This is my two-hundred-eighteenth weekly reflection or update.

Last week, I changed my weekly reflection to a weekly update on a current project. For more on why I made this change, see here.

Current Personal Project: Reading Books about Entrepreneurs and Sharing What I Learned from Them via Blog Posts and Audio Recordings Distributed as a Podcast

Metrics (since 4/1/24):

• Total audio recordings published: 42 (+8)
• Total blog posts published: 62 (+7)

What I completed this week (a holiday week):

• Read autobiographies of Ed Thorp and Sumner Redstone (see here and here)
• Published eight recordings—one was a bonus episode on Ed Thorp (#40 Ed Thorp Part 4)
• Had four additional feedback sessions—I missed my target by one
• Compiled and sorted feedback from five sessions completed the week of 5/20/24
• Tested Google NotebookLM
• Evaluated a candidate for extracting my highlights from books
• Updated podcast titles—added series number (e.g., “Part 2”) and other tweaks
• Researched metrics for podcasts

Content:

• Audio content changes: I now include the series number, how I discovered the book, an intro including what the recording will be about, more context throughout, personal insights and takeaways, and a closing.
• The average recording length increased from roughly 5 minutes to 12 minutes
• My current goal for each book is a three-part series

What I’ll do next week:

• Read two biographies or autobiographies
• Write seven blog posts and record seven audio blogs
• Adjust podcast titles
• Compile feedback from sessions completed the week of 5/29/24 and identify insights
• Make changes to audio content based on feedback
• Complete five feedback sessions
• Identify two people to study who has successfully shared book insights via solo podcasts or YouTube channels (the books can’t be about entrepreneurs)
• Make a decision on whether to use Amazon affiliate links for books
• Crystallize, in writing, my “why” for doing this project

Asks:

• Listen to my most recent audio recordings and provide feedback on how I can improve them. The more candid the better! Email me at hello [at] jermainebrown.org.

This week was hard. In my post tomorrow, I’ll share more about what I struggled with and what I learned.

Week two hundred eighteen was another week of learning. Looking forward to next week!

FYI: I’m still playing with the format for this weekly update. I’ll add and remove stuff until I settle on a format I like.

Prefer listening? Catch audio versions of these blog posts, with more context added, on Apple Podcasts here or Spotify here!

I’ve read two-thirds of Sumner Redstone’s autobiography, A Passion to Win. The intensity and drive that Sumner Redstone developed in his early life served him well when he transitioned from practicing law to being an entrepreneur.

Redstone joined his father’s company, eventually known as National Amusements, Inc. (NAI). His annual salary went from $100,000 as a lawyer to $5,000. The company was a drive-in movie theatre business, and Redstone rapidly expanded it. NAI was a smaller player with theatres outside urban areas. Getting allocation for popular films, or the right to play them as soon as they were released, was an issue that hampered the company’s growth. Redstone saw this as unfair. Wanting the right to show the most desirable movies just like his big-city competitors did, he pleaded his case to studios with no luck.

Refusing to lose and accept unfair business practices, he sued the studios in 1958. Redstone’s move was risky because he was suing his suppliers. It was a David-vs.-Goliath battle that other theatre owners refused to fight. If he lost, his suppliers could severely punish NAI for challenging entrenched business norms.

The studios gave in and settled, giving Redstone most of what he wanted. Winning this battle was pivotal for Redstone. It told him the legal system could help him change an industry that was set in its ways and level what he saw as an unfair playing field. Redstone had found his edge. He’d found a way to fight and win.

He used the law again to fight Disney over a practice of blind bidding. Movie companies made theatres pay large, guaranteed advances for the right to show a new movie though they couldn’t screen it to evaluate its quality. NAI lost $400,000 on one movie, a massive sum for the company, and Redstone sued Disney and other major movie companies for acting as an oligopoly. He wanted a fair marketplace with “asymmetry of information” eliminated; i.e., he wanted theatres to be able to evaluate the quality of movies before bidding for the right to show them. Disney settled with him, and over time the practice disappeared from the industry.

Redstone’s intensity, drive to win, and advanced understanding of the law made him a formidable opponent and a force to reckon with. His hard-nosed strategies paved the way for NAI’s growth for the next twenty years. But not even Redstone could fight the change sweeping the entertainment industry in the 1970s and 1980s. Cable television was a Goliath like nothing he’d seen before, and he would have to devise a new strategy for NAI to continue growing and for him to continue winning.

