In this conversational excerpt, Speaker A references a Steve Jobs quote that you cannot make someone work hard if they don’t want to, framing it as a mindset issue tied to personal background and competitiveness. The discussion pivots to hiring philosophy: prioritize candidates who are intrinsically motivated—especially those passionate about AI—because they will self‑drive hard work, whereas training unmotivated hires is seen as a waste. The conversation then explores the benefits of having a co‑founder versus a single founder, suggesting a co‑founder could simplify growth. Finally, Speaker A outlines an acquisition strategy that emphasizes retaining the original founders of acquired companies, noting that their organization typically only does deals when founders stay on board. They estimate roughly 15 deals in the past five years and imply a high founder‑retention rate, though exact numbers are not provided.
Chapters
That's called you fire them and you move on. Exactly. And you know who said this? Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs said this, right? In his entire career, he has not found that you can make someone work hard who doesn't want to work hard. Like, that's a mindset thing that you have to transform. Like, you have to go on your own spiritual journey to learn how to work hard, right? Whether it's something that happened to you in your childhood or whatever it is exactly, or you're just a competitive person. But that's why, like, that's why I push that. Sometimes my team thinks I'm crazy on the AI thing, but I'm just like, dude, it's so easy. If they're into the AI stuff, it means they're going to push themselves hard, right? At this point in life.
And if they're not, there's no point in hiring 'em because you don't want to train 'em and have to convince 'em. No. It's a waste of your time. Yeah. You're really a single founder. Yeah. It's easier if you had double founder, maybe.
It would be way easier with double founder, I'll tell you that much, right?
Why not just go find another co-founder and bring 'em into the business?
I wouldn't be opposed to that, but I think once we start ramping up these acquisitions again, I think naturally you're going to try to keep some of these founders, right? And you've kept a lot of these founders. We only try to keep the founders. We do not try to do deals without the founders. So, okay, if you look at the net amount of deals that you've done, how many deals have you done in the last 5 years?
I don't know.
20, 30? No, less than 20 for sure. Okay, so let's call it 15, okay? How many of those founders are still with you today?
Out of all the deals we've done, only once where we got rid of the founders. Technically, actually 3 times, but 2 of them, we didn't want the founders. We just wanted the technology. Okay, so 13 of 15. So, uh, but there's only one time where the founders wanted to leave and we accepted it. So call it one deal out of all the deals we've done where we accepted it. The other deals where we didn't want the founders, we went into trying to buy the company without the founders. Okay, so let's say you kept 93% of the founders.
