💥 Ben’s secrets behind viral content
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What you need to know
💥 Ben’s secrets behind viral content
🎁 Delayed gratification leads to success
🪓 Lean toward cutting too much
👂🏻 Why are listening tours important?
Thanks to Jakob, Podup subscriber #12, for recommending this episode. Reply with your favourite episode for a chance to have this featured next week.
Reframe how you tell a story
Behind The Thread: E3: Ben Levy, Shaan Puri's Business Partner: How to go viral online & sta...
3 min read vs 54 mins listening
If you’re reading this, you probably know who Shaan Puri is. Host of My First Million and self proclaimed inventor of the two hour lunch break. If Shaan was Batman, Ben Levy would be Robin. Ben is a genius content creator in his own right. He sat down with Calum to share his secrets to going viral.
What they say
Ben answers how he’d start from scratch
I’d pick something that’s early and growing. I would start with ‘What am I interested in where there’s a ton of white space and there’s not great content? Do I believe there’s an opportunity to have a trusted voice in that space?’
I would try to figure out how to get interesting guests with interesting stories to pull clips from.
The Athletic’s best piece ever was the Kawhi Leonard story. They never even talked to Kawhi, they just talked to a bunch of people he played basketball with at San Diego State (where he went to school) to paint a story with a different view point.
Ben Levy
Calum references Shaan’s best takes
It goes back to what you were saying earlier about having a strong take - the internet rewards novelty, or doing something new.
One of the things Shaan did really well was the moment everyone loved Clubhouse, he had a new take on it.
Even in the metaverse, everyone’s thinking about VR and headsets, he had a new take.
What you’re saying now with the Kawhi angle, it’s a new way to communicate a story and that gets outsized rewards.
Calum Johnson
Ben uses a great analogy for going viral
There are ideas that clearly have a much greater shot of going viral.
There’s a movie that’s really old called Super Size Me and it’s about this guy who only ate McDonalds for 30 days.
That’s much more interesting than going ‘I’m going to make a health study on McDonalds.’ Nobody’s going to give a shit, but the way he framed that same problem applies to a lot of the way you do content.
Ben Levy
What I say
Why it matters: You may think ‘This doesn’t apply to me, I’m a developer / designer / product manager / any other role in business.’ You’d be wrong. If you can generate interest in a world full of noise, you’re a great storyteller. If you’re a great storyteller, you have a better chance of getting what you want. From fundraising to getting a promotion, from hiring to sales, you’ll have greater success if you adopt Ben’s storytelling recipe.
Between the lines: If you don’t live on Twitter, you may not have understood Calum’s reference to Shaan’s epic takes on Clubhouse and the metaverse. If that’s the case, enjoy!
Clubhouse take
So... everyone seems to think clubhouse is the "next big thing" - but I think it's going to fail.
Here's how I think it all goes down..
Metaverse take
Hot take: Everyone is wrong about the Metaverse.
here's my 3 part theory..
The marshmallow test
My First Million: Michael Sonnenfeldt: The Most Successful Real Estate Deal of All Time and Bui...
2 min read vs 1 hour 5 mins listening
Science is awesome. Every study is a block of knowledge that others can build on top of. It’s always fun to hear about an experiment in the 70s that still reverberates in its field 50 years later. This segment features one of them. It’s called the marshmallow test.
What they say
Michael breaks it down further
Have you heard about the Marshmallow test? It’s a very famous test that was done at Stanford.
They setup a table of twelve 3 or 4 year olds and put one marshmallow in front of each of the kids.
They said ‘I’m going to step out of the room. If you don’t touch the marshmallow while I’m gone, when I come back I’m going to give you another marshmallow.’
Only one or two of the kids could wait for the person for 20 minutes to come back. The rest just had to eat the marshmallow in front of them.
They tracked many kids who went through this. The very few who could delay gratification were more successful in school, in life, and in business by various measures over the next 30-50 years of their life.
When you’re an entrepreneur, you have to delay gratification because you’re putting money into your business.
The discipline of delayed gratification is at the core of entrepreneurial success.
Michael Sonnenfeldt
What I say
Why it matters: Delayed gratification often means you’re disciplined enough to focus on breaking the back of mission critical problems. This contrasts sharply to people who crave instant gratification. These people prioritise short term projects. This may work for 6-12 months, but an insatiable appetite for quick wins will kill a business over time.
Between the lines: Scientific studies can look identical to well-run experiments at a startup. They start with a well thought out question you’re trying to address. You’ll then include a thoughtful hypothesis, structured experiment, key things to measure, clear analysis, and disseminate your findings.
