• Garry Tan said he once passed up a role on Palantir's founding team to stay at Microsoft.
• It was a "$2-4 billion mistake," he said. He learned not to chase "what was hot."
• Tan eventually joined Palantir as its 10th employee. He now leads startup accelerator Y Combinator.

Garry Tan was employee No. 10 at Palantir. He regrets that it wasn't single digits.

On "The A16z Show," the Y Combinator CEO said that he was offered a place on the company's founding team — but he turned it down to stay at Microsoft.

Tan was in Stanford University's Phi Kappa Psi fraternity. His frat brothers included Joe Lonsdale and Stephen Cohen, two Palantir cofounders. Both were interning at Peter Thiel's hedge fund, Tan said.

He described one of Thiel's strategies: "When you start a thing, you write down on a piece of paper all the smartest people who you need to go and hire."

Tan was on both of their lists, he said. So, Tan said that Lonsdale and Cohen flew him down from Seattle to have dinner with Thiel.

Thiel said, "I'm so sure this is the right thing for you," Tan recounted. He also offered Tan a $70,000 check, Tan said, which would have matched his Microsoft salary at the time.

"I said, 'Thank you very much, Mr. Thiel, but I might get promoted to level 60 this year,'" Tan said. "Which I did."

He called it a "$2-4 billion mistake."

Palantir has since become a $420 billion company. It popularized an entire job category — the forward-deployed engineer — that is now replicated by many Big Tech companies. Palantir's stock opened at $10 per share during its 2020 direct listing; on Thursday, it was trading at over $175 per share.

Tan chalked his mistake up to chasing what looks hot. He compared it to an early career move in which he worked on Windows Mobile rather than sticking with web development. Then, the Facebook boom happened.

"Joe and Stephen were among the smartest people I'd ever met," Tan said. "If not them, who was I going to be a cofounder with?"

The universe was speaking to him, Tan said, but he didn't listen. "All I cared about was what was cool, what was hot, what would a really good investor say," he said.

Tan eventually made it to Palantir, of course. He learned: "Everything that's awesome in my life is kind of a cult." That cult should start with "some sort of truth or belief that flies in the face of an orthodoxy," he said.

It's "very punk, actually," he said.

Do you work at Palantir? Contact the reporter from a non-work email and device at hchandonnet@businessinsider.com, or on Signal at henrychand.30.

• Business Insider asked its readers on LinkedIn: Are shorts appropriate in the workplace?
• Instagram head Adam Mosseri recently said he was "pro" wearing shorts in the office.
• As of Friday morning, 54% of respondents said no, while 20% said yes. More debated dress codes in the comments.

Free the knee? Our readers want the knee locked away.

Instagram boss Adam Mosseri recently came out as "pro" shorts in the workplace. He said that it was a "hot debate" in the Instagram office, though "not all shorts are created equal" and not everyone can "pull them off."

We posted the question to our readers on LinkedIn: Do you think it's appropriate to wear shorts to the office? Over 7,000 people have cast their vote so far.

As of Friday morning, the majority of respondents, 54%, said no, compared to 20% who voted yes. Another 25% of respondents said "it depends."

The survey is far from scientific, and the results could shift as more readers vote. Still, the early results provide an interesting look into people's evolving views of the office dress code. Gone are the "Mad Men" days of mandatory suits. And with Gen Z firmly in the workplace and sweltering summer temperatures potentially swaying people's views, it's a good time to revisit the polarizing topic.

A lively debate over dress code and etiquette

Readers in the comments below the LinkedIn poll debated what, if any, shorts dress code would be appropriate.

Joella Shepherdson commented that chino shorts should be allowed, but basketball shorts shouldn't. She voiced worry of a "double standard."

"I think if skirts are acceptable, shorts should be too, but they should be subject to the same workwear rules as normal," she wrote.

Stephanie Cary wrote that it may depend on the industry. Startups and fashion may be more open to the apparel, she wrote.

What about a temperature threshold? Jay Martin wrote that shorts were okay if it was over 90 degrees.

Of course, the heat is outside the office for much of corporate America. Many workplaces pump cold air into their cubicles. April Weygand drew a comparison: "The men wear shorts in the summer while the women are wearing sweaters because of the crazy AC."

