A solo Shaan monologue on what it actually means to operate at high intensity as a founder. He argues that intensity isn’t working 24/7 — it’s focus times common sense times insanity. He walks through the Peter Thiel one-priority philosophy, Zuckerberg’s Instagram acquisition story, WhatsApp’s singular focus strategy, Stripe’s “Collison installation” customer onboarding, Ben Horowitz’s lead bullets, and Sylvester Stallone writing Rocky in three days.
Speakers: Shaan Puri (host)
The Real Problem: Not Intensity, But Wrong Answers [00:00:00]
Shaan: I got a call yesterday from an entrepreneur who was going through something that is so relatable. They were stuck. At a plateau. Their business wasn’t growing as fast as they wanted. They were pitching me on all the new things they were going to do, new features they were going to add, new projects — and then they started telling me about the side hustle they had going on.
I had to stop them. I had to tell them the truth: stop searching for answers.
We are all guilty of this. If I’m fat, all of a sudden I’m keto, I’m paleo, I’m reading books, I’m listening to podcasts — and I’m not just doing the obvious things. The trap that people fall into is thinking that the answer to their problems is elsewhere. That maybe a mentor has it, or a book has it, or there’s some knowledge they don’t have, and that’s what’s holding them back.
That’s really never the case. If I talk to ten people, only one might need a strategy change. For nine out of ten, the answer is: up your level of intensity.
What Intensity Actually Means [00:02:30]
Shaan: The best part about intensity is that it’s contagious — you can create a culture of intensity.
There’s a wonderful story about Peter Thiel when he was running PayPal. He had a very simple system. Everybody in the company should figure out one priority. Not a to-do list. A single priority. Forcing people to figure out their one priority — not ten things, one — was an incredible forcing function. Everybody had to say something. And if you said something stupid, it was like: that’s your priority? So everybody picked one meaningful priority.
But that’s only half of it. The second half is actually sticking to that. Because human nature makes everything feel important. I have my one priority, but there’s a second thing that’s important too, and a third — and then what happens is we don’t know the answer to number one. Number one lacks a clear solution. It’s a gnarly, important problem. So what do we do? We gravitate toward the second task, because it’s much clearer.
Warren Buffett tells the story of the guy who lost his keys outside a bar. He’s crawling around on the ground and an officer says, “Sir, what are you doing?” “I’m looking for my keys.” “Did you drop them here?” “No, I dropped them over there.” “Well, why are you looking over here?” “Because this is where the light is.”
That’s how most people operate with their priorities. They crawl around doing the known things, the things that feel familiar — rather than the important things where the solution is over in the dark.
So Peter Thiel, if anybody tried to talk to him about something that wasn’t their one thing, he would literally just leave the room. He’d be like: oh, you’re talking to me about that? I thought your thing was this. Okay, see you. He would signal through his behavior — this is not a priority — by just not engaging.
Thiel said: if you allow yourself to have more than one focus, you’ve already blinked. You’ve flinched. You’ve determined that mediocrity is an acceptable outcome.
I call the brain an answering machine. It’s just about what question you ask it. The brain can really only handle one question at a time. Not as much as we think we can multitask — we can kind of solve one problem at a time. The question is: what are you going to load into your brain, and are you willing to let it sit there until it’s solved?
Intensity Is a Formula [00:07:00]
Shaan: Intensity is not working 24/7. That’s the first thing. Intensity is a formula: focus times common sense times insanity.
There’s a great video of Conor McGregor talking after a training session. He went from a plumber on welfare to the highest-paid athlete in the world on the Forbes list, the first two-weight world champion in the UFC — all in five or six years.
He says: “I’ve lost my mind on this game. Like Vincent Van Gogh — he dedicated his life to his art and lost his mind in the process. That’s happened to me. When that gold belt was around my waist, my mother has a big mansion, my girlfriend has a different car for every day of the week, my kids have everything they ever want. And I’m happy. I lost my mind. Yeah, I’ll die a crazy old man.”
That is the level of intensity and insanity you can get to if you really do this at a level 12.
Now, not everybody’s going to want to do this at level 12. But you should know what level 12 looks like, and then you get to decide how you’re going to dial that knob down. The problem most people have is they think they’re already at a level 10. They don’t even consider level 12. They think they’re at 10 when actually they’re at six.