If you work in a growth team or are involved in growth in some shape or form, I’d suggest going on a reading spree of the most famous scientific experiments. It will get your gears turning and help you to better structure your future experiments.
Only the paranoid survive
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg: E83: Market slide continues, and how to addre...
3 min read vs 1 hour 49 mins listening
The All-In podcast has become a beacon of bad news. But, this bad news is a must read if you want your business to survive the next 12-24 months. This is another doomsday episode that I’d encourage all Podup readers to listen to.
What they say
How conservative should you be?
If a company doesn’t make cuts until it’s forced to, they never really lengthen their runway, and when they finally do make the cuts they go into a death spiral and die.
Founders really have to think about the asymmetry of the risk that they face. Let’s say that you cut too much and the environment is better than you think it’s going to be, well you can always hire back.
On the other hand, if you don’t cut enough and the situation is worse than you think, then you just die.
This is why Andy Grove said only the paranoid survive. You’ve got to think about the downside risk and be more skewed toward the bad scenario than the wishful thinking scenario.
David Sacks
What are the best startups doing?
We have all these decks flying around by venture capitalists telling founders to make these really tough decisions.
I remember posting about Layoffs.FYI. The number one company on that list, Getir, is a Sequoia company. Are they making a course correction? You bet your arse they are. They’re laying off 4,500 people, 15% of their workforce.
They’re making the tough decisions because that’s what leaders do, even in good businesses.
Brad Gerstner
What I say
Why it matters: It can be bleak reading, but if you’re going to apply anything from today, this should be it. Global supply chains and customer spending is only going to get worse. This is a call to arms for leaders to review spend on people and projects, then have the hard conversations about what is truly mission critical for the future of your business.
Between the lines: Layoffs.FYI is another example of a beautiful database business. All the data is either public or crowdsourced, so there’s nothing propriety or difficult to do. Layoffs.FYI doesn’t appear to be monetised in anyway. If you did this yourself, you could easily add a job board and paid ads on the newsletter to quickly hit your first $1M+ revenue. Food for thought!
The man behind Moderna
Masters of Scale: 110. Extraordinary leaps need solid foundations, part 1, w/Moderna CEO Stéphan...
3 min read vs 40 mins listening
Stéphane Bancel joined Moderna as CEO in 2011. In just over a decade, he grew the company into a $50B+ behemoth. He shaped the culture and processes that allowed the company to respond to Covid-19 with lightening speed and efficiency.
Before Moderna, Stéphane learned his trade at bioMérieux, a French biotech company with 6K+ employees at the time. He never expected to become CEO because the Chairman had told him he was way too young. Stéphane overcame the odds and won the job. Here’s the story behind his early career.
What they say
Stéphane’s first 60 days at bioMérieux
At first I’m very freaked out. I’m like ‘Shit, I don’t think I can do this job.‘
I spent the first 60 days going around the world talking to 150-200 leaders of the company.
I would ask them the same questions ‘Talk to me about your life and your family, talk to me about your department. What do you do in your country or your lab?’
I’d then ask them ‘If you were the CEO tomorrow, what are the two or three things you would do?’
As a leader, you need to spend a lot of time on the ground with people, so town halls and dinners with the leadership team.
As a leader you keep repeating the plan. There was priority 1, 2, 3 and 4. Not 50.
We started executing. The company did fantastic. We doubled the growth rate in the 5 years I was there compared to the 5 years before. The stock did very well.
Stéphane Bancel
What I say
Why it matters: The sad reality is a lot of folk will be out of a job in the coming months. Those who find new opportunities will do well to follow in Stéphane’s steps. A listening tour is a great way to assimilate yourself in a new company (or in a new role or department).
You can immerse yourself in the culture of a new team and quickly understand their biggest concerns. This helps you to navigate what path to take - what concerns do you tackle head on and how do you galvanise the team around this?
Between the lines: Two themes crop up in almost every successful business. The first is focus. But, this is more of an indicator of survival than success. A lack of focus is often the cause of death during a startup post-mortem. The second is asking the right questions. A curious mindset helps leaders to inspire teams, adopt a first principles approach, and test and learn faster.
Take Stéphane’s listening tour questions. At first, he set people at ease. He was personable and caring, breaking down any barriers you’d have when talking to your new CEO. When people were more relaxed, he set out to understand their biggest pain points and empowered them to think beyond the scope of their roles.
Note, these quotes were pulled at different points of the episode. Some sentences were left out to make the narrative clearer and more concise. Podup is not associated or affiliated with any podcast (unless otherwise stated). All roundups are independently written and do not imply any sponsorship or endorsement by the podcast.