STRATEGY

Penny stocks are mostly garbage companies. But garbage companies spike on hype all the time. My job is to trade the hype, not believe in the company.

Implied volatility is almost always higher than realized volatility. That is not a theory. That is an empirical fact. Sell premium. Let the math work.

Bitcoin is digital gold. Altcoins are digital venture capital. Know which game you are playing.

Dollar cost averaging is boring. It is also one of the best strategies for most people.

We are stubborn on vision. We are flexible on details.

Startups are not about working hard. They are about working on the right things.

The difference between a good entrepreneur and a great one is that great ones know their next five moves.

Business is a sprint and a marathon. You have to pace yourself but also know when to run.

Here's how I think of my money — as soldiers. I send them out to war every day. I want them to take prisoners and come home, so there's more of them.

A wonderful company on sale is the only thing worth buying.

I'm a shameless cloner. I have no original ideas. And that's perfectly fine.

Heads I win, tails I don't lose much. That's the Dhandho framework.

Cloning is a very powerful idea. Find someone who's already figured it out and just copy them.

Don't diversify for the sake of it. If you have conviction, concentrate.

SEO is not about gaming Google. It's about creating the best result for the person searching.

Give away everything you know for free. Then sell the implementation.

Most financial advice addresses 10% of the picture. The other 90% is taxes, income, insurance, and legal structures.

The most powerful financial tool you have is your income. Everything else is secondary.

The value of financial planning isn't stock picking. It's tax planning, behavioral coaching, and coordination.

Great fundamentals plus great timing equals great returns. You need both, not one or the other.

We are running a political campaign and the candidate is Uber.

We chose to be the regulated exchange when it was the hard path. Now it's the only path.

We gave away the hardware for free. Everyone thought we were crazy. But the transactions are where the money is.

We don't compete with Amex on perks. We compete on making finance teams' lives easier. That's a fight we win every time.

Open source is not charity. It's the most effective go-to-market strategy ever invented for enterprise software.

Free viewers was the most important product decision we ever made. When everyone can see the work, everyone cares about design.

We're not building a medical device. We're building a general-purpose brain interface that starts with medical applications.

Everyone was fighting over New York and LA. We went to the suburbs. Turns out, that's where most of America actually lives.

Advertising at the moment of purchase intent is the most valuable real estate in marketing. We own that moment for groceries.

We work with grocers, not against them. Amazon wants to replace your grocery store. We want to make your grocery store better.

We stayed in the US and Canada while Uber went to 70 countries. Focus isn't glamorous, but it's how you survive.

In Southeast Asia, the motorbike is the car. If your ride-sharing app doesn't work for motorbikes, you don't understand the market.

Uber came to Southeast Asia with the Silicon Valley playbook. We came with local knowledge. Local knowledge won.

We're not competing with DoorDash or Instacart. We're their future delivery infrastructure. We replace the driver, not the app.

We left Google because we realized the fastest path to autonomous driving wasn't the one with people in the car.

Eighty percent of our traffic comes from Google searches. We're the only social platform that actually benefits from search engines instead of competing with them.

We didn't solve piracy by fighting it. We solved it by making the legal option better than the illegal one.

We went from Funko Pops to Pokémon to sports cards to sneakers to fashion. Each community pulls in the next one. Collectors collect more than one thing.

The free plan isn't a marketing gimmick. Every free user makes the paid product better because they add data, traffic patterns, and threat intelligence to the network.

Payroll is just the door. Once we're running payroll, we can offer benefits, retirement plans, financial wellness — everything an employee needs in one place.

Every SaaS company thinks they need to be the best at one thing. We think integration IS the thing. Good enough across ten categories beats best-in-class in one.

The compound startup thesis is simple: when all your systems share the same data, automation becomes trivial. When they're separate, it's impossible.

We're not a therapy company. We're a business infrastructure company for therapists. The distinction matters because we're not competing with therapists — we're serving them.

We're not trying to eliminate prior authorization. Health plans need cost controls. We're trying to make it instant so it stops being a barrier to care.

We published our clinical research in peer-reviewed journals before we had a sales team. That was deliberate. In healthcare, credibility is the product.

A $15 billion market with no dominant technology platform. No venture-backed competition. No one from Silicon Valley had even looked at it. That's exactly where we wanted to be.

We give away the scanner because the real business is every crown, bridge, and veneer that flows through our platform for the next decade. The scanner is the door. The lab is the house.

Lululemon proved women would pay $100 for leggings. Nobody had done the same thing for men. We just asked: what if men's athletic clothing was actually good?

The tallboy can is the whole strategy. It looks like a beer. You can hold it at a party and nobody asks why you're not drinking. We made water socially acceptable for people who think water is lame.

At Annie's we proved that organic could go mainstream. At Once Upon a Farm we're proving that fresh can go mainstream. Same playbook, higher degree of difficulty.

Free returns on first orders sound expensive. But the data shows that retailers who try a brand risk-free reorder 80% of the time. The free return isn't a cost — it's the best customer acquisition tool we have.

Competition is for losers.

I made my reputation buying things nobody else wanted. The question was never whether they were broken. The question was whether they were fixably broken.

A board seat gives us the ability to effect change from the inside. That's always better than shouting from the outside.

Going global early — particularly into India, China, and Brazil — gave us access to some of the best businesses of the last decade before most Western investors were paying attention.

I don't have any single investment philosophy. The whole point is that we're trying to find things that work.

Focus is the hardest discipline in startups. Every founder wants to expand. My job is to keep asking: what's the one thing you do better than anyone else in the world?

