The Management Styles Of Mark Zuckerberg And Jensen Huang, Private CEO Conversations Around AI And Their People, The Real Use Case For AI (It's Not Replacing Jobs)

0:01By the way, when you look at Google, when you look at Microsoft right now, when you look at Apple, Nvidia, I would say Nvidia is innovating. i think google's still doing well right um google has its new glasses coming i think meta is doing a good job with their glasses as well i think the one that's not innovating as much that will still continue to print cash for a while is probably apple i feel like apple on the innovation curve is kind of going down while the other ones are going up right when it comes to this ai stuff are you pulling up the stock dude no check this out i actually texted someone on this okay uh Uh, here's Apple's revenue in 2022.

0:36Uh, it's 394.33 billion. So 394. What do you think their revenue is in 2024? Higher. 391. They've been pretty much flat for 22, 23 and 24. All three years have pretty much been flat years. Now look at NVIDIA. I agree. but before I look at NVIDIA, what do you think has happened to Apple stock in the last three years? Growing. By how much? 50. 2022, I'm just picking a middle point, like around June, 140-ish. Right now, 211. So call it 210. Okay. Right? Yeah. So 50. That's 50%. Yeah, 50%. Yeah. Like 50 % with flat revenue. Uh-huh. and profit hasn't drastically increased or anything and plus they lost that lawsuit to epic yes but they're trying to still fight them and but going back to you wanted me to look up nvidia by the way that was the silliest thing i ever did you know i believed nvidia wouldn't keep going up and i thought it was the right time i could have told you just leave it there for five more years i was just really dumb on that one you don't call them all you know but you look at well you trade It's a little different.

1:52But you look at NVIDIA, oh my God, it's skyrocketed. But what do you want to look at? Their numbers? No, just how much revenue growth last three years. Look at this. The blue is revenue growth, right? Annual? 2023,$26 billion. What do you think 2025 is? Their years end at different cycles. Annual? Uh-huh. 26, what do you think they're now? 125? uh in 20 20 in 2023 they had 26 billion in total yeah 2025 what did they do for the whole year i'm saying 5x uh yeah 130 yeah so yeah it's kind of crazy yeah just spot on they do more profit right now if you just get net income not ebda because net income is true cash flow they do the net income of 72 billion which is more than what they did in revenue in 2024 i'm talking about profit drop to the bottom line after paying interest payments and all that kind of stuff,$72 billion.

2:51You know what we should talk about? So Microsoft just cut 7 ,000 people because AI is that damn good, right? And I saw someone on LinkedIn post yesterday, we should unionize. I'm like, like, what? So anyway, that aside, but I think what's worth bringing up is these private CEO conversations around AI and their people, right? So I kind of just mentioned earlier, I was on a call and then everyone's like, you know, one person's building AI technology, let's just say in the fitness space, right? One person took from another idea where it's like, oh, they have an AI enforcer team where it's like, let's find AI efficiencies, but let's also bonus people on cutting other people, right?

3:27Which is, you know, it is what it is. And then the other one's like, just like, huh, you don't want to go with AI? Okay, gone, right? So$6 million in payroll cut. That's annual payroll, right? And so I think it's just, that's an example. I think it's worth us bringing up some stories and we're not going to name names or anything, But the reality is that it's either you shape up or you ship out. Yes. But going back to the Microsoft example, when they laid people off, they typically lay off bottom performers and people from divisions that aren't making money. AI is definitely going to impact roles in corporations.

4:02That's a given. But companies at the same time tend to use whatever excuse they can to cut. and a lot the one of the most common excuses that large corporations have used over the years is bad economy when the economy gets bad they're like oh things aren't going well we need a cut and if you look a lot of the big tech companies during the last few economic downturns whether you want to call them recessions or not but just when people are feeling the pain they're making more revenue and more profit and their balance sheets are massive and they're doing stock buybacks it's what they say to be, to, you know, to use as an excuse for it to be acceptable for them to just cut.

4:42When we talk to people behind the scenes now, I'm kind of speaking for both of us right now. I don't even know how it is for you, but it is like, let's not necessarily add more headcount. We're not looking to decrease headcount, but let's not necessarily add headcount. That's kind of the where things are right now. Eventually, I think in the next one to two years or so, it's more so, okay, who's going to need to go? But that's where we sit right now. And so what kind of blows my mind right now when I'm because I'm talking to a lot of COO candidates or GM candidates right now when I ask them like when I start the conversation usually it's it's how did you prepare for this conversation I love that question right um it just shows how much research in them the second one is so what are you doing with AI right now oh yeah you know not not really much right now I'm kind of waiting to see what happens it's like oh yeah you're just done right there um but one of my favorite questions by the way is tell me about a time when you worked your hardest some people have answered me in the past 40 hours a week and I'm not saying you need to work 80 hours a week but like when you tell me the hardest you've ever worked is 40 hours a week done yeah so so and then it's like so how many hours was it like some people are like 100 120 hours i'm like oh please don't know don't do that here like i love that but um these questions tell us so much anyway i digress a little bit let's let's bring it back to the the conversations the ai piece yeah but before we go to that there's one interview uh that i ended up doing like call it a few months ago where i was interviewing a product marketer.

