65 ideas from over 200 Colossus episodes this year:
1/ Work ethic eliminates fear. — Michael Jordan
2/ Only dead fish go with the flow. — David Ogilvy
3/ Scale is information, information is knowledge, and knowledge is power. — Michael Ovitz
4/ All great events hang by a single thread. The clever man takes advantage of everything and neglects nothing that may give him some added opportunity. The less clever man, by neglecting one thing, sometimes misses everything. — Napoleon
5/ Gentlemen, you have undertaken to cheat me. I won't sue you for the law is too slow. I'll ruin you. Yours truly, Cornelius Vanderbilt. — Vanderbilt
6/ Rolex watches are sold to people who climb mountains. Patek Philippe watches are sold to people who own mountains. — Patek Philippe
7/ As an investor, only two states exist: you're either humble or about to get run over. That's it. — Katie Koch
8/ Relentless is really hard to compete with. — Jay Bilas
9/ You won't conquer the oceans if you stay within sight of the shore. — Oliver Thomas
10/ The most important ingredient is the one that's left out. — Sean Feeney
11/ Find what feeds your passion. Align your personality with your purpose. Now, no one can touch you. — Oprah
12/ Life and business is a repeat game. — Ken Langone
13/ I don't wait for things to cross my desk. I go out and look for them. I made 250 calls a day. — Michael Ovitz
14/ Patek Philippe's greatest competition isn't Rolex. It's Patek Philippe from the past. — Patek Philippe
15/ We have evolved to walk and make stuff. If you don't do those things, problems tend to surface. — Tim Ferriss
16/ People perform to the degree of inspection, not expectation. — Dev Ittycheria
17/ The best leaders are exothermic. Every atom jiggles faster around them. There is no chance for stasis. — Tobi Lütke
18/ Even today, the CEO and CFO sleep in the same room when they travel. It sends a message from the top down that you should act as an owner of this business. — Fastenal
19/ When most people give presentations, they try to squeeze two megabytes of data into a pipe that carries 128 kilobytes. — Steve Jobs
20/ The best predictor of your mental and physical well-being, even how long you will live, is the quality of your five closest friends. — Robin Dunbar
21/ We got a letter in the mail from KFC rejecting us as franchisees. They said we had no money, no experience, and were too young. Other than that, they loved us. — Matt Perelman & Alex Sloane
22/ How many days of your life do you have a sense of calm, peacefulness, purpose, and are in a good place? To me, that's what really matters and the pursuit of more robs you of that. You can't take it with you. — Ric Elias
23/ Everything is a choice. I try to not let the world happen to me. It's taken a long time to get good at saying no, and it still feels painful, but I've gotten better at it. — Bret Taylor
24/ I will never build a purely digital business. They're too hard. Your failure rate is astronomical. I like things that are messy and complicated because the average person can't tolerate the pain. I like that barrier. — Adam Sandow
25/ It's too easy to be cool and hedge your bets, but true greatness requires being all in. — Glue Guys
26/ There are two error types in Venture Capital but only one of them matters—missing the big one is the whole game. — Bill Gurley
27/ Venture Capital is like taking the best Olympic athletes, giving them money, and saying 'See you at the Olympics.' That's crazy. — Dave Fontenot
28/ If people come at you with anything but love, remember, it's not about you. — Cyan Banister
29/ Marketing is our core competency. We're going to outsource everything else. Red Bull has no production facilities or warehouses. — Dietrich Mateschitz
30/ The market determines how big the company can get, and the people determine how big the company will get. — Pat Grady
31/ Rules are opportunities, not constraints. — Gabe Whaley
32/ As a leader, if you're not spending 90% of your time teaching, you're not doing your job. A business achieves long-term success by continuously replenishing leaders inside the organization. — Robert Kierlin
33/ Once you accept and embrace that you're not perfectly rational, that you are a little insecure, that you do have a little bit of an ego, then you can manage decisions around that reality rather than pretending they don't exist. — Morgan Housel
34/ If you don't stop repeating a mantra, you won't survive. — Haruki Murakami
35/ There are only two reasons companies behave well: because they want to and because they have to. Our preference is to invest in those that want to. — Nick Sleep
36/ I learned this from Schwarzman. People don't give money to the investors they think are going to make the most money, they allocate to people they like. — Eric Serrano
37/ Most investors are more willing to pay a lot of money for something with no problems than to pay the right amount of money for something with problems. — Ali Hamed
38/ If you want to get to the promised land, which is 100x on your investment, you need 20 to 30 years to do it. And if you can't get to 10x in 10 years, you have no chance to get to 100x in 20 to 30 years. — Mitch Rales
39/ The willingness of markets to continually put multiples on temporary surpluses is a constant source of confusion. — Modest Proposal
