Rick Rubin & Intuition-Driven Building

`1:30:05`

businesses can go out of business. They do all the time. All of them do eventually basically, at some point. We take risks. We don't put ourselves at risk, is kind of how I like to think about this. So, I'm willing to take plenty of risks, but I'm not going to do something that's going to bet the farm unless we had to. And if I'm at the point where I have to, I feel like it's over already anyway, frankly. I'm not interested in betting the farm. It's just not even that fun. I'd rather just have the farm and then not have the farm. — So big margin of safety is the way you think about it. — Big margin of safety. — A lot of cash, high profit margins. You still pay attention to your costs. — Yeah. We pay attention to costs. — Yeah. Yeah. — When we talk about cutting costs, like we just... David wrote this great article about how getting off the cloud is going to save us something like ten million bucks and whatever it is. And a lot of people are like, "Why are you putting in all this effort to save ten million bucks?"

`1:30:50`

It's because it's our money, man. We don't have outside funding, and I don't want any outside funding. Everyone has wanted to give us money over the years. I don't want anyone's money. It's our money. We make money through our customers, through revenue. So we take very good care of that money, and we're careful with it, and we watch our costs. So again, if you want to stay in business, your only competition are your costs, which hopefully you want to stay in business. So these are the things that I'm paying attention to, and so I want to have margin. That's why we keep the company small. We don't spend money on marketing. We've spent some money on marketing over the years, but it's been a rounding error for 27 years. We don't waste money on stupid things. We just don't blow it on things. We just save it, keep it, and allow ourselves to make more mistakes elsewhere that we sort of enjoy trying and making.

`1:31:37`

And so, I would not want to run a grocery store. I don't want to run a 2% or 1% margin business. And what's always blown me away is how many companies in Silicon Valley who are in the software business lose gobs and gobs of money. It's like the most unbelievable thing for an industry like Silicon Valley to lose so much money on the highest margin product in history, software, with no costs, nothing. There's nothing to software. It's bits. There are some data costs, but it's called basically zero, all things considered. And there are still companies that are blowing billions, have never made a penny. They're big companies that you know of, just blowing money. It just blows my mind. It seems so incredibly irresponsible to me, but that's just me coming from a

`1:32:23`

small business entrepreneur mindset, I suppose. But I just don't get that world. — So the blubber, if we're going to use... — The blubber, let's get back to the blubber. — The blubber helps you stay in business. — Yeah, it's fat reserves. Like, you should have those. It's cool to have 6% body fat, but it's not a good thing to live that way for a long period of time. You need to have some... If you're stuck out in the wilderness for a while, you need to burn something, right? — You're dead. — So, we've lived through dot-com crash, 2008 stuff, COVID. We have fat on the bone. I think it's very important to have that and not just be at the bone. The other thing is that because we're an LLC, at the end of the year, whatever money is left over goes to the members, the unit holders, which are me, David, and then we have two other people on the cap table.

`1:33:11`

And then also, 10% of our profits go to our employees every year. And it's based on seniority. Or actually, that's the wrong... It's based on longevity, not seniority. The two aren't the same thing. However long you've been here. So every month you've been... You basically accrue units, up to ten years' worth of units. At that point, you've maxed out your units, and we distribute profits based on that. So, it's not based on which role you're in. It's not based on the salary or your title. If you've been here for ten years and you're a principal software engineer making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, your bonus, your profit-sharing bonus, is the same as someone on customer support who's maybe making 90 grand or a hundred grand, who's been here for 10 years.