh, I actually quit AMD I knew I wanted to start a business with my wife based on the work she had done. She had worked at a company called Schlumberger, giant oilfield services company, global company, and they had shut down their office in Austin and they wanted us to move to one of their other locations and we didn't want to leave Austin. And so, you know, that led to me pitching the business plan based on her technical work., that was net— that became NetQoS that we raised the $11 million on.

I was muted. $200 million returning 10x to investors. So that was a solid home run, but 10 years of your life, right? So this is what— I mean, 10 years, that's so long, especially in an entrepreneur's life. How did you last that long?

Well, you know, it was kind of bracketed by a couple of major events. You know, early on 9/11 happened, which caused a, you know, huge challenge and a lot of shops just stopped buying anything. To, you know, the great financial crisis 2008 when Lehman Brothers failed, which, you know, put a whole other series of challenges into the market. And so, you know, we We wrote, made it survive both those challenges.

But you returned the money to these investors, which is a huge sign for them. Did these investors back you up for your next ventures after that?

Yeah, the two partners personally did. The firm actually ended their existence. The main, main guy retired, but the The individual investors, the partners became individual investors in my next gig, and we got them 7 times their money in about 18 months.

At that time, I feel there's a pattern that's being forged in you, which is like you truly understand how to manage company and ultimately how to exit them, right? So around that time, is it when your core philosophies that exist in you today started happening?

Yeah, that was driven by— I was chairman of what they call the Austin Technology Council, which was the consortium of technology companies in the Austin market. We did a little study. We were trying to, you know, grow the market, of course, and become the next Silicon Valley or a better Silicon Valley. And so we did a study and decided that we needed more venture capital money in the Austin market. And but also we needed better prepared CEOs if we got that venture capital money. And so, because of my teaching background and kind of my interest in the area, I said, oh, I'll create a course for CEOs. And so, that was almost 20 years ago. I started teaching a course for CEOs and that led to the book and software. And I got detoured a few times along the way and did some other things. But, you know, basically for almost 20 years, I've been teaching a course for CEOs and their exec teams.

And you also started taking the other side of the table at that time, becoming an investor yourself. Right? What, what, what justified that decision?

Well, I, I did believe that I knew how to maximize value out of assets. And so I, I played private equity guy. First company, I found a company that was a spin-out of a bigger company that was on the market. I bought it personally out of my own funds. And then we found another company that we thought was undervalued and, and bought it. Uh, and what I didn't do, which I should have, uh, is of course raise a big private equity fund like most people would've done. I thought prices were high back then, 2011, 2012. Of course, it turned out that we were just at the very beginning of a huge increase in pricing. Uh, and so I should have kept investing, but instead I bought those two companies and kind of sat on my hands. We made good money with those two investments. Uh, but I didn't build a big fund or, or make, uh, any more significant investments.

And are you a better operator or investor? And also, back then, what did it come to your mind that, oh, I don't need to actually be spending my full days running these companies, I can just invest in a bunch of folks that are equally, if not smarter than I, and just watch them make magic happen?

Well, I, I am definitely a much better operator than investor.

I need the answer to that one.

Yeah, uh, I'm not brave enough probably to be an investor. You know, I see too much downside risk to be a great investor. But yeah, I bought the companies and then tried to find CEOs that I could mentor to take over and run the companies day to day because neither— to do a good job as CEO, you really have to be invested in the company. You have to be excited every morning to get up in that area, and that just wasn't at that time in my life, something I wanted to do with those companies.

Isn't that contrarian at your level of net worth nowadays though, to be a better operator than investor? Most guys at your level would be like, yeah, just rather to invest in a portfolio of elite CEOs. But there's also one thing about investors— most of them come from established families that always had wealth, and they never wanted to have skin in the game really and be on the battlefield, right? What is there to say about that?

Yeah, I don't get any joy really just from the investing side. I mean, it's great, you make money, okay, that's great, but it's way too passive to me. I'd rather put— if I'm going to take risk capital, I'd rather risk it in something that I'm directly involved in. I just don't enjoy sitting on the sidelines and watching.

