Leadership Stories

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A collection of 1-minute examples of extraordinary leadership


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Lisa Su’s turnaround of AMD

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Lisa Su might be the most impressive CEO of the last decade.

When she took over as the CEO of AMD in 2014, they had 20 days of cash left. They had more than $2B in debt. They had just sold their headquarters and laid off a quarter of the company.

Their chips were four years behind Intel, who dominated all but the low-price end of the laptop market. They had only 2% of the server market.

The market cap had fallen to just $3B.

Su rallied the company around three principles:

  1. Create great products

  2. Deepen customer trust

  3. Simplify the company

She invested in R&D, and has grown it 4x over her tenure. She prioritized a new chip architecture called Zen which launched in 2017. By 2020 it was the fastest chip on the market.

She used the momentum to sign deals with Lenovo, Sony, Google, and Amazon. She acquired Xilinx for almost $50B.

Today AMD has grown to 33% share of the server chip market by revenue and gaining. Revenue is >$20B. Market cap is $240B.

The next prize is the AI chip market, where Su is competing head to head with her cousin, Jensen Huang.


Nat Friedman’s first 100 days as CEO of GitHub

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In 2018, Nat Friedman convinced Satya Nadella that Microsoft should buy GitHub for $7.5B. What was Friedman's first act as GitHub's new CEO?

Ship one thing.


On his first day, at 9am, he had meeting with his leadership team over Zoom. They were probably expecting a long term strategy, but instead he shared his screen and pulled up a GitHub repo where users could submit and vote on product feedback.

He said "we're going to pick one thing from this list, and fix it by the end of the day."

He initially got pushback that it wasn't possible. But ultimately they found something that would work, and they shipped it that day.

Then he said, we're going to do this again, every day, for the next 100 days.

What did this accomplish?

1. It built trust with their customers: "We needed to show the world we cared about developers, not that we care about Microsoft. If the first thing we did was add Skype integration, developers would have said 'we're not your priority'."

2. It built excitement internally about shipping: "Github was a company that had a little bit of stage fright about shipping, so when we broke that static friction it felt great."

3. It helped Friedman ramp up as leader: he quickly figured out which teams were standouts, where there was a lot of tech debt, which stuff they shipped was good and which was bad.

The big strategy (including becoming a leader in AI) would follow. But first, he shipped 100 things.


Jensen Huang’s unconventional management style at Nvidia

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The way that Jensen Huang runs Nvidia makes you question everything we think we know about how a company should operate. It is optimized for (1) attracting amazing people, (2) keeping the team as small as it can be, and (3) allowing information to travel as quickly as possible.

40 direct reports, no 1:1s

  • Believes that the flattest org is the most empowering one, and that starts with the top layer

  • Does not conduct 1:1s - everything happens in a group setting

  • Does not give career advice - "None of my management team is coming to me for career advice - they already made it, they're doing great"

No status reports, instead he "stochastically samples the system"

  • Doesn't use status updates because he believes they are too refined by the time they get to him. They are not ground truth anymore.

  • Instead, anyone in the company can email him their "top five things" with whatever is top of mind, and he will read it

  • Estimates he reads 100 of these everyone morning

Everyone has all the context, all the time

  • No meetings with just VPs or just Directors - anyone can join and contribute

  • "If you have a strategic direction, why tell just one person?"

  • "If there is something I don't like, I just say it publicly"

  • "I do a lot of reasoning out loud"


No formal planning cycles

  • No 5 year plan, no 1 year plan

  • Always re-evaluating based on changing business and market conditions (helpful when AI is developing at the pace that it is)


Howard Schultz’s founder’s touch at Starbucks

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Everyone loves to talk about how great the Starbucks mobile ordering business is/ It has driven phenomenal growth, and cash stored on cards is effectively an interest-free loan from customers.

However Howard Schultz says it almost killed the business. It destroyed their most important differentiator, which is the quality of the experience.

