2025-08-11 08:00:00
I stumbled on this podcast with the legendary investor Christopher Hohn a few weeks back. YouTube’s algorithm is magical sometimes. Hohn sticks to old-school investing. He skips tech and picks physical businesses with real assets. Some of his wins include toll booths and airports.
Though I lack the cash or connections to ever buy toll booths in Europe, I wanted to find modern versions.
If toll booths and airports are physical businesses where you get paid every time someone passes through, what’s some other toll booths for today’s age: something with recurring, unavoidable usage and strong barriers to entry?
A toll booth business sits at a critical choke point in a growing market, charging a small fee for every transaction that passes through. You spot these opportunities by targeting layers that meet four criteria.
They must be
How do you identify a modern toll booth business opportunity?
In software, toll booth economics show up in several forms:
These businesses work like airports or toll roads, generating predictable cash flows, have high margins once built, lock customers in for years, and can steadily raise prices over time.
Here are some new age tollbooth businesses: AI inference services that route traffic across models, skimming a fraction of a cent per token. Synthetic data exchanges certifying privacy-safe datasets, taking a cut of each license. Passkey identity rails that charge apps per authentication, leaning on security audits as a moat. Programmatic carbon clearinghouses matching offsets with buyers, clipping a few basis points per tonne. Autonomy OS licensing certifying drones, charging per mile monitored.
Approach to build a toll booth business:
2025-08-10 08:00:00
‘Zuck reportedly spent $200 million hiring the former head of AI research at Apple — triple Tim Cook’s salary. Apple didn’t match it, so he just hired him.
The thing to remember is most people think about this in dollar terms because that’s how the media reports it. In reality, you should think about it in dilution terms.
When hiring a senior executive, there are three ways to think about compensation: 1. Relative to their alternatives – What would they get elsewhere? In this case, Daniel Gross was running a successful venture fund and building a company with Ilya. You have to outbid those options. 2. Relative to peers in the company – Keeping balance here is hard. Zuckerberg clearly threw this out the window, which could cause issues when other executives expect similar refresh packages. 3. Marginal impact on the business – This is the real test. If I buy a company — say, Superhuman — I ask: “Does this increase the company’s value by at least the percentage of equity I’m giving up?” If yes, it’s worth it. The same applies to hires.
For example, if hiring someone costs 1% of the company, the question is: will they increase our chance of success by at least 1%? $100 million sounds huge to us because we compare it to executive salaries, but for Meta, the total of all these hires might be just 0.1% of market cap. If I were on the board and thought this increased success probability by 0.1%, I’d approve it.
The twist is Zuckerberg made these moves publicly and raised the bar for every other company. Still, from a purely mathematical perspective, it’s not crazy.
Unlike my acquisition of Superhuman, where we’ll only know results years later, Meta’s moves are judged instantly by the public markets. But even if the stock moved 0.1% on news of these hires, no one would notice — it fluctuates that much daily. In essence, Zuckerberg acquired talent the way you’d acquire a company.
He’s acting like a founder focused on long-term value, not short-term judgment. That mindset — thinking in years, not weeks — is what founder-like leaders do. Some bets will work, others won’t, but with a trillion-dollar market cap, you’re wasting potential if you don’t make big bets.’
2025-07-28 08:00:00
Note: While reading a book whenever I come across something interesting, I highlight it and later turn those highlights into a blogpost. It is not a complete summary of the book. These are my notes which I intend to go back to later. Let’s start!
You have a mental dialogue going on inside your head that never stops. It just keeps going and going. Have you ever wondered why it talks in there? How does it decide what to say and when to say it? How much of what it says turns out to be true? How much of what it says is even important? And if right now you are hearing, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t have any voice inside my head!”—that’s the voice we’re talking about.
If you’re smart, you’ll take the time to step back, examine this voice, and get to know it better. The problem is, you’re too close to be objective. You have to step way back and watch it converse. While you’re driving, you hear internal conversations like,
“Wasn’t I supposed to call Fred? I should have. Oh my God, I can’t believe I forgot! He’s going to be so mad. He may never talk to me again. Maybe I should stop and call him right now. No. I don’t want to stop the car right now…”
Notice that the voice takes both sides of the conversation. It doesn’t care which side it takes, just as long as it gets to keep on talking. When you’re tired and trying to sleep, it’s the voice inside your head that says,
“What am I doing? I can’t go to sleep yet. I forgot to call Fred. I remembered in the car but I didn’t call. If I don’t call now…oh wait, it’s too late. I shouldn’t call him now. I don’t even know why I thought about it. I need to fall asleep. Oh shoot, now I can’t fall asleep. I’m not tired anymore. But I have a big day tomorrow, and I have to get up early.”
No wonder you can’t sleep! Why do you even tolerate that voice talking to you all the time? Even if what it’s saying is soothing and nice, it’s still disturbing everything you’re doing.
If you spend some time observing this mental voice, the first thing you will notice is that it never shuts up. When left to its own, it just talks. Imagine if you were to see someone walking around constantly talking to himself. You’d think he was strange. You’d wonder, “If he’s the one who’s talking and he’s the one who’s listening, he obviously knows what’s going to be said before he says it. So what’s the point?” The same is true for the voice inside your head. Why is it talking? It’s you who’s talking, and it’s you who’s listening. And when the voice argues with itself, who is it arguing with? Who could possibly win? It gets very confusing. Just listen:
“I think I should get married. No! You know you’re not ready. You’ll be sorry. But I love him. Oh come on, you felt that way about Tom. What if you had married him?”
If you watch carefully, you’ll see that it’s just trying to find a comfortable place to rest. It will change sides in a moment if that seems to help. And it doesn’t even quiet down when it finds out that it’s wrong. It simply adjusts its viewpoint and keeps on going. If you pay attention, these mental patterns will become obvious to you. It’s actually a shocking realization when you first notice that your mind is constantly talking. You might even try to yell at it in a feeble attempt to shut it up. But then you realize that’s the voice yelling at the voice:
“Shut up! I want to go to sleep. Why do you have to talk all the time?”
Obviously, you can’t shut it up that way. The best way to free yourself from this incessant chatter is to step back and view it objectively. Just view the voice as a vocalizing mechanism that is capable of making it appear like someone is in there talking to you. Don’t think about it; just notice it. No matter what the voice is saying, it’s all the same. It doesn’t matter if it’s saying nice things or mean things, worldly things or spiritual things. It doesn’t matter because it’s still just a voice talking inside your head. In fact, the only way to get your distance from this voice is to stop differentiating what it’s saying. Stop feeling that one thing it says is you and the other thing it says is not you. If you’re hearing it talk, it’s obviously not you. You are the one who hears the voice. You are the one who notices that it’s talking.
You do hear it when it talks, don’t you? Make it say “hello” right now. Say it over and over a few times. Now shout it inside! Can you hear yourself saying “hello” inside? Of course you can. There is a voice talking, and there is you who notices the voice talking. The problem is that it’s easy to notice the voice saying “hello,” but it’s difficult to see that no matter what the voice says, it is still just a voice talking and you listening. There is absolutely nothing that voice can say that is more you than anything else it says. Suppose you were looking at three objects—a flowerpot, a photograph, and a book—and were then asked, “Which of these objects is you?” You’d say, “None of them! I’m the one who’s looking at what you’re putting in front of me. It doesn’t matter what you put in front of me, it’s always going to be me looking at it.” You see, it’s an act of a subject perceiving various objects. This is also true of hearing the voice inside. It doesn’t make any difference what it’s saying, you are the one who is aware of it. As long as you think that one thing it’s saying is you, but the other thing it’s saying is not you, you’ve lost your objectivity. You may want to think of yourself as the part that says the nice things, but that’s still the voice talking. You may like what it says, but it’s not you.
