📌 Billionaire patterns Founder @ https://xitter.cf/t.co/GZexqlYXRt Follow the signal
Kailua, HI
Joined November 2007
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Richard C. Wilson retweeted
Elon Musk explains why school feels so boring
School often gets learning backwards.
Elon: "you want to teach to the problem instead of teaching the tools"
Start with something real.
Elon: "here's a car engine, we're going to try to understand how this car engine works. We're going to take it apart."
To take it apart, you need tools.
Elon: "along the way, you learn about wrenches and screwdrivers and all the tools that are needed"
But that's not how school usually works.
Elon: "we're going to teach you a course on screwdrivers and a course on wrenches. And you're like, why do I have a course on wrenches?"
It's like learning to cook.
A year of knife drills is torture.
"Let's make tacos tonight" and you learn the knife in a day.
Elon: "That would be like, say, a course on calculus without explaining what calculus is useful. And then you sort of forget it."
Give people the "why" first. The "how" sticks.
Richard C. Wilson retweeted
You're under no obligation to keep explaining yourself to people who knew you before you changed. Growth means becoming someone they don't recognize.
Richard C. Wilson retweeted
Underrated life advice: Be more enthusiastic. One of the most attractive traits is genuine enthusiasm. It's energizing to spend time around people who show real excitement for life. For people, ideas, and tiny moments. It takes courage to care so openly. Enthusiasm is contagious.
Richard C. Wilson retweeted
“You will lose friends, you will lose lovers. You will lose comfort, but if, in losing them, you find yourself, you have gained more than kings.”
— Marcus Aurelius
Many of the deals we close take 100+ emails of follow-up, spread over anywhere from 18 months to 12 years.
The average person gives up too early.
The relationship-focused investor stays helpful, stays in touch, and is still there when the timing finally lines up.
Valuation is the least interesting part of raising capital.
A founder who says they raised $20 million at a $100 million valuation has told me almost nothing about the deal.
Here are the 6 questions I would ask before signing:
1. Board control?
2. Which major decisions need investor approval?
3. Hiring and firing - whose call is it?
4. What happens to my stake in future rounds?
5. If investors disagree, then what?
6. What rights come with the capital?
Dilution is not the enemy either.
Owning 100% of a company that never reaches its potential can be worth less than owning 60% or 70% of a much larger, stronger one.
The wrong investor can create more problems than the capital solves. Pick partners who make you stronger, not just ones who can fund you.
The investor who gets the first look is the one who is thought of first.
That means the best reputation and the most strategic value added to the company.
Nobody gets first look by asking for it. They get it because founders already think of them when something good is coming.
Reputation is deal flow with a delay.
My girls asked me to buy them a toy Tesla they could drive around the neighborhood.
It cost $400. I did not want to buy it just because they asked.
So we did a lemonade stand down by the Starbucks in town. The first one brought in $55 a day, and a more recent one brought in $250 a day.
The money was not the point. They saw that customers pay for value and that effort creates results.
Teach the next generation how value is created before you show them what it can buy.
Brian Brogan makes a succession point I agree with: transmitting the family's decision-making system matters more than transmitting the assets.
Assets are easy to retitle. A way of deciding takes years to teach.
If you plan to hand the business to your kids, start with the process. Who decides? On what rules? How do disagreements get resolved?
The ownership paperwork is the easy part.
The best time to think about selling is before someone wants to buy you.
In my own case, three publicly traded companies offered to buy our training division within a 6 month window. In that same window we acquired two small businesses and a piece of intellectual property.
That is when we set up Wilson Holding Company, to keep our assets properly managed and consolidate our advisors.
Build the structure before the offers show up and you get to choose instead of scramble.
Skip Coomber frames diversification this way: its job is to keep one mistake from becoming existential.
Every investor gets some things wrong. The real question is whether any single one of them can end the game.
Build the portfolio so the answer is no.
When I started Family Office Club, I wrote a goal in my affirmation journal: $1 million a year in revenue.
Someone saw it by accident and laughed.
In year 3 of the business, we did $1 million a year.
Plenty of people also told me the family office industry would never amount to anything.
Write the big number down anyway. Not everyone has to understand it yet.
Michael Spencer of NEX Group has a view on cost cutting worth remembering: it eventually stops being a strategy.
There is a limit to how much you can improve a business by taking costs out.
His alternative: work back from where you want to be in 3 to 5 years, then make decisions from that destination.
Cutting is a tactic. A destination is a strategy.