The risk of missing a category is worse than the risk of being early. Timing risk gets talked about too much. Category risk doesn't get talked about enough.

The goal is not to compete. The goal is to create a market where you are the only option.

Speed is your biggest advantage as an early-stage startup. The goal is to learn faster than everyone else. That requires moving faster than feels comfortable.

Specialization is a competitive advantage. We focus on technology because that is where we have genuine expertise. Generalists get beaten by specialists.

The only way to survive in this business long-term is to have a genuine edge and to know exactly what that edge is.

Silence in this business is a competitive advantage. The more people know what you're thinking, the harder it becomes to execute.

We don't do acquisitions. We build everything ourselves. That's slower, but it means everything actually works together.

Payments is not a winner-take-all market. But it is a market where the best technology wins the best merchants.

Our biggest competitor isn't another software company. It's the spreadsheet. And the spreadsheet has a 40-year head start.

We don't want to be a tool people use. We want to be a platform people build on. That's a very different ambition.

We spent three years in stealth building the product. Most startups would have shipped in six months. We needed it to be right.

We started in France because the French are cheap. I say that with love — they care about value. That was the perfect test market.

Israel was supposed to be our proof of concept. A small country, short distances, high gas prices. If it didn't work there, it wouldn't work anywhere. It didn't work there.

We walked away from SMBs entirely in 2022. Fired those customers. Everyone called it suicidal. But you can't be everything to everyone and win.

Nubank proved Brazilians would trust a digital bank. We didn't need to prove that again. We needed to prove they'd trust one with investment products too.

We got Matthew McConaughey to read bedtime stories. LeBron James to talk about mental fitness. Harry Styles to narrate sleep music. Content is the moat.

Korea has 52 million people in a country the size of Indiana. Dense population, fast internet, high expectations. It's the perfect test market for e-commerce. If it works here, it works anywhere.

CRED only accepts users with a credit score above 750. We don't want everyone. We want the top. That exclusivity is the product.

I owned GSI Commerce. Sold it to eBay for $2.4 billion. Kept Fanatics because I thought it could be bigger. eBay got $2.4 billion. I got $31 billion. Best negotiation of my life.

We don't just sell jerseys. We own the entire chain — the league license, the manufacturing, the website, the delivery. Nobody else in sports has that. Nobody.

We merged with Flight Club. A digital-first marketplace merging with the most legendary physical sneaker consignment store in the world. Online meets offline. That was the power move.

Everyone is fighting over who has the best AI model. We're fighting over who can run any model the fastest. That's a better fight to be in.

NVIDIA builds GPUs for everything. We built a chip for one thing: running language models as fast as physically possible. Specialization always beats generalization.

We started with mutual funds, not stocks. Everyone said start with stocks — that's where the excitement is. But mutual funds are where the trust is. For a first-time investor, trust beats excitement.

We merged with Ginger, a mental health therapy platform. Meditation plus therapy plus psychiatry — all in one app. Nobody else has that full stack of mental health.

The branding was intentional. Millennial pink. Clean design. No weird stock photos of old men running on beaches. We made healthcare look like a lifestyle brand. That was the unlock.

When your underlying technology becomes free and commoditized, you have two choices: die, or move up the stack. We moved up the stack.

We tried to be a speaker company, a wearables company, and a health data company all at once. We were good at all three and great at none. That's how you burn a billion dollars.

The FDA doesn't regulate wellness devices the same way it regulates medical devices. That's our opening. We're not diagnosing diabetes. We're showing healthy people how food affects their biology.

Our average order value is $4. Four dollars. Amazon India doesn't even want that customer. We built the entire business around them.

We introduced zero-commission selling. Sellers keep 100% of their margin. Everyone said we'd die. We grew 3x instead. Turns out when you stop taking from sellers, more sellers come.

Pfizer used BioNTech's technology. We built ours from scratch. Our own lipid nanoparticles, our own manufacturing, our own everything. That's why we own it all. That's why the margins are 90%.

We spent more on YouTube ads than most SaaS companies spend on their entire marketing budget. People called it wasteful. Our revenue grew from $50M to $300M in two years. Wasteful?

We pulled out of the US and UK markets. Everyone called it a failure. I call it focus. You can't fight Chime and Monzo on their home turf while also trying to win Europe. So we chose Europe.

We started with payments. Now we do insurance, mutual funds, lending, and stock broking. Payments is the gateway drug. Once you have 500 million users making payments, you can sell them anything financial.

Banks didn't want to work with us at first. We were screen-scraping their data. They hated it. Then they realized their customers wanted fintech apps, and fintech apps needed Plaid. Now they work with us willingly.

We hit profitability in France before expanding. That was intentional. We didn't want to be another neobank burning cash in five countries at once. Profitable in one, then expand. Old school. It works.

We're not trying to be a consumer neobank. N26 and Revolut fight over individuals. We want every freelancer, every startup, every SMB in Europe. Different customer. Different product. Different business.

We started with payment gateway. Then payroll. Then lending. Then banking. Every product we launch makes the others stickier. The platform play is working. Churn is nearly zero.

Roman, Rory, Zero — we built three brands for different audiences and then unified them under Ro. Men's health, women's health, smoking cessation. The platform was always the vision. The brands were the entry points.

We bought a pharmacy. A real, physical pharmacy. Because when you control the pharmacy, you control the experience end to end. Prescription to doorstep. No middlemen. No CVS.

Everyone is fighting over training. We focused on inference — running the models, not building them. Training happens once. Inference happens a billion times a day. The economics favor inference.

