A $5 billion company has operated for 65 years with ZERO managers.

Employees hire their own colleagues, rank each other for compensation, and choose their own projects.

This company has never had a loss-making year since 1958.

Thread W.L. Gore is a material science company with 13,000+ employees holding 1,000+ patents.

Your Gore-Tex jacket, medical implants, and guitar strings? All made by workers who report to no one.

And they have achieved that with ZERO management layers.

The question is how?

For the first time in history, the US is facing a scientist brain drain.

After Trump decided to cut 56% of the NSF budget, China launched a $500B science program to "steal" scientists.

How China is silently replacing US in the science war: 🧵 Let's go back to WWII.

Vannevar Bush (Roosevelt's advisor) convinced him that wars would be won by advanced tech, not just weapons.

Bush proposed that instead of having government labs build the weapons, they should give universities massive amounts of money to figure it out.

A Swedish bank lets branch managers approve million-dollar loans without asking anyone.

They've had ZERO bailouts in 150 years, crushed every competitor for 52 years, and employees own more shares than any other investor.

This shouldn't work, but it does 🧵 But first, let's go back to 1970...

Handelsbanken was on the verge of dying.

The CEO had just resigned over a foreign exchange scandal, and a tiny regional bank was stealing customers left and right.

Brian Chesky credits Airbnb's success to what Peter Thiel said after investing $150 M.

Chesky became so obsessed with Thiel's advice that today employees hire their own teammates at Airbnb.

Every entrepreneur needs to understand how & why it works: 👇 Brian Chesky had this crazy approach. He interviewed the first 400 people himself.

His question was crazy: "If you had a year left to live, would you still take this job?"

Most candidates thought he'd lost his mind. But it worked - he only hired people who'd die for the mission

A video game company made $2 billion in 1982.

Its employees used to drink beer in the office, hold meetings in hot tubs, and did coke with girls.

Even Steve Jobs was part of it once.

But within just 2 years, the company had to bury millions of games in a desert. Thread 🧵
Atari wasn't just any company.

Founded in 1972, it created the entire video game industry from scratch.

Engineers tested games in local bars to see how players responded.

Their first hit, Pong, caused such a sensation that the coin box literally overflowed with quarters.

LEGO was 4 weeks away from bankruptcy in 2003:

• Losing $1 Million per day
• $800 Million in debt
• Negative profit margin (-30%)

But then something happened, and by 2010, they started growing faster than Apple. How? 🧵 The situation was so dire that Lego's CEO had to send a memo:

"We're running out of cash and likely won't survive."

The 72-year-old company had never posted a loss until 1998.

By 2003, it lost $300M and projected a $400M loss in 2004.

Toyota lets 19-year-olds stop $2.5M/hour production lines.

Netflix's engineers spend company money with ZERO approval.

Amazon gives full independence to "2-pizza" teams.

Why the most profitable companies give extreme control to employees, and how it can save your business: 👇 The average lifespan of an S&P 500 company is just 15 years, and McKinsey predicts 75% of them will disappear by 2027.

One of the reasons companies die is that they are built on a hierarchical basis.

Even in the fast-paced world, most decisions require 5+ approvals.

A $1 billion company has operated for 53 years with ZERO managers.

Workers buy $500,000 machines without approval. Hire their own colleagues. Set their own salaries.

And they're outperforming every competitor in their industry.

The coolest company you've never heard of 🧵 Morning Star supplies 10% of the world's ingredient tomato products with just 550 employees.

It processes 30% of California's tomatoes.
Your tomato ketchup may be made by tomatoes processed here.

And they have achieved that with ZERO management layer.
The question is HOW?

In 1979, Jerry Buss bought the Lakers using a "Monopoly-like" deal.

For $67.5M, he got a team worth $7 Billion today.

But his true genius wasn't the price—it was turning basketball into Hollywood-level entertainment 🧵 A single Lakers courtside seat in 1979 generated $615 in annual revenue.

By 1988, the same seat generated $10,000+ annually.

Today, that single seat generates over $1.2 million per season—a 195,000% increase from Buss's purchase.

Let's dive in 👇

Instagram had 30M users and only 13 employees.
SpaceX's Falcon was launched by just 30 engineers.
WhatsApp reached 450M users with only 55 employees.

The math doesn't add up - until you understand what small teams know that big companies don't.

Thread 🧵
The numbers are staggering:

• Minecraft: Built by 1 person, acquired for $2.5 Billion
• Stripe: 7 devs, now valued at $50 Billion
• AirPods: 20-person team, $20B+ product line

Let's understand how tiny teams created more value than companies with thousands of employees...

Marvel was $700M in debt and bankrupt in 1996.

By 2005, they were so desperate that they offered their characters as collateral for a $525M loan.

If their first movies failed, they'd lose everything.

A thread 🧵 Marvel was selling film rights to survive.

They offered Sony the rights to EVERY Marvel character for just $25M, but Sony only bought Spider-Man.

X-Men went to Fox, and Hulk to Universal.

The Avengers were literally the heroes nobody wanted.