Donald Peace narrowed in on Mosseri's comment that "not everyone can pull it off." Peace called it a "clearly subjective judgement," describing the Instagram head's view as an "HR nightmare."

Working from home has changed standards of dressing. Brian Bower wrote that he sometimes wears pajama bottoms while working virtually.

"Businesses up top," he wrote. "Party below."

• Miguel Marquez began pursuing financial independence in his late 30s.
• He uses a seven-step ladder, ranging from debt freedom to Fat FI, to make the goal feel achievable.
• The Spanish and French professor is currently at Lean FI, with traditional FI his next milestone.

Miguel Marquez has spent years making complex subjects easier to understand.

Originally from Spain, the 47-year-old earned a Ph.D. in French linguistics from Indiana University Bloomington and now teaches French, Spanish, and personal finance at a university in Shenzhen, China.

Through teaching personal finance and pursuing financial independence himself, Marquez has learned that saving for such a distant goal can feel either too intimidating to begin or too tedious to sustain over decades.

He found a way to make the process more manageable by using "financial freedom milestones," a concept he first discovered on the Money Flamingo blog. Rather than treating financial independence as one enormous — and potentially unachievable — target, the framework divides the journey into seven stages.

"It's like playing a video game," he said, with each milestone representing another level of financial security.

Marquez, who began seriously pursuing financial independence after completing his Ph.D. at 38, explained the seven milestones he uses to track his progress.

1. Debt freedom

The first milestone is eliminating debt. Marquez said he borrowed money only once, during his fourth year at university, and quickly decided it was not something he wanted to get used to: "I didn't like the feeling."

He's been debt-free since completing his undergraduate degree, meaning he had already cleared the first milestone before he began deliberately pursuing financial independence.

2. 'F-you money'

The next stage is accumulating "F-you money," typically defined as having enough savings to leave an unfulfilling job, take a career break, or make another major life change without facing immediate financial consequences.

Definitions vary, but Marquez follows the version popularized by JL Collins, author of "The Simple Path to Wealth": roughly one year of living expenses set aside.

That cushion creates options, Marquez said: "If you're in a job you don't like, you can say, 'I'm leaving.' You can look for a different job, become self-employed, or do whatever you want to do."

3. Coast FI

Reaching Coast FI means you have invested enough that, assuming your portfolio continues compounding, it's projected to grow into the amount you'll need by traditional retirement age — without requiring further contributions.

That can free up income for other priorities, since you no longer need to save as aggressively for retirement.

Marquez said he reached Coast FI in June 2024, less than two years after moving to China for his current teaching position. He was in his mid-40s.

4. Flamingo FI

About a year later, Marquez reached "Flamingo FI," another concept developed by the Money Flamingo blog.

At that point, he'd saved about half of his full FI target — or roughly 12.5 years of annual expenses under the conventional 4% rule. The name comes from the idea that you've reached FIRE "standing on one leg," like a flamingo.

5. Lean FI

Marquez is currently at Lean FI, a form of financial independence in which investments can cover essential living costs while leaving relatively little room for discretionary spending. He said his portfolio, worth nearly $400,000, can support housing, food, fixed expenses, and an occasional short trip.

His low cost of living in Shenzhen is an important part of the calculation. He lives in subsidized housing on his university campus and said he can cover his annual expenses with just 30% of his income.

6. Full financial independence

The next stage is full financial independence, sometimes simply called FI or traditional FIRE.

Under the 4% rule, you're generally considered financially independent once you've saved about 25 times your annual expenses. You can then withdraw 4% in your first year of retirement and adjust future withdrawals for inflation.

7. Fat FI

The final milestone is Fat FI: having enough invested to support a lifestyle with considerably more discretionary spending than traditional financial independence. While there is no universal threshold, some investors define it as a portfolio large enough to cover two or three times their normal expenses, while others use a specific net-worth target.

Marquez said he's not compelled to reach Fat FI. Because his living costs are comparatively low, he expects ordinary financial independence to provide him with a lifestyle that already feels abundant.

Chunking out his journey into smaller milestones helped him reach a level of financial security he once assumed was out of reach on a teaching salary.

"I thought that you needed a lot of money to solve the money problem," Marquez said. "But when I started calculating and writing down what I would actually need, I thought, 'Wait a second — this is feasible.'"

