High Growth Handbook

High Growth Handbook — Summary

The hardest-working person in the room

A young founder once told Sam Altman, with some pride, that his company had seventy-four investors and that he answered every one of them right away. When the annual audit request landed, his was the first completed spreadsheet back. Precise. Fast. Dependable. Altman heard him out, then told him that meanwhile his company was on fire.

Users? Barely any. Revenue wasn't really coming in either.

He added that investors care about returns, not about how briskly he sends the paperwork back. A person who spends his days replying to seventy-four people is doing precisely none of the work those seventy-four people gave him money to do. And the cruelest part is that the whole time he feels like a good person. Diligent. Conscientious. He was working, wasn't he?

Elad Gil's book is full of processes and lists, and underneath all of them the same question keeps beating. What is the work that actually matters, and what is the work that only looks like it? Gil is not a theorist. He was on Google's mobile team while the company went from fifteen hundred people to fifteen thousand. His own startup was bought by Twitter, where he arrived as part of a ninety-person company and left a fifteen-hundred-person one. Then he founded Color Genomics, and along the way he was there early at Airbnb, Coinbase, Stripe, Square, Instacart and Pinterest as an investor. Everything he wrote down he either lived through himself or asked fourteen people who had: Marc Andreessen, Reid Hoffman, Sam Altman, Patrick Collison, Naval Ravikant, Keith Rabois.