Prefer listening? Catch audio versions of these blog posts, with more context added, on Apple Podcasts here or Spotify here!

Reading about John Malone’s journey with TCI and Sheila and Robert “Bob” Johnson’s BET journey led me to Sumner Redstone. Redstone’s Viacom purchased BET for $2.3 billion in stock in 2000. Malone received $850 million; Johnson, $1.4 billion. I wanted to understand the man behind this transaction, so I began reading his autobiography, A Passion to Win.

What immediately stood out to me were Redstone’s years before his business career and his intensity. Redstone’s father was a street-smart entrepreneur, and his mother was a homemaker who made education a priority and instilled the importance of diligence and concentration in her children. He said that his mother “was a constant driving force in my life, and though I often resented her presence, I could never challenge her.”

Redstone attended Boston Latin School, one of the most rigorous schools in Boston and the oldest existing school in the U.S. Redstone said that the “school demanded an obsessive, driving commitment to excellence from everyone. A passion to win.” He wrote that the “competition [at his school] was cruel, it seemed inhuman . . . . And it taught [students] to pursue excellence for the rest of [their] lives.” There Redstone “was first exposed to the idea that thinking, educated and disciplined people have the power within themselves to create a new and better world.”

Sumner did nothing but study. “Throughout high school I don’t remember eating,” he said. He graduated with the highest grade-point average in the school’s three-hundred-year history and was awarded a full scholarship to Harvard University.

As an undergraduate, Redstone was disappointed by Harvard. "There was no feeling of daily individual competition, no sense of intensity, no battle of intellects." He said, “I was disappointed; the rigor I expected from the educational world was nowhere present.” He promptly finished all the required coursework in a little over two years. During World War II, he joined the army, where he worked to break codes transmitted by the Japanese military.

Based in DC, he worked the graveyard shift for the army and attended Georgetown Law School during the day. His first year, he ranked first in his class. After he left the army, he was accepted to Harvard Law for his second year.

He took a coveted clerkship for a judge in San Francisco for a year and then worked as an attorney for the Department of Justice. There, he handled and argued “tax cases involving hundreds of millions of dollars.” He won seventeen straight cases. After five years, he joined a private practice.

At his firm, he did antitrust and tax work and eventually argued an important tax case before the Supreme Court. He won the case, cementing his reputation as a top tax attorney.

In 1954, he was six or seven years out of law school, about 30 years old, and making $100,000 a year, or roughly $1.1 million in 2024 dollars. He came to realize that “[w]hen you’re practicing law, it’s just a business. It’s not a crusade for humanity, it’s a business.” This realization led to his decision to quit and go into business for himself.

Redstone’s early years shaped who he became. He was an intense, driven person who enjoyed a battle. These characteristics fueled the building of a media empire.

Prefer listening? Catch audio versions of these blog posts, with more context added, on Apple Podcasts here or Spotify here!

I’ve finished rereading Ed Thorp’s autobiography, A Man for All Markets: From Las Vegas to Wall Street, How I Beat the Dealer and the Market.

My last two posts covered Thorp’s rise from living in a house with fourteen people to academia to founding the hedge fund Princeton Newport Partners (PNP). PNP turbocharged his life’s trajectory, but then it encountered problems it would never recover from.

Jay Regan, Thorp’s partner, ran the Princeton, New Jersey, office, while Thorp ran the Newport Beach, California, office. In late 1987, Rudy Giuliani, US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, was after Michael Milken and Robert Freedman. Regan was friends with both of them and did business with them through PNP’s Princeton office. The office was raided by federal authorities, and Regan and four other leaders in that office were charged with various crimes. They were convicted, but years later their convictions were reversed on appeal; all charges were eventually dropped. Authorities never questioned anyone at the Newport Beach office, and Thorp and his office weren’t aware of what allegedly was happening in Princeton. They learned the details from PNP’s lawyers and news reports. The ordeal resulted in PNP winding down.

After leaving PNP, Thorp reflected on his next steps. He had more money than he could spend and decided to optimize his time for travel, time with his wife and kids, and exploring interesting problems.

