Dalton & Michael: How future billionaires get sh*t done

Yeah. Paul Graham wrote this really famous blog post, believe called maker schedule manager schedule, where, you know, he said something that all of us have thought before, but he put it very succinctly and in great words. So if you haven't read it before, anyone out there on the Internet, you should read it. Just Google maker schedule, manager schedule. We can put a link in.

And he introduces the idea of the difference between how makers, I e programmers in his case, organize their time to be productive versus folks that are managers. Alright? And so it's great terminology. It's good stuff. Yes.

Let's start with the maker mode. You were a developer in your startup. I was a business guy in my startup. I think in many ways, this stuff came a little bit more natively to you. And I had to learn this stuff by, like, basically destroying the productivity of my cofounders. So how did you think about Maker's Mode as a founder?

Most companies are set up around a manager schedule where you have a day packed with meeting after meeting. And so if you're a programmer at a big company, you would have to you know, you'd have like an hour to program here and an hour to program there. And this is bad. This was not conducive to building things. Okay?

And so to just walk through my perspective as someone that, you know, was programming back in the day when I was a startup founder. When you're programming, the more of the program you can keep in your head at any one time, the the easier it is for you to know what's going on and have the context up here to make changes and fix bugs.

And it takes like an hour or two, cold, of looking at a program and figuring stuff out for it to get loaded into RAM, so to speak. Mhmm. And so if you're interrupted, like if you have to program in hour increments, man, are you gonna suck. Like, you constantly have to restart your state every time you program.

And so a great maker's schedule is something like an eight hour uninterrupted block of time. And his argument think he was also talking about this from the perspective of an artist or a musician. Like, you wanted to record an album or write music or if you wanted to write a book, the same deal. If you had to write a book in twenty minute increments, I think a lot of writers wouldn't love that.

Fair? Which is so much different than the business guy. Like I, you know, I was the business guy at my startup and you certainly can do email in twenty minute increments or hour increments. And so I remember having this conversation with Emmett where he said, Michael, imagine that I'm doing ridiculously complicated word problems and you're interrupting me in the middle of them.

And I was like, then it clicked. I was like, oh, well, I've had to do hard word pro like like, I went to school. I had to do that. Shit. That's what your day is like? Oh, one, that sounds a lot harder than writing emails. But two, I would hate to be interrupted. Like, that once he said that, it kinda clicked.

Before he said that, I just assumed, know, he's typing, I'm typing. Yeah, he's typing things. And.

I remember when I read the post, what resonated with me is I felt like my work day really began around five or 6PM. Isn't that weird? And that's because what that's when things would quiet down and I would stop getting email and the building I was working out of would quiet down. And that's where actually all the good programming happened was at the end of the day.

What was interesting was that for us we basically had to figure out how to build that in. I think in the beginning organically it happened because that was our sleep cycle. We were all living in an apartment together. But when we had more employees and we had an office, you know, we literally and this is something that I just noticed happened organically. Nothing got done before lunch.

Like getting to work was all about like getting in, answering your email, doing a couple of meeting. Like it was just no one who was writing code even wanted to start writing code before lunch because lunch was the big like f u in the middle of the day. And our whole trick was, one, how do we not serve a lunch that makes everyone go to sleep?

And two, how do we make that post lunch time free of everything? PG in some ways designed YC a little bit that way. Right? I think that's counterintuitive to a lot of founders. Like one, there aren't that many events. You don't have classes all day at YC. Like, you know, we try to take as little time as possible during your week so you can actually get shit done.

Two, there's a hard deadline, demo day. And three, I think people are often surprised like a good portion of YC is just asking you what are you gonna accomplish by demo day and then asking you every week, well did you do it? Yep. And it's you confronting the yes or no of that.

Like It turns out that like there's a lot of magic around that and he wanted to build as much maker time as possible in the program. I think in this kind of balance between maker mode and manager mode, what people should be trying to do is maximize their productivity when they're in that mode. Productivity when they're in that mode. Right? How do you maximize productivity?

So when I think about manager mode, for me, I always like to think about this like, okay. If I'm gonna be managing my time between my to do list, which is just another way of saying shit that's actually important to get done, meetings, email, and Slack, I always think that my to do list comes first.

Like whenever I'm being productive, I start at the to do list and I do everything there and then I check those things. Whenever I control it.

Versus if it's inbox driven, other people are in control of your time, which is watch out.

Horrible. Horrible. The second thing is around meetings. And like we talk about this a lot. Like, you're gonna have to have some meetings. I've seen a couple tricks but they can all be reduced down to write shit down. The worst thing is when you have to have another meeting because people didn't write the shit down from the first meeting.

Like like that is like when you know you've punched yourself in the face.

But like, I'm so shocked. It's like, no, I'm Again, me push you on that because you and I agree. But let me let me let's make this clear to the audience. What are we saying? What we mean is, say you and I are in a meeting and we agree on something. If neither of us writes it down, it's like it never happened. Never happened. It's like we just we we were, like, patting ourselves on the back.

What a great meeting. Right, Michael? No one writes it down. We're like, what do we talk about?