There is nothing more important to true growth than realizing that you are not the voice of the mind—you are the one who hears it. If you don’t understand this, you will try to figure out which of the many things the voice says is really you. People go through so many changes in the name of “trying to find myself.” They want to discover which of these voices, which of these aspects of their personality, is who they really are. The answer is simple: none of them.
If you watch it objectively, you will come to see that much of what the voice says is meaningless. Most of the talking is just a waste of time and energy. The truth is that most of life will unfold in accordance with forces far outside your control, regardless of what your mind says about it. It’s like sitting down at night and deciding whether you want the sun to come up in the morning. The bottom line is, the sun will come up and the sun will go down. Billions of things are going on in this world. You can think about it all you want, but life is still going to keep on happening.
In fact, your thoughts have far less impact on this world than you would like to think. If you’re willing to be objective and watch all your thoughts, you will see that the vast majority of them have no relevance. They have no effect on anything or anybody, except you. They are simply making you feel better or worse about what is going on now, what has gone on in the past, or what might go on in the future. If you spend your time hoping that it doesn’t rain tomorrow, you are wasting your time. Your thoughts don’t change the rain. You will someday come to see that there is no use for that incessant internal chatter, and there is no reason to constantly attempt to figure everything out. Eventually you will see that the real cause of problems is not life itself. It’s the commotion the mind makes about life that really causes problems.
Now this raises a serious question: If so much of what the voice says is meaningless and unnecessary, then why does it even exist? The secret to answering this question lies in understanding why it says what it says when it says it. For example, in some cases the mental voice talks for the same reason that a teakettle whistles. That is, there’s a buildup of energy inside that needs to be released. If you watch objectively, you will see that when there’s a buildup of nervous, fearful, or desire-based energies inside, the voice becomes extremely active. This is easy to see when you are angry with someone and you feel like telling them off. Just watch how many times the inner voice tells them off before you even see them. When energy builds up inside, you want to do something about it. That voice talks because you’re not okay inside, and talking releases energy.
It is actually narrating the world for you. But why do you need this? You already see what’s happening outside; how does it help to repeat it to yourself through the mental voice? You should examine this very closely. With a simple glance, you instantly take in the tremendous detail of whatever you’re looking at. If you see a tree, you effortlessly see the branches, the leaves, and the flowering buds. Why then do you have to verbalize what you have already seen?
The narration makes you feel more comfortable with the world around you. Like backseat driving, it makes you feel as though things are more in your control. You actually feel like you have some relationship with them. A tree is no longer just a tree in the world that has nothing to do with you; it is a tree that you saw, labeled, and judged. By verbalizing it mentally, you brought that initial direct experience of the world into the realm of your thoughts. There it becomes integrated with your other thoughts, such as those making up your value system and historical experiences.
Take a moment to examine the difference between your experience of the outside world and your interactions with the mental world. When you’re just thinking, you’re free to create whatever thoughts you want in your mind, and these thoughts are expressed through the voice. You are very accustomed to settling into the playground of the mind and creating and manipulating thoughts. This inner world is an alternate environment that is under your control. The outside world, however, marches to its own laws. When the voice narrates the outside world to you, those thoughts are now side by side, in parity, with all your other thoughts. All these thoughts intermix and actually influence your experience of the world around you. What you end up experiencing is really a personal presentation of the world according to you, rather than the stark, unfiltered experience of what is really out there. This mental manipulation of the outer experience allows you to buffer reality as it comes in. For example, there are myriad things that you see at any given moment, yet you only narrate a few of them. The ones you discuss in your mind are the ones that matter to you. With this subtle form of preprocessing, you manage to control the experience of reality so that it all fits together inside your mind. Your consciousness is actually experiencing your mental model of reality, not reality itself.
You have to watch this very carefully because you do it all the time. You’re walking outside in the winter, you start to shiver, and the voice says, “It’s cold!” Now how did that help you? You already knew it was cold. You’re the one who’s experiencing the cold. Why is it telling you this? You re-create the world within your mind because you can control your mind whereas you can’t control the world. That is why you mentally talk about it. If you can’t get the world the way you like it, you internally verbalize it, judge it, complain about it, and then decide what to do about it. This makes you feel more empowered. When your body experiences cold, there may be nothing you can do to affect the temperature. But when your mind verbalizes, “It’s cold!” you can say, “We’re almost home, just a few more minutes.” Now you feel better. In the thought world there’s always something you can do to control the experience.
Basically, you re-create the outside world inside yourself, and then you live in your mind. What if you decided not to do this? If you decide not to narrate and, instead, just consciously observe the world, you will feel more open and exposed. This is because you really don’t know what will happen next, and your mind is accustomed to helping you. It does this by processing your current experiences in a way that makes them fit with your views of the past and visions of the future. All of this helps to create a semblance of control. If your mind doesn’t do this, you simply become too uncomfortable. Reality is just too real for most of us, so we temper it with the mind.
You will come to see that the mind talks all the time because you gave it a job to do. You use it as a protection mechanism, a form of defense. Ultimately, it makes you feel more secure. As long as that’s what you want, you will be forced to constantly use your mind to buffer yourself from life, instead of living it. This world is unfolding and really has very little to do with you or your thoughts. It was here long before you came, and it will be here long after you leave. In the name of attempting to hold the world together, you’re really just trying to hold yourself together.
True personal growth is about transcending the part of you that is not okay and needs protection. This is done by constantly remembering that you are the one inside that notices the voice talking. That is the way out. The one inside who is aware that you are always talking to yourself about yourself is always silent. It is a doorway to the depths of your being. To be aware that you are watching the voice talk is to stand on the threshold of a fantastic inner journey. If used properly, the same mental voice that has been a source of worry, distraction, and general neurosis can become the launching ground for true spiritual awakening. Come to know the one who watches the voice, and you will come to know one of the great mysteries of creation.
Your inner growth is completely dependent upon the realization that the only way to find peace and contentment is to stop thinking about yourself. You’re ready to grow when you finally realize that the “I” who is always talking inside will never be content. It always has a problem with something. Honestly, when was the last time you really had nothing bothering you? Before you had your current problem, there was a different problem. And if you’re wise, you will realize that after this one’s gone, there will be another one.
The bottom line is, you’ll never be free of problems until you are free from the part within that has so many problems. When a problem is disturbing you, don’t ask, “What should I do about it?” Ask, “What part of me is being disturbed by this?” If you ask, “What should I do about it?” you’ve already fallen into believing that there really is a problem outside that must be dealt with. If you want to achieve peace in the face of your problems, you must understand why you perceive a particular situation as a problem. If you’re feeling jealousy, instead of trying to see how you can protect yourself, just ask, “What part of me is jealous?” That will cause you to look inside and see that there’s a part of you that’s having a problem with jealousy.
Once you clearly see the disturbed part, then ask, “Who is it that sees this? Who notices this inner disturbance?” Asking this is the solution to your every problem. The very fact that you can see the disturbance means that you are not it. The process of seeing something requires a subject-object relationship. The subject is called “The Witness” because it is the one who sees what’s happening. The object is what you are seeing, in this case the inner disturbance. This act of maintaining objective awareness of the inner problem is always better than losing yourself in the outer situation. This is the essential difference between a spiritually minded person and a worldly person. Worldly doesn’t mean that you have money or stature. Worldly means that you think the solution to your inner problems is in the world outside. You think that if you change things outside, you’ll be okay. But nobody has ever truly become okay by changing things outside. There’s always the next problem. The only real solution is to take the seat of witness consciousness and completely change your frame of reference.
