Why Listen To This?
- Ravi is a partner at Sequoia. Formerly, spent a decade in private equity at KKR before joining Instacart as their first CFO and COO.
Learnings
- ‘3 — Keep the main thing, the main thing.
- Get the main thing done first.
- If you juggle 2-3 things at the same time, most of the time, you value activity over progress on the main thing.
- ‘22 — Attributes of a good main thing:
- The business should have either:
- Good metric; or,
- The best people.
- The business should have either:
- ‘25 — The litmus tests for a good main thing:
- It should be obvious.
- An exercise put forward by Joseph Campbell:
- Take seven stones and stand at the edge of a cave.
- View each stone as something that matters to you.
- Throw them one by one until you have one remaining.
- That is the most important thing for you.
- ‘47 — What does Ravi look for in a company?
- Look for companies that are early and inevitable.
- Stripe → Focused on increasing the GDP of the internet.
- Inevitability ≠ Imminent. Have patience.
- The management should understand the business in real detail.
- Look for companies that are early and inevitable.