Even if I didn't think I needed it, oh, let's write down the agenda. Oh, let's write our notes where we decided. Oh, that would be great. Any other things that have made you productive as a manager? The number one thing.

that I do that I realized that a lot of the other successful founders did too was I had my analytics dashboard or whatever was important KPIs on the business up on my screen twenty four seven, and I would stare at it all the time. And I actually can memorize. I even this is even the case for YC, man. I don't even know if you know this, but, like, a lot of our internal stats, I have memorized. Yes.

It's because I stare at them all the time, and no one told me to do that. This is just a me thing. But I'm, like, obsessed with, like, the internal key KPIs for anything I'm working on. I'm just, like, an addict to look at that stuff.

I think that that is such what we see on the other side, and I completely agree with you. That was a huge thing. Especially for my second startup, that was a really huge thing. It's funny when you talk to a founder who knows their stats well, they just talk about their stats so differently. Know, like, man, like, first of all, they don't round off numbers to the nearest zero, you know.

But second of all, they know whether they're up or down 10% at any given time. Any given Whereas other founders is like, yeah, I think it was an up week.

And it's like, how do you not know? How do you not know if your revenue didn't like, went up this week? Like, how do you not know that? What are you what are you doing? Yeah. No. I I don't get it. I don't get when someone is like operating a business.

And it's like, what was our do we was our revenue last month?

But like the back keeper, they they give that to me at the end of the month. And it's like, what? Like Or people didn't know. I mean, for us it was you know, DAUs and it was like amount of video watched. But it's like everyone on the founding team knew when we had less traffic today than yesterday. Everyone. Right? Yeah.

Like just just like in like in their bones like.

I I think my last point on this manager schedule thing that I would just add is what I've learned that I did not appreciate when I was a founder is that the maker schedule vibe works for sales and talking to customers too.

And it's scheduling twenty minute blocks to talk to customers is not the same as an eight hour like like, even if it's not literally your programmer, using the maker's concept to apply to the things that are the main event of your startup at any one time. And for many folks that is sales. Yes. Yeah. You should be scheduling eight hour blocks.

Like if your if your your job as the cofounder is to be doing sales and it's like a couple of slivers in between other things on your schedule, I don't think that's gonna go well.

You know, it's interesting. I agree with you. It's basically this idea of get all of this stupid crap so productive that you can clear out that every founder can clear out a chunk of their time for them to make your schedule. And like some founders are gonna have to do more of this non development blocking tackling. Others are gonna have to do less of it. But I completely agree with you.

Like it's really hard to get anything at a high level done in twenty minute blocks. Let's talk though about the opposite of all these things. Right? So the premise of this chat is how future billionaires get shit done. Let's talk about what we see great founders not do. What what comes to mind, What are founders Look,.

I think the trickiest thing for everybody is social media. It's like social media is the black hole for time. Yes. And you know, we're all guilty of it too. Like, it's addictive. And so what's tricky is how to have a healthy relationship with social media. Yep. So that you aren't spending $24.

07 paying attention to who the main character on Twitter is that said something dumb, and everyone's, like, making fun of them. It's so hard not to do that constantly. And it's also not hard to think that, like, you are a startup founder and you're succeeding and you, like, did well.

But if I actually if like a like a hidden camera was shadowing you through the day it was like you just read Twitter all day. You know what I'm saying? Like imagine if there was like a hidden camera auditing what people actually did with a lot of their time. That's it. I think some people out there would be pretty embarrassed if there was a full clear eyed accounting of where their time went.

It's like, hey, Discord here, TechCrunch here, Twitter here, you know. Yeah. It's like how much time are you actually spending on not those things?

You know It's hard, man. I had a Twitter problem and you know, one of the things that I realized is that sometimes willpower isn't enough. You know, like what I did was I follow unfollowed everyone on Twitter and then I installed this like Chrome app that basically disables like three quarters of Twitter's features. And I was just you know, it was like this is an addictive thing.

I need a intervention. And that did it. Like that kinda killed my Twitter because it was just like, oh, well. And it was funny because for a while Twitter kept on trying to feed me interesting articles and interesting stuff but it wasn't they couldn't really do it because I was not following anyone. I wasn't really interacting with many tweets. And so eventually just like,.

it broke. But Yeah. I mean, I I uninstalled Facebook years ago, so I don't have it. I don't have notification turns on. I don't have the Twitter app installed on my phone. So again like everyone should do what works for them but people that actually are super productive do abnormal things to turn all this crap off. Yeah. Isn't that like, you have to, like Yes.

Aggressively be abnormal on protecting your time. Yes. Because if you don't, the world is gonna steal your time from you. It's gonna steal your energy from you. And, like, that's a bad trade off if you're a startup founder, man. Yeah. What a waste of time.

You know, it's funny. It's like it's almost like there are these two sets of tools. There's one set of tools that allow you to organize your time better and there's another set of tools that protect your time and yeah, effective people use both constantly. And I think ineffective people sometimes are mistaken and they think if I were just had a stronger will, I like needing tools is the problem.