• McDonald's second-quarter sales growth slowed as it faced trouble rolling out a new value menu.
• CEO Chris Kempczinski said that the chain has an execution issue, not a strategic one.
• Customers told Business Insider that the chain should rethink its approach to pricing.

McDonald's customers are looking for value. Some say they aren't finding it there.

Patrons of the Golden Arches told Business Insider that they're not impressed with the chain's prices lately. Some are reducing their visits and are critical of the food quality delivered for the cost. While McDonald's still has fans, some diners are reducing their visits.

McDonald's executives have acknowledged that they've had trouble breaking through to customers. The company's shares are down 9.6% this year.

US sales growth slowed during the chain's second quarter, it said Tuesday. CEO Chris Kempczinski pointed to trouble rolling out an under-$3 value menu — ranging from burgers and breakfast sandwiches to soft drinks — and running too many promotions at once as reasons why the chain struggled during its second quarter.

Kempczinski said that McDonald's had execution problems, but that its strategy is sound. The customers who spoke to Business Insider had their own thoughts, especially about prices.

Steve Armstrong, a retiree in Louisiana, said that he goes to Burger King because he thinks its Whopper represents a better value and is higher-quality than burgers at McDonald's.

"There's better food out there," Armstrong said. "And if you want people's money, you need to step up."

Christoph Winarski, who goes to McDonald's about once a week, said he's noticed menu prices rising over the past few years and is rethinking his habit.

"When you can get a meal from a sit-down restaurant for the same price that you get from a fast-food meal, I think that's kind of where the tipping point is," he said.

McDonald's has a value issue, customers say

Out of 227 people who responded to a Business Insider reader survey asking them to rate the value that they got for their money while dining at McDonald's, about 57% — 130 people — responded "poor" or "very poor." The survey was not scientific but showed that price and value for money were key factors they use to decide whether or not they eat at McDonald's.

Brian Schnabel said that he often stops at McDonald's while driving between his home in New York City and visiting friends in Maryland.

He hasn't ordered from the chain's under-$3 menu lately, he said, because he finds it overpriced. "If it were $1, it might be worth it," he said, referring to the dollar menu that McDonald's scrapped in 2013.

Instead, Schnabel said his go-to order at McDonald's is the Chicken Snack Wrap, which consists of fried chicken covered in lettuce, cheese, and a tortilla and costs $2.99 at the locations that he visits.

Schnabel said he thinks the snack wrap is a good deal.

"It's out of character, almost, for McDonald's to offer something at $3 which is so substantial and fills me up," he said.

Some responses to Business Insider's survey echoed the sentiment.

"I am not going to McDonald's as much since the in-app deals were cut back," one person wrote, adding that they liked a 2019 promotion that allowed diners to get a second sandwich, such as a Big Mac, for $1 when they ordered one at full price.

"To be honest, there's far better out there for my dollar," another said. "Unless something REALLY changes, I won't be going back."

Some said they liked McDonald's new value menu. "I have gone back to McDonald's only since the new value meals," one wrote. "They are an outstanding deal!"

Value versus meal deals

Mike Perry, founder and creative officer at Tavern, an agency that works with restaurant and hospitality clients, said that McDonald's should consider other ways of pitching its under-$3 selection.

Instead of trying to sell it as a "value" menu, it could make more sense to offer the items as add-ons to full meals or refocus on meal deals, such as the $5 meal that McDonald's introduced in 2024. "I would just never say the word 'value,' frankly," he said.

Other chains, such as Chili's, have successfully drawn in customers by focusing on meal deals like the Triple Dipper instead of value menus with cheap à la carte items, Perry said. That approach also tends to help restaurants' bottom line in the long run, he added.

"You can only sell so many dollar hamburgers," he said.

Do you have a story idea about McDonald's? Contact this reporter at abitter@businessinsider.com or via encrypted messaging app Signal at 808-854-4501. Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.

• Tarek Mansour, the CEO of Kalshi, acknowledged the company has an "unusual" management style.
• Most employees report directly to him or his fellow cofounder, Mansour said on a recent podcast.
• It's "kind of chaotic," Mansour said on a recent podcast, but "the tradeoff is a company that can adapt quickly."

At Kalshi, most employees report directly to both founders of the largest prediction market in the US in what CEO Tarek Mansour described as a deliberately "unusual" management structure.

