Founder Who Built 8 Billion Dollar Companies - the CEO Should Be in Everything

0:00Remember I told you about the guy that founded 8 billion dollar companies. So eight separate billion dollar companies. Brad Jacobs. That's the waste management guy, right? Yeah. So he's done like eight different things. And he tends to acquire the companies. Yeah, he tends to buy and like he tends to give a lot of equity and hire like an amazing management team. And then he kind of just moves on to the next thing. But it was interesting because I was listening to a podcast he was on and he said that the CEO should be in everything. Like they're like basically kind of what we talk about. Like the fact that you think you can just hire a CEO and then just let them do their thing is not the reality.

0:34because they're not going to have the same vision that you have, right? And ultimately, it's got to be you in the deep. The more details you're involved, for example, for you, okay? You might not be managing people, but you're in finance, okay? You're in sales for the big deals. But I don't go to the meetings. Like, they had a meeting in Chicago and one in Europe where they're going all the finances. Okay, get my point here, right? So, okay, when we talk on this podcast, it's like, okay, you're mostly involved with, like, you know, driving traffic or strategy stuff or, like, you know, that type of stuff, right?

1:02But there's a lot more that goes into it, okay? You're going to tell me you're not involved with finance. You're not going to tell me. No, I am. I just don't. I don't get involved in everything. And what I mean by that is I won't go to all the meetings. But even with finance, they had their meetings and I'll get the recap and I'll tell them what I want, change or adjust it or what I think is off. But I don't have the time to go fly all the way to Europe to just meet with each country lead and be like, all right, what's the budgeting for next year? So watch. Okay. So we talk, you're involved with strategy.

1:30You're involved with like, you know, driving traffic, right? What else are you involved with? Just very high level. I'm involved in anything that... I'm involved with most things. I was... I did a client pitch earlier this week. I follow up with the sales team to see if they followed up on what the client thought. Yeah. I didn't get the answer, so I texted the potential client directly. Wow. Okay. I bet your team loved that. I screenshotted it. I'm like, they love the presentation. I'm like, here you go. Yeah. No joke, I just did it myself. I'm involved with 2026 revenue forecasting. I don't forecast.

2:09I just question their forecast and try to understand what their logic is. 2026 profitability, so finance. I'm involved with reviewing M &A deals. I'm involved with product launches. Today, I just tested the new version of Answer the Public. Technically, I've been testing it every week, but I screenshot a lot of bugs and send it to my team on WhatsApp. Product, user testing, CRO on your website. If I get a customer complaint, I follow up with my team on what's happening. Like I got a customer complaint the other day from someone who's paying our India team. And they're asking for all this stuff.

2:42I added in the person who runs India and she sent it to the team. I followed up if they're happy. And she's just like, Neil, this was closed before I was in here. They're paying us only a few hundred dollars a month. and they're expecting all this stuff, which by the way is not profitable. And then I followed up with them and they said they're happier now and look at all the results. Although it costs us a lot of money. When I say costs us, we made way less revenue than what we spent. But at the end of the day, is that the client's fault? No, that's our fault. So then I have to fix it. You got product stuff.

3:24You got customer success stuff. You got sales stuff as well. You got finance stuff too. You got, what else you got? We're talking M &A stuff too, okay? Projections, what else do you have? Overall brand. Okay. Like the client example I gave is you can't just fire the client. That's our fault. You still got to make sure people are happy. Because if people aren't happy, what's going to happen? Reputation. Your reputation is going to be screwed, right? Content. I'm going to go film content later today. We're literally filming content right now. He's going to go film content later. You got to do a webinar every two weeks as well.

3:54Okay, got to fly around, speak at conferences, networking. I'm going to dinner today to meet a lot of entrepreneurs who are successful, build up more relationships. Do I want to do it? No. Face of the company, right? So my point of saying all this is that there's a lot more. Like, it's very nice to say, oh, you can delegate all these things. But the reality is, even though you have other people responsible, you're still jumping around. And I'm doing the same thing, too. And do we necessarily like jumping around? I don't know. Like, my CEO told me, you're like a fruit fly. You just keep hovering around.

4:23Dude, that's a great analogy. I'm like, yeah, I totally do hover around. I was like, you know, I told you yesterday, I was like, you know, I would like to be a fruit fly that hovers around the bigger poop, not the small poop. You know what I mean? Like, you just get to bigger and bigger poop as you go. It's just like the different, like, Honda Civic, and then you go to, like, a Toyota Camry, you just get higher, like, bigger problems, right? So, yeah, absolutely, we're fruit flies. Technically, you want smaller and smaller poop. I want big poop. No, because I know what you're saying, but the Mercedes-Benz, thank you.