Enterprises don't want to rent GPUs from the cloud. They want AI infrastructure they own, on their premises, behind their firewall. That's our market. NVIDIA sells chips. We sell full-stack AI systems.

I built a gaming company, an e-commerce company, and a fintech company. At the same time. In Southeast Asia. Everyone said pick one. I said: they feed each other. Garena funds Shopee. Shopee feeds SeaMoney.

Student loans, personal loans, mortgages, investing, banking, credit cards — all in one app. Every product we add makes the others cheaper to acquire customers for. That flywheel is why we'll win.

We open-sourced Stable Diffusion and gave it away for free. OpenAI charged for DALL-E. We gave it to the world. That decision made us famous. It also made it very hard to build a business.

We expanded from sneakers to streetwear, electronics, collectibles, and trading cards. Anything with a resale market and a counterfeiting problem. That's a surprisingly large number of things.

Pinduoduo made shopping social in China. Temu is taking that model global. Group buying, gamification, prices so low they feel illegal. The formula works everywhere because saving money is universal.

We process more secondhand clothing than anyone in the world. Our clean-out bags are basically a Trojan horse for changing consumer behavior.

Open-source AI is not charity. It is strategy. The companies that contribute to open models get to shape the standards everyone else builds on.

Most companies do not need to train their own model from scratch. They need fast, cheap inference on the best open models. That is the real market.

We do not want to be a bank. We want to be the financial operating system for Korea. Banks are one layer. We want to be the layer underneath.

We got our banking license because we believe you cannot build a serious financial institution on top of someone else's license. You need to own the full stack.

Hertz and Avis spent decades building fleets and airport counters. We built a marketplace and let the cars come to us. Turns out there were millions of them.

We are not a lender. We are an AI platform that banks plug into. The banks fund the loans, take the risk, keep the customers. We just make the decision better.

Product-market fit is not when customers tell you they like your product. It is when they tell other people. Wealthfront grew almost entirely by word of mouth in the early years.

We have a bottom-up adoption model. One researcher on a team starts using W&B, shows their teammates the dashboards, and suddenly the whole lab is on it. We do not need a sales team for that.

We are a subscription company that happens to give you hardware. The strap is free. The insights are what you pay for. That flips the entire wearables business model.

Stripe does not work in Indonesia. PayPal barely works in the Philippines. The best payments companies in the world do not serve the fastest-growing internet economies. That is our opening.

We open-sourced most of our trading technology. People thought we were crazy. But open source attracted the best developers in India to work with us, and that talent is worth more than any proprietary code.

Jack Ma taught me one thing that changed my life — the best time to attack is when everyone else is retreating. I bought BitTorrent during a bear market. I bought into Huobi when everyone was running from exchanges.

I develop in Miami, New York, DC, and LA. If one market dips, the others carry you. Geographic diversification is the oldest trick in real estate and most developers still do not do it.

We sold Starwood Hotels to Marriott for $13.6 billion. I started with one distressed apartment complex. That is what happens when you buy what nobody wants and turn it into what everyone wants.

I do not buy buildings. I buy themes. E-commerce needs warehouses. Cloud needs data centers. Demographics need rental housing. The building is just the physical expression of the thesis.

BRRRR — Buy, Rehab, Rent, Refinance, Repeat. That is the entire strategy. You recycle your capital and never run out of money to invest. It sounds too good to be true and it is not.

The browser extension was the most important product decision we ever made. It made Grammarly work everywhere — Gmail, Google Docs, LinkedIn, Twitter. You install it once and forget it is there until it saves you from sending an embarrassing email.

We wrote tens of thousands of SEO pages — one for every app combination. "How to connect Gmail to Slack." Each one ranks in Google and brings us users. Content marketing at an industrial scale.

Our average enterprise customer uses 4 or more of our products. They start with monitoring and then realize they need APM, then logs, then security. We designed it that way — one platform that keeps expanding.

Amazon can take any open-source project and offer it as a service. That is why we built the LGTM stack — Loki, Grafana, Tempo, Mimir — as an integrated system. The value is in the combination, not any single tool.

Coinbase listed 10 tokens and called it responsible. We listed 350 and called it giving people what they want. The market decided who was right.

I have made more money sitting on my behind than by actively trading. The art is not in buying — it's in holding.

The secret to retail is not selling things. It is buying things cheaper than anyone else and passing the savings to the customer.

Own the land under your business. Rent is a tax on ambition that never stops growing.

When you are small, you have to be very focused and rely on your brain, not your strength. The small guys can beat the big guys if they are smarter and faster.

A good connector creates more value than a good builder. Our job is to connect one billion people to everything they need — not to build everything they need ourselves.

We don't need to build everything ourselves. We just need to build the platform and invest in the best people who can build everything else.

In China, if you don't cannibalize your own product, someone else will. WeChat was designed to kill QQ before a competitor could.

The fastest company wins, not the smartest. Speed of iteration beats perfection of planning every single time.

The internet model for hardware is simple: sell the device at cost, build a relationship with the user, and make money on services for the next ten years. The phone is not the product — the user is the product.

Standing on the right wind, even pigs can fly. The key is to find the wind — not to be a better pig.

A messaging app is not a messaging app. It is the front door to a person's digital life. Once you own the front door, you can build anything behind it.

I don't invest in ideas. I invest in brands that have survived at least one crisis. If a company can survive near-death, it can survive anything. That's when I buy.

We spent two years building before we launched. In crypto, that's like waiting a century. But we wanted to get security right before we got users. That patience is why we've never been hacked.