So then the equation to not minimize your longevity, right? How do you manage stress? Because it's stressful to operate like these big engines, and you don't want that to affect your personal life. You want to live as long as possible to have more fun and make more money, right? So what's your system to, uh, yeah, take more risk but like minimize the downside stress of it?

Yeah, well, I, I grew up playing competitive tennis, and, uh, I can remember at 12 or 13, a book hit my radar that my dad bought for me called The Inner Game of Tennis.

Classic.

Yeah, which was a classic, but it was new at the time. And it really changed my attitude playing tennis. And tennis is like the CEO job. It's a lonely job when you're on the court. You don't have a coach there to temper you and give you advice and whatever. And you, you know, you kind of got to figure it out all yourself, and, and you got to learn to deal with stressful situations and learn what that's like. And I think that, that's been hugely helpful in my, uh, my business career, my tennis background. And then I'd played a fair amount of poker, uh, early in my career as well, back before it was cool, back before Rounders came out and everybody thought poker was a cool game, back when I tell people I play poker and they look at me like I was a degenerate gambler or something. And I go, no, it's really a very sophisticated game that mirrors what you have to do in business because with poker you have to make probabilistic decisions without— with incomplete information. And so I think both those were very helpful in my career as CEO.

When you play poker, how much psychological deciphering do you try to do to other people around the table or do you focus mostly unprobabilistic side of things?

Well, one of the things that was effective for me, you might have noticed I have a slight Southern accent. Some people in parts of the country will assume that means you're a little slower or a little dumber or whatever. And so I often played to that, you know, to the idea I didn't know much what I was doing and found that especially young people would sometimes mistake that act, and that could be effective. So that was a ploy. And, you know, I used to go out to Vegas.

10x down on the accent and the Texan expressions.

Sure, sure. Why not? You know, let them assume you don't know what you're doing, you know.

Bring the cowboy hat, pickup in the background.

I used to love playing out in San Jose in the Valley when the internet bubble was, you know, growing because there were so many young, smart, really smart developers who thought it was all about the math and didn't understand any of the psychological aspects of the game. And so that was cool.

He must have got wrecked. Um, you know, I mean, I don't do that much deciphering in poker. I think I play my own game, and I do play sometimes intimidation tactics, like, uh, try to scare people off. It works sometimes, but Yeah, um, I'm not that good and probably way less good than you are. I run a group called VC Poker Fridays. I should invite you to that one. It's pretty fun. It's online and we have ex-poker champion Ray Furr's joining us and the CEO of PokerNow. Um, I'm not sure if you know Ray Furr's story, right? Have you heard that one? No, no, uh, he was— he's, uh, he's the founder and CEO of Full Tilt. Poker, which went down spectacularly. I'm not sure if you ever watched that one, but, uh, that was Rafe. Yeah, massive, like, uh, failure. He was— he had the $100 million lawsuit by the SEC. He won it, I think, ultimately. Um, but yeah, he ended up in, like, a psychiatric ward. It's like— and then he went out of there. It's a crazy story, one of the craziest I had on, uh, my podcast. And Rafe became a friend. But, um, Yeah, poker is intriguing. Okay, tennis. What does, what else does happen in a day in your life? Like, what other habits do you nurture for high performance in your CEO life?

Yeah, so, you know, the CEO job, you can do anything. And so a lot of people, when they get stressed, tend to go whatever comes most natural to them. So if they You know, if they've been a salesperson most of their career, they get stressed, they go sell something. One of the things about my career is I was never an expert.

I thought you were going to say go drink and do drugs. And the, in the salespeople, like real degenerates, that's what they do. They don't go sell more.

No, but, but not the CEOs. Uh, usually they, they're past that. But anyway, uh, but because of my career, I kind of, you know, started my own businesses and kind of always was a generalist. I don't have anything I like to do specifically in the business. I mean, you know, and so I've learned to focus on, you know, kind of whatever wheel's turning the slowest is the key. You've got to look at objective reality, figure out is it sales problem? Is it a marketing problem? Is it a product problem? Is it an employee problem? Is it a customer problem? Shareholder problem? What is it? And spend your time there where you can get the most leverage.