No one is going to believe this, but FedEx:

• Knew Tesla would succeed years before the Wall Street
• Spotted Nvidia's rise before any analyst
• Delivers 15 Million packages every day
• And employs 5,30,000+ people

Why FedEx is sitting on the world's most valuable data: 🧵 Fred Smith saw the revolution coming while still in college.

Flying computer parts as a Yale student, he noticed companies paying for entire planes to transport tiny components.

But he only started FedEx after serving in the Vietnam War.

Why is no one talking about Marc Andreessen?

• Was worth $100M at 24
• Once owned 5% of Nvidia (Worth $125B today)
• Built the first user-friendly browser (Mosaic)
• Invested $400M in Elon Musk's Twitter
• Told Microsoft to go to hell

The man who makes the future 🧵
Everyone’s online because of this guy.

At 21, Marc Andreessen built Mosaic—the first browser that didn’t suck.

Mosaic displayed images alongside text - something impossible before.

Within months, 2 million people downloaded it.

In 1985, Reebok dethroned Nike to become America's No. 1 shoe brand.

Reebok's sales exploded from $12.8M to $310M in just two years.

Phil Knight was watching his company get crushed by a British upstart...

But then Nike pulled out a $2.5M weapon to crush its rivals: 🧵 Nike's downfall began with pure arrogance.

When America was obsessed with aerobics, Nike execs dismissed it as "nothing more than fat ladies dancing to music."

Meanwhile, Reebok created the Freestyle - the first shoe designed for women.

This oversight cost Nike BILLIONS.

Andrew Carnegie went from $1.20 a week to $309 Billion.

When he retired, he gave away 90% of his wealth to build 2,509 libraries and funded multiple universities.

But he barely spent 2 hours every day to build this fortune.

Here's the entire story: 🧵 Carnegie wasn't always wealthy -- or even American.

His parents sold their belongings in Scotland to come to America when he was 13.

So Carnegie started working as a bobbin boy in a cotton mill where he earned $1.20 per week.

BYD isn't just beating Tesla - it's humiliating them:

• Sold 4 Million EVs in 2024 (Twice that of Tesla)
• Tesla, Ford, and Toyota fight over its batteries
• Warren Buffett invested $232M for a 10% stake

How China quietly built BYD into the world's biggest EV empire 🧵 Elon Musk once laughed at BYD for competing with Tesla.

But the same company forced Tesla to sell their cars at dirt cheap prices and is now ambushing Elon to back out of China.

How a "man you've never heard of" pressured Elon to rethink everything 👇

Steve Ballmer tripled Microsoft's revenue to $78B in 14 years.

Yet when he announced his retirement, Microsoft's stock jumped 7.5% in a single day, adding $20B in value.

Investors were literally celebrating his departure.

The evil truth of how Ballmer destroyed Microsoft 🧵
When Ballmer took over, Microsoft was worth $642 Billion.

So how did they miss the 5 biggest and most obvious tech shifts?

• Search (lost to Google)
• Smartphones (lost to Apple)
• Mobile OS (lost to iOS/Android)
• Media (lost to Netflix)
• Cloud (lost to Amazon)

Jensen Huang once said, "My will to survive exceeds everyone else's will to kill me."

In 1996, Intel was worth $100B whereas Nvidia was 30 days away from bankruptcy.

How Jensen Huang beat Intel at a game he didn't even stand a chance at.

Thread 🧵 Intel's playbook was ruthless in the 90s. They would:

1. Wait for new PC tech to emerge
2. Integrate everything into the motherboard
3. And kill the entire industry

Intel had destroyed sound card and network card companies already. And now they were coming for graphic cards...

No one is talking about how Palantir bypasses military bureaucracy, embeds engineers inside agencies, and forces the government to depend on it.

Peter Thiel calls the CIA a front for Palantir.

How Palantir took over the Pentagon and why no politician can kill it today:🧵 But what does Palantir even do?

Palantir builds data platforms that turn disconnected information into actionable intelligence.

Think phone records, bank data, social media, travel history - their software merges it all and predicts what you might do next.

Why Elon Musk wins every single time is because he operates in "wartime mode"

Keeps absurd timelines, screams & fires people, accepts collateral damage, sleeps in the factory to ship fast.

If you want to scale your business at 10X speed, you need to learn Elon's algorithm: 🧵 To beat OpenAI, Musk built xAI (Grok) at a mindboggling speed:

- Poached talent from everywhere
- Diverted 12,000 GPUs taken from Nvidia to xAI
- Pressured Oracle to get access to their GPUs

And built Colossus - a 100,000 GPU supercomputer within 122 days. The progress shows:

Richard Branson is the craziest CEO alive:

• Started an airline because his flight got canceled
• Built 400 companies just for fun
• Sued British Airways & distributed all the money
• Kitesurfs with naked models on his back

The person you know, the story you don't 🧵
While Steve Jobs was preaching about focusing on a single thing, Branson was running 400 companies.

Branson literally started an airline because his flight got canceled and he wanted to meet his girlfriend.

Let's dive in 👇