6:01So someone whose job is to market a product, market new features. You know, in marketing, people only think about driving traffic, but when you have more features, how can you mark them to existing customers to generate more revenue and adoption? And they were telling me how they're using AI to come up with sketches and ideas and campaigns. And I was like, oh, cool. For what? They're like, oh, for a friend's project and some side projects. And they're telling me all these examples I was doing. This was over Zoom. And I was like, oh cool do you mind showing me some of the stuff and i'm like here you can screen share and uh they paused for a little bit they couldn't end up sharing anything they had they couldn't come up with an excuse i came up with the excuse and i'm like oh is it uh sensitive data and stuff that you can't do like yeah yeah it's sensitive yeah yeah yeah and i'm like yeah that doesn't work for the stuff that you were trying and testing on your own that had nothing to do with other companies um and definitely didn't hire them but i love actually having having people show me examples when they're talking about ai and marketing and if they can't show me examples i don't want to hear them i want to see them because then i can judge how good your prompts really are and how good you are using what neil's actually talking about is once you start to peel the onion one two by the third time they usually broken right yes so you're you're basically you're dressing them down right and just slowly and you can tell when someone talks in very long winded stories and whatever i'm just like can you show me an example and then it quickly falls apart and that's when i end the interview so now i have no qualms ending the interview very early it's like hey man i just want to be very honest like i think you're a great person but this is just not the right fit here and that's it and i'm sure you do the same thing too yeah and i'm i'm actually usually don't cut it short you don't uh usually when i do interviews other people are on there with me and i know this is going to sound bad and i probably shouldn't say but i'll just i'll uh uh i'll try to find a reason to turn off video yeah and then i'll work in the background and i let someone else take over the interview why did you say you got to go i could but i don't want to hurt their feeling and i feel really bad wow at that moment you feel hurting someone's feelings?

8:15Yes. Of all places. That's the easiest place to leave. I know, but sometimes I don't want to say it. Like sometimes I'm in some instances, I'm very confrontational and other instances I'm not. It's just like, dude, when we talk to other entrepreneurs, going back to your question on what are we hearing behind the scenes? Most of the people that I'm talking to, we all believe in a similar concept that you said. It's like, we're not just hiring as much. We're hiring still really good, amazing A players when we can find them. But in general, we're not hiring as much and we're just focusing on how not only can we use technology, but how can we do more with what we have?

8:55And that has nothing to do with AI just because things are bad right now. And then the second thing that we all know is when you have a decent amount of headcount, you naturally get attrition. So when people talk about how AI is going to change marketing and it can change, you know, um, head count and all this kind of stuff. You don't necessarily need a fire. People naturally leave a company, no matter how good you are. You don't replace them. And that's the example with Amazon. You look at Amazon and their fulfillment centers during COVID, they boomed and then things started slowing down because the COVID rush was over.

9:29Yeah. So like, oh, is Amazon going to lay off a lot of people? Well, and their service centers, they look at how long someone lasts in general for a job. They're like, oh, we don't really need to do anything. By this time, all these people are going to leave. We're good. And then they look at how much they would have had to pay in severance. And then they do a math calculation of what one's cheaper. Dude, speaking of AI. Okay. You're going to like this. Do you have a, do you have a robotic cleaner at your home? Like a robot? I haven't found that any that are good yet. No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

9:55See, see, I bought this when I was on a plane. So, so some, some guy tweeted this, right. And then this wired reviewed it and it's like the best robotic cleaner. Cause it maps out your entire home. and so i i went to the website apple pay was there i instantly just click apple pay 1200 robot over here is it really good it's arriving in like a week or two but like it'll tackle crumbs it'll know not to like suck away like a like a dog or something it knows to avoid like maybe poop for example um but you can see it knows exactly what to do and it maps everything out it's called matic yeah it knows to not get the toys yeah it knows not to get the toys it struggles with legos though it can do spills too yeah same thing or you have to switch up the i don't even have it yet it's coming like like just you gotta let me know if it's legit i'll let you know this is the first time i've ever gotten something because i've never trusted like a room or anything else like my friends love their room was and all that but this is the first time in my life i'm like saw the wired interview someone tweeted it saw the wired interview instantly bought and that's this is why you never know how attribution works because i saw a tweet and i went to wired how how do you know where i bought from if you told me it was amazing right now i would have just bought it he said it does exactly so attribution it's so hard to get down it's so hard yeah so because i'm ocd i have a cleaner seven days that's what i'm saying this would be perfect like you would buy like three of these my house isn't that big but my new one your new one you're gonna buy three of them yeah anyway it's called the manic guys i'm not affiliated at all um but this is interesting because wade foster of zapier he said that the real use case for ai is not replacing jobs it goes back to what i was saying earlier about new work um so he said this he said a common refrain is that AI will replace human jobs.