Coinbase made crypto easy for beginners. We made it powerful for experts. Both approaches are valid — we just chose the harder market.

We built Gemini to be the most regulated exchange in the world because we knew that was the only way Wall Street would take crypto seriously. Trust is built by rules, not promises.

We ran ConsenSys like a venture studio for years — dozens of projects, most of them experiments. A lot failed. The ones that survived — MetaMask, Infura — became essential infrastructure. That's how innovation works: you plant a hundred seeds and water the ones that sprout.

We spent two years in stealth. No blog posts, no conference talks, no Twitter threads. Just building. In crypto, that's basically being invisible. But when we launched, we had real customers and real revenue — not just a whitepaper and a token.

We launched Alchemy University to teach blockchain development for free. If we grow the developer pie, everyone wins — including us. Education is the cheapest customer acquisition strategy in the world.

You can't beat piracy by fighting it. You beat it by offering something better. We made it easier to listen legally than to steal. That was the whole strategy.

People call us copycats. I call us efficient resource allocators. If a business model works in America, why wouldn't it work in Brazil or Indonesia? The only question is who gets there first.

I use SBA loans to buy businesses with almost no money down. The government will literally lend you money to buy a business. It's the best-kept secret in finance, and it's been around for decades.

The best business plan is a customer who already wants to pay you. If you have to convince someone they have a problem, you're selling vitamins. Sell painkillers instead.

We built Near to be developer-friendly from day one. Most blockchains require you to learn a new programming language. Near works with JavaScript. That one decision expanded our potential developer pool from thousands to millions.

Our technology is so efficient that we can license our powertrain to other automakers and they'd still come out ahead. The motor, the inverter, the battery pack — every component is best-in-class. That's our insurance policy.

Our first vehicle was the EP9 supercar. It broke the Nürburgring EV record. People said — why is a startup building a supercar? Because credibility in automotive is earned on the track, not in a press release.

We make our own batteries, our own chips, our own motors, our own glass. When supply chains break, we don't call suppliers — we call our own factories. Vertical integration isn't a strategy. It's survival.

Panasonic, Ford, Toyota, and Volkswagen are all our partners. They supply us with battery scrap and buy back the refined materials. We're not competing with automakers — we're completing their supply chain.

The firms that will dominate the next decade are the ones that control origination — not the ones that just allocate capital.

I spent years building OPPO's distribution in Indonesia. That taught me that whoever controls the last mile controls the market.

I like investments that are complicated. Complicated means fewer bidders. Fewer bidders means better prices.

The businesses nobody wants are the businesses with the most potential. A Fortune 500 company divesting a division is handing you a diamond they do not know how to polish.

We do not sell to vegans. We sell to meat lovers. If our burger is not delicious to someone who eats beef every day, we have failed.

The answer is not to fight AI. The answer is to use AI better than anyone else. CheggMate is our bet that human-verified plus AI equals something neither can do alone.

We put the Beyond Burger in the meat aisle, not the health food section. If you want to change how people eat, you have to be where they already shop.

Microsoft missed mobile. We will not miss AI. That is the one sentence that explains every decision I have made since becoming CEO.

The $13 billion OpenAI bet was not a bet on AI. It was a bet on building the platform that AI runs on. That is what Microsoft does — platforms.

The hardest part of running Alphabet is that you are defending a $175 billion ad business while simultaneously trying to reinvent it with AI. Both things have to be true at once.

The supply chain is not glamorous but it is the reason your iPhone arrives on time, works perfectly, and costs what it costs. Operations is the invisible moat.

We won the baristas first. When your cool local coffee shop uses Oatly, that is more powerful than any Super Bowl ad.

Midnight delivery is our sweet spot. Nobody else is open at 2am, and that is when people want snacks the most. Zero competition, maximum willingness to pay.

The key insight was owning the inventory. DoorDash does not own the food. We own the chips, the beer, the medicine. That control is our advantage.

Small satellites need small rockets. Riding as a passenger on a big rocket is like taking a bus when you need a taxi — you go when they go, where they go.

We launch from New Zealand because the skies are clear, the airspace is empty, and you can reach any orbital inclination. It is the best launch site on Earth that nobody thought of.

We sold the logistics business to Flexport because I realized we were losing focus. A company that does everything does nothing well.

Uber spent $2 billion trying to beat us in China. They lost. Markets are won by the company that understands local culture, not the company with the most funding.

Estonia has 1.3 million people. You cannot build a unicorn serving Estonia. We had to think global from day one.

We merged with Uber ATG because combining the best teams gives you the best chance. Self-driving is too hard for any one company to solve alone.

Our free tier is not charity. It is strategy. Two million developers using Snyk for free means two million developers who will demand Snyk when their company buys enterprise security.

Figma was winning prototyping. So we stopped competing and found a bigger market.

We expanded to 23 countries and pulled back to one. The best lesson I ever learned was that focus beats ambition.

We build three businesses not one. Gaming funds e-commerce. E-commerce creates payments. Payments enable lending. That is the flywheel.

Curation is our moat. Anyone can list 100,000 products. Knowing which 100,000 products to list — that is the skill.

Everyone thinks real estate is about houses. It is about information. Whoever controls the information controls the market.

Red Hat was a 34 billion dollar bet on open source and hybrid cloud. History will judge whether it was brilliant or desperate. I believe it was brilliant.

We burned billions fighting Zomato. We would do it again. In India market share is destiny.

We do not expand to 100 cities. We go deep in 10. Density is everything in quick commerce.

