Hello, my warrior princesses:
I'm writing to tell you I'm here, still in the fight with the company. We've grown irresponsibly, and the truth is that I know we have six tough months ahead of us. However, if you ask me, I acknowledge the problem, and I also acknowledge our strength. It's nothing we haven't survived before, but it's annoying to know that we have some tough months ahead of us. All this of my own making.
I've been reading Poor Charlie's Almanack, which are the talks that Charlie Munger gave to different people. There are some incredible things in that book, and others, that I have to admit, I don't fully understand. He said that in life you had to "invert, always invert." The phrase seemed cryptic to me and I had a hard time understanding it. He also said that he wanted to know where he was going to die, so he never would go. I kept reading his speeches like a carnivore eating a salad until I finally understood what he meant. So I wanted to do an exercise here about the company and then a bit about our family and what I want for you.
For Veevart, I must think that we want a financially successful company. We want to have a compact company, full of people who feel challenged and are not afraid of work, people who want to grow beyond what they can be given, who are ambitious and know how to discern the traps that lie hidden between instant gratification and long-term gratification. We want our company to attract the best people, for people to aspire to work with us. We want to be a sales and marketing machine. We want our products to be recognized for their robustness, ease of use, and innovation. We want our customers to see us as partners, as much more than just vendors, that our implementations and our daily management of customers provide 10 times the value of what they paid. We want our city and our country to see us as architects of progress, as role models.
Now let's break this down, invert it, and look at what we would do to achieve those results:
We want to have a financially successful company - Invert: What to do to have an unsuccessful company in financial terms:
◉ Spend on unnecessary things
◉ Not measure expenses against profits
◉ Hire excessively without a clear ROI
◉ Not measure employee performance against what should be generated
◉ Not measure the performance of departments against what they should generate
◉ Let clients owe us a lot of money
◉ Borrow money long-term with high rates
◉ Acquire a lot of debt and not have a plan to pay off that debt
◉ Not having a budget and not following it monthly
◉ Rely on a single source of income
◉ Let the money sleep
◉ Not prepare for a possible crisis with cash reserves
◉ Not having financing options open when they are needed
We want to have a compact company, full of people who feel challenged and are not afraid of work, who want to grow beyond what they can be given, who are ambitious, and who know how to discern the traps between instant gratification and long-term gratification - Invert: What to do to have a large company of people who only work for money, who want easy things, who don't think about the future, about building themselves up, but about what they can have now.
◉ Hire excessively
◉ Don't be clear about what we're looking in people
◉ Hire and keep people who don't read, don't have interests, don't educate themselves
◉ Hire and keep people who are more interested in money than in building their skills and strengths
◉ Hire and keep people who complain without contributing
◉ Hire and keep people who always seek public recognition instead of seeing that recognition in a job well done and in the impact of that work on others
◉ Don't anticipate that people will leave and then go out and hire the first person we find
◉ Hire and keep people who just want a job
◉ Pay poorly, the minimum
◉ Don't listen to our employees
◉ Don't demand more from our bosses, or escalate leadership problems
◉ Keep bad leaders
◉ Don't give employees the tools they need to build the culture they want for the company
◉ Don't be transparent
◉ Value titles over behavior
◉ Hire and keep people who don't understand that it's possible to do more by working less, and who don't sit down to think about how to do it
◉ Don't provide training to people who are going to do jobs they've never done before
◉ Don't build spaces for respite and relaxation
◉ Have an ugly office
◉ Hire and keep toxic people
◉ Hire and keep people who don't understand the value of work relationships, who are not interested in those friendships
◉ Don't build spaces for respite and relaxation
◉ Don't give clear feedback and focus on the negative aspects of people
◉ Fill people with work without caring about or respecting their personal time
◉ Don't put marketing effort into cultivating our values and the things we do well
◉ Work late and tired, without taking vacations
We want our company to attract the best people, for people to aspire to work with us - Invert: What to do so that no one knows about our company, that it is as if it does not exist, and that people run away when they hear our name:
◉ Do not provide a sense of purpose
◉ Fire or dismiss people in an inhumane way
◉ Don't have a good support structure
◉ Have a terrible onboarding process
◉ Hire only for skills without regard to the candidate's humanity
◉ Pay poorly, the minimum
◉ Don't listen to employees
◉ Don't give them the tools they need to build the culture they want for the company
◉ Value titles over behavior
◉ Don't demand more from our bosses, or escalate leadership problems
◉ Keep bad leaders
◉ Don't provide training to people who are going to do jobs they've never done before
◉ Have an ugly office
◉ Hire and keep toxic people
◉ Hire and keep people who don't understand the value of work relationships, who are not interested in those friendships
◉ Don't give clear feedback and focus on the negative aspects of people
◉ Fill people with work without caring about or respecting their personal time
◉ Don't have any contact with the community
◉ Don't contribute to the community
◉ Don't put marketing effort into cultivating our image in the place where we live
◉ Work late and tired, without taking vacations
We want to be a sales and marketing machine - Invert: What to do to always be worried about sales, not know where our leads come from, and not know if our positioning and message are correct.