The other misconception: oh great, I’ve got to do more — I’m already busy and overwhelmed. No. It’s actually the opposite. You are going to end up doing less. There’s a great Steve Jobs quote: focus is saying no to a hundred great ideas so you can say yes to the one exceptional one. You can do anything, you just can’t do everything. So if you do this right, you’re not doing more — you’re actually doing less, just doing it better.
The Zuckerberg Instagram Story [00:11:00]
Shaan: Let’s jump into examples. Mark Zuckerberg buying Instagram.
Today, if Facebook had not bought Instagram, Facebook might be dead. Instagram was going to be its biggest competitor. But the story of how Zuck bought Instagram is a story of intensity.
The founder of Instagram, Kevin Systrom, used to work at Odeo. He was basically an intern sitting next to a guy named Jack Dorsey. Odeo pivots to Twitter. Kevin goes on to create Instagram.
Twitter doesn’t have photo sharing. They make a $400-500M offer. Kevin is texting his investor: “Should I meet with Zuck? I’m worried — if I go there and say I don’t want to sell, he’s just going to go into psycho mode and crush me.” The investor goes: “Yeah, probably.” So Kevin says: “I guess I’ll take the meeting.”
He already has a deal on the table with Twitter for $550 million. He’s also been told by Sequoia to stay independent at a $500M valuation. Then he meets Zuck.
Unlike Twitter, Zuck did not take no for an answer. Kevin says no. Zuck says: “No, no, no. Just come over to my house and talk. Can you just come over today?” Kevin goes. This is Good Friday — Easter is on Sunday. He walks in and Zuck says: “I’ve thought about it and I want to buy your company.” Kevin’s like: “I know, but I already said no.” Zuck says: “I will give you double whatever you’re currently raising at. That would make Instagram worth a billion dollars. Nobody has ever paid this much for a mobile app. Zero revenue, less than 20 employees. But we’ve got to do this deal this weekend.”
The Twitter guys think they have a deal in the bag. The Sequoia guys think they have a deal in the bag. The mistake they made was thinking work starts on Mondays. Zuck decided to work over the weekend.
They stayed together for 48 hours. Zuck called his lawyers, his corp dev guys — get over here, we’ve got to close this deal now. Kevin’s investor said afterwards: “I sat back and thought: what just happened? Holy — what just happened? How did he pull this off?”
Zuck had this belief: if we don’t create the thing that kills Facebook, somebody else will. The internet’s not a friendly place. I have to act with a certain level of intensity when we find a deal like this. A billion-dollar deal in 48 hours.
By the time the competition woke up on Monday, the deal was gone.
WhatsApp’s Singular Focus [00:17:00]
Shaan: WhatsApp had the right culture. The founder had a sticky note on his desk that said: no ads, no games, no gimmicks.
Every other messaging app was always adding more features. WhatsApp said: we’re going to do the basic thing — messaging — and just do it better than anybody else.
They were like Chick-fil-A. You don’t go to Chick-fil-A because they added fish filets. They decided to sell chicken sandwiches, and they just do it with a higher level of intensity than anyone else. Same with In-N-Out. Not a revolutionary strategy. They just do a burger and fries with more intensity than anyone else was willing to bring at the time. Those two chains make more money per location than chains that do ten times more things.
The founder of WhatsApp always said: “FW around here is Focus.” He goes: “I don’t think about things I can’t figure out. I don’t think about the future. I don’t go to conferences and give talks about where the industry is going. I focus my brain on the things I can wrap my head around — like this customer’s complaining about this bug, let me go fix that.”
Zuck chased them for two years personally — coffees, hikes, dinners. No deal would happen. And he kept inviting them back. Two years later they relented.
The Collison Installation — Stripe [00:21:00]
Shaan: One of the stories I love about Stripe comes from Paul Graham. When the Collison brothers went through YC, Graham noticed that Stripe was doing one thing very differently from the average YC company.
He called it the Collison Installation. When most companies talked to a potential customer, they’d say: oh you’re interested? Cool, I’ll send you a link to the beta when we’re ready, you can sign up. What the Collisons did was: as soon as somebody showed any sign of interest, they’d say: “Awesome. Do you have your laptop on you? I can just set you up right now.” And they would literally brute-force get customers onboard on the spot — open the laptop, install Stripe, explain it, onboard them right then and there.
They did this for the first 100-200 customers, manually.
Paul Graham said: I wonder why more people don’t do this. It’s not like it was some outrageous strategy. It wasn’t even that hard. He said the reason people don’t do this is two things: shyness, or a fear of rejection. Also a misconception — people think big things come from big things. But actually, big things come from an accumulation of smaller things.
