David Rosenthal: commitment

Transcript context

…Yeah. He started programming super young. He was an 11-year-old game programmer. Yeah. It’s all wrapped up in this. His dad worked for the Department of Defense. He worked at the mapping agency as part of the Intelligence Unit where they were creating military maps from satellite imagery doing Palantir and skybox type of stuff back in the day before those companies. Early on, young Tim realizes two things about himself. One is that he loves tinkering with the guts of how things work. Both mechanical—and as we will soon see—computers and technical things. Two is he also actually loves business. This is a pretty rare combination. He becomes just a fantastic engineer and a fantastic business mind. But he doesn’t love business for the money. This is a man who does not have a lot of use for money. He lives in North Carolina, he’s not married, he doesn’t have kids, he doesn’t hang out with celebrities. Yeah, he bought a few fancy sports cars and a nice house and stuff. He has talked about it to the Wall Street Journal. He mostly eats Bojangles fried chicken and drinks Diet Coke. He wears cargo pants that he probably buys for about $20. What he does is he writes code and works on Epic. That’s what he cares about in life. It’s just so refreshing seeing that and this man who’s running such an important internet company versus all the other larger than life tech CEOs out there. You say he loves business. He’s more of a business engineer. He’s not a mogul. He’s not leveraging every component of his business to give him the most cash. He’s excited about what business gives you the potential to do in the world. It isn’t bringing an engineering mindset to the business or a tinkerer’s mindset.…

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