00:28:11 · Lulu Cheng Meservey, Ty Morse
And so the guy who went on your podcast, and I think he immediately got fired for it. [00:28:16] S0: Oh, yeah, [00:28:17] S1: there were people who thought that that was maybe an [00:28:19] S0: overreaction. I about that. [00:28:25] S1: Oh, yeah, I was I was thinking about it. I was waiting to bring it up that I think some people saw that as an overreaction. I did not see it as an overreaction, you know, blessings and best wishes to that guy. But it he he kind of took one for the team, because what happened to him was deterrence for everybody else. Like, once you have a very leaky culture, what do you do you even do? You fire everybody? Like, at that point, it becomes very, very hard to manage. But if you are willing to do what looks like overreacting along the way, then you can manage that a lot better. And today, xAI has one of the much, much less leaky cultures than most other companies of that size and scale. [00:29:12] S0: How do you actually stop that? So if you do, you know, taking back from that example, if you do ever end up finding yourself in a situation where you have a very leaky culture, I remember when another thing from Walter Isaacson biography is Elon said things keep on leaking to the press. We got to have that stop. How do you actually stop that? Like if it's happening at your company?
00:29:12 · Ty Morse, Lulu Cheng Meservey
[00:29:12] S0: How do you actually stop that? So if you do, you know, taking back from that example, if you do ever end up finding yourself in a situation where you have a very leaky culture, I remember when another thing from Walter Isaacson biography is Elon said things keep on leaking to the press. We got to have that stop. How do you actually stop that? Like if it's happening at your company? [00:29:34] S1: Stopping it is hard and brutal. And you have to be willing to go into tyrant mode a little bit. Like you can try to weed people out. You can hire investigators. You can try to monitor people. But at that point, it's like trying to weed out Al Qaeda from the village population. It's just very difficult because they look the same. You know, they look the same. They're sitting at the same desk. Like, who is it? Then you have to do things that feel bad to you and to them in order to get to that point. So, I think that it can be improved, but prevention is better. [00:30:17] S0: And also prevention is worth a pound of cure sort of situation? [00:30:20] S1: Yes, prevention is better. And what prevention looks like is actually a lot of it comes down to personal loyalty to the founder. It's not about installing the software on the laptop or having policies or signing NDAs. The biggest fake LARP y thing in the world is signing NDAs. I never, never has that had an impact on anyone or anything. And the most sensitive situations I've ever been brought into. I don't think I've signed NDAs.
00:30:20 · Lulu Cheng Meservey, Ty Morse
[00:30:20] S1: Yes, prevention is better. And what prevention looks like is actually a lot of it comes down to personal loyalty to the founder. It's not about installing the software on the laptop or having policies or signing NDAs. The biggest fake LARP y thing in the world is signing NDAs. I never, never has that had an impact on anyone or anything. And the most sensitive situations I've ever been brought into. I don't think I've signed NDAs. [00:30:55] S0: Yeah, it's almost like you have to have trust built in your, you know, small cadre.
00:30:55 · Ty Morse, Lulu Cheng Meservey
[00:30:55] S0: Yeah, it's almost like you have to have trust built in your, you know, small cadre. [00:30:59] S1: You either trust or you don't, if it's at the point where like, think the piece of paper is protecting you, something has already gone wrong. So so this is where it goes back to the founder as the cult leader. Personal loyalty is what will make people do the thing. It's what makes people understand commanders intent and internalize it and follow the spirit, not the letter. And that's what you want. It's not like this doesn't technically violate my NDA that I read closely, or I won't be I won't be caught. It's like, I don't want to, because I signed up to this, to work for him and do this thing. And I want to work for him, because I like him. And I want to do this thing, because I think it's important. So why would I do something that damages the company? Why would you have someone working at the company that wants to damage the company? Or who is trying to help the company, but doesn't have the judgment to know what helps the company? Both of those are really messed up, and something has gone really wrong. So personal loyalty, founder connection to their people. That is the best and only way to prevent having a leaky culture. [00:32:11] S0: I have a general philosophy that if I will, like default assume good in people when I meet someone, until I see something unless it's not like a high trusted person that I know, that has told me otherwise for a specific individual. But I think loyalty is like vastly undervalued. [00:32:28] S1: Super undervalued.
00:32:28 · Lulu Cheng Meservey, Ty Morse
[00:32:28] S1: Super undervalued. [00:32:29] S0: Yeah. How should you actually approach loyalty and like who you surround yourself with and who you don't? [00:32:34] S1: I think the right approach is to offer acts of loyalty, and then see what gets reciprocated. So I appreciate the way that you move through life basically is to just offer acts of goodwill, and then see what comes back. And then it's like the opposite of Nigerian prince fishing. Nigerian prince fishing is like you blast out these phishing emails that are poorly executed and badly written, and then you see who's dumb enough to click, and then you engage with them further. The loyalty building version of that is you are putting acts of goodwill out into the world, and they don't have to be expensive or elaborate every time, but they can be small things. They have [00:33:18] S0: to be meaningful. They have to be meaningful, even if they're not like expensive or elaborate, they have to like mean something to the person.
00:33:18 · Ty Morse, Lulu Cheng Meservey
[00:33:18] S0: to be meaningful. They have to be meaningful, even if they're not like expensive or elaborate, they have to like mean something to the person. [00:33:24] S1: Yeah, I agree with that. And then you see which ones reciprocate, and then you engage with those. And so it's like the Nigerian prince fishing scheme for goodwill, but good. The other thing on founders building loyalty, The you know, the book, leaders eat last. And I agree with the concept, which is one of like putting your people first. But in practice, the best leaders are the leaders that eat at the same time in the same place. Literally eating with people is such a symbolic act that forms connections. Like the best founders that I think of today just have lunch with their teams out in the lunchroom. You know, I saw Scott Wu doing that yesterday. You are just one of the people. Napoleon did that. Julius Caesar did it. There's no new innovation on how to relate to people. It's do the job at a level that they can respect. So like, the reason that Cognition is able to recruit these like incredibly elite coders is because they respect Scott as a leader. Two is be among them as a peer, and not somebody that so like at PepsiCo, I remember when Indra Nooyi was CEO, she actually put in efforts, know, one of my old colleagues, mentor of mine helped her do this and put in efforts to just go out onto the floors and just be among the people. So just live how they live, eat what they eat at the same time, so they see you. And then lastly, if you ask them to do something, you do it. Right?