To attain true inner freedom, you must be able to objectively watch your problems instead of being lost in them. No solution can possibly exist while you’re lost in the energy of a problem. Everyone knows you can’t deal well with a situation if you’re getting anxious, scared, or angry about it. The first problem you have to deal with is your own reaction. You will not be able to solve anything outside until you own how the situation affects you inside. Problems are generally not what they appear to be. When you get clear enough, you will realize that the real problem is that there is something inside of you that can have a problem with almost anything. The first step is to deal with that part of you. This involves a change from “outer solution consciousness” to “inner solution consciousness.” You have to break the habit of thinking that the solution to your problems is to rearrange things outside. The only permanent solution to your problems is to go inside and let go of the part of you that seems to have so many problems with reality. Once you do that, you’ll be clear enough to deal with what’s left.
There really is a way to let go of the part of you that sees everything as a problem. It may seem impossible, but it’s not. There is a part of your being that can actually abstract from your own melodrama. You can watch yourself be jealous or angry. You don’t have to think about it or analyze it; you can just be aware of it. Who is it that sees all this? Who notices the changes going on inside? When you tell a friend, “Every time I talk to Tom, it gets me so upset,” how do you know it gets you upset? You know that it gets you upset because you’re in there and you see what’s going on in there. There’s a separation between you and the anger or the jealousy. You are the one who’s in there noticing these things. Once you take that seat of consciousness, you can get rid of these personal disturbances. You start by watching. Just be aware that you are aware of what is going on in there. It’s easy. What you’ll notice is that you’re watching a human being’s personality with all its strengths and weaknesses. It’s as though there’s somebody in there with you. You might actually say you have a “roommate.”
If you would like to meet your roommate, just try to sit inside yourself for a while in complete solitude and silence. You have the right; it’s your inner domain. But instead of finding silence, you’re going to listen to incessant chatter:
“Why am I doing this? I have more important things to do. This is a waste of time. There’s nobody in here but me. What’s this all about?”
Right on cue, there’s your roommate. You may have a clear intention to be quiet inside, but your roommate won’t cooperate. And it’s not just when you try to be quiet. It has something to say about everything you look at: “I like it. I don’t like it. This is good. That’s bad.” It just talks and talks. You don’t generally notice because you don’t step back from it. You’re so close that you don’t realize that you’re actually hypnotized into listening to it.
Basically, you’re not alone in there. There are two distinct aspects of your inner being. The first is you, the awareness, the witness, the center of your willful intentions; and the other is that which you watch. The problem is, the part that you watch never shuts up. If you could get rid of that part, even for a moment, the peace and serenity would be the nicest vacation you’ve ever had.
Imagine what it would be like if you didn’t have to bring this thing with you everywhere you go. Real spiritual growth is about getting out of this predicament. But first you have to realize that you’ve been locked in there with a maniac. In any situation or circumstance, your roommate could suddenly decide, “I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to talk to this person.” You would immediately feel tense and uncomfortable. Your roommate can ruin anything you’re doing without a moment’s notice. It could ruin your wedding day, or even your wedding night! That part of you can ruin anything and everything, and it generally does.
Spend a day watching every single thing your roommate does. Start in the morning and see if you can notice what it’s saying in every situation. Every time you meet somebody, every time the phone rings, just try to watch. A good time to watch it talk is while you’re taking a shower. Just watch what that voice has to say. You will see that it never lets you just take a peaceful shower. Your shower is for washing the body, not for watching the mind talk nonstop. See if you can stay conscious enough throughout the entire experience to be aware of what’s going on. You’ll be shocked by what you see. It just jumps from one subject to the next. The incessant chatter seems so neurotic that you won’t believe that it’s always that way. But it is.
You have to watch this if you want to be free of it. You don’t have to do anything about it, but you have to get wise to the predicament you’re in. You have to realize that somehow you’ve ended up with a mess for an inner roommate. If you want it to be peaceful in there, you’re going to have to fix this situation.
The way to catch on to what your inner roommate is really like is to personify it externally. Make believe that your roommate, the psyche, has a body of its own. You do this by taking the entire personality that you hear talking to you inside and imagine it as a person talking to you on the outside. Just imagine that another person is now saying everything that your inner voice would say. Now spend a day with that person.
You’ve just sat down to watch your favorite TV show. The problem is, you have this person with you. Now you’ll get to hear the same incessant monologue that used to be inside, except that it’s sitting next to you on the couch talking to itself:
“Did you turn off the light downstairs? You better go check. Not now, I’ll do it later. I want to finish watching the show. No, do it now. That’s why the electric bill is so high.”
You sit in silent awe, watching all of this. Then, a few seconds later, your couch-mate is engaged in another dispute:
“Hey, I want to get something to eat! I’m craving some pizza. No, you can’t have pizza now; it’s too far to drive. But I’m hungry. When will I get to eat?”
To your amazement, these neurotic bursts of conflicting dialogue just keep going on and on. And as if that’s not enough, instead of simply watching TV, this person starts verbally reacting to whatever comes on the screen. At one point, after a redhead appears on the show, your couch-mate starts mumbling about an ex-spouse and a painful divorce. Then the yelling starts—just as though the ex-spouse were in the room with you! Then it stops, just as suddenly as it started. At this point, you find yourself hugging the far corner of the couch in a desperate attempt to get as far away from this disturbed person as you possibly can.
Will you dare to do this experiment? Don’t try to make the person stop talking. Just try to get to know what you live with inside by externalizing the voice. Give it a body and put it out there in the world just like everybody else. Let it be a person who says on the outside exactly what the voice of your mind says inside. Now make that person your best friend. After all, how many friends do you spend all of your time with and pay absolute attention to every word they say?
How would you feel if someone outside really started talking to you the way your inner voice does? How would you relate to a person who opened their mouth to say everything your mental voice says? After a very short period of time, you would tell them to leave and never come back. But when your inner friend continuously speaks up, you don’t ever tell it to leave. No matter how much trouble it causes, you listen. There’s almost nothing that voice can say that you don’t pay full attention to. It pulls you right out of whatever you’re doing, no matter how enjoyable, and suddenly you’re paying attention to whatever it has to say. Imagine that you’re in a serious relationship and are about to get married. You’re driving to the wedding and it says,
“Maybe this is not the right person. I’m really getting nervous about this. What should I do?”
If someone outside of you said that, you’d ignore them. But you feel you owe the voice an answer. You have to convince your nervous mind that this is the right person, or it won’t let you walk down the aisle. That’s how much respect you have for this neurotic thing inside of you. You know that if you don’t listen to it, it will bother you every day of your life:
“I told you not to get married. I said I wasn’t sure!”
The bottom line is undeniable: If somehow that voice managed to manifest in a body outside of you, and you had to take it with you everywhere you went, you wouldn’t last a day. If somebody were to ask you what your new friend is like, you’d say, “This is one seriously disturbed person. Just look up neurosis in the dictionary and you’ll get the picture.”
That being the case, once you’ve spent a day with your friend, what is the probability you’d go to them for advice? After seeing how often this person changed their mind, how conflicted they were on so many subjects, and how emotionally overreactive they tended to be, would you ever ask them for relationship or financial advice? As amazing as it seems, you do just that every moment of your life. Having taken its rightful place back inside of you, it is still the same “person” who tells you what to do about every aspect of your life. Have you ever bothered to check its credentials? How many times has that voice been totally wrong?
“She doesn’t care for you anymore. That’s why she hasn’t called. She’s going to break up with you tonight. I can feel it coming; I just know it. You shouldn’t even answer the phone if she calls.”
After thirty minutes of this, the phone rings and it’s your girlfriend. She’s late because it’s your one-year anniversary and she was preparing for a surprise dinner. It was definitely a surprise to you, since you completely forgot the anniversary. She says she’s on her way over to pick you up. Well, you’re very excited and your inner voice is chatting about how great she is. But haven’t you forgotten something? Haven’t you forgotten about the bad advice the inner voice gave you that caused you to suffer for the last half hour?