Real estate got us started. But buildings are buildings. Factories need digital twins. Hotels need virtual tours. Construction sites need documentation.

The super app model works in Asia. We are proving it works in Latin America too.

You cannot just sell Pepsi and Doritos forever and pretend the world is not changing around you.

Citi was trying to be everything to everyone in every country. You cannot win that way. You win by being the best at fewer things.

We have invested in 450 projects. If blockchain gaming takes off we own a piece of everything.

Tax efficiency is not tax evasion. It is the difference between a good capital allocator and a mediocre one.

Lots of companies do not succeed over time. What do they fundamentally do wrong? They usually miss the future.

We put scooters on sidewalks in Santa Monica without asking permission. The city was furious. Users loved it.

We are pivoting from consumer to enterprise. Companies will pay for their employees mental health. That is a better business than convincing individuals one at a time.

We are one of the few AI companies building our own models. That is expensive. It is also the only defensible position in enterprise AI.

We pivoted from consumer to enterprise. The consumer AI writing market is dead. Enterprise AI workflows are alive.

We host thousands of open-source AI models. If open source wins we win. That is the bet.

The US Air Force is paying us to develop hypersonic drones. The military funds the R&D. Commercial passengers get the benefit. That is the playbook.

In enterprise software, the winner is whoever offers the most complete stack.

The biggest risk is not taking any risk. In a world that is changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.

The most important decision an investor makes is the asset allocation decision.

A fool with a plan can outsmart a genius with no plan.

If everybody is doing it one way, there's a good chance you can find your niche by going in exactly the opposite direction.

Privacy is not optional in this business. It is the business.

Come for the tool, stay for the network.

I don't believe in strategic plans. I believe in capital allocation.

We don't just sell software to restaurants. We become their operating system.

Content is our real product. The hardware is how you access it.

One platform for the entire DevOps lifecycle. That's not a tagline — that's our entire strategy.

OpenAI has 1000x our compute budget. We compete by being faster, more creative, and more consumer-friendly.

Expanding into HRIS was the hardest product decision we've made. But owning the full people stack creates a real moat.

GoPay is the key. If every rider also uses our digital wallet for e-commerce, the ecosystem becomes unbeatable.

The financial marketplace model works. Help people find the best products. Earn referral fees. Everyone wins.

Financial services — car loans, insurance, warranties — have higher margins than car sales. That's where the business really works.

Quick commerce — delivering groceries in 10 minutes — is growing faster than food delivery. Blinkit was our best acquisition.

Competing with free is our entire business challenge. We have to be so much better that paid beats free.

We pulled back from some markets to focus on profitability. Discipline over growth. Hard lesson learned.

Every company will eventually need real-time data streaming. We're building the infrastructure before the demand peaks.

The Gojek-Tokopedia merger created the most comprehensive super app in Southeast Asia.

Gen Z is our bet. Acquire young users now. They'll be valuable customers for decades.

Free P2P transfers build the habit. Cross-border payments and business services build the business.

Justin.tv was everything to everyone. Twitch was gaming only. Focus is how we won.

Our technology platform can power any insurance company. B2B licensing might be bigger than our own insurance sales.

Pure digital insurance doesn't work for most Europeans. They still want a human advisor. We give them both.

Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Poland. We're focusing on markets where we can win, not trying to be everywhere.

We pivoted from rockets to spacecraft propulsion. Sometimes the best business is selling shovels, not digging for gold.

I was NASA's CTO. I know what space needs. It doesn't need another SpaceX. It needs better spacecraft components.

Build cash-flow businesses first, then acquire trophy assets.

Find what your continent imports the most. Build the factory. Capture the margin.

From timber to luxury. People think it was a plan. It was evolution.

Real estate is about demographics and migration. Predict where wealthy people will move, and build for them.

The smartest strategy is the one your competitors think is stupid — until it works.

Scale and consistency beat innovation. Enter a market, outspend everyone, and dominate.

I started in Brooklyn buying storefronts that national chains needed. Same logic, different zip code.

Baidu was not about copying Google. It was about understanding China.

Semiconductors are the oil of the 21st century. We intend to be the biggest producer.

Sell the bridge before selling the destination. Passage gets us into data centers; full photonic computing comes next.

Rocket Internet built the shell. Alibaba built the engine. Now we need to win the race.

Private label is where the margin is. Fresho produce gives us 30-40% margins instead of 15%.

The Solexa acquisition for $600 million was the decision that changed everything for Illumina.

Outspend competitors on rider subsidies until they quit. Then improve economics as the monopoly.

Robotaxis and autonomous trucks. Two markets, two timelines, one technology platform.

Operating in both the US and China gives us twice the data and twice the regulatory learning.

The pivot to asset-light listing services is the right move. Owning houses was the wrong move.

If TikTok gets banned, Lemon8 is Plan B. Same algorithm, different content format.

Take beloved brands and turn them into games people play for years. That's the Scopely formula.

I learned at Peak Games that one great game beats 20 okay games. Royal Match is that lesson applied.

We power Cleveland Clinic's telehealth, not compete with it. Infrastructure, not application.

Most companies don't have a strategy problem. They have an execution problem. They know what to do. They just don't do it fast enough.

Everyone was fighting over Manhattan. We went to the suburbs. Turns out, that's where America actually lives.

Don't own the talent. Own the stage. The talent changes. The stage is forever.

I don't represent talent. I create ecosystems where talent becomes worth ten times what they were before they walked in my door.

I don't invest in industries. I invest in great assets that are being undervalued or undermanaged.