4:52The Mercedes-Benz is not a bigger poop. It's a smaller poop. The Honda Civic is a bigger thing. Okay, fine. Yeah, that's true. You just have to reverse it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You want smaller and smaller pieces of poop over time. But my point is, do you agree with what Brad is saying here? The CEO should be involved in everything, right? It's like, okay, maybe that's the wrong way. The founder should be involved with everything. So I think about Amplitude. They launched a free tool. You and I both tested it. At nighttime, I was sending my team screenshots of it and breaking down what they do better than us and what we do better than them and where we need to improve.

5:26Right? And a lot of us were messing. This wasn't like, you know, 3 p.m. in the day. This was like at 6, 7 p.m. my time for some of my other team members. It was like 11 p.m. for that. And who's going to do it if you don't do it? Oh, yeah. They're all messaging us back and forth. Like, even for them, when it was like 11 p.m., they're still messaging back and forth. When he says the founder or CEO, whatever you want to call it, should be involved in everything, right? They shouldn't because it should run without their involvement in everything, but it's more so they have to or else it doesn't work well or grow well.

6:00Yes. It's not like we want to. Yes. But we have to. Yes. That's a better way to put it. Yeah. Okay. Because I don't want to. Do you want to? No. No. I don't want to be a fruit fly. Yeah. I kind of enjoy being a fruit fly sometimes. Yeah. Sometimes it is fun. Yeah. But I just look at it overall as it does drive chaos with the team too. Like when we're just hovering around sometimes and we hover around too much, It's like it does drive chaos and I get it. But at the same time, it's a trade off. Like our greatest strength is also our greatest weakness too. Right. If someone is over involved with everything, they also sometimes can write that can cause more problems too.

6:33So, okay. Last thing I'll say here on this. So, um, Brian Halligan tweeted this. So basically this is the Jensen Huang. Wait, before you get into it, can we go back to one thing? Yeah. Do you guys do company all hand meetings? Uh-huh. Are you leading them? Yeah. Okay. So you're involved in that. Like, well, I'm like leading with the first five minutes of the story. Like I have to make a video on Friday saying, okay, here's how we're trending towards a vision. Here's what we're doing. Here's what we're changing. Here's the things I need to do better. Here's this, right? And then, so I need to be motivational on Friday.

7:05It's like a coach, right? And then when I appear to do all hands, sometimes I'm a coach. Sometimes I'm a, hey, we need to do this better type of thing. Do I want to do that? No. Some of my teams watches this too. No. So, yeah. we just had an all hands meeting today at 9 30 a.m uh-huh and oh this is not your thing no i learned about it i think it was yesterday because my ceo was telling me how he's like creating a deck or something for the all hands i didn't even know we had all hands so then my co-founder mike my ceo is also named mike but my co-founder mike's like hey you joining all hands it's starting 9 30 here's a link if you're not or if you want it and then i'm like i got a podcast from 9 30 to 10 30 i was able to make the podcast shorter so i ended the podcast call it like a 10 0 8 yeah so then i joined the all hands for 10 minutes showed my face but i already know what they're gonna cover i looked at the all hands i think they do different ones for different regions um because it's just time zone yeah but when i joined maybe 380 something people so i'm estimating here but maybe roughly 30 % of our staff were on it.

8:13Yeah. Right. And you have, it's global. So you don't have everyone in the world on obviously. Yeah. It's too hard because it's middle of the night for certain people. Yeah. But yeah, when I look at that, like that's some of the stuff that I'm not involved in. And there's countless examples of that in my organization where like I'm not involved in every sales training. But I am involved in all divisions. I'm just not involved in every single meeting or every little minute detail. And your problem set changes over time as you continue to scale, right? Obviously. The thing I would say, what I learned is as much as I don't think you're a fan of like, you know, I'll just speak for myself, like having to do the all hands, right?

8:59Like communicate the message and repeat the message. That's not me. You know why I'm not a fan of it? It's because I live with myself all the time. So I know what the message is in my head, right? But people don't know what the message is. And what I learned from my team, like I heard this last year is like, hey, we could really use more of those videos from you in the all hands because we want to hear from you because we don't know what you know. And because they're like, you see the entire battlefield. And I'm like, OK, that's fair. So I do it. I appear. And, you know, I try to communicate stories because stories, they blow over well, right?

