Zach Dell

I'm almost 30.

So until about middle school, I was pretty in the dark.

But there are so many lessons that come to mind from watching him operate over the last couple decades.

I'll just name a few.

One thing that has always stood out to me has been the tenure of the top leaders across the company.

Dell has a lot of employees who have been at the company 10, 15, 25 years.

I've always really admired this, and I think it's really showed me how important it is to build a company around a mission, a vision, a strategy, and a culture that is really built for the long term.

And that's really the only way that you get these long-tenured leaders is you set the company up to be oriented around a 10, 20, 30-year vision.

Another thing I have learned from him is deep open-mindedness and the value of rigorously challenging your own ideas.

I don't know that he's ever talked about this publicly, and hopefully I don't get in trouble for doing so, but he's done something in the past, and I think probably still does it, that I think is just so cool, where he'll actually invite a sell-side analyst or an equity research analyst into board meetings every once in a

pitched the bear case on the company to the leadership team and kind of red team the business from an outside-in perspective, someone who's deep in the industry, studies the space intensely.

And the objective of that person is to come and highlight all the things that they might not be thinking about, that they might be struggling with.

And my dad told me he goes to the person, whoever it might be, and asks them, like, don't hold any punches, give us your best shot.

be as negative as you can.

And I think this concerted effort to constantly question the work that your team is doing and challenge the assumptions is super, super powerful.

And I think finally, above all, his genuine love for the game has just shown me the immense power of intrinsic motivation.

I mean, he wakes up every single day so excited to go solve the next big hard problem.

He's 30 years in.

He's still running towards problems, not away from them.

He's having a ton of fun doing it.