Speaking on a recent episode of Sequoia Capital's "Long Strange Trip," Mansour said he and fellow cofounder Luana Lopes Lara have roughly 150 direct reports with little traditional hierarchy in between.

"There's some functions that like we sort of let them do like what they do," Mansour said, "but pretty much most of the company reports to between the two of us."

Mansour and Lara founded Kalshi in 2018 after they met as students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The CEO acknowledged that the management style is "pretty unusual," but said the tradeoff is a company that can adapt quickly, even if it's "kind of chaotic."

"I think you could build an organization that's somewhat okay with that, because what you get out of chaos is like continuous, constant adaptability," Mansour said. "It's very easy for a company to adapt, very easy."

His goal, Mansour said, is to keep the company flexible enough to "constantly reorient and reassemble around the biggest challenges or biggest opportunities."

"You want to be able to do that with no friction — that's inherently chaotic," he said, adding, "your structure needs to be as adaptable as possible."

During the podcast, Mansour told host and Sequoia Capital partner Brian Halligan that he doesn't follow any leadership playbook and described his approach as "making it up as I go."

Mansour called he and his cofounder, Lara, "probably very sort of like entrepreneurially illiterate."

"We haven't read all the books, we haven't watched all the podcasts," he said.

Mansour said he concentrates on Kalshi's big-picture strategy, while Lara focuses on the day-to-day operations of the company.

"I actually think we kind of disagree by design," Mansour said. "Like we have this thing, this dynamic over time, it's become a thing where like we essentially will always take the opposite side of the argument."

• Pepsi's former CEO shared a raft of career advice in a recent interview.
• Indra Nooyi said that chasing opportunity, finding mentors, and working hard are key to success.
• Nooyi also endorsed focusing on the job you have, taking calculated risks, and staying humble.

Indra Nooyi, the former CEO of PepsiCo, offered up some great career tips during an interview released July 1 as part of the Hoover Institution's "Only In America" documentary series.

Here are the six best pieces of advice she gave:

1. Seek opportunity

Nooyi emigrated from India to the US in 1978 to attend the Yale School of Management. Studying and living in the US was the springboard she needed to secure jobs at Boston Consulting Group, Motorola, and ultimately PepsiCo.

"An immigrant could come in with nothing in her pocket and become the CEO of an iconic American red, white, and blue company," Nooyi said, reflecting on her unlikely career path.

"I would never have been CEO in any other country in the world including in India," she added, championing the US as a meritocracy where the best and the brightest can get ahead.

2. Find mentors

Recruiting guides to accelerate her learning and help her chart a career path were vital to Nooyi's success.

Nooyi said she's a "product of great mentoring" and "forever grateful to every one of those people who gave me so much of their time and energy."

"My mentors believed in me even more than I believed in myself," she said. "They would give me impossible assignments to do, just to prove to the world that I was worth mentoring. They would lift me up at points when I thought I could never be lifted up."

3. Work hard

Nooyi said she's had to hustle and grind her entire life, including as a foreign student at Yale.

She and her peers "worked our tail off" with the mindset that they weren't at college to go to parties or take weekend trips, but instead "to study and to work hard and to move ahead."

"So we'd go to school in the morning, work through the night, and I was a receptionist in my dorm from midnight to 5 a.m. So people realized that this was a grueling experience for us and they respected us for that."

4. Focus on the job you have, not the job you want

Nooyi said she didn't join PepsiCo intending to become CEO. Her approach was "I'm going to nail this job," to the extent that when her bosses wanted to promote her, she would ask if they were sure and tell them she was happy in her current role.

Having an explicit goal like becoming CEO in 10 years can mean "you get obsessed with that," she said. Her advice is to "do the job you're doing very, very well and everything else will take care of itself."

5. Budget for taking risks

Nooyi said she "took calculated risks knowing that I might lose my job sometimes."

That was possible because she and her husband "lived simply" so that "even if I had lost my job we could have lived on one salary," she said.

"So we both were very comfortable that the risks I was taking were calculated, and it was worth fighting for, and that's what we did through our career."

6. Stay humble

Nooyi said her family played a "major role" in keeping her grounded.

She recalled her mother always telling her, "I don't care if you're a big shot, leave your crown in the garage because you don't need to bring your crown into the house. You're the mother, you're the wife, you're the daughter, the daughter-in-law. Don't forget those roles."