9:28Meaning that people absorb it more. So I don't know what you say on those calls, but that's that's my position now. And I think it does help. And I find that the best messages need to be repeated over time because people forget. Yeah. Yeah. So how do you do it? When you appeared for five, ten minutes. Hey, guys. No, I didn't say anything. You did? You just showed your face. Because people were presenting. So when we do our all hands, there's a deck. People make their versions of the slide. It all gets compiled together and people present their part. I bet you people would like to hear from you.

9:57Yeah, I agree with you. You're just not going to do it? I think you should do it. No, I could do it. I just didn't know. Yeah. until last i was when i was driving to la so call like around three o 'clock yeah is when i found out there's all hands today and then when i found out the time today and i was giving the invite i already had something that was scheduled a week ago for a podcast interview and i already changed it on once yeah so i don't want to be the prick that changes on them twice yeah right so then i was like but i did compromise i got them to do a 30 minute podcast instead of an hour um and i didn't tell them hey we need to end this earlier i just control the podcast pace you know i know you know how to do this really well too because we've done it so often where we can make it end because there's not much more to talk about yeah because we can pick the talk tracks and the subjects and just make it so we have extra time or we can make it drag out and i chose to make it end earlier so then that way i could go to the all hands yeah show my face people are talking i don't want to the prick that interrupts interrupts them yeah uh when they get to share the highlights of their departments or their accomplishments or their team's accomplishments so i didn't want to interrupt but i showed up for a little bit and i'll get the summary from either my co-founder a few other people on the team um or the ceo but yeah you're right um what makes me really feel like a prick I was in Dallas for the high level of it.

11:25Yeah. So when I was there, two people came up. They're high. They're like, oh, what's up? I was like, hey, what's your name? And they're like, oh, cool. What do you do? And they're like, I work for you. And I was like, oh, cool. I felt really bad then. And then I was like, oh, how long? One was like four years. The other one, I think, was two years. Other people were also hitting me up. had to take some pictures they came back to take pictures other people were uh trying to take pictures so i was there for around the hour and two people's questions then i went around the conference to go try to find them to try to get them coffee or something before my flight i could not find them i just felt like a piece of crap yeah because i should try to know everyone in my company but it's really hard at our scale right the moment you hit i don't know what the number is we're a thousand plus call it but the moment you hit i don't know maybe like four or five hundred and your teams are spread all over and you have different divisions, maybe it starts getting harder.

12:24But 1 ,000 plus for sure, I think it's really hard to know everyone on a first name basis. Dumb bar's number. You can really only know 150 people at a time. Is that what it is? Yeah. But I just felt really bad. And I'm like, okay, I need to go hang out with these people, buy them coffee and get to know more. You know what I remember? Maybe this will motivate you to do the five, 10 minute spiel each time you appear in all hands. When I work for W Promote, this is like 16, 17 years ago. Whenever we did all hands each month, the CEO would speak and like everyone was listening intently because we wanted to know where we're going.

12:56And now I'm just recalling this now as I'm thinking about it. Because when my team told me this, I didn't think about, I didn't connect these two moments. I'm like, yeah, they do want to hear. And like, even though you're not the CEO, technically you are the leader of the company, right? You are the leader of the company. And so I think when they hear where they're going, it motivates them, it excites them. And imagine all the other goodwill it creates. Other people talk about it, maybe they'll tell other people to join. So I think that five, 10 minutes goes a long way if you do it.

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14:21That's your fault. That is my fault. And I think I know the reason. It's not like anyone's trying to cut me off. I'm the only one not on Microsoft. That's also your fault. Yeah, so we have like Outlook. I still use Gmail and I don't want to switch. So I don't have a corporate email address. I think this five minutes spent every month will make you more money. How about that? or all hands are not monthly oh how often global all hands or maybe a few times a year max oh dude even better roi yeah i know but they probably forget to tell me because i bet you what ends up happening is an email just goes out saying it's a all hands to everyone on the corporate email now technically my domain's owned by the company so i am on a corporate email but i'm on gmail when everyone else when i mean everyone else literally everyone else is on outlook yeah and there's a few people who have gmail as well but they have gmail and outlook yeah for me i'm just on uh gmail guys this is a neil problem you know who said you know who said this who this person said the storyteller is the most powerful person in the room who said this i don't know steve jobs steve jobs so i i think uh when you do it you can report back on how well it's worked because they um they continue to want me to do it even though i ask if i can stop doing it they continue to ask me to do it so So anyway, I want to give one more thing here.

