Embracing failure, what it takes, and who to hire

Welcome back to the Z Fellows newsletter! Every Monday we share 3 ideas - to help you build companies, ship products, and create your life's work.

1: Jeff Bezos on Embracing Failure

“Outsized returns often come from betting against conventional wisdom, and conventional wisdom is usually right. Given a ten percent chance of a one hundred times payoff, you should take that bet every time. But you’re still going to be wrong nine times out of ten.

We all know that if you swing for the fences, you’re going to strike out a lot, but you’re also going to hit some home runs. The difference between baseball and business, however, is that baseball has a truncated outcome distribution.

When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can get is four. In business, every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score one thousand runs. This long-tailed distribution of returns is why it’s so important to be bold. Big winners pay for so many experiments.”

— Jeff Bezos (2015 Shareholder Letters)

Source: Invent & Wander

2: Nick Rellas on what it takes to be successful:

“There’s no substitute for being the most knowledgeable about what you’re trying to do. You have to have an almost “autistic” level of knowledge about your field.

If you’re creating a dating app, go one level deeper.

• Why do humans need to date?

• What drives the need for human connections?

• Why do we live in tribes?

• When did we start creating tribes?

Chase EVERY thread down. Buy a lot of books, have a tight filter.

Be a student of your field.” — Nick Rellas (Founder of $1B exited company Drizly)

Source: Private Z Fellows Workshop

3: Keith Rabois on the type of people to hire

“Some people like to learn to swim by being thrown in the water and kinda drowning a bit and there are other people who need a lot of instruction. Basically, you want the people that kinda enjoy learning to swim by being thrown in the water and that’s one of the filters. You ultimately need tenacious people; the tenacity to go over the wall, under the wall, through the wall, making friends with the wall, figuring out why the wall doesn’t matter and that’s the core skill that most startups need. Intellectual horsepower — most companies are solving problems that other people haven’t solved or can’t solve or don’t think they can solve and sometimes that comes from pure insight married with tenacity and not giving up.”

— Keith Rabois

Source: How to Find and Grow Talent

Best of The Week

See you next Monday,

- Jay + The Z Fellows Team

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