Transcription
Elon shared this at a L base camp, and I think it reflects a lot of his philosophy around how he builds, uh, cultures and teams. So you have two teams: the Japanese team has four rowers and one steerer, and the American team has four steerers and one rower. Can anyone guess when the American team loses? What do they do? They fire the rower. Elon shared this example, I think, as a reflection of how he thinks about hiring the right people, building the right people, building the right teams at the right ratio.
From working so closely with folks like these incredible leaders, what have you learned? I would say definitely Elon runs his companies in an extremely unique style. I don't actually think that people appreciate how unique it is. You sort of like even read about it in some way, but you don't understand it. I like to say that he runs the biggest startups. So he likes very small, strong, highly technical teams. I would say at companies, by default, they sort of like the teams grow, and they get large. Elon was always like a force against growth. I would have to work and expend effort to hire people. I would have to like basically plead to hire people. And the other thing is that big companies usually—um—it's really hard to get rid of low performers, and I think Elon is very friendly to, by default, getting, getting rid of low performers. So I actually had to fight for people to keep them on the team because he would, by default, want to remove people.
So, keep a small, strong, highly technical team; uh, no middle management that is kind of like, uh, non-technical. For sure, number two is kind of like the vibes of how this is how everything runs and how it feels when he sort of like walks into the office. He wants it to be a vibrant place: people are walking around, they're pacing around, uh, they're working on exciting stuff, they're charting something, they're coding. He doesn't like stagnation; he doesn't like to look for it, to look that way. He doesn't like large meetings; he always encourages people to like leave meetings if they're not being useful. So actually, do see this or, you know, it's a large meeting, and some, if you're not contributing and you're not learning, just walk out, and this is like fully encouraged. And I think this is something that you don't normally see.
Maybe part of that also is like I think a lot of bigger companies, they like pamper employees. I think like there's much less of that. It's like the culture of it is you're there to do your best technical work, and there's the intensity and so on. Maybe the last one that is very unique and very interesting and very strange is just how connected he is to the team. Usually a CEO of a company is like a remote person five layers up who talks to their VPs who talk to their, you know, reports and directors, and eventually you talk to your manager. It's not how he runs companies, right? Like he will come to the office; he will talk to the engineers. Many of the meetings that we had were like 50 people in the room with Elon. He talks directly to the engineers; he doesn't want to talk just to the VPs and the directors. Normally people would talk, spend like 99% of the time maybe talking to the VPs. He spends maybe 50% of the time, and he just wants to talk to the engineers. So if, if the team is small and strong, then engineers and the code are the source of truth, and so they have the source of truth, not some manager, and he wants to talk to them to understand the actual state of things and what should be done to improve it.
The degree to which he's connected with the team and not something remote is also unique, and also just like his large hammer and his willingness to exercise it within an organization. So maybe if he talks to the engineers and they bring up that, you know, what's blocking you, okay, I, I just, I don't have enough GPUs to run my thing, and he's like, oh, okay. And if he, if he hears that twice, he's going to be like, okay, this is a problem. So like, what is our timeline? And when, when you don't have satisfying answers, he's like, okay, I want to talk to the person in charge of the GPU cluster, and like someone dials the phone, and he's just like, okay, double the cluster right now. Like, let's, let's have a meeting tomorrow. From now on, send me daily updates until the cluster is twice the size. And then they kind of like push back, and they're like, okay, well, we have this procurement set up, we have this timeline, and Nvidia says that don't have enough GP, GPUs, and it will take 6 months or something. And then you get a rise of an eyebrow, and then he's like, okay, I want to talk to Jensen. And then he just kind of like removes bottlenecks. So I think the extent to which he's extremely involved and removes bottlenecks and applies his hammer, I think is also like not appreciated. So I think there's like a lot of these kinds of aspects that are very unique, I would say, and very interesting. And honestly, like going to a normal company outside of that is definitely missing aspects of that. I don't think I hit on all the points, but it is a very unique, uh, thing, and, uh, it's very interesting. And yeah, yeah, uh, yeah, I guess that's my brand.