15:40So did you know that Jensen Huang, the NVIDIA CEO's trifecta, his success trifecta, his management style trifecta? You want to know what it is? Go for it. I know quite a bit about his management style already. Okay. These you probably know already. But one, most people don't know this. He doesn't do any one-on-ones with his staff, okay? Because they're already like high level. Like they're all SVP VPs, right? He has 60 direct reports. So he doesn't believe in having a management layer. And the one that I like the most that people on my team for sure don't like is the criticized publicly trifecta.

16:09So this is known as, sure, you praise publicly, but you also criticize publicly as well. And it's actually worked out well. And I would say that he actually has another thing that he does. Maybe we'll call this, I don't know if it's trifecta or fourfecta, whatever, right? Quadfecta. But I like what he does around the day. I think it's a daily top five. So basically, you just talk about what you're working on. But at the end of it, you talk about what trends are interesting to you. So it was like 10, 15 years ago when he noticed that a lot of people kept talking about machine learning and deep learning.

16:40And at that point, he knew that they had to get into AI. And that's how they're able to do that. And so we have a function of that. But Brian Halligan from former HubSpot CEO, he said, despite Jensen's astronomical success, I don't see a lot of CEOs borrowing his plays. So specifically the 60 direct reports, no one-on-ones and criticized publicly trifecta. Yeah, I think it also varies per company. And I'm not saying that's the right way or wrong way. I think you just got to find your own style. And I'll give you another example. When I met up with my buddy, as I mentioned, he works for a Fortune 100 company.

17:14They do over$100 billion a year in revenue. $100 billion. He's not a C-level. He's not the layer below. He's the layer below that. So when you have$100 plus billion in revenue, when you're two levels lower than the CEO, that's a lot of people. Right? he interacts with the ceo and the ceo interacts with a lot of people on his level and it may not be a direct report but he's interacting with people and sending reports to ceo and helping with projects and other people are that's a really hands-on ceo yeah and i know for a fact even though he doesn't he may not have 60 direct reports i don't know what the number is he's interacting and reporting with probably 100 to 200 people in his organization at any time and I'm like, that's hardcore.

18:05You mean the CEO? The CEO is. Yeah. Right? And I'm not saying that's the right way to run things or not run things, but even in that organization, I think they should cut 50 % of their staff. I think there's a lot to learn from that because Steve Jobs from Apple had the top 100. Usually you're going to have a top 100 to 200 people that you go to. I'm sure you have like a top 50 to 100 people that you constantly go to, right? Not, not, nor near a hundred, but we're also not as big where - Okay, there's a top 50. Top 25? Top like 30. Yeah. But these are the people you know you can count on, right?

18:35Correct. And then some people cycle out of your favor sometimes too if you're not getting things quickly enough, right? Yes. And percentage-wise, I probably interact with my more, I have more top people than like Apple. Because if you look at 30 people, I don't have the employee base that they have. While with Apple, they may have, I don't know, 50 ,000, 100 ,000 employees. So top 100 is a very tiny percentage. And then if you look at organizations your size, you're interacting with almost everyone. Right, so you're even better than me. No, I'm not actually. It's like, there's probably, I don't know, 10 that I go to.

19:10Yeah, but what I would say is, it goes back to Dunbar's number again. So Steve Jobs, top 100, right? Jensen has 60, you have 50. It's usually like, it's 150, below 150 is the number. The guy you just mentioned, it's like 150, 200 people or whatever, right? Yeah. And going back to your point too, when you think about Jensen's, oh, Elon style, right? So we did like a planning session earlier this week. This is the first time I ever ran the Elon algorithm. So just to reinforce, it's QDSSA, QDESA, right? So whenever you have a problem in your company, you question, then you delete, then you simplify, then you speed up and then you automate, right?

19:49Yeah. We tried it because the question I asked people was like, hey, what's one stupid thing you think we're doing as a company right now, right? And these are all the things people are questioning. And so we started methodically going down these things. And oh my God, we started deleting so much. We started simplifying so much. We didn't even think about speeding up or automating yet. Because a lot of people today, they're like, oh, AI, I want to automate everything, right? But I'm telling you, love or hate Elon, this algorithm does a good job. Am I saying all the things we're talking about, how I do it is the right way?

20:14We're just like, no, this is just what works for us. And it's worth experimenting with things. Yes.

20:24a