Be a painfully persistent recruiter (Stripe)

Patrick notes that “the biggest thing we did differently...is just being ok to take a really long time to hire people.” It took the company six months to hire its first two employees. Describing their “painfully persistent” process of recruiting in his conversation with Lilly, Patrick noted that he could think of five employees that Stripe had taken three or more years to recruit.

Every successful company cares about serving its customers to some extent, but very few are genuinely obsessed with pleasing them in that word’s truest meaning. Those who embrace such devotion are rewarded with stronger customer affinity and better retention.

To please your customers, you must obsess over them.

Charlie Munger once said, “Never, ever, think about something else when you should be thinking about the power of incentives.” When it comes to organizing your company, optimizing performance, and capturing the upside, there’s no better place to begin than with the underlying incentives.

The tendency to view one’s work at a state or civilizational level may sound grandiose, but in many instances, it offers the aptest comparison and clearest lessons. As tech insinuates itself into every aspect of our lives, companies and protocols act as pseudo-nation states with enormous impact and broad scope.

With online marketing saturated, finding innovative ways to advance a story of one’s making is likely to become increasingly valuable and a critical source of differentiation.

OpenSea’s leadership followed an astute strategy: they preserved optionality on multiple levels. Firstly, the team kept burn low, bringing in money through fees. Doing so freed Finzer and Atallah from continuously fundraising and gave them the time for the market to mature.

More importantly, OpenSea built optionality into its product. Rather than concentrating on owning a particular use-case, the team designed the platform to host the long-tail of assets.

Great businesses often don’t try to do everything. Rather than splitting their energies, they focus on how they can intensify their most pronounced advantage.

Tiger follows an axially different method. The firm outsources its diligence to consulting firm Bain. Tiger can focus on its greatest strengths by taking this tact: moving quickly and relying on an encyclopedic knowledge of successful business models to pick winners.

Red Bull does something similar. The company outsources the production of its beverages to focus entirely on marketing.

To win, find ways to deepen your advantages, even at the cost of outsourcing commoditized operations.

Sometimes, the best marketing strategy is to define yourself by what you’re not.

Throughout Telegram’s journey, the company has defined itself as a kind of Not-Facebook: a user-friendly private alternative to Big Blue’s surveillance state. Such counter-positioning was made more effective once WhatsApp was brought into Zuckerberg’s fold, allowing Durov to extend the same argument to his most direct competitor.

Great businesses never sit still. They are constantly in a state of reinvention and internal bottoms-up disruption. Doing so not only opens new opportunities but protects against competitive displacement.