Thorp went through a “period of adjustment,” he said. He consulted for an institutional investor, which led to his uncovering Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme in 1991. He restarted his hedge fund operations with only four team members and focused narrowly on hedging Japanese warrants and investing in other hedge funds. In 1990, Ken Griffin was trading options and convertible bonds from his Harvard dorm room. Thorp recognized Griffin’s potential, shared PNP’s secrets with him, and became the first investor (i.e., limited partner) in Griffin’s new Citadel Investment Group. Thorp also came close to seeding David Shaw, founder of DE Shaw, the hedge fund that Jeff Bezos quit to start Amazon.com.  

In 1992, Thorp restarted his statistical arbitrage operations, choosing to manage a single large account for a large institution. In 1994, he launched Ridgeline Partners to manage his and others’ money. Between the two, he managed over $450 million (PNP’s peak had been $272 million). Thorp’s staff at PNP had been roughly eighty people across both offices. To run Ridgeline and the managed account, he had six people. He’d figured out how to run his new hedge fund in a way that suited the life he wanted to live.

In 2002, Thorp decided to wind down Ridgeline. More hedge funds were using statistical arbitrage strategies, which reduced the number of investable opportunities and thus his firm’s returns. More importantly, he wanted to have more time to enjoy his children and grandchildren and his wife. When she died of cancer in 2011, Thorp was thankful he’d prioritized time with her over making more money.

PNP’s demise was “traumatic” and likely destroyed future wealth in the billions for Thorp. Thorp wisely used that event to transition to the third phase of his life—one centered on spending time with people he cared about, not wealth accumulation. He continued to invest and solve interesting problems in a way that best served his new way of living. Thorp had created his ideal life.

Prefer listening? Catch audio versions of these blog posts, with more context added, on Apple Podcasts here or Spotify here!

I’ve reread two-thirds of Ed Thorp’s autobiography, A Man for All Markets: From Las Vegas to Wall Street, How I Beat the Dealer and the Market.

After profiting from playing blackjack and the royalties from his book detailing his card-counting system, Thorp lost money investing in the stock market. He decided to learn his way out of the problem and spent the summers of 1964 and 1965 reading books on economics, finance, and the markets—all while still losing money.

Thorp’s two summers of learning established a foundational understanding of markets, and he absorbed practical lessons about anchoring and other pitfalls. He eventually discovered a pamphlet describing common stock warrants. A warrant is a derivative security. It gives the owner the right to purchase a company’s stock during a specific time window at a specified price. It’s basically a call option issued by the company. Thorp realized that math could be used to value warrants and to offset any risk by hedging. Thorp had found his way to beat the stock market.

In the fall of 1965, Thorp joined the University of California Irvine’s Math Department, where he learned that economist Sheen T. Kassouf had written his PhD thesis on warrant valuation and hedging. Together, Kassouf and Thorp refined their methods, invested their own capital, and published what they learned in Beat the Market: A Scientific Stock Market System in 1966.

Additionally, Thorp devised a formula to identify the precise worth of a warrant, option, or convertible bond. This formula increased his returns, confidence, and investable opportunities. He began managing accounts for friends and coworkers, one of whom introduced him to a thirty-eight-year-old Warren Buffett. Buffett ran a $100 million hedge fund, Buffett Partnership, Ltd., and invested in warrants, too. Thorp decided to mirror Buffett’s partnership structure to simplify managing his $400,000 in assets in a single account.

Jay Regan read Beat the Market and cold-called Thorp. The two agreed to start a hedge fund based on Thorp’s methods. Thorp would manage the research team in Newport Beach, California, while Regan managed traders and back-office administration in Princeton, New Jersey.

Princeton Newport Partners (PNP) launched in November 1969 with $1.4 million in assets. Thorp split his time between PNP and his professorship. A decade later, PNP had $28.6 million in assets and achieved an average annual return of 14% after fees, far superior to the S&P 500’s average annual return of 4.6%. In the 1980s, PNP expanded to statistical arbitrage, a “fund of hedge funds,” and other strategies. At its peak in 1987, the firm managed $272 million. From 1979 to 1987, PNP generated average annual returns of 18.2% after fees; the S&P 500, 11.5%. PNP had no losing years or losing quarters.

Thorp was 55 years old and managing roughly 40 people at PNP full-time. He was making millions annually. His life had reached heights he’d never imagined because of his curiosity about the markets, love for math, and willingness to share what he learned with others (before PNP, at least).