What if you had hired a relationship advisor who had given you that terrible advice? They had completely misread the entire situation. Had you listened to the advisor, you never would have picked up the phone. Wouldn’t you fire them on the spot? How could you ever trust their advice again after seeing how wrong they were? Well, are you going to fire your inner roommate? After all, its advice and analysis of the situation were totally wrong. No, you never hold it responsible for the trouble it causes. In fact, the next time it gives advice, you’re all ears. Is that rational? How many times has that voice been wrong about what was going on or what will be going on? Maybe it’s worth noticing whom you’re going to for advice.
When you’ve sincerely tried these practices of self-observation and awareness, you’ll see that you’re in trouble. You’ll realize that you’ve only had one problem your entire life, and you’re looking at it. It’s pretty much the cause of every problem you’ve ever had. Now the question becomes, how do you get rid of this inner troublemaker? The first thing you’ll realize is that there’s no hope of getting rid of it until you really want to. Until you’ve watched your roommate long enough to truly understand the predicament you’re in, you really have no basis for practices that help you deal with the mind. Once you’ve made the decision to free yourself from the mental melodrama, you are ready for teachings and techniques. You will now have a real use for them.
If you want to free yourself, you must first become conscious enough to understand your predicament. Then you must commit yourself to the inner work of freedom. You do this as though your life depended on it, because it does. As it is right now, your life is not your own; it belongs to your inner roommate, the psyche. You have to take it back. Stand firm in the seat of the witness and release the hold that the habitual mind has on you. This is your life—reclaim it.
René Descartes, a great philosopher, once said, “I think, therefore I am.” But is that really what’s going on? The dictionary defines the verb “to think” as “to form thoughts, to use the mind to consider ideas and make judgments” (Microsoft Encarta 2007). The question is, who is using the mind to form thoughts and then manipulate them into ideas and judgments? Does this experiencer of thoughts exist even when thoughts are not present? Fortunately, you don’t have to think about it. You are very aware of your presence of being, your sense of existence, without the help of thoughts. When you go into deep meditation, for example, the thoughts stop. You know that they’ve stopped. You don’t “think” it, you are simply aware of “no thoughts.” You come back and say, “Wow, I went into this deep meditation, and for the first time my thoughts completely stopped. I was in a place of complete peace, harmony, and quiet.” If you are in there experiencing the peace that occurs when your thoughts stop, then obviously your existence is not dependent upon the act of thinking.
Thoughts can stop, and they can also get extremely noisy. Sometimes you have many more thoughts than other times. You may even tell someone, “My mind is driving me crazy. Ever since he said those things to me, I can’t even sleep. My mind just won’t shut up.” Whose mind? Who is noticing these thoughts? Isn’t it you? Don’t you hear your thoughts inside? Aren’t you aware of their existence? In fact, can’t you get rid of them? If you start to have a thought you don’t like, can’t you try to make it go away? People struggle with thoughts all the time. Who is it that is aware of the thoughts, and who is it that struggles with them? Again, you have a subject-object relationship with your thoughts. You are the subject, and thoughts are just another object you can be aware of. You are not your thoughts. You are simply aware of your thoughts. Finally you say,
“Fine, I’m not anything in the outside world and I’m not the emotions. These outer and inner objects come and go and I experience them. Plus, I’m not the thoughts. They can be quiet or noisy, happy or sad. Thoughts are just something else I’m aware of. But who am I?”
It starts to become a serious question: “Who am I? Who is having all these physical, emotional, and mental experiences?” So you contemplate this question a little deeper. This is done by letting go of the experiences and noticing who is left. You will begin to notice who is experiencing the experience. Eventually, you will get to a point within yourself where you realize that you, the experiencer, have a certain quality. And that quality is awareness, consciousness, an intuitive sense of existence. You know that you’re in there. You don’t have to think about it; you just know. You can think about it if you want to, but you will know that you’re thinking about it. You exist regardless, thoughts or no thoughts.
Take a moment to look at the things you think you need. Look at how much time and energy you put into various activities. Imagine if you knew you were going to die within a week or a month. How would that change things? How would your priorities change? How would your thoughts change? Think honestly about what you would do with your last week. What a wonderful thought to contemplate. Then ponder this question: If that’s really what you would do with your last week, what are you doing with the rest of your time? Wasting it? Throwing it away? Treating it like it’s not something precious? What are you doing with life? That is what death asks you.
Let’s say you’re living life without the thought of death, and the Angel of Death comes to you and says, “Come, it’s time to go.” You say, “But no. You’re supposed to give me a warning so I can decide what I want to do with my last week. I’m supposed to get one more week.” Do you know what Death will say to you? He’ll say, “My God! I gave you fifty-two weeks this past year alone. And look at all the other weeks I’ve given you. Why would you need one more? What did you do with all those?” If asked that, what are you going to say? How will you answer? “I wasn’t paying attention… I didn’t think it mattered.” That’s a pretty amazing thing to say about your life.
Death is a great teacher. But who lives with that level of awareness? It doesn’t matter what age you are; at any time you could take a breath and there may never be another. It happens all the time—to babies, to teenagers, to people in mid-life—not just to the aged. One breath and they’re gone. No one knows when their time will be. That’s not how it works.
So why not be bold enough to regularly reflect on how you would live that last week? If you were to ask this question of people who are truly awakened, they wouldn’t have any problem answering you. Not a thing would change inside of them. Not a thought would cross their minds. If death were to come in an hour, if death were to come in a week, or if death were to come in a year, they would live exactly the same way as they’re living now. There is not a single thing they carry inside of their hearts that they would rather be doing. In other words, they are living their lives fully and are not making compromises or playing games with themselves.
You have to be willing to look at what it would be like if death was staring you in the face. Then you have to come to peace within yourself so that it doesn’t make any difference whether it is or not. There is a story of a great yogi who said that every moment of his life he felt as though a sword were suspended above his head by a spiderweb. He lived his life with the awareness that he was that close to death. You are that close to death. Every time you get in the car, every time you walk across the street, and every time you eat something, it could be the last thing you do. Do you realize that what you’re doing at any moment is something that someone was doing when they died? “He died eating dinner… He died in a car accident, two miles from his home… She died in a plane wreck on a trip to New York… He went to bed and never woke up…” At some point, this is how it happened to somebody. No matter what you’re doing, you can be sure somebody died that way.
You must not be afraid to discuss death. Don’t get uptight about it. Instead, let this knowledge help you to live every moment of your life fully, because every moment matters. That’s what happens when somebody knows they only have a week left. You can be certain that they would tell you that the most important week they ever had was that last week. Everything is a million times more meaningful in that final week. What if you were to live every week that way?
At this point you should ask yourself why you aren’t living that way. You are going to die. You know that. You just don’t know when. Every single thing will be taken from you. You will leave behind your possessions, your loved ones, and all your hopes and dreams for this life. You’ll be taken right out of where you are. You’ll no longer be able to fill the roles you were so busy playing. Death changes everything in a flash. That’s the reality of the situation. If all these things can be changed in an instant, then maybe they aren’t so real after all. Maybe you’d better check out who you are. Maybe you should look deeper.
The beauty of embracing deep truths is that you don’t have to change your life; you just change how you live your life. It’s not what you’re doing; it’s how much of you is doing it. Let’s take a very simple example. You’ve walked outside thousands of times, but how many times have you really appreciated it? Imagine a person in a hospital bed who has just been told they’ve got a week to live. They look up at the doctor and say, “Can I walk outside? Can I look at the sky just one more time?” If it were raining outside, they would want to feel the rain just once more. For them, that would be the most precious thing. But you don’t want to feel the rain. You run and cover up.
