Real correspondence from the people running real companies — and what it reveals about leadership.
Topic
The calls about what to build, ship, and kill.
45 letters · most recent first
Phil Spencer & Jeff D Fisher ·Microsoft ·22 FEB 2023
Captured days after Microsoft signed a ten-year cloud-gaming agreement with NVIDIA, this brief exchange between the heads of Xbox and NVIDIA's GeForce unit surfaced inside the FTC's lawsuit to block Microsoft's Activision Blizzard acquisition — making private deal-making correspondence part of the public antitrust record.
[redacted developer] ·Apple ·23 AUG 2015
A small developer's 2015 complaint to Apple's CEO — later surfaced in federal antitrust litigation — captures the moment independent creators began to feel systematically squeezed out of the marketplace Apple had built around them.
Jim Giles & Eisar Lipkovitz & Jonathan Bellack & Payam Shodjai & Chris LaSala ·Google ·4 NOV 2017
When your product bundles a commodity with something rare, price the commodity like a utility and hide your margin inside what only you can offer.
Julie Sterling & Jonathan Bellack & Drew Bradstock & Alex Shellhammer ·Google ·11 NOV 2015
If your frontline can't answer the obvious question, the problem isn't training — it's that you haven't decided what you actually believe.
Scott Spencer & Jonathan Bellack & Scott Cunningham ·Google ·11 OCT 2015
If your product's integration advantage forces the market to build ugly workarounds, the workarounds eventually become the market.
Tom Oliveri & Philipp Schindler & Hiroshi Lockheimer & John Giannandrea & Sundar Pichai ·Google ·26 AUG 2016
If you can't measure it before you ship it, you're not experimenting — you're guessing with revenue.
Jonathan Bellack & Assaf Grabinsky & Nitish Korula & Drew Bradstock & Vahab Mirrokni & Martin Blais ·Google ·4 AUG 2015
When your own pricing structure drives customers to build workarounds, the real threat isn't the workaround — it's the rule.
Neal Mohan & Eric Rosenblum ·Google ·20 AUG 2010
When a young business is fighting to establish itself, the worst thing you can do is bury it inside a bigger org chart.
Julie Sterling Osterling & Jonathan Bellack & Heidi O'brien & Chris Jansen & Brian Tomasette & Jason Sigalos ·Google ·29 SEP 2015
If your own sales team can't explain why you don't do the thing customers want, the market has already made the decision for you.
Eddy Cue ·Apple ·10 JAN 2013
When a rival's business model forces them to behave in ways users dislike, that tension is your product opportunity.
Jack Dorsey & Sarah Friar ·Square, Inc. ·3 AUG 2016
The real moat isn't the hardware — it's every product a seller adopts after the first swipe.
Square Investor Relations Team ·Square, Inc. ·1 NOV 2016
The strongest growth signal in this letter isn't revenue — it's that larger sellers are choosing Square on product merit, not discounts.
Jack Dorsey ·Block, Inc. ·2 NOV 2023
When the company is growing faster than the business, the fix is a hard ceiling, not a pep talk.
Roku Management ·Roku ·21 FEB 2019
The platform that wins the eyeballs first will collect the ad dollars second — Roku is betting the sequence matters.
Tony Xu ·DoorDash ·11 FEB 2025
Profit and growth aren't opposites when capital follows evidence, not enthusiasm.
Tony Xu ·DoorDash ·18 FEB 2026
The product your customer sees is rarely the product that decides whether you win.
Neal Mohan & Joan Braddi ·Google ·3 SEP 2008
The smartest strategy documents don't just show where you're winning — they name exactly where the work isn't done yet.
Neal Mohan ·Google ·31 JAN 2009
Be open to partners — until the partner's product replaces the part of yours that actually makes money.
Netflix Investor Relations ·Netflix ·21 APR 2014
When you face bigger rivals on every side, define the game by the two things only you can do well.
Mark Zuckerberg ·Meta Platforms, Inc. ·11 FEB 2012
If a small competitor has already won the use case your future depends on, the cheapest option is usually to buy them — before the market figures out how valuable they are.