Nooyi said that the message from her mother, that she wasn't above helping around the house and taking care of her family, "anchored" her and kept her humble.

• Anthropic's Boris Cherny says companies are right to focus on their ROI for AI.
• At the same time, Cherny said employees at all levels and roles still need tokens to be able to experiment with AI.
• Then, the Claude Code creator said, companies can start to control costs.

Claude Code creator Boris Cherny has a message for companies that are nervous about their AI token budgets.

"ROI is absolutely the right framing because you don't want to just think about cost because you kind of spend something on it and you get something back," Cherny said during a recent fireside chat at Scale AI.

Jesse Chen, Meta's director of product management who moderated the chat, asked the Anthropic employee directly about the recent concerns raised by Uber COO Andrew Macdonald about whether the rideshare giant's AI spending was leading to enough of a return to justify the rising cost of AI tokens.

Tokens are units of text that serve as a measurement for AI usage, such as the prompts processed by large language models, including those that power chatbots like Anthropic's Claude or its generative AI coding tool, Claude Code.

Cherny said it's right to be focused on ROI. It's also important, he said, not to overdo it in response to cost concerns.

"The way to do this is give people tokens and give them safety to experiment so they feel like they can try stuff and they're not going to get penalized for it," he said. "Once you find these internal use cases that kind of work, then you want to control the costs and you want to do that on the backend, not on the front end."

Otherwise, companies might miss out on the best ideas for deploying AI.

"Often, some of the most interesting ideas and the most innovative ways to improve processes and new product ideas are going to come from an accountant somewhere in the corner of the org or a marketing person that the CEO has never heard of," Cherny said.

Cherny emphasized that Anthropic offers several ways for its enterprise customers to control costs and set budgets, including per-seat cost controls.

Others in the AI space, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, are also increasingly discussing companies' concerns about the ROI of their AI investments.

As Cherny mentioned, AI firms like Anthropic are essentially token generators. That also means that they have an incentive to keep selling their models and generative AI tools, especially as they approach highly anticipated IPOs. The creator of Claude Code said that Anthropic is also paying attention to how its tokens are used.

"They're not free for us because every token we use is a token we do not give to a customer, so there's an opportunity cost," he said. "When I think about it, it actually maybe comes back to ROI."

Measuring that ROI is also changing, Cherny said, as the pace of AI model advancements continues to accelerate. He previously said that companies may have looked at the percentage of code written by AI. Cherny said that measurement is no longer as useful once more people let AI write 100% of their code, as he does.

"Then think about, how much is the code per engineer accelerating? And then the third thing to think about is like, what are the other bottlenecks that are getting in the way?" he said. "Because once you get it to this point where engineers are just writing a lot of code, the bottleneck is going to be like good ideas. So, how do you un-hobble that so that your company can generate ideas faster?

• Panera Bread CEO Paul Carbone hopes to reverse the chain's slumping sales with a new strategy.
• The effort, named RISE, addresses customer complaints about food value and in-store service quality.
• The chain's latest menu launch, featuring new summer drinks and bowls, builds on the momentum.

As Panera Bread's chief financial officer, Paul Carbone once signed off on a change that looked good on a spreadsheet.

The chain swapped its salad base from 100% romaine lettuce to a mix of romaine and iceberg in the summer of 2024, a move he said was intended to save money.

Now, as CEO, Carbone says Panera is trying to undo that kind of thinking.

"No one really likes iceberg lettuce," Carbone told Business Insider. "No one looks at that white salad and says, 'Now that's worth it.'"

For Carbone, the lettuce decision — which was fully reversed in June 2025, shortly after he became chief executive — has become shorthand for a broader problem at Panera: Years of small cost-cutting moves, menu changes, and operational tweaks chipped away at the experience customers remembered loving.

Panera is now rolling out a summer launch tied to its broader "RISE" transformation strategy, an acronym for the steps of the turnaround effort, which stands for "refresh the menu," “ignite value," "serve guests with excellence," and "expand the network."

The latest evidence of that effort arrives this week in the form of new shrimp-topped bowls, upgraded salads, bacon-and-cheese breakfast frittatas, frozen coffees, and fruit-forward beverages — a menu overhaul intended to remind customers why they fell in love with Panera in the first place.