He said: most people believe startups take off or they don’t take off, business either works or it doesn’t. Actually, what I’ve learned doing YC is that startups happen because the founder makes them happen. They take off because the founder makes them take off. It’s like an engine — you can’t force something that will never work to work, but if something has the potential to work, you hand-crank the engine to get it going. Then it starts, and once the engine is going, you’ve pushed the boulder enough — eventually it starts to roll on its own. But at the beginning it feels like pushing it to the top of the hill.
Lead Bullets, Not Silver Bullets [00:25:00]
Shaan: Ben Horowitz has this phrase: lead bullets, not silver bullets.
When he was running his company at a very tough point — tough competition, the company on the line — his first instinct was to pivot, to find a magical solution, a rabbit out of a hat. He said: “I so wanted to stand in front of my company and say ‘aha, I have the answer, here’s what we just have to do and it’ll all work out.’”
He said: but that’s not really how it worked. I stood in front of the company and told them: there are no silver bullets for this. Only lead bullets. They didn’t want to hear that. But I had to make it clear: we simply have to build a better product. There was no back door, no escape hatch, no window. We have to go through the front door and deal with the big ugly thing blocking it.
And in my experience, what actually came out of this philosophy is that there are bullets — but the only way you discover them is by firing a ton of bullets that you think are lead. And then you pleasantly surprise yourself when you find one idea, one experiment, one tactic that works in an outsized way. You find your silver bullet. But the only way to do that is by being the person who believes there are only lead bullets.
If you want to look at your pie chart, you should be spending maybe 10-20% of your time on ideas or strategy, and 80-90% is blood, sweat, and tears executed with a certain level of intensity.
When to Sprint — The Sylvester Stallone Story [00:29:00]
Shaan: There is a time to sprint. You cannot sprint the whole time. But you should be able to recognize when a great opportunity comes your way and it’s time to dial up the intensity.
Sylvester Stallone wanted to be an actor. He went to every audition and couldn’t get a role. Nobody wanted to cast him — he didn’t look the part, his mouth moved a little funny from a problem at birth, he just wasn’t the classic Hollywood face.
He doesn’t give up. He decides: if I can’t get cast in a movie, I will make a movie and give myself the role. The problem is he hates writing. So he decides: I’m going to sprint. I’m going to brute-force my way through this.
He goes home and decides to write a movie. He writes the first script of Rocky — the rough draft — in three days. Three days. His daughter asked him: “Did you really paint your windows black to focus?” He said: “Yeah. I didn’t want to know what time it was. It didn’t matter what time it was — it was time to write. Otherwise I would tell myself it’s time for breakfast. I wanted to eliminate all my possible excuses and distractions, because I knew how hard it was for me to write. I was begging while I was writing: please, someone just call the phone, just give me any excuse to do anything else besides this. Instead I unplugged the phone. I painted the windows 100% black.”
That’s a certain level of intensity. He doesn’t do it all the time. But he knew there was a time to sprint.
Three Actions [00:33:00]
Shaan: Three actions for you. How do you actually do this?
First: narrow your focus. Stop giving your brain so many different priorities and problems to think about. Narrow it down.
Second: write down your common sense solution. I call it a common sense solution because it should sound very easy. Make a product so good people want to share it. Make 30 sales calls a day. Write a giant sticky note with the number and every day cross it out and write it again tomorrow. Something a fifth-grader could execute. The strategy should be simple enough that you can execute it at a level 12.
Third: ask yourself what level 12 looks like. Just as a thought experiment. You don’t even have to do it. But ask: if I dialed the intensity knob all the way to 12, what would that look like? What would I actually do?
Jesse Itzler wanted to get in the best running shape of his life. What did he do? He hired a Navy SEAL to come live in his house and work him out every single day. Wake him up at any hour, run any number of miles in any weather, eat and drink exactly what this guy said. The Navy SEAL was David Goggins — before Goggins was even famous. He came into the bedroom where Jesse and his wife were sleeping and said: “Wake up. We’re running now.”
That was level 12 intensity. And the sad part is we don’t even know what level 12 looks like until we’ve heard something like this.
If I did one thing for you today, I hope I just inspired you to go figure out what level 12 intensity looks like — and then ask yourself: what does level 12 look like if I ratcheted up the intensity of the thing I’m already doing?