Grit

Guest: David Heinemeier Hansson, CTO & co-owner of 37signals and creator of Ruby on Rails 

37signals CTO David Heinemeier Hansson has organized his life around his passions: Writing, racing sports cars, and coding. “ Why aren't we all doing that?” he wonders. “Why aren't we all trying to optimize our life in such a way that much of it is enjoyable?”

Part of the problem, David argues, is that it’s impossible to find a creative or productive flow inside of mainstream work culture. Open offices, managerial over-hiring, and sloppy scheduling prevents people from reaching a flow state.

“40 hours a week is plenty than most people,” he says. “... So many people today are focused on just adding more and more hours. They're not thinking about how those hours are spent.” 

Chapters:

• (01:19) - 24 Hours of Le Mans
• (06:48) - Amateurs in sports car racing
• (10:54) - Flow and meditation
• (15:25) - Mundane bulls**t
• (18:14) - Optimizing for flow
• (21:09) - Calendars and open offices
• (24:30) - Full-time managers
• (29:06) - Small companies
• (32:20) - Selfishness and work
• (40:21) - Taking other people’s money
• (45:43) - Temptation
• (49:49) - Moderately rich
• (55:19) - “The day I became a millionaire”
• (58:56) - The hassle
• (01:03:58) - Achieving the dream
• (01:08:34) - Shopify and Tobias Lütke
• (01:14:50) - Trade-offs and downsides
• (01:18:43) - The impact of Ruby on Rails
• (01:22:02) - “I love being wrong”
• (01:25:37) - DEI and illegal drugs
• (01:29:49) - Not hiring
• (01:30:35) - What “grit” means to David

On this special episode of Grit, we look back at some of the coolest stories and best advice our guests have shared in 2024.

Chapters:

• (00:49) - David Risher on his Amazon easter egg & moving on
• (07:02) - Jason Kilar on bouncing between relevance & irrelevance
• (15:13) - Eoghan McCabe on "re-founding" the company he started
• (22:59) - Mark Fields on battling with Trump & running to the fire
• (29:41) - John Hanke on intensity and balance
• (38:00) - Rony Abovitz on whether losing he's bitter about losing Magic Leap to COVID
• (47:42) - Mark McLaughlin on sacrificing personal time
• (57:39) - Taylor Francis on building culture

Guest: Larry Baer, CEO of the San Francisco Giants

In 1992, Larry Baer was part of the ownership group that bought the San Francisco Giants and successfully prevented the team from being moved to Tampa, Florida. Back then, they had a big problem to solve: An old, uncomfortable ballpark that voters wanted to see replaced, but didn’t want to pay for.

20 years after the construction and financial success of Candlestick Park’s replacement, Oracle Park, Baer — now the CEO of the Giants — embarked on an even bigger project, developing an entire neighborhood near Oracle called Mission Rock. “We’re in the baseball business, but really, we're in the media, entertainment, sports, real estate business,” he says. 

Chapters:

• (01:05) - Growing up a fan
• (04:37) - Larry’s dad
• (07:28) - Stopping the move
• (13:28) - The Giants in 1992
• (15:18) - “What am I doing here?”
• (19:31) - Hiring with urgency
• (23:34) - Last out to first pitch
• (27:45) - Buster Posey
• (30:13) - The Candlestick problem
• (36:36) - Making a new stadium
• (43:00) - Always hungry
• (45:01) - Becoming CEO
• (49:52) - Homegrown talent
• (52:55) - The Mission Rock neighborhood
• (57:27) - Revitalizing San Francisco
• (01:03:20) - “It all starts here”
• (01:07:20) - What Oracle Park means
• (01:09:52) - What “grit” means to Larry

Mentioned in this episode: Barry Bonds, Candlestick Park, Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, Juan Marichal, Josh Harris, Larry and Bob Tisch, CBS, Peter Magowan and Safeway, Charles Schwab, Don Fisher, Bill Hewlett, Arthur Rock, Charles Johnson, Harmon Burns, Bank of America, Walter Shorenstein, Dianne Feinstein, Bob Lurie, Bobby Bonds, Dennis Gilbert, Roger Craig, Al Rosen, Dusty Baker, Bob Quinn, Brian Sabean, George Steinbrenner, Bob Lillis, Matt Williams, Greg Johnson, the 1994 baseball strike, Chase Manhattan Bank, Warren Hellman, Jimmy Lee, Pacific Bell, Coca-Cola Company, J.T. Snow, Jeff Kent, Bill Neukom, Brandon Crawford, Brandon Belt, Tim Lincecum, Matt Cain, Madison Bumgarner, Sergio Romo, Hunter Pence, Marco Scutaro, Joseph Lacob and the Golden State Warriors, Tishman Speyer, Al Kelly, Ryan McInerney, Visa, Che Fico, Arsicault, Trick Dog and Josh Harris, the Chase Center, Sam Altman and Open AI, Anthropic, Daniel Lurie, Salesforce and Dreamforce, Imagine Dragons, Pink, the Moscone Center, and Billy Crystal. 