The good times wouldn’t last forever.

Prefer listening? Catch audio versions of these blog posts, with more context added, on Apple Podcasts here or Spotify here!

Jim Simons’s biography mentioned another notable investor, Ed Thorp. I’d read Thorp’s biography, A Man for All Markets: From Las Vegas to Wall Street, How I Beat the Dealer and the Market, but I started reading it again.

This quote sums up Thorp’s life:

“In the abstract, life is a mixture of chance and choice. Chance can be thought of as the cards you are dealt in life. Choice is how you play them. I chose to investigate blackjack. As a result, chance offered me a new set of unexpected opportunities.”

Thorp was a college professor, started two quantitative hedge funds, and created a blackjack revolution. He’s ninety-one now and still doing chin-ups and push-ups.

Where he started, the distance he traveled, and his choices along the way are all notable.

He was born during the Depression to struggling parents. Ten relatives lived in his home, and he attended one of the worst-ranked high schools in his city. Seeing how the Depression and World War I had shaped his father’s future, he vowed to do better.

Thorp shrewdly recognized that he could use math and science to change his life if he ranked first in the state’s chemistry exam. He finished fourth but took the physics exam the next year and ranked first. He received a full scholarship to UC, Berkeley (and transferred to UCLA for financial and social reasons). His decision to focus on acing state exams did indeed change his life’s trajectory.

While working toward his master’s in physics and PhD in mathematics at UCLA, he wondered if math could improve the odds of winning at blackjack and roulette. While on a teaching assignment at MIT and with the help of Claude Shanon, the “father of information theory,” he proved that they could, in both games. He shared his blackjack findings in an academic paper and a bestselling book, sending armies of blackjack players to Las Vegas. His curiosity about gambling led to unexpected highs and lows. He was introduced to the underworld of Las Vegas and was nearly killed. But book royalties and gambling winnings gave him his first financial cushion.

Thorp reflected on the type of life he wanted to live. He didn’t want to live in casinos and deal with shady people. He wanted to follow his curiosity, solve math problems, and work with smart people. He became a professor at New Mexico State University and began investing his savings—but his investments lost money. He wondered if math could improve his odds as an investor. He began looking for a link between math and the market. His curiosity—about the stock market this time—would change the trajectory of his life . . . again.

Thorp was dealt a tough hand, but he was able to change his life through good decision-making. His curiosity and love for math led to breakthrough discoveries in gambling and to working with the brilliant Claude Shanon. His decision to share that knowledge led to more opportunities and improved his finances. By age 29, his life had drastically improved. His next decision would propel his life to unimaginable heights.

Prefer listening? Catch audio versions of these blog posts, with more context added, on Apple Podcasts here or Spotify here!

Entrepreneurs like hearing about the ups and downs of others’ journeys, so I’m sharing mine in this post. Here’s what I struggled with this week and what I learned:

What I struggled with:

• Reading two books and sharing lessons from them via my written blog and audio recordings distributed via a podcast was hard. Consistently doing all this at once is new, and it likely contributed to this week feeling like an uphill battle.
• Six feedback sessions confirmed what I already knew: my audio recordings aren’t great. The external feedback is helping me improve. It’s frustrating that I can’t improve these recordings as fast as I would like. It’s slow and gradual, and I need to accept that.

What I learned:

