I'm annoyed that nobody told me what I'm about to tell you earlier in my career, and it all makes sense now. It makes sense as to why some people through history have been so unbelievably productive, while other people don't seem to make much progress at all.
Probably to share it with you, but also probably because I've just learned something about productivity, entrepreneurship, building, success, which I can't get out of my head.
And I think we can probably all relate to the fact that sometimes we wake up in the morning with one particular plan and then our emails happen and WhatsApp happens and we end up drifting off into the noise.
And everything that comes onto my desk today and all the things that I have buzzing around in my head and on my to-do list are now going to fall into one of those two columns.
When Airbnb, the founders of Airbnb, and I've interviewed Brian Chesky from Airbnb, launched Airbnb, they noticed that their users were uploading really, really bad images of their Airbnbs to the website.
the founders of Airbnb manually went knocking on doors of their users when they only had a couple of users and they said to those users, can we come in and take professional photos for you?
Now the founders of Airbnb knocking door-to-door is not scalable, you're not going to be able to do that with the hundreds of millions of users that they now have.
You can't scale that and when I say scale, I mean, you can't automate that process of Mark Zuckerberg manually pitching the three billion users that Facebook now has.
And another example is one of the most famous companies in the world called Stripe, which is probably worth hundreds of billions of dollars now, it's a payment company.
And in the early days, the founders Patrick and John Collison would literally go to their customers' offices onto their computers and install the software for them.
And this is really the point because so many founders, they understand that they want to reach a billion people, they want to be the next Airbnb, the next Meta, the next Stripe.
And this is where they make the critical mistake because all of those companies I just named, none of them at the start were thinking in terms of scale.
Whenever you feel like something that is unscalable is going to stand in the way of your team or you figuring out the answer to a very important question,