"𝘕𝘰𝘸, 𝘪𝘧 𝘸𝘦 𝘧𝘢𝘴𝘵 𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘸𝘢𝘳𝘥, 𝘪𝘵 𝘪𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘣𝘪𝘨𝘨𝘦𝘴𝘵 𝘈𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘴 𝘩𝘦𝘦𝘭 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘚𝘵𝘢𝘳𝘣𝘶𝘤𝘬𝘴. 𝘈𝘯𝘥 𝘪𝘵’𝘴 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘯 𝘢 𝘤𝘭𝘰𝘴𝘦 𝘴𝘦𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘥. 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘮𝘰𝘣𝘪𝘭𝘦 𝘢𝘱𝘱 𝘤𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘶𝘯𝘣𝘦𝘭𝘪𝘦𝘷𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘷𝘦𝘯𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘤𝘶𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘳𝘴. 𝘉𝘶𝘵 𝘳𝘦𝘮𝘦𝘮𝘣𝘦𝘳, 𝘸𝘦 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘢𝘯 𝘦𝘹𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘢𝘭 𝘣𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘥 ... 𝘐𝘵 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘣𝘦𝘨𝘪𝘯𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘰 𝘥𝘦𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘰𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘦 𝘢𝘵 𝘢 𝘳𝘢𝘱𝘪𝘥 𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘦, 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘳𝘥 𝘱𝘭𝘢𝘤𝘦 𝘦𝘹𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘦𝘯𝘴𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘮𝘶𝘯𝘪𝘵𝘺. 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘤𝘬 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘢𝘵 𝘳𝘦𝘤𝘰𝘳𝘥 𝘩𝘪𝘨𝘩, 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘱𝘢𝘯𝘺 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘪𝘯𝘷𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢𝘩𝘦𝘢𝘥 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘤𝘶𝘳𝘷𝘦, 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘱𝘢𝘺𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘵𝘰 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘷𝘦𝘭𝘰𝘤𝘪𝘵𝘺 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘮𝘰𝘣𝘪𝘭𝘦 𝘢𝘱𝘱 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘪𝘵 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘣𝘦𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘶𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘭 𝘪𝘵 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘵𝘰𝘰 𝘭𝘢𝘵𝘦."

This is where metrics break down. When launching the mobile app, every number screamed to do it. Every experiment you ran would have gotten rolled out. Because the deterioration of the business just happens too slowly to be able to measure in a conventional way.

It takes someone - almost always a founder - who deeply understand what the business actually is at its core to protect it and push against short term decision making.


Bom Kim’s last-minute decision to pull Coupang’s IPO

In 2012, Coupang was just a few weeks away from IPO. Founder Bom Kim was set to make hundreds of millions of dollars.

At the last minute, he decided to pull the IPO.

Up until that point, what they had been building was essentially the Groupon of South Korea. It was a group buying site that delivered discounts on other businesses.

But Kim decided what they actually needed to build was the Amazon of South Korea. An end-to-end e-commerce marketplace that vetted and ranked supply, held inventory, and directly managed warehousing and delivery.

We had to ask ourselves: was the platform we had built, were the services and experiences that we were providing for our customers, creating a 5% difference or were we creating the kind of world where customers' jaws would drop? If we wanted to provide something that really mattered to customers — 100 times better, exponentially better — we had to go through an enormous amount of change.

Kim also knew that this “enormous amount of change” would be very hard to do as a public company.

So he decided to stay private and build something extraordinary. Coupang today:

  • The #1 e-commerce platform in South Korea

  • $25B in annual revenue

  • 14M of the 22M households in Korea are members of their loyalty program

  • 99% of orders are delivered within 24 hours

In March 2021 they did IPO, this time at a $90B valuation.


Gwynn Shotwell is the perfect counterbalance to Elon Musk

Many people have written about how Elon Musk is able to get so much done. But they almost always miss one of the most important reasons: Gwynne Shotwell.

She is the president and COO of SpaceX, where she has worked for more than 20 years. This excerpt from Walter Isaacson's biography on Musk captures their relationship:

Musk does not naturally partner with people, either personally or professionally. At Zip2 and PayPal, he showed he could inspire, frighten, and sometime bully colleagues. But collegiality was not part of his skill set and deference not in his nature. He does not like to share power.

One of the few exceptions was his relationship with Gwynne Shotwell, who joined SpaceX in 2002 and eventually became its president. She has worked with Musk, sitting in a cubicle right next to his at SpaceX headquarters in Los Angeles, for more than twenty years, longer than anyone else.

Direct, sharp-spoken, and bold, she prides herself on being “mouthy” without crossing the line into disrespect, and she has the pleasant confidence of the high-school basketball player and cheerleading captain she once was. Her easygoing assertiveness allows her to speak honestly to Musk without rankling him and to push back against his excesses while not nannying him."

In other words, without Shotwell, we're not going to Mars.


Carol Tomé made UPS Better, not Bigger

UPS had promoted their CEOs from within for 100 years, many of them former truck drivers. And it was working, until it stopped.

In 2019, their stock had been flat for 6 years and the business was bogged down in complexity and bureaucracy.

They asked Carol Tomé to join, even though she had just retired after 18 years as CFO of Home Depot.

She accepted the job in late 2019, not realizing she would take over in the midst of the chaos caused by Covid:

"I’d planned to spend my first few months as CEO on a listening tour... Instead I found myself in a whirlwind of activity, working with the rest of the leadership team to push our way through the pandemic while also planning our future."

Her rallying cry is "Better, not Bigger”. A few examples of what this has meant, which have helped grow the business and lift the stock:

Focused the business - this included selling the freight business which was lower margin, as well as enabling execs to kill initiatives.

Cut bureaucracy - When Tomé joined there were 21 committees which had to approve idea and send them up to leadership. She killed these and created just 6 review boards in different areas which can approve projects on their own

Emphasized speed - she pulled up a project to expand 1-day shipping that was supposed to land in June 2021 to Oct 2020.