◉ Don't educate ourselves in marketing and sales
◉ Don't keep an eye on the competition
◉ Don't know what our ICP (Ideal Client Profile) is
◉ Don't know the customers we want to work with
◉ Don't contact the customers we want to work with
◉ Don't think ahead, don't calculate what we need to do to see the results three months down the road
◉ Don't worry about the opportunities we create
◉ Don't instill trust in our communications
◉ Be egocentric and not focus on the needs of our customers
◉ Produce Marketing that does not educate
◉ Don't know our product
◉ Have our product team and our marketing team misaligned
◉ Have our product team and our website not know each othery
◉ Don't make our product team visible to the world
◉ Don't let the world know the value of our team
◉ Don't let the world know our commitment to our customers
◉ Don't let the world know our love for our work
◉ Put out boring videos and materials
We want our products to be recognized for their robustness, ease of use, and innovation - Invert: What to do to have failed products, full of bugs, difficult to use, and that do not fulfill the work they were created for,
◉ Don't listen to our customers - don't talk to them
◉ Don't understand the urgency of things
◉ Don't plan
◉ Don't go into detail
◉ Do super big and super long projects that never get off the ground
◉ Don't work on technical debt
◉ Don't worry about bugs
◉ Don't keep an eye on the competition
◉ Don't worry about how our product is used
◉ Don't count clicks
◉ Don’t worry about crowded interfaces
◉ Don't keep track of how much time is spent on each development
◉ Don't know how much each product produces
◉ Don't know how each product is sold
◉ Don't be disciplined with sprints and releases
◉ Work late and tired, without taking vacations
◉ Have bad designs that are done quickly and without research
◉ Don't be aware of the workarounds that customers and other teams in the company do to do things that the product should do by default
We want our customers to see us as partners, as much more than just vendors, that our implementations and our daily management of our customers provide 10 times the value of what they paid - Invert: How to make our customers hate us:
◉ Don't listen to our customers
◉ Don't understand the urgency of things
◉ Don't analyze and do things just to get them done
◉ Don't go into detail
◉ Don't worry about how our product is used and fix everything with workarounds
◉ Work late and tired, without taking vacations
◉ Don't worry about building relationships or seeing the human side of the customer
◉ Be dishonest
◉ Make the same mistakes over and over again
◉ Don't keep our promises
◉ Don't understand the value of our time and communicate to the customer the value of what we do
◉ Ignore our KPIs
◉ Don't communicate to the product team what both our customers and us need
◉ Don't genuinely care about our customers
◉ Don't know their goals
◉ Don't take ownership of their goals and help them achieve them
We want our city and our country to see us as architects of progress, as role models - Invert: How to make sure that neither our city nor our country knows anything about us:
◉ Be indolent
◉ Don't let the world know the value of our team
◉ Don't let the world know our love for our work
◉ Put out boring videos and materials
◉ Don't do marketing with the things we do with the community
◉ Don't take the time to think about what we can do for our community, our city, and our country
July 7, 2024
Hello my happy warriors,
I hope you are well. Today I am arriving with you at the Athens airport to take you to Paros. I will sleep there, and then return to your mother who will be waiting for me in Athens. We will spend a week there, half working, half visiting.
The "invert, always invert" exercise has been very useful to me, and I want to continue it thinking about you and on a personal level.