We pivoted from consumer to enterprise in 2009. That decision saved the company. Consumer storage became free. Enterprise storage became a billion-dollar business.

Dropbox got the consumer market. We got the Fortune 500. I'll take that trade.

Risk management isn't about avoiding risk. It's about making sure no single risk can destroy you.

Everyone said owning inventory and logistics was suicide. They said be a marketplace. I said: I want to guarantee every product is real.

Value-add multifamily is simple: buy an ugly building, make it pretty, raise the rents, repeat. The math works every time.

I treat my career like a business. Every joke is content. Every movie is marketing. Every Instagram post is distribution.

Profitability in delivery is not impossible. It just requires making advertising revenue larger than delivery losses. That's what we did.

Startups that solve for the top 10% of users always look stupid at first. That is the point.

The biggest mistake founders make is solving for the median user. The median user is already served. Solve for the extreme user.

Size is only an advantage if it gives you options. When size becomes bureaucracy, it becomes a liability.

Running a great company is about 70% leadership and 30% strategy. Get the people wrong and strategy doesn't matter.

The industrial internet is real. The companies that figure out the software layer on top of their hardware will win the next century.

Build the boring category that everyone needs but nobody wants to fund. That is where the best businesses in India have been built.

Network effects are the most powerful force in business. Find the category where they apply and build before anyone believes it matters.

Every government in the region told us no at some point. We did not fight governments — we partnered with them. That is the only way to build in this region.

The 360-degree batsman idea was about having no weakness. I apply the same principle to building wealth — no single point of failure.

Southeast Asia is not one market. It is eight different markets that speak fifty languages and have ten different regulatory environments. The company that figures this out wins everything.

If the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is near.

Change before you have to.

We have a strategic plan. It's called doing things.

Being the smartest person in the room is only useful if you're in the right room.

In chess and in markets, the best move is often the one your opponent doesn’t see coming.

Event-driven investing requires patience. The events happen on their own schedule, not yours.

The opportunity in event-driven investing is that most people don’t do the work to understand what’s actually happening in a merger or restructuring.

The less people know about what we do, the longer we can keep doing it successfully.

A franchise model is the closest thing to a perpetual motion machine in business. Collect royalties forever on someone else’s capital.

Distressed investing is simple: buy things other people are desperate to sell, at prices that guarantee a margin of safety.

When you buy a European brand, you buy 100 years of engineering. When you build a Chinese brand, you have 10 years of learning ahead. I chose to buy.

The best deals happen when sellers are desperate and buyers are scarce. I make sure I’m always the buyer who shows up.

Build the platform, and the users will find the value.

The companies that treat recruiting like a strategic function instead of an administrative one will win the talent war every time.

Every great hire starts with a relationship that was built months or years before the job opened. Gem makes that relationship trackable.

We pivoted from selling directly to homeowners to selling building kits to developers. The B2B model scales faster and burns less cash.

Vertical integration is the only way to make prefab construction work. The moment you depend on subcontractors, you lose control of quality and schedule.

Lojas Americanas taught me that execution beats strategy every single time. A mediocre strategy perfectly executed beats a perfect strategy poorly executed.

The best investment is not the one that gives you the highest return. It is the one that gives you control over a market.

Vertical integration is the only way to protect your margins in mining. If someone else ships your copper, they control your profit.

You don't preserve a fortune by being afraid to invest it. You preserve it by being smart about where you put it.

Market share is the only metric that matters in banking. Everything else follows from it.

Speed matters in deals. If you give the other side time to organize, you have already lost.

Structure matters more than strategy. If the structure is wrong, the best strategy in the world won't save you.

Control the entire value chain. If you depend on someone else for your raw materials, you are vulnerable.

Highways are more predictable than city streets. That's why autonomous trucking will be solved before robotaxis.

Everyone wants to solve the hardest problem in autonomy. We chose to solve the most profitable one.

Buying ClassPass was about owning both sides of the marketplace. We run the studios. ClassPass brings the customers. Together, that's an unbeatable combination.

Flipkart invested because Walmart wants to own India's fresh food supply chain. Instead of building from scratch, they invested in what already works.

Complexity is the enemy of low prices.

Buy enough shares to matter. A two percent stake means you get a thank-you note. A twenty percent stake means you get a board seat.

We started with books because they are the hardest to get wrong. Every book is the same shape.

Wealth concentrates by building. Wealth endures by diversifying.

Stay private. Shareholders want dividends. I want ships.

Digital banking is not a feature. It is the entire future of how people interact with money. We had to become a technology company that happens to have a banking licence.

Success in any market requires you to understand its people before you understand its economics. The economics will follow the people.

Patience is not just a virtue in Islam. It is the single most important business strategy there is.

Vertical integration is not a strategy. It is survival. If you do not control your supply chain, someone else will — and they will use it against you.

We are not a mining company. We are a trading company that happens to own mines. The difference matters enormously.

We are not a media company any more. We are an internet company that happens to own media assets.

Morocco's future is linked to Africa's future. We built Bank of Africa because we believe deeply in that link.

The best protection against political risk is to build something the country needs. That has been our strategy everywhere we operate.

Patience is the most underrated quality in business. We have been building for 60 years. That is our competitive advantage.

A business is only as strong as its capacity to serve the people around it. If you lose sight of that, you lose the business.

Fashion and telecom look very different, but they both run on network effects and brand loyalty.

The best businesses are the ones you can hold forever. The question is whether they let you.

The role of a strategist is to provide clarity when markets are generating noise.

