Ali Ghodsi

But I was applying first-principles thinking to everything I was sucking in. I was making sure that it actually made sense to do these things. I was building my own — kind of like Bruce Lee built his own Jeet Kune Do based on all the different martial arts — I was building my own CEO playbook based on all the ingredients I was learning from the different places. And that way it was self-consistent. That's one thing I would recommend.

I think that's a useful way of operating a company. I still operate the company that way. I try to identify what the main bottleneck is at the time, and I try to just focus on unclogging that. Hire people. There's drama. People are quitting. The board, this and that. Legal department. Customers. Revenue. Missing this. There's a million things coming your way every day. You don't have the time to move the needle on anything. So focus on that main bottleneck.