My top 10 takeaways from some of the world’s greatest companies

Hello friends,

Last week, we published the longest piece in The Generalist’s history. This week we’re sharing one of our shortest.

Much of my work at The Generalist is inspired by a quest to unearth business wisdom. Why did one company supersede a better funded competitor? What strategic maneuver unlocked a step change in growth? How have cultural choices created unusual efficiency?

The only way to do that is to understand companies deeply. After spending 1.5 years studying some of the highest-performing businesses and crypto projects in the world, we can step a level up, and distill what we’ve learned.

The result is a piece outlining the ten lessons I’ve found most powerful to date, drawing inspiration from companies like Stripe, FTX, OpenSea, Tiger Global, Coupang, and others. To jump straight into lessons from the greats, just click the button below.

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10 LESSONS FROM GREAT BUSINESSES

Actionable insights

If you only have a couple of minutes to spare, here are ten lessons from great businesses that investors, operators, and founders should know.

1. Be a painfully persistent recruiter (Stripe)
2. Maximize deep work time (Levels)
3. Obsess over your customer (Coupang)
4. Align the incentives (AngelList)
5. Think like a nation-state (Terra)
6. Invest in soft-power (FTX)
7. Preserve optionality (OpenSea)
8. Intensify your advantages (Tiger Global)
9. Find your counter-positioning (Telegram)
10. Proactively reinvent yourself (Many)

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What makes a business great?

If there is a central, unifying question at the heart of The Generalist’s pieces, this is it. Where is the magic in this machine? What makes it special?

Since I went full-time as a writer, we’ve published deep dives on 50 businesses, touching on hundreds of others in the process. That has spanned mainstays like Red Bull, Starbucks, and LVMH to radical insurgents like OpenSea, Decentraland, FTX, and Terra. In total, we’ve published more than 585,000 words, the equivalent of half the Harry Potter series.

Output is only useful if it produces commensurate insight. What have we learned from writing a budding fantasy franchise’s worth of business analysis? What higher-order observations can we begin to make?

This piece is designed to answer these questions, pulling together the ten most impactful lessons I’ve learned from studying leading companies and crypto projects. They are more than theoretical – I have used many to improve my running of The Generalist. I expect to return to each of them many times in the years to come; I hope that they will be useful objects of reflection for you, too.

***

Be a painfully persistent recruiter (Stripe)

The Collisons’ business shines by converting complexity to simplicity. Stripe absorbs the scuff and tangle of payment infrastructure so that it can radiate clean technical primitives. It is fitting that the company’s founders also apply this talent in other domains. Perhaps most usefully, it plays a vital role in Stripe’s culture.

The best example of this is the firm’s approach to recruiting. Attracting exceptional people is a startup’s most important task outside of finding product-market fit. Much has been written on the tricks and tactics to secure top talent. What interview process produces optimal results? What perks are most persuasive?

All of these things matter. But, we can simplify. More than any particular stratagem or scheme, the most effective way to hire extraordinary people is to be so persistent it hurts. From The Generalist’s piece on Stripe:

Patrick notes that “the biggest thing we did differently...is just being ok to take a really long time to hire people.” It took the company six months to hire its first two employees. Describing their “painfully persistent” process of recruiting in his conversation with Lilly, Patrick noted that he could think of five employees that Stripe had taken three or more years to recruit.

Like Stripe itself, this maneuver is the sort of thing that sounds simple – like accepting payments online – but is deceptively tricky. Persistence and pestering are twins with scarcely a mark to distinguish them. The difference is articulation, tone. If you can find the right words, the right message, you can persist – if you fail, you pester. Attempting to thread this needle involves some jeopardy of one’s emotions (it does not feel nice to badger) and reputation. But how often do we stop right before we succeed? How often do we stop one ask too soon?

Though The Generalist does not have the prolific requirements of a high-growth startup, I have found the Collisons’ framing broadly applicable. When you see an exceptional opportunity, or find an extraordinary potential partner, find the words, find a way to be absurdly, painfully persistent. ​
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IN A MEME
​​For the pictorially inclined, here's the whole piece — all 3,000 words of it — in a single meme.

THE GENERALIST PODCAST

Over the past few months, I’ve been creating audio versions of some of The Generalist’s most popular pieces. If you’d like to listen to stories about Terra, Tiger Global, Coatue Management, Decentraland, and many more, just add our work on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. As I publish new pieces every Sunday, you can expect the audio version of those to pop up mid-week.

PUZZLER
​​​All guesses are welcome and clues are given to anyone that would like one. Just respond to this email for a hint.

First to find the shortcut in last week’s circular conundrum? Steven R. He was followed by a crew of decrypters including Parth B, David P, Deekshit B, Attison B, Nicholas P, Robert H, Kunal G, Krishna N, KI, and Ashmit P. All cracked the culinary code embedded in last week’s puzzler.

The answer? A donut. Yum. A number of readers provided fitting and rather metaphysical alternatives including Time, a circle, the infinity symbol, the sky, space, and the universe. I enjoyed them all.

It’s shaping up to be a busy week over here at Generalist HQ. We have a special piece dropping next Sunday that I think you will enjoy. Wishing you a lovely, relaxing Sunday.

See you soon,

Mario