Carbone said Panera began developing the strategy last year after multiple years of negative same-store transactions. Sales sometimes rose, he said, but that growth was driven by pricing and mix, not by more customers coming in.

"The lifeblood of a restaurant company is transactions," he said. "So that's where we started to develop Panera RISE."

At its core, RISE is Panera's attempt to fix the complaints customers raised most often: food that no longer felt worth the price, fewer affordable options, weaker in-store service, and growing competition for diners' attention. The company spent months talking with thousands of customers to determine its areas of focus.

Carbone said many still had warm feelings toward Panera, but had stopped visiting because the chain had gotten too expensive, removed favorite menu items, or simply fallen out of their routines.

That's a tough place to be in a restaurant market where consumers have become increasingly selective. Business Insider has previously reported that diners are splitting along income lines, with lower-income consumers cutting back while wealthier households keep spending. Restaurants have responded with discounts and limited-time offers to improve value messaging, but analysts have warned that value alone is not always enough to bring customers back.

Panera's own traffic remains under intense pressure. Foot traffic has declined year over year every month from January through May this year, according to data from the foot traffic firm, Placer.ai.

R.J. Hottovy, Placer.ai's head of analytical research, said sandwich chains in particular have seen fewer visits than other concepts as consumers push back on menu price increases and embrace healthier eating habits.

Carbone's diagnosis goes beyond food. Panera also cut labor at cafés to cut costs, he said. The company has since added a front-of-house role, the Guest Experience Champion, to greet customers, answer questions, and help maintain dining rooms.

It is also rethinking how technology fits into the business.

"There was a time that if you talked to folks here, they would tell you that we were a technology company that sold food," Carbone said. "I will tell you emphatically, we are a restaurant company that uses technology to enhance the guest experience. We're not a technology company."

That does not mean abandoning digital ordering, kiosks, or loyalty tools. Only about a quarter of Panera's business is now eaten inside its cafés, Carbone said, but two-thirds of customers still walk into a restaurant, whether they are dining in, picking up, or ordering to go.

That means the in-store experience still matters.

Under RISE, Panera is adding new menu items and drinks, but the bigger bet is that customers will notice when the chain starts optimizing for experience again, not just efficiency.

Carbone said Panera's priorities now are simple: "Transactions, sales, profits — in that order."

After years of trying to drive growth through price cuts and efficiency, Panera is betting that getting more customers through the door again will take something simpler: giving them a reason to come back.

• Target is calling about 150 remote workers back to its Minneapolis headquarters.
• The relocation mandate impacts workers within its merchandising division.
• The retailer, which brought on a new CEO earlier this year, has been working to turn the business around.

Target is calling more remote workers back to its headquarters.

The retailer is requiring about 150 remote workers within two teams in its merchandising group to relocate to Minneapolis, a spokesperson confirmed to Business Insider. Bloomberg earlier reported the news.

The company is offering relocation assistance to those who decide to move and severance to those who choose not to.

A company spokesperson said in a statement that "increased in-person collaboration across a core part of our merchandising team will help us reinforce our merchandising authority, unlocking greater creativity and enabling us to move faster to deliver on our strategy."

The retailer, which brought on a new CEO earlier this year, is in the midst of a turnaround strategy to revive growth, and improving its merchandise is a pillar of that effort.

The relocation mandate comes as more companies, such as Amazon and AT&T, have been calling workers back into the office in recent years. Target last year ramped up in-office days for employees already based in Minneapolis.

Target does not have a companywide mandate and has left in-office requirements to team leaders.

Have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at dreuter@businessinsider.com or text/call/Signal at 646-768-4750. Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.

• Anduril president Matthew Steckman said that defense tech companies have to "create a monopoly."
• There are only one or two programs in each category that are big enough to sustain a business, Steckman said.
• "If you capture them, you have a business, and if you don't, you have no business," he said on "20VC."

Defense tech is winner-takes-all, according to Andruil's president.

Anduril has quickly become a market leader, spawning a venture capital frenzy. The industry is also notoriously competitive, with companies duking it out for lucrative government contracts.

On the "20VC" podcast, President and Chief Business Officer Matthew Steckman described the company's strategy. They'd need to win in key product categories, he said — and maybe monopolize them.