What is it that won’t let us live our lives? What is inside of us that is so afraid that it keeps us from just enjoying life? This part of us is so busy trying to make sure the next thing goes right that we can’t just be here now and live life. All the while, death is watching our footsteps. Don’t you want to live before death comes? You’re probably not going to get a warning. Very few people are told when they’re going to die. Almost everybody just takes a breath and doesn’t know they didn’t take another.
So start using every day to let go of that scared part of you that won’t let you live life fully. Since you know you’re going to die, be willing to say what needs to be said and do what needs to be done. Be willing to be fully present without being afraid of what will happen in the next moment. That’s how people live when they face death. You get to do that too, because you are facing death every moment.
Learn to live as though you are facing death at all times, and you’ll become bolder and more open. If you live life fully, you won’t have any last wishes. You will have lived them every moment. Only then will you have fully experienced life and released the part of you that is afraid of living. There is no reason to be afraid of life. And the fear will fade once you understand that the only thing there is to get from life is the growth that comes from experiencing it. Life itself is your career, and your interaction with life is your most meaningful relationship. Everything else you’re doing is just focusing on a tiny subset of life in the attempt to give life some meaning. What actually gives life meaning is the willingness to live it. It isn’t any particular event; it’s the willingness to experience life’s events.
You fear death because you crave life. You fear death because you think there’s something to get that you haven’t experienced yet. Many people feel that death will take something away from them. The wise person realizes that death is constantly giving them something. Death is giving meaning to your life. You’re the one who throws your life away; you waste every second of it. You get in your car, drive from here to there, and you don’t see anything. You’re not even there. You’re busy thinking about what you’re going to do next. You’re a month ahead of yourself, or even a year. You’re not living life; you’re living mind. So it is you who throws your life away, not death. Death actually helps you get your life back by making you pay attention to the moment. It makes you say, “My God, I’m going to lose this. I’m going to lose my children. This could be the last time I’ll see them. From now on I’m going to pay more attention to them, and to my spouse, and to all my friends and loved ones. I want to get so much more out of life!”
If you are living every experience fully, then death doesn’t take anything from you. There’s nothing to take because you’re already fulfilled. That’s why the wise being is always ready to die. It doesn’t make any difference when death comes because their experience is already whole and complete. Suppose you loved music more than anything else. You always wanted to hear your favorite classical composition played by your favorite orchestra. That was the dream of your life. Finally, it happens. You’re there and you’re actually hearing it. It completely fills you. The very first notes lift you to where you needed to go. This shows you that it only takes a moment to become absorbed in a transcendental peace. You really don’t need more time before death; what you need is more depth of experience during the time you’re given.
2025-07-27 08:00:00
Note: While reading a book whenever I come across something interesting, I highlight it and later turn those highlights into a blogpost. It is not a complete summary of the book. These are my notes which I intend to go back to later. Let’s start!
To make more money, you’ve gotta grow your business. You can only grow your business in two ways:
That’s it. I grow our portfolio companies with this exact framework. $100M Leads focuses on number one - getting more customers. You get more customers by getting:
A lead is a person you can contact. That’s all. If you bought a list of emails, those are leads. If you get contact information from a website or database, those are leads. The numbers in your phone are leads. People on the street are leads. If you can contact them, they are leads.
Leads alone aren’t enough. We want engaged leads: people who show interest in the stuff you sell. If someone gives their contact information on a website, that is an engaged lead. If someone follows you on social media and you can contact them, that is an engaged lead. If people reply to your email campaign, they are engaged leads. The leads showing interest are the leads that matter.
Engaged leads are the true output of advertising.
They didn’t want my webinar. But they did want my case study. This accidental discovery showed me how getting leads actually works…you have to give people something they want. The best part is - it’s easier than you think.
Offers are what you promise to give in exchange for something of value. Often, a business promises to give its product or service in exchange the beer for money. This is a core offer. If you advertise your core offer, then you go straight for the sale–the direct path to money. Advertising your core offer might be all you need to get leads to engage. Try this way first.
So your lead magnet should be valuable enough on its own that you could charge for it. And, after they get it, they should want more of what you offer. This gets them one step closer to buying your stuff. A person who pays with their time now is more likely to pay with their money later.
Seven Steps To Creating an Effective Lead Magnet:
Something to keep in mind before we start - Grand Slam Offers work for free stuff as much or better than they do for paid stuff. So make your lead magnet so insanely good people will feel stupid saying no. And yes, this means you may have a few insanely valuable offers (even if some are free). But that’s a good thing. The business that provides the most value wins. Period.
Imagine we help homeowners sell their homes. That is a broad solution. But what about the steps before selling a home? Owners want to know what their house is worth. They want to know how to increase its value. They need pictures. They need it cleaned. They need landscaping. They need minor things fixed. They need moving services. They may need staging. Etc. These are all narrow problems–great for lead magnets. We pick one of the narrow problems and solve it for free. And although it helps, it makes their other problem more obvious–they still have to sell their home. But now we’ve earned their trust. So we can charge to solve the remaining problems with our core offer and help them achieve their broader goal.
There are three types of lead magnets and each offers a different type of solution.
First, if your audience has a problem they don’t know about, your lead magnet would make them aware of it. Second, you could solve a recurring problem for a short amount of time with a sample or trial of your core offer. Third, you can give them one step in a multi-step process that solves a bigger problem. All three solve one problem and reveal others. So your three types are: 1) Reveal Problems, 2) Samples and Trials, and 3) One Step Of A Multi-Step Process.
Reveal Their Problem. Think “diagnosis.” These lead magnets work great when they reveal problems that get worse the longer you wait.
Example: You run a speed test that shows their website loads at 30% below the speed it should. You draw a clear line between where they should be and how much money you lose by being below standards.
Example: You do a posture analysis and show them what their posture should look like. You draw a clear line to what their pain-free life would look like if their posture were fixed and how you can help.
Example: You do a termite inspection that reveals what happens when the bugs eat their home. If they do have termites, you can get rid of them for cheaper than the cost of… another home. If they don’t, they can pay you to prevent the termites from coming to begin with! You can sell ‘em either way. Win-win!
Samples And Trials. You give full but brief access to your core offer. You can limit the number of uses, time they have access, or both. This works great when your core offer is a recurring solution to a recurring problem.
Example: You hook them up to your faster server and show their website loading at lightning speed. They get more customers from your faster load times. If they want to keep it, they need to keep paying you.
Example: You give a free adjustment for their bad posture and they experience relief. To get permanent benefits, they must buy more.
Example: Food, cosmetics, medicine, or any other consumables. Consumables, by nature, have limited uses and solve recurring problems… with recurring use. So single serving, “fun sized,” etc. samples are great lead magnets. It’s how Costco sells more food than other stores–they give out samples!
One Step Of A Multi-Step Process. When your core offer has steps, you can give one valuable step for free and the rest when they buy. This works great when your core offer solves a more complex problem.
Example: This book. I help you get to $1,000,000+ per year in profit. Then you’ll have new problems we can help you solve, and scale from there.
Example: You give away a free wood sealant for a garage door. But the sealing process requires three different coats to protect from all weather conditions. I do the first one free, explain how it only gives partial coverage, and offer the other two in a bundle.
Example: You give away free finance courses, guides, calculators, templates, etc. They are so valuable people really can do it all themselves. But, they also reveal the time, effort, and sacrifice of doing it all. So you offer financial services to solve all that.
There are unlimited ways to solve problems. But my favorite lead magnets solve them with: software, information, services, and physical products.
Software: You give them a tool. If you have a spreadsheet, calculator, or small software, your technology does a job for them.
Ex: I give away a spreadsheet or dashboard that gives a gym owner all their relevant business stats, compares them to industry averages, then gives them a rank.