11:29I think this is a misnomer based on what we've seen at Zapier. While some AI use cases replace human tasks, far more AI use cases are doing things humans couldn't or wouldn't do because of cost, tediousness or time constraints. So he's like, I'm bullish on innovation in a whole host of areas that would have been considered niche in the past. I'll give you one example here. So I think a week ago, I told you, we have this thing where like Noah might say, okay, here are the top three things I got done yesterday. Here's the number one thing I got done. So we have a coach in there that's actively checking like how you're doing.

12:00Right. And the thing is this after a week of having this in there where it's like, oh, Neil, your number one task isn't that high leverage. Like here's what you should do instead. And it actually looks to the last 30 days and it keeps coaching you. If you keep making the same mistake, I'll call you out in public. And then I'll do like a leaderboard at the end. Like who's been consistent with it? Who's scoring the highest and who needs like the most help? And so that becomes a performance question conversation, by the way, if you're not performing that well. a week later everyone's stuff has gotten so much better it's like all high leverage stuff because you want your people working on high leverage stuff and i'm like i couldn't have done that before because you would have had someone like you or me needed to enforce and check like nobody has time for that but now the ai does and then i used the prompt i gave you earlier i just kept refining the prompt it's getting better and better it's kind of similar to something that i do manually in marketing so what i like doing is you take our marketing team i ask them what do you work on just in general, what do you work on that helps us improve our goals of more leads, more revenue, more upsells, lower retention?

13:00And they create a list and they send it to me. Separately, I asked the manager to create a list and I say, you have all these people that work for you. What are they doing to help really improve our business? And then you can see where there's a disconnect. And then you start digging in where there is a disconnect because that usually tells you there's something wrong with either your manager or the people in those in that role if you trust the manager there's usually something wrong within those roles yeah then you dig in with their with the people that there's a disconnect the manager stuff should align with the people when it doesn't there's something wrong and you need to dig in because there's either you either need to fix what they're doing yeah or train them better yeah um which i would put those at the same thing or if you can't just replace um or eliminate it's usually one of those three you thinks?

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16:37No. But at the end of the day, we care the most. Yes. And I'm not trying to do this because I want to fire people. I'm trying to do this to figure out if they're working. Or micromanage or control them. Nobody wants to do that. No. And I just want to make sure people are working on stuff that helps the business grow. If not, cool. I'll help you. You were hired for a reason. I'll help you shift your priorities so then that way you're more beneficial to the company. And if you're more beneficial to the company, you're likely to do better. You're likely to get more raises and promotions. It creates a win-win and people want to be valuable.

17:05That's a great idea. I'm actually going to try that because Lindy has a phone call thing and you can use your voice. So it stole Elon's voice. And it was like that. One of the things is like, what are the five things you accomplished this week? So it just calls everyone. You can call the entire company doing that. Really? Yeah. That's pretty cool. I don't know what kind of issues I'm going to have legally from that. You try it on your exec team first. My exec team, I don't even have to worry about. No, your exec team is too good. Yeah, yeah. You wouldn't want to do it on them. By the way, speaking of exec team, I just want to call out.