Like, successful people are just have a stronger will. And that's like not true. It's like, no. Successful people reach for tools all the time. Like, successful people recognize their weaknesses and actually reach for tools. Now here's the one that comes up a lot. The collecting of mentors, advisors, weird credentials like advice, oh I went through three different accelerators and an idea lab.

Oh, my advisory board. I'm building my advisory board. Why do you think founders are attracted to that versus just building something and launching it? It smells like you're doing successful startup stuff. You're like part of a community.

of startup this and, you know, like, there's all this stuff you can do. And I'm not saying, like, it's all bad, but it it's it's a bottomless pit of time suck. Like, you could go so far deep in there.

You could be in that bottomless pit for years and be a startup founder that's never built a product and has never gotten a single customer because you just cycled in and out of various forms of startup mentorship. It's weird. It's it's like going to Hollywood and getting acting lessons. Yes.

And like you just you you're gonna like this acting lessons mode for like years and you're like, yeah, I'm an actor. And it's like you know what I'm saying? Like it feels like you're making progress. Right? But you're not. You know, I think a lot of it also has to do with founders being a little bit afraid and thinking these things derisk.

Well, I have an advisory board that's gonna derisk my startup, it's a bunch of smart people saying my idea is good. Or if I do a bunch of mentorship, it derisks my startup, I get a lot of advice. And I don't know. The thing we keep on saying over and over again is like the two things that ridiculously re de risk your startup. Three things. And we'll get to the third one in a second.

First one is talking to your customers. The second one is building and launching product. And it's like, God forbid you're doing anything more than you're doing those things, you are not taking the optimal de risk strategy. And then the last one, we see a lot of people trying to hedge their bets. So many people are trying to be like, well, I'm keeping grad school open. I've got a Google job offer.

I've got a Jane Street or whatever the new tech finance thing of the minute is and I'm talking to three friends about doing a startup. And like I'm kinda moving all those pieces down the board at the same time. And like we get asked questions like, okay, so how do I optimize this? I'm like, I don't I don't think you can be great at those four things at the same time.

Like, it's hard enough to be great at one of those things. But, like, once again, like, why should I like, why shouldn't I hedge, Dalton? Like, isn't the optimal move to hedge? Like, how do I know I'm making the right decision?

When you're taking a high risk life decision, lot you know, like we said again, like we said on these this video series a number of times, you're gonna look stupid and you're gonna take risk and there's a chance you're gonna be like, that was a huge mistake. And you wanna, like, barter with the universe. You wanna you wanna be like, come on. Can I can't I, like, derisk this?

Like, you wanna think that you can be smarter than the system to somehow give up nothing and have no downside and only have upside.

And the more you try barter downside.

Yeah. The more you wanna try to barter with the universe to be like, okay. First, I'll get a job at Google, and then I'll save money, and then I'll do, you know, I'll invest in crypto, and then I'll do like, you wanna, like, barter with the universe to have no risk. And I guess, like, I get where I feel I get where people are coming from. I just I'm not sure that's a real thing.

And I think it's being more real with yourself is like, yeah. I'm taking risks. Like, yeah. Quitting my job at Google is a risk. And this I may regret it, but I may not. And but I'm doing this with eyes wide open. And by actually putting my full heart into anything I do, whatever that is, including not quitting my job, that's how can you have regrets about that, being proud of the work you do?

I mean, is what I tell a lot of folks. I do a lot of office hours with people that are shutting down. I did one today. You It's like their final office hours because they're shutting down their startup. But I tend to tell people similar stuff, which is like, look, if you're proud of the job you did, if you had heart and you gave it your all, and you feel like you learned stuff, then great job.

You should view this as an affirmative experience.

You didn't feel like I'm.

proud of you. I'm proud of the job you did. I know you had your heart into this thing. And like, we'll get the next one.

You know? I think that that message has to be told because it is rewarding but founders have to be kind of reminded that they didn't fail. Like it's not like Or or let's just put it this way. It's not like failing a test that like a a basic math test that you study for. It's not like that. You try to do something that so few people in the world are successful at.

Failing is not really failing at all. It's.

like trying to be a pro athlete. Like, when you're really good in college and you try to go pro and you, like, make a team and then you get cut in the first year, like, that's still pretty awesome. Yeah. Like, still one Maybe one of the best thousand people on earth who could play basketball. Like Yeah.

And so it's like, you know, again, it would be great if you were number one in the world, but, like, people are gonna respect what you did. And you and if you if you're if you're proud in your heart of the work you did,.

then you will view this as a positive thing in your life. Know? Yeah. And I always tell the people who are hedging, I always say this the other side. You know, in our world, it's really competitive. And what happens if there's a team that's exactly as competent as you and they're not hedging? They're always gonna win. You know?

They're always gonna beat you. So how much better do you have to be than that team if you're splitting your resources two ways, three ways, four ways? Like So it's not even a good strategy even if you were trying to think strategically, unfortunately. No. So yeah. So there you go.

Those are some of the things that future billionaires do to get shit done and some of the things that they avoid as well. Great job, Bill. Sounds good. Thanks, man.