Every defense product category has one big or two big programs, Steckman said. He used the example of small drones, for which there are "very few" programs that would create enough revenue to maintain a business.

"If you capture them, you have a business, and if you don't, you have no business," Steckman said of these programs.

Defense tech companies must shoot for the moon, he said. It's this "addressable market question" that most companies in the sector get wrong, he said.

"You have to create a monopoly," Steckman said. "We knew that."

Anduril's strategy, then, was to create strong underlying technology that could keep them competitive in multiple markets. The company calls this Lattice, the tech that consumes data, interprets it, and then manipulates robots around it, he said.

Those technologies apply to 20 different markets, Steckman said, each "different parts of the defense apparatus."

It's clearly paid off. The company is reportedly raising its next round at a valuation of $60 billion. Some venture capitalists with FOMO are paying premiums for their shares. One compared it to buying Taylor Swift tickets.

Want to work there? Your best way in might be winning a drone-racing competition. In April, the company will reward one winner with a job and a $500,000 check.

After Steckman posited his theory of monopolization in defense tech, host Harry Stebbings asked: Why, then, are there so many drone companies?

"There will definitely be one winner," Steckman said. "The challenge for investors is actually figuring out which one it is."

• To invest in real estate without having to fork over a big down payment, some investors are using the BRRRR method.
• It involves buying a property with potential, renovating it, and renting it out.
• Then, investors can use a cash-out refinance to help fund their next purchase.

Real estate investing can be an effective way to build wealth, but it's not as simple as selecting an index fund, contributing money, and letting it grow.

Successful real estate investing requires time, strategy, and money — often a significant amount, especially for investors looking to build multi-property portfolios.

To scale without having to save for a new down payment and closing costs for each deal, some investors use a strategy known as "buy, rehab, rent, refinance, repeat," or BRRRR.

The approach involves buying a property with potential, renovating it, and renting it out. Once rented, the next step is to refinance, allowing investors to pull out their original investment, plus any equity they've built, to help fund their next purchase. Banks typically lend up to 70% to 75% of a property's value in a cash-out refinance.

Scaling quickly by recycling capital

When buying an investment property, "you're really looking at at least 20% down," Pieter Louw told Business Insider. He and his childhood friend, Connor Swofford, used the BRRRR strategy to scale from zero to 24 units in 12 months. "Even with a $300,000 or $400,000 property, with closing costs, you have to come up with 60 to 80 grand, which is not very scalable."

Their first deal was a duplex with a carriage house in Buffalo. Two of the three units were ready to rent, while the third required renovations. They said they bought it for $295,000, put about $40,000 into it, and by the time they refinanced, it appraised for $430,000.

"That really kick-started us," said Louw.

They've financed their deals with hard money loans (short-term loans secured by a "hard" asset, such as real estate), sometimes layering in private money for the down payment or renovations. Working with hard money lenders allows them to move faster than traditional banks, though it does come with risk, Swofford said: "It's a big balloon payment, you have to personally guarantee the loan, and there's a bit more paperwork and harder compliance hurdles to clear."

Thanks to Louw's construction background, they can confidently predict their rehab costs and timeline, which is critical for a successful BRRRR.

"The two biggest things are making sure that your construction budget is reasonably accurate," said Louw, "and knowing your purchase price and what the value would be afterward: the ARV."

Carolyn Yu has used the BRRRR method to scale to five properties in two years.

Her strategy centers on buying below market value, improving the property, allowing it to appreciate, and then tapping into the built-up equity to help finance another purchase.

"My strategy is basically to use every property to fund the next one," said the 27-year-old investor seeking early retirement.

A slower, more flexible version of BRRRR

There's more than one way to execute a BRRRR. Financially independent investor Dion McNeeley has experimented with a "live-in BRRRR," and Mike Newton, a Washington State trooper who owns more than 20 rental units, uses what he calls a "slow BRRRR" strategy to reduce risk.

"One of the main concerns with the BRRRR strategy is, what if I don't get the appraisal I want? What if I don't get it remodeled as quickly as I thought I would?" said Newton. "All of a sudden, as I take longer, it now costs me way more money."

His "slow BRRRR" strategy works like so: First, he secures private money from individual investors in his local real estate community. There's nothing unique about that step; the key is how he structures the loans. He sets up a five-year interest-only loan term. For example, on a 2025 triplex purchase, he borrowed $60,000 at 10% interest, meaning he owed the lender $6,000 per year, or about $500 a month, with no principal payments.