Information: You teach them something. Courses, lessons, interviews with experts, keynote presentations, live events, mistakes and pitfalls, hacks/tips, etc. Anything they can learn from.
Ex: I give away a mini course for gyms on how to write an ad.
Services: You do work for free. Adjust their back. Perform a website audit. Apply the first layer of garage sealant. Transform their video into an ebook. Etc.
Ex: I run gym owner’s ads for free for thirty days.
Physical Products: You give them something they can hold in their hands. A posture assessment chart, a supplement, a small bottle of garage door sealant, boxing gloves to get boxing gym leads, etc.
Ex: I sell a book for gym owners called Gym Launch Secrets.
With three different types of lead magnets and four ways to deliver them, that’s up to twelve lead magnets that solve a single narrow problem. So many magnets, so little time!
I make as many versions of a lead magnet as I can and rotate them. This keeps the advertising fresh and low effort. Plus, you see which ones work best.
David Ogilvy said, “When you have written your headline, you have spent 80 cents of your (advertising) dollar.” What that means is, five times more people read your headline than any other part of your promotion. They read it and make a snap decision to read further… or not. Like Ogilvy hints, leads have to notice your lead magnet before they can consume it. Like it or not, this means how we present it matters more than anything. For example, improving the headline, name, and display of your lead magnet can 2x, 3x, or 10x your engagement. It’s that important. Besides, if no one shows interest in your lead magnet, no one will ever know how good it is. You can’t leave it to chance. So listen up. Here’s what you do next - you test.
The three things you’ll want to test are the headline, the image(s), and the subheadline, in that order. The headline is the most important. So if you only test one thing, test that. For example, I had no idea what to title this book. So here’s what I did to figure out which name would do the best - I tested.
People prefer to do things that take less effort. So if we want more people to take us up on our lead magnet, and consume it, we gotta make it easy. You can see 2x, 3x, and even 4x+ increases in take rates and consumption simply by making it easier to consume.
Software: You want to make it accessible on their phones, on a computer and in multiple different formats. This way, they’ll pick the one easiest for them.
Information: People like to consume things in different ways. Some people like watching, other people like reading, others like listening, etc. Make your solution in as many different formats as you can: images, video, text, audio, etc. Offer them all. That’s why this book comes in every format people consume.
Services: Be available at more times in more ways. More times of day. More days of the week. Via video call, phone call, in person, etc. The easier you are to get a hold of, the more likely people will become engaged leads to claim the free value.
Physical products: Make it super simple to order and fast to get to them. Make the product itself fast and easy to open. Give simple directions on how to use the product. Example: Apple made its products so well they didn’t even need directions. And the packaging is so good, most people keep the boxes.
Give Away The Secrets, Sell The Implementation: The marketplace judges everything you have to offer - free or not. And you can never provide too much value. But, you can provide too little. So you want your lead magnet to provide so much value people feel obligated to pay you. The goal is to provide more value than the cost of your core offer before they’ve bought it.
Think about it this way. If you’re scared of giving away your secrets, imagine the alternative: You give away sucky fluff. Then, people who might’ve become customers think this person sucks! They only have sucky fluff! Then, they buy from someone else. So sad. Not only that, they tell other folks who might’ve bought from you, not to. It’s a vicious cycle you don’t want to ride.
But remember, people buy stuff based on how much value they think they’ll get after they buy it. And the easiest way to get them to think they’ll get tons of value after they buy is… drum roll please… to provide them with value before they buy.
Imagine a company scaled from $1M to $10M just by consuming my free content. The chance they’ll partner with Acquisition.com is huge because I paid for my share before we even started.
Once the leads consume the lead magnet, some of them will be ready to buy or learn more about your offer. This is the time to give a Call To Action. A Call To Action (CTA) tells the audience what to do next. But, there’s a little more to it than that. At least, if you want your advertising to work. Good CTAs have two things: 1) what to do and 2) reasons to do it right now.
What to do: CTAs tell the audience to call the number, click the button, give information, book the call, etc. There are way too many to list. Just know CTAs tell the audience how to become engaged leads. Good CTAs have clear, simple, and direct language. Not “don’t delay” but instead “call now.”
Warm audiences are people who gave you permission to contact them. Think “people who know you” - aka - friends, family, followers, current customers, previous customers, contacts, etc.
Cold audiences are people who have not given you permission to contact them. Think “strangers” - aka - other peoples’ audiences: buying contact lists, making contact lists, paying platforms for access, etc.
The difference matters because it changes how we advertise to them.
We can contact people 1-to-1 or 1-to-many. Another way of thinking about this is private or public communication. Private communication is when only one person gets a message at a time. Think “phone call” or “email.” If you announce something publicly, many people can get it at the same time. Think “social media posts” or “billboards” or “podcasts.”
Now, automation can make this seem confusing. Don’t let it. Automation just means some of the work is done by machines. The nature of the communication stays the same. Email, for instance, is one-to-one. Emailing a 10,000 person list “once” is more like one-to-one really fast by a machine. Automation, which we cover later, is one of the many ways we can get leads on steroids. Like audiences, the difference between public and private communication matters because they change how we advertise.
Combining warm and cold audiences with 1-to-1 and 1-to-many leads us to the only four ways we can let anyone know about anything: the core four. I combined them below for you.
Warm reach outs are when you make one-to-one contact with your warm audience - aka - the people who know you. It’s the cheapest and easiest way to find people interested in the stuff you sell. It’s super effective–and most businesses don’t do it. Don’t be like most businesses. Also, you do have a warm audience, even if you don’t know it. Everybody knows somebody. So your personal contacts are the easiest place to start.
Warm reach outs usually come in the form of calls, texts, emails, direct messages, voicemails, etc.
You let them know about your lead magnet (something free and valuable), or you let them know about your core offer (the main thing you sell).
When you start doing warm reach outs, you don’t get many engaged leads for your time. You do everything on your own and make each message personal. But, for that reason, it is reliable. As certain as the sun rises and sets, it works.
The rule of 100 is simple. You advertise your stuff by doing 100 primary actions every day, for one hundred days in a row. That’s it. I don’t make many promises, but this is one. If you do 100 primary actions per day, and you do it for 100 days straight, you will get more engaged leads. Commit to the rule of 100 and you will never go hungry again.
Here’s what it looks like applied to each of the core four:
Warm Reach Outs:
Post Content:
Cold Reach Outs:
Paid Ads:
I start every agency relationship with a purpose and a deadline to fulfill it. I open by saying:
“I want to do what you do in my business, but I don’t know how. I’d like to work with you for 6 months so I can learn how you do it. Plus, I’ll pay extra for you to break down why you make the decisions you do and the steps you take to make them. Then, after I get a good idea of how it all works, I’ll start training my team on it. And once they can do it well enough, I’d like to change to a lower cost consulting arrangement. This way, you can still help us if we run into problems. Are you opposed to this?”
In my experience, most agencies are not opposed to this. And if it doesn’t work for them, that’s perfectly fine. Just move on to the next agency. But, before you start kicking everyone to the curb, be willing to negotiate. At some price, it’s worth it for both of you. Viva capitalism!
This is how I use agencies now. Like when I wanted to learn YouTube, I actually hired two agencies. The first, I hired to keep me committed to making videos while they did some legwork on the platform itself. The second I hired (at 4x the price) to really teach us the in-depth ideas behind making the best content possible. And once our videos beat their videos, we dropped down to consulting only.
I’ve used this method again and again. I hire one “good enough” agency to learn the ropes of a new platform. Then, I hire a more elite agency to learn how to maximize it–and I cannot recommend this strategy enough.
If you are upfront about your intentions and the agency agrees, you get the best of both worlds. You get better short-term results because they (probably) know more than you. And, you get better long-term results because you learn how to do it yourself or your team learns to do it for you. You also spend the maximum amount of time with their best reps.