Most retail investors trade against the institutions and wonder why they lose. You have to learn to follow the smart money, not fight it.

I want to make Wanda a global company — not just a Chinese company that operates globally, but a real global company.

The Internet is not a threat to our shopping malls. The Internet cannot replace the human experience of being somewhere.

Harbour City is not just a shopping mall. It is a piece of Hong Kong's commercial identity — and you do not sell your identity.

Our strategy has always been to own world-class assets and manage them for the long term. We are not traders. We are stewards.

India is not a market — it is a hundred markets. The biggest mistake is treating it as one.

Reducing debt was not a sign of weakness. It was the smartest thing we did. It gave us the freedom to grow on our own terms.

The Wanda deal was not impulsive. We saw a rare window to acquire quality assets at prices that reflected a seller's urgency, not the assets' true value.

Content is king, but distribution is the kingdom.

We are not in the business of creating content for content's sake. We are in the business of creating content that people love and that sustains a business.

The most important thing for us is to get to profitability in streaming. We are laser-focused on that.

We have the best broadband network in the country, and we intend to keep it that way. Everything else we build sits on top of that foundation.

This combination creates a strong, well-positioned media company with the assets, resources, and scale to be a global competitor.

Crown is not just a casino. It is a destination. People come to eat, to sleep, to be entertained. Gaming is just one part of it.

I don't give up on anything. I just change tactics.

Litigation is not a last resort for me. It is a business strategy. If someone owes you money, you fight for it.

The best companies are run for the long term. Not for the quarter, not for the year, but for generations.

European football's future belongs to the clubs that invest. Standing still is not an option at the top level.

Content is king.

You cannot compete with Amazon by being Amazon. You compete by being something Amazon cannot be.

We've been building the most advanced networks in the world. And we're doing it at scale and with real financial discipline.

Consolidation is inevitable. The question is whether you're the consolidator or the consolidated.

We want to give in a way that is as impactful as possible. That means being willing to fund things that are hard to measure and that most people are ignoring.

In business, I have always looked for sustainable competitive advantages. In philanthropy, I look for the same thing — what intervention creates a lasting change in outcomes, not just a temporary improvement.

Conventional wisdom is usually wrong. If you do what everyone else is doing, you get what everyone else gets.

We fund institutions, not programs. Programs end. Institutions endure. If we are serious about systems change, we must be willing to build the organizations that will outlast us.

There is no separation between the business and the basketball. They are the same thing.

The best players and the best organizations anticipate — they are always two seconds ahead of everyone else. That is what creates the real competitive advantage.

Winning a Super Bowl is the goal. It has always been the goal. Everything we invest in this organization is toward that end.

A new stadium is not a luxury. It is a necessity if we want to compete at the highest level of professional football.

We are not here to be interesting. We are here to win. And we are going to do whatever it takes to get there.

Better not bigger. That is our strategy. We are focused on improving the quality of our revenue and delivering excellent returns to our shareowners.

Poe is not about picking a winner in the AI race. It is about giving users the best experience no matter which model delivers it.

We turned down Google's acquisition offer because we believed Yelp could be worth more to the world as an independent company.

The incumbents in telecoms were not positioned to move fast. They had everything to lose by competing with themselves.

We didn't win because we had the best technology. We won because we made our customers successful.

Transitions are either your greatest risk or your greatest opportunity. You choose which one it is.

If you can't explain what your company does in two sentences, you've got a real problem.

The most dangerous thing in business is to be right for the wrong reasons — or to win the battle and lose the war.

Yahoo was spreading itself like peanut butter across every possible product. Thinly spread, no depth anywhere. That is a recipe for mediocrity at scale.

Companies that try to dodge regulators don't build lasting businesses. The ones that engage — even when it is painful — build moats.

We built Kraken to survive the long game. Not to win the quarter.

I built the audience before I built the product. That is the only reason the launch worked.

The geopolitics of energy is really the geopolitics of the next hundred years. Whoever controls the supply chains controls the alliances.

I have always believed that the greatest risk in this business is not drilling a dry hole. It is failing to lease the land before someone else does.

Whoever gets the land first, wins. Everything else in this business is secondary.

Competition is healthy. It sharpens your instincts and forces you to become better at what you do.

Copper is going to be one of the most critical metals for the energy transition. We are positioning Rio Tinto to benefit from that long-term trend.

Our focus is on value, not volume. We want to be the best mining company, not the biggest.

A strong balance sheet is not a sign of timidity. It is what allows us to invest through the cycle when others cannot.

The demerger of South32 is about creating two strong, focused companies rather than one complex one. Simplicity creates value.

Copper is the metal of the energy transition. The world simply does not have enough of it to meet what electrification demands, and that gap is going to grow.

We exited petroleum because we believe the long-term risk-return profile no longer supports holding those assets in a diversified mining portfolio.

We are not trying to be the biggest bank. We are trying to be the best bank for the communities we serve.

The mathematics of gambling are simple. The mathematics of building a sustainable business around gambling are considerably harder.

Independence is the foundation of everything we do at Heineken. Once you lose it, you cannot buy it back.

Growth means nothing if it costs you the thing that made you great in the first place.

The Shoppers acquisition was not about adding scale for its own sake. It was about where Canadians were going to go for healthcare. We needed to be there, and we needed to be there first.

Family businesses that last generations do so because they think in generations. The public market thinks in quarters. We try to run this company on the longer clock.

We are long-term in the life science operations, which means that at the same time we invest forward and streamline.

What the crisis will bring to us is something very different, which is the power of one for real.

