Andrej Karpathy: This Is Elon Musk's Secret To Success.

Elon shared this at a l base camp and I

think it reflects a lot of his

philosophy around how he builds uh

cultures and teams so you have two teams

the Japanese team has four rowers and

one steerer and the American team has

four steerers and one rower and can

anyone guess when the American team

loses what do they do they fire the

rower and Elon shared this example I

think as a reflection of how he thinks

about hiring the right people building

the right people building the right

teams at the right ratio from working so

closely with folks like these incredible

leaders what have you learned I would

say definitely Elon runs his compan is

in extremely unique style I don't

actually think that people appreciate

how unique it is you sort of like even

read about in some what you don't

understand it I like to say that he runs

the biggest startups so he likes very

small strong highly technical teams I

would say at companies by default they

sort of like the teams grow and they get

large Elan was always like a force

against growth I would have to work and

expend effort to hire people I would

have to like basically plead to hire

people and the other thing is that big

companies usually you want um it's

really hard to get rid of low performers

and I think Elon is very friendly to by

default getting getting rid of low

performers so I actually had to fight

for people to keep them on the team

because he would by default want to

remove people so keep a small strong

highly technical team uh no middle

management that is kind of like uh

non-technical for sure number two is

kind of like The Vibes of how this is

how everything runs and how it feels

when he sort of like walks into the

office he wants it to be a vibrant place

people are walking around they're pacing

around uh they're working on exciting

stuff they're charting something they're

coding he doesn't like stagnation he

doesn't like to look for it to look that

way he doesn't like large meetings he

always encourages people to like leave

meetings if they're not being useful so

actually do see this or you know it's a

large meeting and some if you're not

contributing and you're not learning

just walk out and this is like fully

encouraged and I think this is something

that you don't normally see maybe part

of that also is like I think a lot of B

bigger companies they like pamper

employees I think like there's much less

of that it's like the the culture of it

is you're there to do your best

technical work and there's the intensity

and and so on maybe the last one that is

very unique and very interesting and

very strange is just how connected he is

to the team usually a CEO of a company

is like a remote person five layers up

who talks to their VPS who talk to their

you know reports and directors and

eventually you talk to your manager it's

not how he R companies right like he

will come to the office he will talk to

the engineers many of the meetings that

we had were like 50 people in the room

with Elon he talks directly to the

engineers he doesn't want to talk just

to the VPS and the directors normally

people would talk spend like 99 % of the

time maybe talking to the VPC he spends

maybe 50% of the time and he just wants

to talk to the engineers so if if the

team is small and strong then engineers

and the code are the source of Truth and

so they have the source of Truth not

some manager and he wants to talk to

them to understand the actual state of

things and what should be done to

improve it the degree to which he's

connected with the team and not

something remote is also unique and also

just like his large hammer and his

willingness to exercise it within an

organization so maybe if he talks to the

engineers and they bring up that you

know what's blocking you okay I I just I

don't have enough gpus to run my thing

and he's like oh okay and if he if he

hears that twice he's going to be like

okay this is a problem so like what is

our timeline and when when you don't

have satisfying answers he's like okay I

want to talk to the person in charge of

the GPU cluster and like someone dials

the phone and he's just like okay double

the cluster right

now like let's let's have a meeting

tomorrow from now on send me daily

updates until cluster is twice the size

and then they kind of like push back and

they're like okay well we have this

procurement set up we have this timeline

and Nvidia says that don't have enough

GP gpus and it will take 6 months or

something and then you get a rise of an

eyebrow and then he's like okay I want

to talk to Jensen and then he just kind

of like removes bottlenecks so I think

the extent to which he's extremely

involved and removes bottlenecks and

applies his hammer I think is also like

not appreciated so I think there's like

a lot of these kinds of aspects that are

very unique I would say and very

interesting and honestly like going to a

normal company outside of that is

definitely miss aspects of that I don't

think I hit in all the points but it is

very unique uh thing and uh it's very

interesting and yeah yeah uh yeah I

guess that's my brand