He'll eventually pay the loan back in a lump sum after he rehabs and refinances the property, but he has plenty of time to do so. He includes a clause that allows him to extend the loan for up to three additional years if the appraisal doesn't meet a specified threshold. He also includes a no prepayment penalty clause.

"If we had some crazy recession or the value didn't come back, I can wait longer and continue to cash flow," he said. "Even though 10% is not a great interest rate, if you're not paying any principal, the actual payment I'm making of $500 a month is less than what a principal and interest payment would be."

When the timing is right, he refinances, pays back the private lender, and moves on to the next deal.

Why some investors are shifting to BRRRR now

For Louisville-based investors Mike Gorius and Kevin Hart, BRRRR is becoming more attractive as market conditions change.

The business partners have primarily focused on house flipping since they started buying real estate together in 2019, but they're leaning more heavily into BRRRR projects in 2026.

A cooling market has made quick resale profits harder to rely on.

They know the strategy isn't risk-free. You still have to make sure your numbers work, and you can hit the value you're expecting, Hart said.

"From the get-go, you still have the risk of rehab and the risk of running correct costs to make sure that you can actually get a good appraisal."

However, compared to flipping, BRRRR offers a more predictable exit.

"You're taking out the risk of the market," explained Hart. Instead of worrying about a flip sitting for months while you're paying interest, "you know that at the end of the rehab you can get a tenant in there and you can immediately refinance with the bank."

It may not yield quick cash like a successful flip, but they're playing the long game.

• A16z cofounder Marc Andreessen recently said he practices introspection "as little as possible."
• The internet lit up with memes, challenging his theory that the "great men of history didn't sit around doing this stuff."
• Critics pointed to historical figures like Marcus Aurelius, John D. Rockefeller, and Warren Buffett.

Marc Andreessen is not digging deep within himself. He's proudly anti-introspection.

The cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz said in a recent interview that he isn't big on self-reflection. In fact, he told David Senra that he aims for "zero" introspection — or "as little as possible." He wants to be moving forward, he said, drawing an upward slope with his hand.

"I found people who dwell in the past get stuck in the past," Andreessen said. "It's a real problem. It's a problem at work, and it's a problem at home."

Andreessen also said that the "great men of history didn't sit around doing this stuff."

After Senra posted the clip online, X users sounded off in the comments — and quickly memed Andreessen's words.

Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham replied to ask, "What?"

"That's not true," Graham wrote. "Do you not feel that Charles Darwin, for example, was among the great men of history?"

SoFi CTO Jeremy Rishel called Andreessen's take "absurdly wrong," citing examples such as Marcus Aurelius and the US founding fathers. Fifty Years founding partner Seth Bannon pointed to other examples, like John D. Rockefeller and Warren Buffett.

AppClub founder Preston Attebery pointed to a moment when Steve Jobs seemed introspective. After being ousted from Apple, Jobs told Newsweek that he "went for a lot of long walks in the woods and didn't really talk to a lot of people."

"They are telling you to forget about introspection while they go on podcasts to introspect," Opendoor product manager Fahd Ananta wrote.

Others defended Andreessen. Serial entrepreneur Ryan Carson wrote that he didn't have the patience for introspection, journaling, or therapy. The clip "made me feel less bad about it," he wrote.

Podcast host Rob Wiblin wrote that Andreessen was actually criticizing rumination, "which really is harmful most of the time."

Elon Musk posted on X: "Reinforcing negative neural pathways via therapy or introspection is a recipe for misery. Don't cut a rut in the road."

As he often does, Andreessen posted through it all. He put multiple statements from "my therapist Claude" up on his X and recommended a book. As Peter Thiel is to the antichrist, Andreessen is to introspection, he wrote.

Introspection was the combination of neuroticism, narcissism, and thumbsucking, the venture capitalist wrote.

When one interviewer asked Steve Jobs an introspective question — where he fits in the history of American inventors — Jobs responded, "I don't really think that way." Andreessen reposted the clip with one word: "Well."

Throughout it all, Andreessen took several opportunities to rag on his critics.

"A lot of you need to do more introspection, obviously," Andreessen wrote.