Share prices go up because the sector grows. So if I think this sector is going to be good in the next 10 years, then I will just invest in it.

We wanted to control the whole chain, from the plantation to the bottle on the shelf.

In this business, the license is the asset. The building is just concrete.

It's much better to go into a new business with men who are extremely smart but don't know a damn thing about it. There are no prejudices that way. We start with a clean slate and build everything from the foundation.

I don't think that a business is a product like any other. Not everything is for sale.

Our role is to invent the desire of tomorrow that they don't even know that they have today.

When you negotiate, you always have to put yourself in the other person's shoes and understand what they really want.

The size of the market is the single biggest determinant of a venture-scale outcome.

Building products has become easier and cheaper, but building brands is harder than ever.

I'm not trying to sell a project. I'm trying to sell a relationship.

It allows us to reach a billion dollars in a short time, so that you are just an order of magnitude away from the big players.

You have to be willing to cannibalize your own business before someone else does it for you.

At the end of the day, we are all product companies. We all solve a problem. And if you don't understand your product, it's very hard to build a great business around it.

Let's make sure that we have great products, and we stitch them so that they work better together.

You don't have a malware problem, you have an adversary problem.

Anyone can buy active ingredients. We decided to make our own.

If you control the raw material, you control your destiny.

The next billion customers are in Africa and Asia, not Silicon Valley.

We're big enough to look for oil anywhere, but small enough to act fast. We don't have to go through five layers of executives to find a vice president on vacation in the Bahamas to get a decision.

Our view is that we're in the business to create long-term value. Long-term is not 6 months. Long-term also isn't squeezing all the value out of an asset in its first 3 years.

We will need a strong balance sheet that allows us to withstand adversity, while continuing to invest in the future.

You need to define realistic targets. If you define the wrong medium-term targets, you create the wrong tensions in the organization and you create the wrong revenues and profits.

We make investments in companies that aren't performing all that well. The biggest impact we're having is we're lighting a fire under a management team to do more faster than they would have otherwise done.

We should go after good companies with good boards and good managements because we'll have a better chance of getting them to buy into our ideas and then get it done.

What we do is we try to bring out the full value of a company.

The only rule that works is the one that says no rule always works.

all-in bets

The last thing that we think about at KKR in this kind of a rising rate environment is we sit on $115 billion of dry powder across the firm.

If you have $118 billion of cash in your pocket and nobody can take it away from you when things get cheaper, that's called a good day.

Our people and connected culture are at the heart of value creation.

Being able to connect that local team with our global franchise is critical.

As thematic investors, we start our work by being students of our sectors.

The other part of the market is a much more customized and specialized part, which entails sourcing and trying to create opportunities where they might not already exist.

We chose to stay private to keep our strategic flexibility as we expand overseas.

Have the market tell you what they think is a fair valuation.

Super apps don't get built by offering multiple services at the start. They get built by cracking the core service first and then adding other adjacencies based on customer need, ability to execute and competition.

We narrowed down on sectors to do only tech and consumer. So, no infrastructure, manufacturing and real estate. And a bias towards early stage investing.

Pick a big enough market and a great enough founder, and time does most of the work for you.

I would rather own a real piece of a few companies I understand deeply than a little bit of everything.

A good chess player usually knows and accepts the fact that he himself is a chess piece in a bigger game.

Patience with strategy, but stay aggressive in execution.

Business is an infinite game. The point is not to win once and stop, but to keep playing.

Hua Xing is not a relationship business. We do not make money by making friends. We are a product business, and our product is a rock-solid financial advisory and private financing offering.

I remain fully committed to the process I've come to call Englishnization, making English the language in which we do business. I do this because I am convinced it is the best thing I can do both for Rakuten and for Japan.

Do not build one product. Build an ecosystem where every service makes the others stronger.

Mistletoe is not just a fund. It is a collective of people who help each other build.

The best startups and the biggest corporations should be connected, not kept apart.

The world is changing so fast that the traditional growth formulas are not working anymore.

The future for us is outside Korea. A market of fifty million people is not enough.

Even when you are number one, you have to think and fight like a challenger.

Do not be afraid to invest outside your own country. Growth does not stop at the border.

We didn't define ourselves by Southeast Asia.

We defined ourselves as a top VC in emerging startup ecosystems.

I'd say that 30% to 40% of our portfolio we bought from other investors on the cap table.

Today, I believe that 40% to 50% of our investments are in Indonesia, and they are growing.

As we look ahead to the new year and drive towards profitable growth, I am confident that we can cement our position as our country's leading tech company for many years to come.

The challenge is always to find the balance between tradition and modern business practices.

Opportunity is only for the people who are ready.

When you focus too much on competitors, you become more like them.

We run a concentrated portfolio. A few big bets, not a hundred small ones.

We would rather own a few networks we deeply believe in than a hundred we do not.

We do not just buy tokens. We buy them and then go help run the network.

The real risk in crypto is not a price drop. It is backing a network nobody ends up using.

Being early and surviving the swings is the price of catching something before everyone believes.

We do not passively hold. We play, we stake, and we help the network work.

Poker did not teach me to gamble. It taught me bankroll management. Do not go broke.

Every decision is a bet. Figure out the payoff and the odds before you make it.

I would never, as a hedge fund investor, invest in a blackjack player. But I've made a lot of money investing in casinos.

It's more about following the trends of entrepreneurs than it is unilaterally trying to decide what's interesting. As an investor, your job is to shift your attention to find it.

We wanted to slow the pace down quite a bit relative to what was in vogue at the time.