17:34I listened to this Mark Zuckerberg interview that he did with the Stripe co-founder. The Johnny Ive one was pretty good too on design. But just the management styles of Mark Zuckerberg and Jensen Huang. So Jensen Huang is like, he doesn't believe in one-on-ones. He doesn't need to do one-on-ones. He thinks best practices are way too mediocrity. And then for Mark Zuckerberg, he doesn't believe in delegation, right? And he also doesn't really believe in one-on-ones because both these guys are executive teams are really good. but my point of saying this is that there's no right management style like i remember i interviewed like a coo candidate yesterday and then we had read a lot of the same management books and he was spewing a lot of this stuff to me i'm like bro like i've read every the problem with with me is i've read everything that you've read right and what i've learned being a little older now at 38 is like there's no right or what like best practices are usually a way to not like you end up being like everyone else i'm like you got to learn what works for you and what i've learned is these are the things that work for me and so jensen might criticize publicly right it's just but that's what works for him and neil was actually ahead of the game because i would always tell him about these new books i was reading and he's like yeah don't care i'm just gonna do it my way right so he's to neil's credit he's always done it his way i've just learned a little later that i gotta do what works for me but you mentioned the stripe founder what does the stripe founder do so the stripe founder was interviewing mark zuckerberg at their user conference yeah yeah and so zuck's like dude i like i'm gonna drop into whatever i want to drop into and if i delegate it that means someone else is like no like if everything rolls up to me as a founder i'm gonna drop into whatever i want to drop into and that's kind of how we are now yeah yeah you've always been like that but i'm that's this is how i am now so my favorite call with some of my executives and we have a great relationship so they're transferring like oh how's your day how's how's everything and they're honest i got to them like oh it's a shit day you know i'm dealing with this and dealing with that a lot to put in fires and fixing this.

19:25And, uh, so my executive teams, I was talking to someone that they're like, Oh, how's your day? They're like, dude, sorry for getting back to you late. It's just been a shit day. A lot of problems to deal with. Excuse my language for anyone listening. And I was like, do we lose any revenue? No, no, it's not that it's just people not doing exactly what we want. The client wanted this. They did that, but they could have done a B or B C and D that would have produced even better results. And it doesn't matter that the client didn't know and didn't request it. We should be going above and beyond for our customers to get a better experience.

19:58That is how you grow agency. Because he's like, you do better than what they expect. You will then get more referrals. And he's like, I'm gonna fix this if I have to, have to fly. And I'm like, dude, you're having a baby soon. You know, I'm like, you don't need to fly. And I'm like, anything you need to wear? He's like, nope. He's like, move on. I was like, cool. Don't need to hear the rest. I know you'll take care of it. And typically, if they weren't having a baby, I wouldn't ask the details. I would have been like, loss of any revenue? And they would have said yes or no. And if they said yes, I would have dug in.

20:29If they said yes, I would have said, what can we learn from it? And how do we avoid making this mistake again and better satisfy our customers? If they said no, I would have just been like, cool, you'll deal with it. I'm on to the next thing. Yeah. But the only reason I do that is I know they care about the company like me and they'll fix things. These are your executives. These are my executives. And even a lot of the people on our team, they really do genuinely care about the customers. Yeah. Because it's not about what are you getting paid for? It's more about what is the client expecting? How can you give them everything they're expecting and more?

21:05If you just give them what they're expecting, in my opinion, some people look at that as like we hit the KPIs. We did amazing work. That's base level. Exactly. I look at that as average. I'm like the client signed up for us to accomplish X. If you accomplish X to me, that is not you did amazing job. That means you did an average job. If you do also Y and Z, that's when you did an excellent job. We should strive for achieving X as a default, but also achieving Y at least and maybe Z if we can pull it off. Yeah, because that's what makes us remarkable. Yes. It's not remarkable to be average. And so you want to do remarkable work, right?

21:42And then, by the way, today's remarkable is tomorrow's average. So you have to keep pushing the pace. Yes. And again, this goes back to this is why your executive team needs to be strong or your founder has to keep pushing. That's how you keep things remarkable. Yes. Because once you disappear, I've seen this a thousand times. The moment I try to disappear, oh, my God, everything crumbles. No, it doesn't work out. Yeah. I don't think you've ever tried to disappear. Like, I don't just knowing you for 14, 15 years, you've always been involved. I don't think you've really disappeared. I have. But the moments where it hasn't worked out is like when you try to launch courses and things like that, when you had somebody else doing it and you kind of expected to just grow.

22:17Yeah, I also disappear in my own company, NP Digital. And to be very specific, we have so many different divisions and regions. I disappear on certain regions and divisions because when some of them are just doing really well and growing super fast, even in bad times, and we have regions like that right now, I tend to just not meddle. And I tend to be like, look, you may be doing things differently than I would, but if you're growing 50 plus percent year over year on a decent baseline of numbers and your churn for your division is like 5 % or something extremely low, I'm like, yeah, I don't want to meddle.

22:54You have leaders who are doing really well. And then I go and just go focus on something else that needs help. But then sometimes I had to go back to the ones that were doing really well because maybe something changed in their government or their economy or in that division where I had to go in and work on improving or fixing something. I just look at this all as spinning plates, right? So you might have a lot of spinning plates and they start to become wobbly. So the moment they start to become wobbly, that's when you get involved. Yes. That's all it is. That's it for today. please don't forget to rate, view, subscribe and we'll see you tomorrow.