There's an idea in this book where it says Jensen prioritized technical skill and maximum effort above all.
And as I was reading, I noticed a lot of similarities between the way Jensen thought and ran his company with the way that Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos thought and ran their companies as well.
In fact, from day one, in Jeff Bezos's very first shareholder letter, Jeff wrote about the importance and emphasized the importance of having the very best team.
He wrote, setting the bar high in our approach to hiring has been and will continue to be the single most important element of Amazon's success.
Jeff's focus on talent is very similar to this quote that I found from Steve Jobs in an interview that Steve gave that very same year in 1997.
And this is what Steve Jobs said.
He said that, I think I've consistently figured out who the really smart people were to hang around with.
You must find extraordinary people.
The key observation is that in most things in life, the dynamic range between average quality and the best quality is at most 2 to 1.
But in the field that I was interested in, I noticed that the dynamic range between what an average person could accomplish and what the best person could accomplish was 50 or 100 to 1.
Given that, you're well advised to go after the cream of the cream, he says, you want to build a team that pursues the A players.
And this is exactly what what Ramp did.
Ramp has the most talented technical team in their industry.
Becoming an engineer at Ramp is nearly impossible.
In the last 12 months, they hired only 0.23% of the people that applied.
When you use Ramp, you now have top tier technical talent and some of the best AI engineers working on your behalf 24,7 to automate and improve all of your business's financial operations.
And they do this all on a single platform.
That means the longer that you use Ramp, the more efficient your company becomes.
This is important because as Sam Walton said in his autobiography, you can make a lot of different mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation.
Or you can be brilliant and still go out of business if you're too inefficient.