Founder interviews

Podcast

David Geffen: talent, ruthlessness, and the price of chasing money

Founders February 16, 2020

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Founder interviews 9

Bootstrapping 6

• Choosing money over passion built billions — and chronic misery
• Cap your downside: Geffen repeatedly made others absorb all losses
• Sociopaths sleep well; the only strategy is avoidance

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Business models

Podcast

Be a platform: building virtuous cycles for scale

Masters of Scale February 13, 2020

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Business models 9

Case studies 7

Culture building 5

• Open your business to third-party developers and watch everyone win together
• Shopify waited nine years before developers earned more than the platform itself
• Silicon Valley underestimated retail, giving Shopify years to build unnoticed

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SEO

YouTube

SEO fundamentals in 2020: content, backlinks, and indexation

Ahrefs February 12, 2020

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SEO 10

Content marketing 6

• Algorithm updates rarely affect the three fundamentals that actually drive rankings.
• Matching search intent — type, format, and angle — matters more than any tactic.
• A noindex tag or robots.txt block can silently kill all your SEO work.

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Prospecting & outreach

YouTube

Sales as a profession: process, listening, and repeatable results

Bill Gallagher February 12, 2020

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Prospecting & outreach 9

Closing techniques 8

Communication 6

• Gift of gab gets you into sales; process makes you good.
• Documented playbooks doubled conversion rates across three companies.
• Rapport is the result of great questions, not small talk.

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Case studies

Podcast

Henry Singleton: capital allocation genius behind Teledyne

Founders February 10, 2020

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Case studies 10

Bootstrapping 6

Long-term planning 6

• Bought 130 companies in a decade, then never bought another one
• Retired 90% of outstanding shares — shareholders gained 3,000%
• Buffett called his capital deployment record the best in American business

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