Winston Weinberg

This I think is actually really, really important.

And the best deal makers I know are very good at this, which is there are certain deals where you want one thing from the deal and nothing else matters.

This only works when you understand the value of something

more than everyone else does.

And if you understand the value of something more than everyone else does, throw all of your principle deal making and you're supposed to negotiate X and then Y and then it'll be 50% in between and all of that, that's all bullshit.

Throw that aside and get the thing that you know is more valuable than anybody else does, done.

The best deal makers I know, like the best, they know that very well.

There's just certain deals that we've struck where I wanted one thing in the deal and maybe the financial part of the deal or something else about the deal, like my CFO or my VCs were like, oh my God, don't agree to that, like do X, Y, Z. And I knew that if we signed it and we got the particular thing that I wanted from that deal, it would help our company to such a degree that it would help close another deal.

or it helped do something else.

Like a lot of what you're doing, I think like the very good deal makers, and I think Sam Altman is incredible at this, is you're holding multiple ropes and you can kind of think of it as like you have like 17 ropes in this hand, you have 17 ropes in this hand, you're grabbing all these ropes.

And at some point you're going to get like pulled apart because it's just too much pressure and you're going to lose, right?

And what you do is you get good at tying off one of the ropes and then that pressure is gone and you have one tied.

And then you tie another one, and you tie another one, and you tie another one.

And tying those ropes allows you to pull more ropes.

And that's a lot of how I think about deal making.

I think another company that has done an incredible job of this is Microsoft.

Incredible job.

They've created this partnership ecosystem, right?

A lot of people have given them a lot of flack of like, why do you let people do XYZ partnership?

Why do you let people build on this?