Jeff Lawson
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Grit · The 20-Year Bet to Make Fusion Energy Work | Jeff Lawson
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How Did Twilio Employees Earn a Red Track Jacket?
Jeff Lawson says employees earned the red track jacket by writing an app on Twilio, demoing it in front of their peers, and only then receiving the jacket. The red track jacket was a symbol of what it meant to be a Twilioan. A new hire did not get the jacket on the first day of work. Nobody handed it over and said the jacket was issued, good job. The person had to earn it.
It did not matter if someone was a software developer, a product manager, an accountant, or a lawyer. Everybody was expected to write an app on Twilio. The company taught people how to code and showed them how to get started. To be part of the Twilio tribe, a person had to understand what the product did. Writing code got
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Is Move Fast and Break Things a Brilliant Value?
Jeff Lawson calls move fast and break things one of the most brilliant values in corporate history, even though he does not love a lot of the culture Facebook has become. The signal to noise ratio on the statement is huge because it tells people they have permission to break things.
A slogan such as do anything to win, or we are here to win, works as an invitation for shenanigans, so the real boundary has to be said out loud. At most companies the assumption is that breaking something means trouble and a career-limiting move. Move fast and break things does the heavy lifting: if the break serves progress and moving fast, people have permission to behave differently than they would at any ot
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When Should a Startup Write Its Values Down?
Jeff Lawson says about a year in, or around 50 people, is a good time for a startup to write its values down. Culture is the feeling people have at work every day: whether they are excited to come in, how a disagreement gets settled, and whether they still like each other afterward. Values are words created to describe that culture, handles a founder can use to steer it.
Inertia has been operating for less than a year and still has not declared company values, though the conversation is active. Writing the words too early happens before a team knows who it is. The earliest employees, especially the founders, and the challenge the company has to solve shape how people act. Inertia recently c
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How Big Is Jeff Lawson's Fusion Company?
Jeff Lawson finished the deals with the lab last summer, basically last September, about a year earlier, and got the company off the ground with 450 million of committed capital. A 50,000 square foot facility is now up in Livermore, and headcount has grown from about five people at the beginning of the year to about 70.
The Livermore work is a set of research streams on how to mass-produce the targets and how to build a very large semiconductor-powered laser. Today the team is doing component-level development on each part of the target and each part of the laser, deciding what each part needs to look like and how the supply chain will work.
In the next phase the company will build prototy
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How Does the Onion Make Money With No Ads?
Jeff Lawson says The Onion now has more than 5X the revenue it had before he bought it, and the site runs with no ads. Readers support the paper directly.
Membership costs $99 a year. Members get the print edition of The Onion mailed 12 times a year, a monthly paper not made for a decade. He thinks they killed print in 2013. Earlier revenue was chum box ads, including AI ads that made little sense. Pages carried so many ads that a phone would start overheating, and the site did not work on mobile. Removing every ad took revenue to zero. Two years on, revenue is more than 5X the level from before the purchase.
The company would be profitable, except money is going into growth so The Onion c
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Why Can Jeff Lawson Wait 20 Years on Fusion?
Jeff Lawson can wait 20 years on fusion because a long shot is a luxury he can afford, and he has nothing left to prove. He wanted to watch AI from the side instead of joining as an active participant, because he expects the market five years from now to look completely different.
His gut may well be wrong, but he expects AI to follow the dot-com era: an initial boom, a lot of change, a shakeout, lessons learned, a few companies that survive, and then the real next era. He was not excited to jump into the fray, so he started a fusion energy company instead of an AI software company. Fusion was also more interesting. When everybody jumps into AI, competition for talent and capital gets huge,
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Is AI Token Revenue More Durable Than Expected?
Jeff Lawson says AI token revenue has proven a lot more durable than he would have guessed three or four years ago. At the very beginning of the era he expected more of a race to the bottom. Token prices over that period did fall that way. Demand so far outstripped the pricing dynamics that the drop did not matter, and what carried the revenue was use case expansion.
He frames selling intelligence in a utility model as, in some ways, the ultimate usage model, and he calls the token business incredible product-market fit for one of the ultimate markets on the planet, intelligence. The same usage model had already turned communications into something people buy by the unit. Stripe did it for
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Are Most Startups Distribution Constrained?
Jeff Lawson says almost every startup is distribution constrained, and very few startups are product constrained. Once a company has product market fit, it is almost certainly distribution constrained, because it still reaches only a tiny fraction of the customers who could use the product.
A company is either product constrained or distribution constrained. Distribution constrained means the product is already strong, penetration can sit at 1% of the market, and growth depends on more sales reps, more marketing, and more channels. Product constrained means the market is saturated and customers have already bought what the company sells, so the company needs more product. Founders from a pr
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When Did Twilio Find Product Market Fit?
Jeff Lawson says Twilio saw developers sign up, enter a credit card, and build useful things with Twilio for themselves and for the companies they worked for on the day the company launched. He frames the idea that Twilio skipped a long stretch without product market fit as something you could argue, and he frames five-, six-, and seven-figure contracts with companies and enterprises as another point where someone might argue the company found it, once developer use turned into scaled commercial contracts. A usage-based model does not always give predictability. He places that later contract stage not very long into the company.
About two or three years in, around 2010 or 2011, the office a
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Why Does Scaling Sales Need a Playbook?
Jeff Lawson says a company cannot scale sales until it has a playbook, and that playbook comes only after product market fit.
Go to market ends up as two sets of people. Before product market fit, the company is still exploring. The first salespeople look a lot more like business development: creative sales with no playbook, where someone has to figure something out with each customer. The goal is to close some sales and get revenue coming in, but really to figure out what the playbook is. Five deals that all look completely different do not teach much. Finding the pattern lets the team write the playbook, train people, and scale, because scaling requires giving people a playbook. Before th