• Blog vs. podcast – My audio recordings had more total listens than my written blog posts had total views. It’s the same content but a different method of consumption. I created more new audio posts this week (19) than blog posts (7) because I was catching up on recordings. However, my written blog catalog contains more than 1,500 posts written in 4+ years, while I’ve posted 35 recordings in a little over a month. I’ll continue to monitor this to see if this trend continues. My gut tells me audio consumption resonates more with people, but the data will confirm this (or not) over time.
• Building in public – My post about my struggle to record audio consistently and how I overcame that struggle was mentioned most during my feedback sessions. Building in public isn’t something I’ve intentionally done before. This inspired my change from a weekly reflection post to a weekly update post. I view this as something with limited downside that could help others. There’s no reason to not give it a try.
• Internal vs. external feedback – Recording my posts every day and listening to those recordings are good daily feedback loops, but they aren’t enough. Getting external feedback in the feedback sessions added a different element. My internal feedback has been more tactically focused, while external feedback was more high level. To put it another way, internal feedback focused on how well I was marching, while external feedback focused on whether I was marching in the right direction. I need both perspectives going forward. As for frequency of feedback, daily is ideal for internal. Weekly or biweekly is probably ideal for external, but I’ll test to pinpoint this.
• Feedback sessions – I had six sessions focused on recordings related to lessons learned from books I read. Here are some clear takeaways:
  • Each recording included the date and title of my blog post. People couldn’t remember the titles or dates of the recordings they reviewed. I replaced the date with episode numbers. This made it easier to reference a recording and shortened the titles.
  • I’m focused on reps to establish my recording habit, so I’m reading blog posts verbatim. I limit each blog post to 500 words, which equals about 5 minutes of audio. Five minutes is too short. The lessons didn’t stick with people. I’m keeping my 500-word constraint but enhancing the recording so the lessons are clear. I’ll summarize what each blog is about in the opening, add more context and my insights throughout, and add an outro. I’m now aiming for 10 minutes max with these changes.
  • It isn’t clear to listeners how they can apply the lessons I learned from the books I read. Judgment (i.e., application of wisdom to their situation) isn’t something you can do for founders. They must do this on their own. I’m not sure what I’ll do to address this. I’m actively seeking suggestions on this one.
  • People want to hear more about the struggle or context of what the founder was going through when they learned the lesson I’m sharing.
  • What resonates with a listener depends on their stage and focus. Early-stage entrepreneurs, established entrepreneurs, and investors valued and sought out different things. Early-stage entrepreneurs are looking for tactical answers to current problems. Established entrepreneurs are looking for general ideas or concepts. Entrepreneurs is too broad a market. I need to think about what niche target audience I want to serve.

Those are my struggles and learnings from this week!

Prefer listening? Catch audio versions of these blog posts, with more context added, on Apple Podcasts here or Spotify here!

This is my two-hundred-seventeenth weekly reflection or update.

Lately, I haven’t gotten as much from my weekly reflection posts. I’ve consistently done them, so I want to keep that muscle memory but try something different. I’m going to test moving from a reflection to an update on a personal project I’m working on.

I like the update email format because writing about what I’ve done forces me to be real about my execution, and writing about what I plan to do adds accountability and forces me to course-correct every seven days. Keeping people in the loop and letting them know how they can help are benefits too. I figured that instead of sending out an email, I could do a blog post, and it would be equally as valuable.

Current Personal Project: Reading Books About Entrepreneurs and Sharing What I Learned from Them

What I completed this week:

• Read biographies of Robert ”Bob” Johnson and Jim Simons
• Recorded 19 audio posts: 12 catch-up recordings and 1 daily recording thereafter
• Adjusted schedule to post recordings in the morning to be more consistent
• Sought feedback on recordings. Had six feedback sessions
• Meet with a potential partner who may be able to help with extracting highlights from books

What I’ll do next week (holiday week):

• Read two biographies
• Write seven blog posts and record seven audio blogs
• Adjust recording titles and descriptions
• Compile feedback from sessions and identify insights
• Make changes to audio recordings based on feedback
• Complete five feedback sessions
• Test Google NotebookLM
• Explore audio-related metrics

Asks:

• Listen to my audio recordings and provide feedback on how I can improve them. The more candid the better! Email me at: hello [at] jermainebrown.org

Closing Thoughts:

• Since this project began, I’ve published 35 recordings. I’ve heard that most people never get past 20 recordings, so that’s encouraging.  
• My objective with this project is to share with entrepreneurs the wisdom I gain from the biographies I’m reading. The recording that was mentioned most in my feedback sessions was about my failure to establish my recording habit (listen here or read about it here). I wasn’t expecting this. It reminded me that talking about struggle and how people overcome it brings value to entrepreneurs. That was good to hear. I’ll try to do more posts sharing the ups and downs of this project’s journey.
• Finding content–market fit will be a journey. I’m thinking about what recording frequency and duration are best, crystallizing the target listener I want to offer value to (I’ll probably need to start with a niche), and finding the right balance of information, insights, etc. when recording.

Week two hundred seventeen was another week of learning. Looking forward to next week!

Prefer listening? Catch audio versions of these blog posts, with more context added, on Apple Podcasts here or Spotify here!

Now that I’ve read Gregory Zuckerman’s The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution, it’s clear to me that people were Jim Simons’s greatest asset.

