How Future Billionaires Get Sh*t Done

**Michael Seibel** (0:00)
I think notebooks are great for ideas.
I think a well-managed to-do list is a software product that you need to adopt. And there's 80 of them. I actually don't even care which one you adopt. But it's like, when I tell something to founders, and then they write it down in a notebook, I'm like, that's gone forever.

**Dalton Caldwell** (0:19)
But they look cool. They have a fountain pen, and they're taking beautiful notes, Michael.

**Michael Seibel** (0:24)
We all know that everything important is in the Moleskine Notebook.
Today, we're going to talk about how future billionaires get shit done. So Dalton, you were inspired by a PG post when thinking of this idea, right?

**Dalton Caldwell** (0:43)
Yeah, Paul Graham wrote this really famous blog post, I believe called Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule, where, you know, he said something that all of us had thought before, but he put it very succinctly and in great words. And so if you haven't read it before, anyone out there on the internet, you should read it. Just Google Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule, we can put a link in.
And he introduces the idea of the difference between how makers, i.e. programmers, in his case, organize their time to be productive, versus folks that are managers, all right? And so it was great terminology, it's good stuff.

**Michael Seibel** (1:16)
Yes.
So let's start with the Maker mode. You were a developer in your startup, I was a business guy in my startup. I think, in many ways, this stuff came a little bit more natively to you, and I had to learn this stuff by like basically destroying the productivity of my co-founders. So how did you think about Maker's mode as a founder?

**Dalton Caldwell** (1:38)
Most companies are set up around a manager schedule where you have a day packed with meeting after meeting. And so if you're a programmer at a big company, you would have to, you know, you'd have like an hour to program here, an hour to program there. And this is bad.
This was not conducive to building things. And so to just walk through my perspective as someone that, you know, was programming back in the day when I was a startup founder.
When you're programming, the more of the program you can keep in your head at any one time, the easier it is for you to know what's going on and have the context up here to make changes and fix bugs. And it takes like an hour or two cold of looking at a program and figuring stuff out for it to get loaded into RAM, so to speak. And so if you're interrupted, like if you have to program in hour increments, man, are you gonna suck. Like you constantly have to restart your state every time you program. And so a great Maker's Schedule is something like an eight-hour uninterrupted block of time. And his argument, I think he was also talking about this from the perspective of an artist or a musician. Like if you wanted to record an album or write music, or if you wanted to write a book, the same deal. If you had to write a book in 20-minute increments, I think a lot of writers wouldn't love that. Fair?

**Michael Seibel** (3:05)
Which is so much different than the business guy. Like I was the business guy at my startup, and you certainly can do email in 20-minute increments or hour increments. And so I remember having this conversation with Emmett where he said, Michael, imagine that I'm doing ridiculously complicated word problems, and you're interrupting me in the middle of them. And I was like, then it clicked. I was like, oh, well, I've had to do hard word problems. I went to school, I had to do that. Shit, that's what your day is like?
One, that sounds a lot harder than writing emails, but two, I would hate to be interrupted.
And once he said that, it kind of clicked. Before he said that, I just assumed, well, you know, he's typing, I'm typing.

**Dalton Caldwell** (3:52)
He's typing things.
And I remember when I read the post, what resonated with me is I felt like my work day really began around 5 or 6 p.m. Isn't that weird? And that's because that's when things would quiet down and I would stop getting email, and the building I was working out of would quiet down. And that's where actually all the good programming happened, was at the end of the day.

**Michael Seibel** (4:14)
What was interesting was that for us, we basically had to figure out how to build that in. I think in the beginning, organically it happened because that was our sleep cycle. We were all living in an apartment together. But when we had more employees and we had an office, we literally, and this is something that I just noticed happened organically, nothing got done before lunch. Getting to work was all about getting in, answering your email, doing a couple of meetings. It was just like no one who was writing code even wanted to start writing code before lunch, because lunch was the big like F you in the middle of the day. And our whole trick was one, how do we not serve a lunch that makes everyone go to sleep?