If you have been around me long then you have probably heard me gush about Charlie Munger. I believe I have a crush on the 94 year old business partner of Warren Buffett and Vice-Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway. I often cite The Tao of Charlie Munger (in our book club) and his speech The Psychology of Human Misjudgement that he gave at Harvard University years ago.
Of all the great lessons I have learned from Charlie this one is my favorite (which is why I made it one of our Leadership Principles at Drift):
“I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest, sometimes not even the most diligent, but they are learning machines. They go to bed every night a little wiser than they were when they got up and boy does that help, particularly when you have a long run ahead of you.”
So what does this have to do with the type of Company we are building?
At Drift we aren’t building a product, we are building a learning machine. A learning machine that can learn from our customers, adapt, and deliver solutions that help our customers enter a new era where businesses can easily buy from other businesses the way we do in our personal lives.
The products & services we deliver to our customers we continue to change over time as we learn more and our customer needs change. In order to see those changes coming we need to stay closer to our customers than our competitors will, experiment and learn from our failures, and practice humility daily (the hardest part) as our egos are our biggest enemy.
So each day remember to go to bed a little bit wiser than you were when you got up, so you too can become a learning machine; if we all do that then over the long-run we will have created a remarkable team and an enduring company.
– DC