Remember, you only get a fraction of the agency’s attention, so results get worse whenever they get new clients. Meanwhile, your team gets better and better because they stay focused on you full-time. So compare your team’s results to the agency’s until you beat them. Then, cancel the relationship and put the money into scaling everything you just learned.
2025-07-26 08:00:00
Note: While reading a book whenever I come across something interesting, I highlight it and later turn those highlights into a blogpost. It is not a complete summary of the book. These are my notes which I intend to go back to later. Let’s start!
On the calls, HR was engaged and interested in pitch meetings, and we felt like we were really on to something. We set up hundreds of meetings, got lots of positive feedback, but never sold a dollar. Unfortunately, HR had no money to pay for our solution. The limited budget they had was deployed rather slowly, and implementation time lines ran over the course of several years. We couldn’t wait several years to earn our first dollars. HR was generally viewed as a back-office cost center. As a result, HR had no budget and little prioritization, and our sales never went anywhere. The people who could afford our product, like the CEOs of our target customers, didn’t want our solution. They simply didn’t care about improving communication and feedback from their distributed workforce, and in some cases, they downright avoided it. We had failed to thoughtfully pick a buyer with purchase authority and develop a solution based on their problems.
When trying to find a buyer problem, I want to find a problem that is extremely important to the buyer, commonly referred to as a “burning problem,” which the buyer will act on urgently. Here is a rough idea of how I think about problem scoring:
Post-Pitch Verbal Survey
Principles of Building Your Solution
A low CAC early in the life of your company is a great sign of product-market fit. It means you aren’t spending a lot of money to drive each new sale, so getting more sales will likely not be very expensive. So what is a low CAC? I’d estimate it to be < 10 percent the cost of your product, but will vary based on the margin of the product you sell. Low-margin products need lower CACs to be profitable. You should also consider breaking out your customer acquisition costs into different subgroups of your customers, called cohorts. For instance, with Attentive we divide our customers into five different customer tiers. Tier 1 customers are massive businesses that may spend seven or even eight figures with us each year. On the other hand, tier 5 businesses are very small and may not spend more than ten thousand dollars. We use different types of marketing to reach the tier 1 “enterprise” customers than to reach the much smaller tier 5 customers. This is important because you may find your business is efficient in reaching certain cohorts and highly unprofitable in reaching others, and thus you need to adjust your operations accordingly and focus where your business is profitable.
At a lot of companies, you will see a marketing hire get a flat base compensation, but a salesperson making significant dollar-based commissions. Instead, I would suggest playing with marketing compensation to align with sales-based compensation. Pay your marketing team in line with the output you desire. At Attentive, we paid marketing for the amount of conversations they drove between Attentive and potential customers. Our marketing team had the opportunity to make a lot of additional cash if they drove a lot of meetings with potential customers. As a result, they worked really hard to hit and exceed that number each quarter.
Look at the top most valued companies in the world today.
Almost every company here is a category leader. Consumers and businesses usually want to buy the well-known and trustworthy brand to avoid risk. People are going to buy the category leader. Due to this dynamic, category leaders are often able to charge higher prices, make greater margins, and have lower churn rates. As a result, investors tend to give the category leaders big premiums in terms of price and long-term potential. For category leadership, you have two options: create an entirely new category, or pick a category with weak leadership in a dynamic market. For my companies, we have done both. For TapCommerce, we solved the problem of low mobile app retention rates with app retargeting. After a consumer downloads a mobile app (such as eBay or Angry Birds), only 5 percent of consumers are still using that app six months after installing it. When we started TapCommerce, retargeting was common on laptops and desktops, but had not yet been successful on smartphone mobile apps. There were one or two companies experimenting with the strategy, but it wasn’t their core business. We started Attentive in 2016, when text messaging was well over twenty years old. I recall one of our investors even told me the story that he had personally sold a text message marketing business over fifteen years before the founding of our company. So clearly we were not creating an entirely new type of category—well, not yet anyway. There were a half dozen or so text message marketing companies operating at decent scale throughout the United States, and they all seemed to be ashamed of their core business. If you went to one of their websites, it was hard to know what they actually did. They spent most of their marketing materials trying to push ancillary products related to whatever was the new in-vogue software area—customer data platforms, mobile wallets, or mobile app notifications. What we realized, though, was that text messaging was an amazing communication channel that was completely underused due to a lack of providers offering great text messaging software. With the advent of smartphones with mobile applications, software vendors had turned their focus toward mobile app software, but consumers still loved text messaging. Simply put, text messaging wasn’t cool, but it was ubiquitous and incredibly effective. We built solutions to make text messaging great.
2025-07-25 08:00:00
Note: While reading a book whenever I come across something interesting, I highlight it and later turn those highlights into a blogpost. It is not a complete summary of the book. These are my notes which I intend to go back to later. Let’s start!
Over time, Son realised there were three main approaches to inventing things:
Son was 19, in his third year at university and in the prime of his youth. Most university students would be busy with their studies, sport or going out on dates. Within the broader scope of a person’s whole life, however, what exactly does it mean to be 19? Son’s guiding principles would be unimaginable for the ordinary person: he already had a 50-year life plan he was intent on following.
A 19-year-old with this sort of foresight and life plan was truly unprecedented and typical of his anything-but-average youth, which would explain his drive and obsession to get things done, and now.
‘For every new day, a new invention.’ Surprisingly, Son had managed to pull his invention scheme off, thanks largely to combining pre-existing things into something new. To facilitate this, he had written down random nouns in English – ‘tangerine’, ‘spike’, ‘memory’ – on cards. Once he had amassed a deck of around 300 cards, he would pull three out of the stack, turn them over, and then see whether or not the words he had chosen could be combined into a new product. The three words could be completely nonsensical together, but could still produce good ideas, no matter how eccentric. For a historical precedent, the 19th-century poet Comte de Lautréamont (a contemporary of Rimbaud’s) would take two things which at first glance had nothing in common – say, a sewing machine and an umbrella – and then combine them to create a unique idea, effectively kick-starting the surrealist movement.
Whilst manually turning the cards over, the thought occurred to Son that there should be a more systematic way of performing such a task – or better yet a way of getting a computer to do it. A computer would certainly be able to come up with inventions more easily and efficiently. In the 1970s, however, not just anyone could program a computer – if they even had access to one – and at any rate, they would need to know the ins and outs of the machine for his plan to work. The first issue – accessing a computer – was easy enough at Berkeley, so he stepped into the 24-hour computer lab and started feeling out the possibilities. It was common for students in the computer lab to chat to each other with any questions or sticking points they came across, as well as swapping information. They kept their stomachs full on milk and bread, and if they got tired would have a quick kip in a sleeping bag they’d brought. What was unique about Son’s approach to utilising a computer was the fact he was using it to generate ideas as opposed to using it as a glorified calculator. First, he would create a computer program where he could input the cost of the individual ‘parts’ – the concepts he had written on his cards. Additionally, he would rate each part for newness out of 10, for size out of 5, and then rate his own knowledge of the part out of 30, before keying these figures in. Or perhaps he would set a figure for how relevant this was to the invention – ultimately, he ended up with around 40 elements to enter into the computer. The lab supervisor was intrigued by what Son was getting up to – it was the first time he had ever seen a student use a computer for creative purposes. He submitted his computer program as part of a free project required as part of his computer science class and received an A. The program would be pulling three ‘cards’ out of a pool of 300 – how many hundreds of thousands of possibilities would come out? Then for each card, the computer would calculate a score using each rating as entered, lastly providing a list of the elements with the highest scores presented first.
