Jon McNeill

This is before I knew about the signature Elon long silence.

It had to be at least 60, to the point where I was just about ready to ask him, are you still there?

And what I have now come to learn is that's his processing mode.

He shuts down all other sensory inputs, and he just lets the compute run while he's trying to figure.

He is.

You can say, go to think mode, and it'll take time.

That is the think harder button.

So he comes back on.

He says, you know what?

I think you're going to fit in here just fine.

You've proven to yourself and to me you can be useful.

So why don't you just join?

I knew.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, like I think your biggest job as an entrepreneur or as a leader is to like stack rank the problems that are constraining your business, stack rank them, and then pull the biggest problem off the top of the pile every day and work it.

And the first principle that I learned from a guy who was a mentor of mine, he taught me, he used to haul me down to the, like I had a software business, he would haul me down to the customer support teams and he'd say, just sit here on a chair and listen to these calls.

And his first principle that he kept saying to me was, I'm going to introduce you to the most powerful analytics you have as a leader.

Your two eyes and your two ears.

Use them because you will get insights so much faster than the data can get to you to give you insights.

And it was true.