40/ Natural gas is this incredibly versatile little molecule... if you shut this off overnight, we're going to be fighting the next war with sticks and stones very quickly. — CNX Resources
41/ The trouble with this business is that everybody expects to find oil on the surface. If it were near the top, there wouldn't be any trick to it. You've got to drill deep for oil. There's essentially an inexhaustible supply of people who want to get the most for doing the least, and so in my own life, I want to get the most by doing the most. — Monty Moncrief
42/ A person can have the greatest idea in the world but if they can't convince enough other people, it doesn't matter. — Steve Jobs
43/ Every great creator is sharing their DNA and experiences with the world. Some spread it through art, some through music. For me, it's through product. — Ronnie Fieg
44/ The first rocket that went into orbit cost $1 million per kilogram. We're now talking about a rocket that might be commercially active in five years, which will cost $10 per kilogram. That's the same price the post office charges. Think of what is possible if space launches are as cost-competitive as the post office. — SpaceX
45/ Every time public markets and regulation fail to provide an adequate solution, private markets step in. — Armen Panossian
46/ The dirty secret about owning a sports team is you go into it assuming you're going to make money and then you find out that if you want to win, you've got to spend all the money. — Marc Lasry
47/ Japan today is basically what the U.S. market was in the 1980s. — Japan Activism
48/ My five-word business book for Japanese internet entrepreneurs is: please don't go to America. — Rakuten
49/ Where do you want me to spend my time as CEO; on a conference call with analysts or finding the next market? I've never met a shareholder who doesn't want me to spend my time on the business. So we don't do a lot of IR and no analyst calls. — Winmark
50/ You talk about the economy, you can write, you can have beautiful charts, you can wax away poetically, you can study stuff and post on Twitter...If you don't put capital at risk, I don't care. It just doesn't matter. — Eric Golden
51/ InterDigital's technology has been licensed to more than 7 billion devices over the last decade. For every iPhone that's sold, they get 60 cents. — InterDigital
52/ Vulcan has 400 quarries across 22 states. That gives them about 16 billion tons of aggregate reserves, or 60 years worth of supply. — Vulcan Materials
53/ I tried to hire a very senior researcher from Meta. They said, come back to me when you have 10,000 H100 GPUs. That would cost billions of dollars and take 5-10 years to get from Nvidia. — Aravind Srinivas
54/ Since the Mendelsons took over HEICO in 1990, sales have compounded annually at 15%, net income at 18%, and that's driven a 21% annual return in the share price. Not too shabby. — HEICO
55/ Accounting for the cost of failures and inflation, the pharmaceutical industry now spends about $2.5 billion per approved drug, compared to $40 million (in today's dollars) in 1953. — Alex Telford
56/ Patek Philippe sells around 70,000 watches annually and earns about $1.2 billion. But, interestingly, the secondary market for Patek watches does about $8 billion in turnover each year. — Patek Philippe
57/ In 2011, 3i invested ~£106 million into discount retailer, Action. It has since received back £2.9 billion, or 25 times what it put in, and the value of its investment today is £14 billion, a return of over 100 times the original investment. — 3i
58/ If the world wants to keep the Olympics, the most rational way to do it is to have one designated site to host the Summer Games every four years and another to host the Winter Games so we don't have to rebuild the entire Olympic infrastructure every time. — The Olympics
59/ Chase Coleman had a really interesting statistic. He said ChatGPT, which launched in 2022, was to AI as Netscape Navigator was to the internet in 1994. Less than 1% of current global internet market cap was founded in the 2 years after Netscape Navigator came out. — Gavin Baker
60/ Hans' vision is still being executed at Rolex on a daily basis despite the fact that he passed away more than half a century ago. How many people can you think of that build a world-class business and 50 years after they pass away, the company keeps going as if they were still running it? — Hans Wilsdorf, Rolex
61/ It's a literal rags to riches story, founded by circus performers in the Great Depression as a rag cleaning business. Today it is America's largest uniform rental business and its growth, profitability, and shareholder returns are among the highest in the S&P 500 over virtually any time period. — Cintas
62/ I was not willing to listen to other people's ideas. I wanted everything to be my way. I fought for many years to make sure no one could tell me what to do. — George Lucas
63/ Every advance in the complexity of the economy puts an added premium upon superior ability. — The Lessons of History
64/ Everybody just assumes you want to be part of a growing market, but there are different ways to go about it. Just look at AMETEK, TransDigm, HEICO, Motorola, or Axon. — Matt Reustle
65/ If you take the top five energy companies in the world and the top five technology companies, the tech names are spending twice as much on Capex today. — Michael Mauboussin