Within Japanese society discrimination was superficially denied as being non-existent although, in truth, it had just manifested in less obvious ways; intentionally and openly using a Korean surname would prove disadvantageous from the start, if not an outright hindrance within the business world. His family only wanted their young son coming back from years away in America to fully grasp the actual reality of Japan, the more insular of the two countries. Son would not be dissuaded from his approach, however. In America – the country where he had effectively grown up – no one was bothered about anyone else’s nationality and Son had no time for Zainichi Koreans being overly self-conscious about their bloodlines. He was not afraid; having tasted the freedoms afforded him in America, he was going to carry on living as such. He was a Korean, living in Japanese society. Later on, Son would admit to having problems accessing a Japanese passport as a Korean citizen, leading him to fully naturalise. ‘A nationality is just a mark or a brand. I pay taxes here in Japan and as a citizen I have rights too.’ Acquiring Japanese nationality, however, is not a simple process and the Ministry of Justice initially refused Son’s application, on the basis that Son was not a Japanese surname. There was no precedent and Son was told in no uncertain terms that if he wanted to naturalise, he would have to change his name. Son – somewhat anticipating this – put his secret plan into action. In Korea, a wife does not take her husband’s surname (as is traditionally the case in Japan) and Masami’s surname was still Ono – her maiden name – at this time. Son had her go to the courts and apply for a change of name, taking on his own surname. On his second application, Son went back to the Ministry of Justice and asked them to look into whether or not there was anyone of Japanese nationality with the surname Son. If there was in fact a precedent, then his application would be accepted. Having conducted his search, the official responded stating they had indeed found someone – his wife. From that point onwards, Son Masayoshi would live his life as a Japanese national.
In the 1980s in Japan, start-up companies were unheard of and there were questions running round Son’s head concerning how exactly he was going to develop his company. He had founded a company, but it was really only a company in name only – something for Son to bide his time with until he could make up his mind about which of the number of markets in Japan he wanted to sink his teeth into. Company results were next to nil. In Son’s mind, since he was doing business in Japan, there was no point in bothering unless he was going to be a market leader. He set about gathering up data whilst making his plans, immediately coming up with over 20 business ideas. Researching whether each was a viable option would take time, so Son employed one full-time staff member as well as one part-timer.
At the time Son had zero income: he had precisely nothing coming in and felt like he was traversing a tunnel with no actual exit. He was growing anxious. Once he had settled on what he wanted to do, there’d be no turning back or even changing lanes later. He’d choose his market and then aim straight for the top. The trouble was, Son was completely obsessed by the first hurdle, but wasn’t entirely certain about which angle to approach that hurdle from. ‘Due to inertia I was at a point where I didn’t want to decide my own fate – but doing things half-heartedly was not an option.’ Son was faced with choices. Even if he could immediately hit upon a market he was interested in trading in, after 10 years he was certain he’d hit a plateau, at which point he’d have to change sectors, and that wasn’t what he wanted to do. Son pulled one of his notebooks from university out – it contained methods and principles he’d learnt along the way. He decided to write down whatever popped into his head: making a list of his thoughts – or rather absolute conditions – for selecting a market to get into.
Taken at face value, they would constitute a completely obvious business management philosophy, but where Son stands apart here is how – for the purpose of making his decision – he assigned each statement its own index number. For each individual line of business he created a stack of papers over 30cm tall, and with 40 different lines if you piled them one on top of the other, they would have stood a dozen metres tall.
Son was prepared to devote his entire life to the one scoring highest, going by the system he devised. Standing on top of a makeshift podium made out of tangerine boxes and under the tin roof of his office, Son began pontificating to an audience of his one full-time employee and his one part-time worker. ‘Profits will have to be ten billion yen in five years, then fifty billion yen in ten years. Eventually I want to be able to count profit in trillions of yen.’ His two employees listened to him carry on in silence, but having to listen to Son babble on about his ambitions on a daily basis like a man possessed soon became intolerable and the two would quit. If a comparison could be drawn with Son at this point, it would be with the character of Don Quixote. With one difference however: Don Quixote was a knackered old man gallivanting about La Mancha whilst Son had only just turned 24. Something fierce was welling up inside of him.
It was close to midnight when the two met in Nagata-cho in Tokyo and, as soon as Son saw Okubo, he promptly asked him point blank again to go into business with him with the words, ‘Want to get married?’ Okubo looked into Son’s eyes. He was deadly serious. Little wonder then that Okubo, a battle-hardened entrepreneur, was caught off-guard for a moment. ‘The hell’s wrong with you, man?’ Okubo would later recall his impression of this meeting in an interview for this book. ‘Anyone else I would have told them to do one right then and then but . . . Son has got a strange charm about him, hasn’t he?’ Those who have met Son – and particularly those who have had business dealings – are all unanimous in mentioning that ‘strange charm’. ‘Have you heard of the concept of C&C (computers and communications)?’ Son asked. ‘Right now I’d say SoftBank Japan are probably the top computer company in Japan, but in terms of communications Shin Nihon Kohon are second only to NTT. And shouldn’t top companies go into business together? Hence my asking you whether or not you’d be interested in wedding your company to mine.’ Son could talk a mile a minute. ‘Have you heard about the new common carriers? They’ve very much to do with your field of business, after all. The thing is, however, if you haven’t got computers involved then you may as well not get into the field – so what do you do about that problem? Well, I’ve got a really good idea in this respect, but what do you say?’
Son never tires of speaking about Claure and how he reflects his own philosophy about business. ‘In any company you certainly need your hunters, but by the same stroke you also need your chefs. However much an art form preparing food may be, though, if you’ve not got hunters going out there and bringing the raw ingredients in then your chefs are going to have a lot of time on their hands and there won’t be much in anyone’s stomach! But then again, someone has got to prepare and dress what your hunters catch and both roles are important. But if you had to choose one it all starts with the hunters, and hunting is an eternally risky business.
‘There’ll be times where a hunter will find himself out in the fields in the hunt and nothing will come along or they won’t be able to capture their prey and it will be a year, having only set off with their rifle and enough food for three days. If they can’t catch something within those three days then they won’t be eating and under those conditions they’re forced to do everything it takes to track and capture their prey. It takes courage to do that, it takes extraordinary decision-making skills to survive under those conditions. It’s a risky business, it’s a duel to the death almost. ‘Put another way, a street fighter isn’t someone like a boxer, who’s doing their fighting in a ring with the laws of the sport governing what they can and can’t do. There’s quite a vast difference between someone like a professional boxer or a judoka at the Olympics where the fights are all lit up, and someone in a brawl in a back alley somewhere, where the fight isn’t confined to a ring. In that sort of fight you don’t know what the other person’s going to resort to, so everything’s fair game in that sense. I’m not saying we don’t care about playing by the rules, just that the business world is like one giant bar brawl in that you constantly have to deal with the unexpected, either in terms of who you’re squaring up against or what weapons they’ve brought to the fight. Whenever something unexpected like this comes up you’ve got to decide right then and there how you’re going to deal with the matter and then leave everything to your own reflexes. There’s no time for parleying or reaching a consensus – what good would that be in a bar brawl?
‘This is precisely why people from administration don’t make good chief executives, why companies never experience any growth under them. Using the analogy from before, administrators are the chefs. In business you’ve got to go on the attack. If you look at conservative companies in the mould of the Japanese Business Federation and why they’ve got zero growth potential it’s because the heads of the planning department and senior administrators have all become the decision-makers. ‘These sorts are only good at managing internal affairs and in terms of promotion as long as you don’t actively fail you could be promoted to chief executive as long as you stick around. You can’t afford to take that approach in business any more. They’re only good at renovating the same old ways of turning a profit, they aren’t looking ahead to the next big thing and investing in it – because they’re the last of their kind. They’re a hopeless case – all they can really do is brag about how great they once were.’