Ask a CEO

“I learned to manage by doing the work no one wanted to do, making my peers' jobs easier, and letting people choose to follow me before I had the title. At Cerebras, going from 25 to 800 people forced me to reinvent that every few years: one-to-one became one-to-many, and the job turned into repeating the story so everyone saw where they fit.”

“I was a terrible manager early on, so I started reading everything I could, from the Stoics to Good to Great, and brought in mentors and structure because I realized leadership is a craft you have to study deliberately. Lara Hogan, who I had on the podcast, put it better than I could: the secret is listening, really listening, which sounds obvious but is the hardest thing to do when you first start managing people.”

“Good management starts with giving people clear direction and then holding them accountable for results, not activity. I learned early that people rise to the level of your belief in them, so I frame feedback as I believe you can be better, not you are not good enough. Progress is not perfection.”

“I don't think motivation is something you do to people. Daniel Pink's book Drive shaped a lot of how I built Automattic: people need mastery, autonomy, and purpose. Give them real agency over how they work, let them get better at something hard, and connect the day-to-day to a mission they actually believe in.”

“I don't think you motivate people with slogans or perks. After hiring more than 15,000 people over 25 years, I've seen that what keeps them is interesting work, colleagues they respect, and leadership they trust to act with integrity. Get those three right and the rest tends to follow.”

“I stopped trying to motivate people and started helping them grow instead. At Mindvalley, I have lunch with every new hire and ask where they want to be one year from now, then we map their growth to their work.”

“Leadership matters because talent without alignment cancels itself out. I saw it scaling EchoSign and now see it in portfolio companies: 50 great people pulling in different directions will lose to a smaller team pulling the same way. Your job as a leader is to make the direction obvious, make debate real, and then decide fast so the vectors actually add up.”

“Leadership is the only way you turn a room full of smart individuals into a team that ships something impossible. At Cerebras, I watched that shift from 25 of us eating lunch together to 800 people across time zones, and the job became repeating the story so clearly that someone I had never met still knew why their work mattered.”

“Leadership is the only force that turns a good plan into a result. I have watched companies with average strategies and strong leaders beat companies with brilliant strategies and weak ones, because leadership is what creates clarity, accountability, and the courage to act.”

“A product manager is the person who decides what gets built and why, then rallies design, engineering, and the business around that decision. When I was a PM at CNET, I learned that the hardest part isn't the roadmap; it's translating user pain and company goals into something a team can ship.”

“A product manager's job is to spend more time with customers than anyone else, figure out what they actually need, and translate that into a roadmap engineering can ship.”

“A product manager is the person who decides what gets built, why, and for whom, then makes sure engineering, sales, marketing, and customers all line up behind it.”