Massive losses from investments based on Simons’s judgment were crushing in Renaissance Technologies’ first year or two. Simons was forced to clarify his mission. “I don’t want to have to worry about the market every minute. I want models that will make money while I sleep,” Simons said. “A pure system without humans interfering.”

Simons was brilliant but couldn’t build this system himself; he didn’t have the skills to build the models that would power it. He needed to recruit people who could. So, how did he find the right people for this seemingly impossible mission?

Spotting

When Simons was working at the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), peers noticed that he had a gift: “His ability to identify the most promising ideas of his colleagues was especially distinctive.”

“He was a terrific listener,” one person said. “It’s one thing to have good ideas; it’s another to recognize when others do . . . . If there was a pony in your pile of horse manure, he would find it.”

In short, Simons had an eye for great ideas. He recognized them even before the person with the idea realized what they had. Simons would leverage this strength in recruiting his team.

Talent Pools

After working at IDA and Stony Brook University, Simons maintained relationships with these organizations—shrewdly, given the exceptional mathematical abilities of their people. He kept his contacts up to date with what he was working on at RenTech and how things were going. He inquired about what others were working on and who seemed promising. He also acted as a conduit, connecting people who could help each other. He stayed top of mind at IDA and Stony Brook and kept a finger on the pulse of these organizations.  

Simons strategically assembled a team that could build the “pure system” he envisioned. He leveraged his natural strength in spotting great ideas and his relationships with organizations with talented mathematicians.

“He told one Stony Brook professor, Hershel Farkas, that he valued ‘killers,’ those with a single-minded focus who wouldn’t quit on a math problem until arriving at a solution.”

When Simons found someone with the rare combination of killer persistence, great ideas, and original thinking, he aggressively recruited them to RenTech.

It was a slow and winding journey, but it eventually paid off. Simons assembled a team that slowly created the model that would power a highly profitable trading system that didn’t require human intervention. RenTech’s outsize and consistent investment returns enabled Simons to build a personal fortune exceeding $30 billion. And he had control of his life and a company where he felt at home and could be himself.

Prefer listening? Catch audio versions of these blog posts, with more context added, on Apple Podcasts here or Spotify here!

I’m finishing up reading The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution by Gregory Zuckerman. The book gives readers insights into Jim Simons’s life and how he built Renaissance Technologies into a $130 billion investment firm.

As I shared yesterday, Simons racked up accomplishments early in his career. He was an Ivy League professor and started a manufacturing company in Colombia, among other things. When he started RenTech in 1978, Simons was forty. His success at RenTech was anything but up and to the right.

Simons knew that to succeed, he had to build an environment of original thinking and exploration and also one of collaboration and great ideas that could serve as a foundation for other people’s future ideas.

To do this, he recruited mathematicians, let them develop mathematical models, and gave them capital to trade using their models. Some worked for RenTech, and others Simons seeded as independent firms. He encouraged everyone associated with RenTech to collaborate and share learnings.

Simons closely monitored the models’ progress and returns. Some took several years to reach production and longer to become profitable. Simons merged the most promising models into a single model at his flagship Medallion fund. And once a model was incorporated into the fund’s model, it was part of RenTech’s core investment approach and something others could continually improve upon.

Navigating this journey was far from easy for Simons. He went through a divorce, two of his sons died in separate freak accidents, and he struggled with self-doubt. Professionally, he endured crushing losses at times. Some key employees and fund managers whom he’d seeded jumped ship. Simons pushed through.

In 1990, twelve years after launching, RenTech was finally on solid footing. A reliable statistical model that could generate above-average returns was in place. RenTech had only $30 million in assets but generated a pre-fee profit of $23 million that year (the year before, it was $0). Three years later, the firm had $122 million in assets and generated $66 million in pre-fee profits. By 1998, the firm had $1.1 billion in assets and generated $628 million in pre-fee profits.

Simons’s early career was characterized by rapid success and many accolades. Then he became a founder. Twelve years of pain followed before he saw consistent and accelerating results. Every founder’s journey is different, but Simons’s reminds us that sometimes things take longer than we planned: persistence is key. You have to stay in the game long enough to win!

Prefer listening? Catch audio versions of these blog posts, with more context added, on Apple Podcasts here or Spotify here!