James Beshara

Interview for culture fit. Chance are it won't work out if you hire someone who is a good functional fit, but isn't on board with your company's mission. Hire missionaries, not mercenaries.

Take particular care at hiring senior people. They have been in the business and know how to fake the interview. The more experienced they are, the harder it is to make sure you are hiring the right person.

Tony needed to kickstart his pizza business, so in order to secure cash upfront, he was able to give Alfred a discount, in exchange for an annual commitment.

In tern, Alfred realized that he could arbitrage his margins by simply selling this pizza to lazy roommates who were not interested in making a trip to the grill downstairs.

As as result, Alfred ended up making easy money in short amount of time, while Tony had to do all the restaurant work and then some.

This is when Alfred realized that even if you have a boring commodity business, you can make it interesting and worthwhile.

As a Junior at Harvard, Tony Hsieh decided to take over the student grill, but instead of selling burgers and fries like it used to, Tony would sell pizza which yielded higher margins.

Further, while most other students were only interested in running this grill in their Senior year, by taking over the operations as a Junior, Tony was able to amortize his costs over two years and to make more money.

Knowing he was the only Junior bidding on this grill, Tony was willing to be the highest bidder. He submitted his bid as "Highest bid +1 dollar," and naturally ended up winning.

James Beshara, the host of Below the Line podcast, says that internet has been built for podcasting and podcasting is the Gutenberg press of our time.

James points out that: (1) It is free to record and takes a lot less time than writing. (2) Disseminating a podcast around the world is also free and instantaneous, and you don't even need to know how to read to consume it. (3) Lastly, you get to hear directly from the expert, as soon as the expert's thoughts are available, without an editorial spin by a larger organization.

At one point, one of the Webflow early employees insisted on building an animation feature into the product. Although the Webflow co-founders were initially skeptical, he persisted. This feature ended up bringing nearly 50% of the business in the following year.

If the co-founders only listened to their ideas, they would have never discovered this, and many other features that came from their team's experiences and needs.

Founders should avoid becoming the bottle neck for their own company. Making a perfect decisions, at the expense of slowing down the whole company is not worth it. Instead, it is better to make a good-enough decision fast, thus enabling the rest of the employees to explore multiple options.

At the end of the day, founder is only one mind, and often the employees would come up with a set of possibilities that would have never been discovered by the founder.

Establish good habits because good habits enable productivity and help to alleviate anxiety.

As the list of important and urgent tasks start to grow, it is imperative to intentionally focus on the essentials.

Nir Eyal says it is a myth that the best product always wins.

For example, when compared in a blind test, Bing get 50% of the users, but in real life, Google has >80% of market share. Most users are already in the habit of using Google, and they just don't stop to consider other options.

Once you can get get a customer to use your product without even thinking about it, then you are no longer competing on either price or features.

Habit-formation is a huge competitive advantage.

Nir has a favorite fitness app that has been able to implement his ideas beautifully. Here are the four steps to getting hooked.

1 - Trigger - This is an itch the consumer wants to scratch, an uncomfortable phycological or emotional state a customer wants to change. Every habit-forming product has to figure this out.

In case of this fitness app, there's a lot of uncertainly about choosing something to do in the gym, and that's the trigger! "Getting in shape" is not a habit, it's an aspiration, so that doesn't work, but choosing something to do, that could become a habit. A habit is a discrete behavior you want to see repeated.

2- Action - What do you do now? - Open the app. It's easy to

Nir wrote Hooked because while Facebook and similar gaming and social media companies knew how to capture users' attention, they did not want anyone else to use those techniques. Nir wanted other entrepreneurs to be take advantage of these methods in pursuit of good, to create healthy habits in people's lives.

Nir read a book called the The T-Factor Diet, which listed the nutritional content of all the food he wanted to eat. Once he realized what he was consuming, he was able to moderate his intake in a way that was helping him, not hurting him.

In order to see an opportunity that other people don’t see, an entrepreneur need to have a bit of rebelliousness, a little bit of chutzpah in them.

Whether or not you can overcome a challenge, it defines you.

Nir was a chubby, clinically obese kid, growing up in Orlando, Florida. Being overweight was difficult for normal reason, but when all the kids would go the pool, Nir felt even more embarrassed about his body. However, that experience set Nir on a path to understand human behavior through the products that we consume, which is how he ended up writing "Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products."

Kevin often finds himself switching in between brewing his own coffee and tea in the morning. Because of how fasting can decrease your chance of cancer and have other health benefits, Kevin has taken up the health trend of intermittent fasting, which involves not eating for 13 to 16 hours every day. Kevin also made an app to help thousands of others adopt the trend.

Often times, spouses act as therapists during the development of a new company. Whenever founders offload onto their spouses, the entrepreneur may feel better but the spouse internalizes the problem and finds themselves unable to help, which leads to them feeling useless and depressed.

It certainly has helped Kevin. Having conversations with people that have gone through similar situations is always easier than talking with someone who has little experience. Kevin prefers being the investor that sits on the sidelines most of the time

In terms of his professional career, Kevin’s investments have been his most successful ventures. By trusting his gut and his connections, Kevin has managed to invest in companies as successful as Facebook and Twitter.

Because Kevin has experienced multiple layoffs, painful decisions, and incredibly successful periods of growth, he now has the expertise to help companies during nearly every part of their development.

Many unsuccessful business founders get bogged down in their own failures and fail to see the silver lining that comes with failure. Often times a bad news cycle or little outside support can prevent the head of a company that recently sold for pennies on the dollar from trying to start again.