Ravi Gupta
speaker
157 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Ravi Gupta’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Now, like, I just want to figure out a bunch of stuff. That's why I come back to like, don't outsource your conviction. Don't do something because I think I believe something. Do something because you believe it. But go try to figure it out.
I think that the people that I respect the most, I heard one time that the Collisons, I remember who said this, but they said they listen with predatory curiosity. Think about that language. I really need to know what you're saying and why you're saying it. I think right now, people that are going to do great things are really willing to change and very much, very curious, very humble.
Shane Battier, former professional basketball player and a dear friend. He's very different than most people in that when he was growing up, he sort of knew he wanted to be an NBA player and was like working accordingly to do that from very young age. A lot of kids say that, but they're not serious about it.
I think Shane describes himself as like, I was like a professional basketball player from the time I was 10 years old. I went and did these things. I was working. I was working with a goal in mind. So he tells this story of there was a poster in his room and the poster in his room had basically like somewhere, somebody is out there working while you're not.
Somebody somewhere is out there practicing while you're not. And Shane would talk about how that haunted him. There was this ghost that was out there and it would make him work harder because it's like, gosh, if I take a break, there's somebody out there who's doing it.
So he tells this story and of course it like ends well because he plays in the NBA and he ends up being amazing and he has this 13 year career and it's like the value of hard work. But the thing that's so interesting is Shane met the ghost. When he played in the NBA, Kobe Bryant was that ghost. Kobe Bryant was working all the time. Kobe Bryant was born a month after Shane. It's crazy.
Grew up in Italy. He wasn't like around the corner in Michigan. There literally was someone on like the other side of the world working all the time. And then he like comes face to face with this guy and he was out of this world good. And that was how Shane had to ultimately measure himself.
As we think about this moment in what's happening, there is someone out there working right now to produce the magic that you promise to your customers. There is someone out there working on it, and they are working on it a lot. You're going to come face to face with them because your customer is going to decide at some point, do they want to work with you or do they want to work with them?
You got to approach that with joy. You got to approach like, I'm going to come face to face. I'm going to go earn the right to play against this person and I'm going to be amazing. And I'm going to go and take this opportunity because I'm given this chance. But that reminded me so much of this moment for a CEO or a leader or anything.
The ghost is out there and you get a chance to play against them, but you got to embrace it and you got to go do it because the ghost is good.
The post starts with this quote from Ayrton Senna, which is that this is a moment where you can actually pass a bunch of cars in front of you. And I think the reason that that creates the optimism for me is you are only limited at this moment by the scale of your ambition. This is something Ruloff asked a lot of founders, but like, what is the scale of your ambition?
This moment, you can go and pass 15 cars in front of you. And remember, you get to decide what race you're in. So if your company's worth $10 billion, this is a chance for you to be worth $100 billion. And if your company's worth $3 trillion, it's a chance for you to be worth $30 trillion.
And if your company's just getting started, you have a chance to beat people that you never thought you'd have a chance to beat. You get to choose the race you're in. So the reason that I think there's such an incredible optimistic moment here is there's going to be a bunch of change. None of us want to live in stasis. None of us want to be stuck where we are.
All of us want to have upward movement that comes from doing something great and like earning it. This is a moment where if you earn it, if you are willing to go and learn this stuff and go and just be committed to being excellent. The world is available to you in a way that it's never been before. You don't even need to hire a lot of people. Think about all the constraints that existed before.
If it's true that a 20-person company can do something that a 20-person company can never do before, It's so much easier to find 20 awesome people than it is to like run a 10,000 person org. That's so far away. You can do it faster. The thing for me is like for high agency, ambitious people, you've been given tools to like go enter a race you never knew possible. and to fucking win it.
That is so awesome. That is what I hope people get. It's not, yeah, sure, if you choose stasis, yeah, you might go into irrelevance. But if you choose optimism and you choose forward motion and you choose embracing this, there is no limit to what you can go and do. And that is the what a time to be alive thinking. That is the thing that makes you excited about your kids.
Oh my gosh, go back to what Sam said. Every person in a decade will be more capable than every person now. I mean, that's awesome. Now let's go get it.
Showing 141–157 of 157 · page 8 of 8
← Previous