Prabhakar Raghavan ·Google ·20 JUN 2019
If a competitor might be eating your lunch one bite at a time, build the instruments to see the bites — don't settle for gut feel.
Prabhakar Raghavan ·Google ·1 JAN 2019
If your pricing model only has two players in it, you've already mispriced — the third player is the door your customer can walk through.
Anna Kartasheva ·Google ·4 JUN 2020
When you can't win the device, win every doorway on it.
Nate Morgan ·Google ·19 OCT 2019
The moment you have data that proves your recommendation was correct, stop being polite — escalate immediately and make the case with numbers.
Eileen Naughton ·Google ·19 MAY 2008
The most valuable approval you can get isn't a blank check — it's a conditional yes that tells you exactly where the limits are.
Neal Mohan ·Google LLC ·23 MAR 2009
An acquired business is worth more than its P&L — cut it like a standalone and you destroy the very reason you bought it.
Neal Mohan & Scott Spencer & Joerg Heilig ·Google LLC ·21 APR 2009
Scale wins fights, but a competitor copying your structure can become a real threat long before they look like one on paper.
Neal Mohan & Jonathan Bellack & Brad Bender & Ari Paparo ·Google LLC ·25 JUN 2009
Once you open a platform to everyone, you lose the right to choose who gets to compete with you on it — so pick your moment carefully.
Jag Duggal ·Google ·6 APR 2010
If you control the plumbing on both the buyer and seller side, you don't just win transactions — you define the rules of the game.
Kento Sugiura ·Google ·23 AUG 2010
When you sit in the middle of a market, your biggest danger isn't one competitor — it's being squeezed from every direction at once.
Neal Mohan ·Google LLC ·11 OCT 2010
Sometimes you acquire a rival not to use what they built, but to stop the clock while you fix what you have.
Neal Mohan ·Google LLC ·18 OCT 2010
When you sit on both sides of a market, the appearance of fairness is a product feature — and you have to build the org chart to protect it.
Neal Mohan ·Google LLC ·19 OCT 2010
Strategy reviews are worthless if leaders won't say out loud what they got wrong.
Zachary Goldberg ·Google ·18 FEB 2011
If rivals are already selling what you fear to build, the only thing worse than disrupting your own business is letting them do it for you.
Jonathan Bellack ·Google LLC ·16 JUN 2011
When 60% of your paying customers are already using a competitor's tool inside your own platform, you don't have a partnership problem — you have a survival problem.
Woojin Kim & Drew Bradstock & Allan Livingston ·Google ·26 JUL 2012
If your internal product can only win by being kept on a leash, you haven't built a strong product — you've just built a wall.
Marc Theermann ·Google ·10 SEP 2012
When you have a product everyone wants, the real question isn't how to sell it — it's what else you can pull through the door with it.
Drew Bradstock ·Google LLC ·22 JUL 2015
When competitors find a cheap workaround to your premium product, the real question isn't whether to fight it — it's whether your pricing power survives if you don't.
Jonathan Bellack ·Google LLC ·6 SEP 2016
When rivals attack your business model, your real moat is the one workflow they cannot route around.
Jonathan Bellack ·Google LLC ·29 OCT 2016
If you measure the whole market instead of the slice customers can actually move, you'll misjudge both your power and your problem.
Jonathan Bellack & Eisar Lipkovitz & Brad Bender & Paul Muret & Danielle Romain ·Google LLC ·10 NOV 2016
A price cut with no strategic story is just margin you gave away for nothing.
Eisar Lipkovitz & Jonathan Bellack ·Google LLC ·4 JAN 2017
Whoever owns the decision-maker in a stack owns the economics — everything else is just inventory.
Jonathan Bellack ·Google ·20 JAN 2017
When a customer pulls the plug, you have one shot — show them what they're losing, not just what you'll discount.
Jonathan Bellack ·Google ·10 MAY 2018
Every dollar that flows through someone else's exchange is a dollar where you don't set the toll — and Bellack's math shows just how big that toll can be.
Jonathan Bellack ·Google ·17 OCT 2016
Senior leaders are paid not for the insight that points at action, but for the plan a hundred people can actually execute.