Yeah, that's the discipline version of it, right? 'Cause you're doing like the hard thing when there's, I mean, there's like nothing exciting to be done, right? So you fundamentally sort of reward your brain. Yeah, me in my case, I think my go-to reverter nowadays is AIs, right? So I'll just go to Fable 5 and I'll ask like, hey, scrape my business and tell me like what's wrong with it, or I'll ask it like smart question. Then it'll give me action items to do and off that, off I go, right? But my question was, I think, meant more like on a personal side of things. Sometimes when I'm really stressed, I do video games, obviously my go-to sports, just like you, right? Or sauna, for example, cold plunge, walks in the nature, right? Boxing, jacuzzi, like what habits you have ingrained in your life, that leads to performance. I'm pretty sure, like, you get up, like, very early, right? Like, what does a day in your life look like?

Fairly, fairly early. Uh, I'm a hot bath guy. Um, I don't know, uh, why, but Winston Churchill type of— yes, Winston Churchill was like the cigar famous for his hot bath. Yeah, or his drink. I don't have the cigar or the drink. Uh, but that, that's usually the way I start. You know, especially as I've gotten older, I'm most productive from 7 to, you know, a little bit after lunch, and then I slow down usually in the afternoon, take a break of some sort, and may come back to something a little later in the evening. But if I have important kind of productivity stuff, creative stuff, I want to focus on that first thing. A lot of people go into the office and start doing email and get caught up in the day to day. I try to avoid that and do something the first hour that's productive and creative. I, you know, create a lot of content, of course, around the CEO role. And so often that's what I'm doing. And of course, I'm using AI like you to help me with some of those things.

And COS is your main thing nowadays. You also run 512 Financial and see Texas CEO Magazine, right? So how do you juggle between these, uh, 3 balls?

Yeah, well, you get, you know, I have somebody, a partner that's, uh, really the operator at 512 Financial, and we provide accounting and HR services to a lot of institutional-backed companies, uh, in the Austin market and some outside the Austin market as well. Uh, and that's going great. And he, he does a great job running that, and I just serve as a kind of chairman of the board type. Mentor available when he needs help. Yeah, my day-to-day work is around the CEOS, the Chief Executive Operating System, and kind of to break news here, we will announce in the next few weeks our combination and renaming with a company called Expertloop to present an AI-powered CEO assistant to the market that serves as kind of coach, chief of staff, trainer, mentor, all those things that a CEO needs, somebody to talk to at 2:00 AM in the morning when you wake up. And so that's where I'm spending most of my time these days.

And what's the overlap between these three, right? Like one's a newsletter/magazine, another is a system for CEOs, and another is HR and financial accounting, right? So Elon has like overlaps between his various ventures. What's your master plan here?

Everything's about helping CEOs. It's really that simple. I mean, that's what I want to do with the last part of my career is make a very difficult job, hopefully a little easier for people. Too many fail in the job. And these are really smart people, talented people. You don't get the job unless you're, you know, smart and talented. But too many of them, when they get the job, they fail because it's a tough job.. And it's very different than most other jobs that you might have in a company.

And you said, uh, I mean, I don't think you're gonna retire. Uh, it's like, what are you like? Cause you said that before, that's my last thing, but I don't think you'll ever go away. I think you're— what's your philosophy on retirement?

Yeah. I can remember when I was 15 or 16 and my dad was at that time 60 or 61, about the age I am now. And he was so looking forward to retirement, you know, 65, and hey, I'm gonna go fishing every day. And I remember even at 15 or 16 thinking, wow, I don't want to have a job where I'm so looking forward to retirement. That just doesn't sound interesting. And I like fishing, but I'm not going fishing every day or playing golf every day or even playing pickleball every day. And so, you know, my ideal is I'll be sitting here at my training center at the— at my ranch when I'm 80-something years old and I just fall off the studio in the middle of class and they dig a hole and stick me in it.

There you go. CEOs nowadays, you coach a lot of them, you've seen a lot of them in action. What, uh, pain points or problems do they usually face that is pretty obvious to you as a guy that ran more than 10 companies and had over $100 million in exit?

