Find people who've been there

Nir on why we reach for our phones without deciding to“Your brain has learned that opening social media relieves a quick pang of boredom, loneliness, or uncertainty, so it now cues the habit before you consciously decide.”

Lorraine on getting noticed for your work“Doing great work doesn’t guarantee recognition. Make your impact easy to explain so people can advocate for you when you’re not in the room.”

Guillermo on building Vercel and Next.js“The best things we've done for our brand is the things that we did without thinking we're working on our brand.”

Lenny on breaking into product management“A few paths actually work. The safest is transitioning internally, partnering closely with a PM until you can make the case. The second is joining an early-stage startup where everyone does everything. Regardless of path, become the person who deeply understands the customer and can translate that into product insight.”

Matthew on finding the right partner“You want to be happy enough that the right thing doesn’t become your everything.”

Kristin on building a pipeline that closes650 sales teams, 20 years and selling the Cloud: Top 10% podcast.

Pedro on where machine learning is headed“The same basic paradigms have been used since the 1950s. At the end of the day, we’re going to need some new ideas.”

Jim on enjoying competition when teammates are more intense“I stopped enjoying baseball when I was chasing what everyone else valued, and I found my game again only when I started competing to raise my own level, not to beat theirs.”

Vinod on which jobs AI will replaceLed KV's first OpenAI investment and juniper Networks: 2,500x return.

Jeffrey on why treating symptoms is the wrong place to start“Symptoms are late signals, not first causes. In chronic illness the biology starts drifting years before a diagnosis. If you start at the symptom, you are downstream. You may mute the alarm without finding the fire. The body is a network, so ask what shifted in the person's story and physiology that made the symptom possible, then address that.”

Julie on becoming a better manager“Your job as a manager is to help other people do great work. Start by understanding what’s getting in their way.”

Jason on when to keep fighting and when to wind down“I’ve seen this movie too many times: four months of runway with flat sales usually means the founder never found a repeatable motion, not that the market said no.”

Julian on using a system to curb phone distractions“I don't try to restart at full speed; I drop back to the mínimo viable version of each habit until the momentum returns, because a 20-minute workout and one focused block on the side project beats another day of zero.”

Suzanne on what happens behind closed doors in a layoff“I've personally been involved in laying off well over a thousand people, and the part no one talks about is how fast the dignity gets stripped away: one minute you're trusted, the next a manager you've never met is reading you a script while someone cuts your computer access.”

Vanessa on sexual expectations couples never say out loud“I don't believe in a universal normal for any stage, but I do think it's completely natural for that early honeymoon frequency to taper off after about a year.”

Alina on turning inbound interest into sales meetingsChili Piper valued near $1B and serves Gong, Airbnb, Rippling.

Spencer on life inside an NBA organization“I used to think pushing past your body meant toughness, but the league taught me that the hardest skill is staying on the floor.”

Peter on which AI tools are worth paying forLed product teams at Meta, Amazon, Roblox and reddit product 0 to 1M+ users.

Nick on metabolic health, nutrition, and brain healthCarnivore IBD case series, Frontiers in Nutrition and harvard MD, Oxford PhD, Dartmouth valedictorian.

Keith on spotting founders nobody has noticed yet“Stop looking at résumés the way Google does.”