Let's say that on a personal level, I have been able to observe that everything has a cost. So let's say that having a lot of money can have a very high cost: for example, you can grow up capricious without understanding the importance of sacrifice. Maybe money gets to my head, and this makes me arrogant and costs me my family. And yet I do not deny that I want to have good money. Not infinite, but I want the net, to the family, to enter us $1.2 M annually. That is the goal I have set for myself by the time I am 50 years old. In order to enjoy $1.2 M annually, I have to make $2.4 million, since the government is going to take half. But that's my number. From then on, we can give everything to charities, and even then, so much of that money will go to various causes.
So inverting this, let's say the statement would be: what should I do to have a mediocre professional life, without major triumphs, that does not guarantee me a peaceful old age, that makes me continue to suffer for money from time to time, that makes us lose sleep for this cause frequently? To achieve this I must:
◉ Stop educating myself, not dedicate time to reading, and instead get lost on the internet, television, and other non contributing activities
◉ Not take responsibility for what happens to me
◉ Not make difficult decisions
◉ Take stupid and ill-calculated risks
◉ Not start new business ideas - not take risks
◉ Not push Veevart to give her best
◉ Sell the company badly and get a job
◉ Not invest our money, but leave it in a bank account without doing anything
◉ Not look for new companies or people who contribute to me and open my eyes to other realities and other games or businesses
Look, I have managed to avoid all the written points, except the last one. This is hard for me. It's not that I haven't tried, but it's difficult. However, I think I have to plan it. See how I can do it. I know that at that level, it is more giving than receiving. I have to see how I can contribute to people who can later, contribute to me.
Now let's examine my relationship with your mother, and how I would like it to be and continue. Your mother is not only my life partner, the person I chose to start a family with, but she is also my best friend. I want her to feel loved, to feel beautiful, and desired, to feel proud of what she does, and what she has achieved. I want her to feel free and not tied down. I want her to know that our bond is strong, that we are two trees that, as they have grown, have become intertwined but continue to grow upwards on their own and with their own directions.
The opposite would then be that she feels abandoned, and unappreciated; that she feels that she is tied down by the chains that marriage imposes, not because we really love each other and because we want to be together. For this, I would have to:
◉ Not have details with her
◉ Not tell her that I love her
◉ Not take time to be with her, despite work
◉ Not tell her anything
◉ Not encourage her to go out and have her own life, and her own friends
◉ Not let her see how much she has done and achieved
For you, Your Highnesses, I want happiness, the happiness that comes from work and a good book, I want you to have everything emotionally: the hug, the kiss, the responsibility, the scolding, and the occasional grounding that always tunes you up. You need all that to grow healthy. I want you to grow up big and strong, curious and ambitious, I want you to grow up readers, which is the less-known secret to success and happiness. Above all, I want you to do all this because you want to, because it comes from within. The world to come, the one you will face is full of distractions, and false information. I want you to have the super power of concentration. I want you to learn to know the human being, to admire its greatness, and to always be watching their pettiness, and their second intentions. I want you to have original ideas, ideas that come from you and the books you read, and not from stupid ideologies you saw on the internet or from your friends.
The opposite of this would be for you to grow lazy, silly, glued to a screen, not reading. It would be for you not to show curiosity, to not be studious, or athletic. For your friends to be “everything” and for you not to understand that achievements are the fruits of sacrifice and work. I want everything you do to be forced, for you to be innocent, and for you to be robbed of money when you grow up because you trusted everyone and didn’t verify how things get done. Wanting you to think like sheep, following everyone, with small lives, small salaries, and slaves to the life they were given and not the one they tamed or forged. For you not to write, which is the greatest source of knowledge because is where one builds the answers. For you not to know history because you have never read it, but for what comes out in the news to be gospel. For you to marry people without ambition, both professionally and humanely. For this then I must
◉ Not surround you with books
◉ Not read (because then you won’t have the example)
◉ Let you watch all the television you want
◉ Not teach you to work but give you all the money they ask for
◉ Not teach you what charity is, not take you to see the people you help
◉ Not put you to work from a young age
◉ Not make space for you to read and give you boring books that make you hate reading
◉ Not explain the reasons for things
◉ Not hug you, kiss you, or tell you I love you
◉ Not let you see us work
◉ Not celebrate your achievements
◉ Not teach you the sweet side of sacrifices
◉ Not encourage you to play sports
◉ Give you phones before the age of 15
◉ Not let you be children, play, and have time to have fun
◉ Not teach you that there is a time for everything
◉ Not teach you the dark side of human beings
◉ Not teach you the wonderful side of human beings