Yeah, so when you're at executive level, you know, let's say you're the VP of Sales for a company, the challenge in your job is not knowing what you need to do. You know you need to go sell stuff. The challenge is always how do you do it? How do you do that better? The problem in the CEO job is it is unclear to most people what a CEO does. What am I doing when I'm being CEO? You can do anything, obviously. Nobody's going to stop you if you want to go sell, if you want to go market. But, but what should you be doing? And so that's the big problem that we, you know, I try to address for CEOs is, hey, how should you think about a business so that you know where to spend your time?

And how has that changed in the AI age? Because back then, I, I mean, some, some things changed, some didn't, right? You still need to go after A+ level talents that can do stuff for you, but In the AI age, it's also spending time with agents, right? And coding stuff on Claude Code, coding systems to your own problems. And obviously getting clarity still as a CEO, right? Like sometimes we're not clear about the problem itself. We need like a bit more research before we act. How has the CEO role changed since the AI revolution in 2020-ish?

Yeah, so I just, I make a distinction between, you know, small companies, let's say less than 20 employees where the CEO is CEO, but they're also doing a whole bunch of other jobs to, you know, most of my customers are 100+ employees where there's a full-time CEO job. So hopefully they're not needing to code. They've got people coding. They're not needing to build stuff. The way I think CEOs should think about AI is they now have access to a pool of employees who are really smart and really knowledgeable. Imagine a really smart college grad who's been trained. They didn't just get a degree in finance, they got all the degrees. But that employee has very little value in most businesses until they understand your industry, context of your business, what your goals are, what your values are, who the people are I need to work with, who the customer— tell me about the customer. All these things that would make any employee— I mean, just because a really smart— I mean, if Einstein walks into your business tomorrow, they're not very effective until you do a bunch of things. And it's really a question of how good your management system and management approach is, how fast you can make a productive employee. And it's going to be the same thing with AI. How effective an AI system can be is going to be based on how well you manage that system, because the AI needs to know a whole bunch of other things, just like a new employee was, except they don't, you know, the AI doesn't sit around the water cooler necessarily and pick up all these things. And it can't volunteer. It doesn't typically volunteer for missions. You have to ask it, you know, know what question to ask it. And so you know, how you manage these AI instances. You know, the companies that have good management in place will be most productive with AI, I believe.

Yeah. Let's start with the human part. We'll get to the AI part. But I mean, the equation is still the same, right? It's like sharpening your axe before you start chopping. And that means hiring the A+ players out there. But these A+ players have so many options. They already have a job. They already have top dollars. How'd you convince these guys to join your org?

Yeah. So, you know, there, there are several things. One of the easiest things for smaller businesses is how quickly you can move, uh, on hires, uh, because a lot of the bigger companies where they might want to work take forever. Uh, we, we always set a goal of 2 weeks from when we got somebody's resume until we either offered them a job or told them we weren't interested. Which meant a whole bunch of things had to happen. But almost never did we then have to compete with somebody else because, you know, they, I'd call them and make an offer and they'd, they'd say, oh, well, you know, I'm talking to Microsoft. And I'd go, well, great. You know, that's wonderful. Congratulations. But, you know, we're a fast-growing business and, you know, I need an answer in 10 days or something. Can you give me an answer in 10 days? Oh, sure. No problem. You call them back in 10 days. They're like, oh, well, we didn't get that meeting scheduled in Redmond yet because the manager was on vacation and, you know, and you go, hey, okay, you know, I understand if you want to wait, that's fine, but I can't promise you the job. And it was amazing how many times people took the job and you never even had to compete with the Microsofts or the Google or whoever in those days. So that's one thing. You also have to be constantly recruiting as CEO and out there meeting people and visiting and understanding who the best people in your industry are. I went to trade shows and spent a lot of time visiting with other employees at other booths trying to find who were the best salespeople, who were the best marketing people, and build relationships in case those companies ever struggled. You know, they would be— I would be quick to call. And so it takes a lot of effort to build a strong recruiting function. And then you got to have a recruiter that's an A+ player. Recruiting is the last place you can afford to have a mediocre person involved, or even outsourcing it to some random company that's just going to put some 25-year-old on the phone with a script.

