Cura Personalis

It's been three full years since I walked on stage with my cap, gown, and flip flops (yeah... that happened) to accept my college diploma. I learned a ton in the first couple years by working in investment banking and founding my own startup. The last year has been with an awesome startup called Life360 which doubled in headcount since I joined. Here are some things I've learned in operations at a company with this kind of growth. The fastest learning happens by osmosis. I learn the most when I experience an ecosystem first-hand. Reading or writing about it will take me down a linear learning curve and that's much, much flatter (and slower) than the exponential one that comes with just being there or seeing it yourself. There's only so much another person can tell you about the best way to do your job. I can ask a bunch of questions and read about how other people do something, but at the end of the day you join a startup to figure out your piece of the puzzle and own it. Learning also has a risk/return tradeoff. To learn how to do something, I have to take 100% of the risk required to learn how to do it. Risk of failure is the price of admission to true learning. Over-communicating with people you work with ensures you're on the same page. Progress (or lack thereof) is hardly surprising when you're constantly communicating with precisely accurate nouns, verbs and adjectives. Like many things, zoom out in moderation. Asking the right big picture questions the right number of times will solidify the big picture in my mind and help me think like my bosses (and their bosses) do. Then I can zoom back into my work and figure it out. Execute with cross-functional considerations. You can only be in one meeting at a time so by definition you'll be excluded from every other overlapping meeting at the company (and the world). Finding creative ways to get the download from other meetings makes sure you don't work in a vacuum. You can also think of this as a way to reduce "oh shit" moments. Thinking of a better way to do something is 1% as impressive as doing something in a better way. There's a time for planning, of course. But execution is all that matters ultimately. I've realized I love working with people who have a bias towards action.

I’ve covered business for more than 20 years, writing articles for Fortune, Forbes, Bloomberg, Money, Fast Company, Time, The New Yorker and The Economist. Along the way, I’ve interviewed countless billionaires, many legendary investors, and the CEOs of some of the world’s largest companies. But in all those years, no business figure has fascinated and obsessed me as much as Warren Buffett.Fifty years after taking charge of Berkshire Hathaway, Buffett reigns supreme as the greatest investor in history, with a personal fortune of $70 billion. Berkshire’s latest annual r

From his office, a banker stood and watched a lone fisherman sitting on the edge of a bridge, carefully taking his time and casting a line into the water below. A few minutes later he caught a trou...