Today, Eileen Fisher, the company, operates nearly 70 retail stores, which generated between $400 and $500 million in revenue in 2016. 31 It's a supplier to many other clothing retailers and has consistently been recognized as one of the best companies to work for. Unlike the businesses featured in Chapter 3 that faced enormous failures, the company has enjoyed continuous growth and thoughtful, productive change, unblemished by financial, legal, or safety failures. Its management practices and governance structures have created a showcase for psychological safety.

Our Stanford colleagues Perry Klebahn and Jeremy Utley made the “add nothing unnecessary” philosophy a cornerstone of their ten-week LaunchPad class. As we said in chapter 3, more than a hundred companies have been founded by LaunchPad students since 2010, and more than 50 percent are still alive in some form. Perry says each founding team is taught to experiment with one or a few narrow prototypes at a time and to assume they won’t be able to predict which offerings customers will want. That means most teams will need to keep abandoning and changing offerings before creating an offering that customers want and will pay for—and will generate enough revenue over the long haul to build a company. As a result, Perry and Jeremy teach students not to take or to delay, many steps that other entrepreneurial classes and investors preach as essential for starting a company. For example, many start-up experts recommend writing a detailed business plan to help founders flesh out and explain their product or service, financial model, target market, and backgrounds. Perry and Jeremy do teach students to keep iterating a three-to-five-minute pitch, because potential investors, employees, and customers will want to know what your company does. Perry and Jeremy also coach strategic inaction, because they believe that writing a detailed business plan is useless or worse. That’s because the company’s offering (and target customers) will almost certainly keep changing. Founders who work hard on writing a perfect plan, Perry and Jeremy argue, waste time that is better spent prototyping, iterating, and learning. And—since labor leads to love—all that effort can cause founders to become irrationally attached to bad early ideas. Perry and Jeremy aren’t alone in their dim view of business plans. A study of seven hundred start-ups led by David Kirsch of the University of Maryland found no relationship between the quality of business plans and whether start-ups received venture-capital funding. Carl Schramm, economist and author of Burn the Business Plan, argues that Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft never had business plans, and “empirically, it appears as if you don’t need a business plan.” In short, before you heap some burden on people and eventually figure out that it wastes their time (or worse), slow down and ask, “Suppose we did nothing?

On June 15, 1971, The Washington Post Company went public at $6.50 per share (adjusted for a subsequent 4-for-1 split). When Kay stepped down as CEO on May 9, 1991, the price was $222, a gain of 3,315 percent. During the same period the Dow advanced from 907 to 2,971, an increase of 227 percent.” Now that I have studied Graham’s life and leadership, my own assessment is that she stands as one of the absolute best examples of a leader who took a company from good to great, with some of the gutsiest business leadership decisions of all time.

To optimize opportunities for leaders it wants to bring in and retain in its fold, Blackstone has pioneered by actually creating a company for two standout talents. The firm perceived an opportunity to build a company for Thomas Staggs and Kevin Mayer to lead. Both men had been passed over to succeed Bob Iger at Disney. First, the firm bought Reese Witherspoon’s company, Hello Sunshine, and then they added children’s entertainment Moonbug and Exile Content Studio, creating Candle Media, with Staggs and Mayer as cofounders and co-CEOs.

As OpenAI concentrated its bets, Altman was applying the same strategy to his other projects and investments. Over the years, as he’d shifted toward more hard-tech innovation, he had developed a belief in betting big and long on the most important projects.

“If you could wave a wand, change anything about the tech, startup, entrepreneurship ecosystem, what would you change?” his brother Jack had asked him at an event as he’d stepped down from YC. “It would be to get everyone in the ecosystem to take a much longer time horizon,” Altman had said. “This world where people start a company and plan to run it for four or five years, join a company and only plan to stay for one or two—that’s not how important shit gets done.”

Along those lines, 2021 seemed to mark a major shift in Altman’s personal investment strategy away from taking a large number of small bets toward taking a small number of really large ones. That year a startup he’d cofounded in 2019 called Tools for Humanity that had remained largely quiet saw an influx of funding and media coverage and a concerted ramp-up in its operations, as Altman directed more external attention to the company. The venture was a dedicated effort to develop a working mechanism for universal basic income, or UBI, a popular Silicon Valley idea to give everyone a regular minimum distribution of income. Altman often passionately discussed UBI as the possible antidote to a future world where AI could create mass economic fallout. At YC he had started the largest pilot in the US to study the concept, spinning out a nonprofit in the process called OpenResearch that administered the program. Over three years, OpenResearch gave a $1,000 monthly stipend to a randomly selected group of one thousand out of three thousand low-income people, with the rest getting fifty dollars a month as a control. In July 2024, OpenResearch would release its findings, showing that the unconditional cash helped people meet their basic needs, assist others, and have more economic leeway.