100%. How do you keep these guys in? How do you foster like a culture in which like an A+ player tribe?

Well, A+ players want to win. Number one. And so you got to focus on winning and anything that gets in the way of winning. And it'll frustrate A players tremendously if you keep some C players around for whatever reason, because you're a nice guy, because you, you know, because they're related to you, whatever the reason is, they don't want to carry C players. And so they want to know you're focused on, on them. And You know, otherwise also setting policies anytime you need to set policies. My thought was always, how are the A players going to react to this policy? Not how are my C players going to react to the policy? A lot of policy gets set around poor performers instead around your A players.

Now the AI part, do you agree that the future job of a CEO is fully managing and orchestrating an army of agents?

Not just an army of agents. People want to deal with people. Relationships will increase in value the more things are automated until, you know, now maybe if Elon builds a perfect robot that, you know, can— has the physical strength of an 18-year-old boy and the mental power of an Einstein, you know, maybe then we get to something that looks a little different. But nobody's going to want to work for a computer. Nobody wants to buy important services from a computer. They want to buy it from a person. Their relationships matter for most people. And I think that'll continue. And some of those human services elements will see more and more value.

You mentioned Elon. Who are you studying nowadays? What top CEO, top investor are you taking notes from?

Yeah, so I mean, Elon's the greatest entrepreneur ever, probably, certainly.

Yeah, hands down.

Yeah, certainly of his generation. I don't, you know, I can't compare to situations of a Rockefeller or somebody, but yeah, certainly of my generation, he's the greatest. You know, I look at some of the CEOs, there's some good CEOs. I think Satya at Microsoft's a very good CEO running a large organization. But, you know, there's a lot that are just kind of, if the market does well, they do well. If the market does poorly, they do poorly.

Elon, he made a couple of mistakes in the last years, but I mean, easy for me to say, right? Like, he outperforms me by like a million. I'm competitive too, and I don't intend to have it keep it that way for sure. But, um, is— are— is his flaws part of his operating systems? Meaning, are they interdependent to his performance, right? Is this bombasticness, or I don't know, his disregard for rules, like, uh, or, uh, public opinion part of why he wins?

Yes, some of it. I mean, you know, what he is is great at, first of all, is setting a vision. And the thing you've got to balance in a vision is you want it to be incredibly inspiring, but you also want it to be possible. And he's a good enough engineer that he always sets a very inspiring vision, but it is possible. Now, other people may not think it's possible, but he knows it's possible. I mean, you know, the latest one is data centers in space. First time a lot of people heard that, they went, That's not going to happen. That doesn't make any sense. He had dug in enough to know it kind of made sense. The numbers kind of work. We can get there. You know, self-driving cars. I'm on my 5th Tesla. 95% of the miles I don't drive these days. The car drives myself. Everybody said you couldn't do that with cameras. He knew. He was a good enough engineer to know you could do it. Now, certainly, you know, some of the political stuff he did, probably has hurt his sales. And, you know, I would have discouraged him from being as political as he, as he became. But, you know, that's not the key. The key is he said—

but he retracted from that, right?

Like, he stepped back.

I think that's all his community is, is founders and SEALs, right? Like, that's who vouches for him. So As long as he stays a founder and an engineer, like, he's gonna get my votes, right? But yeah, when he started doing like all the political stuff, it's like, dude, man, just don't, don't. You have everything, man. Like, and it's, it's not about like not taking risk, it's just a— and he, he's A/B testing, right? But social's never been as strong, right? And we've seen it, uh, quite publicly. But yeah, still the best entrepreneurs of our time, like you said. Uh, Joel, thanks for being on today. Where can people find out more about you?

Yeah. So, uh, if you wanna learn about our latest offerings, go to chatceo.co. And then, uh, my sub, Substack where I write extensively about, uh, uh, the CEO role is called Managing the Future.

Love it. That was Joel and Charles Cormier for another CEO