Links:

Connect with Larry

Guest: Tony Vinciquerra, outgoing CEO of Sony Pictures

Tony Vinciquerra never planned to get into the entertainment business, let alone to become one of the most powerful people in Hollywood. After seven years, he’s about to leave the CEO role at Sony Pictures (although he will stay on as chairman for one more year) and attributes much of his success to luck: “I’ve been in the right place at the right time a lot of times.” 

That said, he also encourages his children to proactively be curious, something that has served Tony well across his whole career. “I don’t have as deep an education as many of the people that [I] compete with,” he says. “So I try to make up for that by knowing what’s going on and being more curious ... working harder at it and being more — I don’t know what the right word is, but sucking more information in, all the time.”

Chapters:

• (00:54) - The perks of being a studio boss
• (03:38) - Hulu and Peter Chernin
• (06:41) - Fox Television
• (10:03) - Building relationships
• (13:37) - Not retiring
• (15:34) - Fixing Sony
• (23:29) - Intellectual property
• (26:58) - Juggling and baseball
• (29:30) - Setbacks and cable networks
• (34:58) - The WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes
• (37:22) - AI and replacing writers
• (39:46) - Adapting to new tech
• (44:38) - Changing consumer behavior
• (49:25) - Sports media and live TV
• (55:31) - Bad days
• (58:57) - Tony’s family
• (01:02:47) - Looking back
• (01:05:04) - Proactive curiosity
• (01:07:33) - What “grit” means to Tony

Mentioned in this episode: Jason Kilar and Warner Bros., Jeff Zucker, John Waldron and Goldman Sachs, FX, Drayton McLane, Netflix, Variety, PlayStation, Spider-Man, Tom Rothman, CBS and Paramount, Comcast and NBC, Disney, Mike Hopkins, Amazon Prime, Funimation, Crunchyroll, Breaking Bad, The Last of Us, HBO, Uncharted, WBZ-TV, the Game Show Network, Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy!, Joker: Folie à Deux, Miramax, Here, Tom Hanks, Venom: The Last Dance, Michael Ovitz, Sam Altman and OpenAI, Pixomondo, Neal Mohan and YouTube, Susan Wojcicki, DirecTV and AT&T, NFL Sunday Ticket, Qualcomm, the New York Knicks, the Golden State Warriors, Larry Baer and the San Francisco Giants, Major League Baseball, Walmart and Vizio, Madame Web, Capital Cities, Mark McLaughlin, and Mark Fields and Ford.

Links:

Connect with Joubin

Guest: Jeff Wilke, former CEO of Amazon Worldwide Consumer and chairman of Re:Build Manufacturing

Jeff Wilke worked more than 20 years at Amazon, overseeing the million-person team that speedily gets packages from warehouses to doorsteps. In hindsight, he observes that Amazon Prime’s exponential growth was actually an incremental daily process.

“I used to say things like, ‘If God was running this plant, whoever is your God ... they can’t violate physical laws. How well would they do?’ And then we know where we are,” Jeff says.

“If we’re perfect in it, compounding over all this time, we’re going to get there. But when you’re in the middle of it, it can feel almost impossible.” 

Chapters:

• (01:37) - Grit and longevity
• (02:24) - Flow state
• (07:29) - Refining mental models
• (12:29) - The ivory tower and the shop floor
• (16:49) - Gnarly holidays
• (20:41) - Identifying grit
• (24:28) - Reflecting and learning
• (27:36) - Christmas 2000
• (31:06) - The duplicate bug
• (34:01) - Incremental progress
• (38:36) - Prime Video
• (43:05) - Organizing the day
• (46:42) - Amazon’s leaders
• (49:55) - The Whole Foods acquisition
• (53:33) - Amazon Fashion
• (59:54) - The great Kindle battle
• (01:02:40) - How to work with Jeff Bezos
• (01:05:11) - Leaving Amazon
• (01:09:48) - Re:Build Manufacturing
• (01:14:35) - What “grit” means to Jeff