Chris Bakke on Selling to Elon, Small Exits, and Using Memes for Marketing
Show notes
Subscribe to my newsletter The Split for new episodes emailed every week: https://www.thespl.it/ Chris Bakke has founded and sold three companies for between $25-100 million to Zillow, Indeed, and most recently Twitter / X. He shares how he convinced Elon to buy his company, what it's like working for Elon, exactly how the Twitter algorithm works, and all his meme making secrets. — — — — Timestamps: (00:00) Intro (02:52) Inside Twitter’s acquisition of Laskie (05:38) Why Twitter / X works so well for recruiting (08:11) A sneak peek at upcoming Premium features (13:58) How the X algorithm works (20:48) Why “dwell time” is the most important metric (24:07) What it’s like reporting to Elon (27:40) Elon’s crazy ability to context-switch (29:16) Why you should consider selling your company for $25-100 million (35:39) The reasons large M&A deals are so rare (42:07) Surviving inside Big Tech as a founder (46:23) Chris's philosophy on company building (51:23) Why “Time in Market” is so underrated (53:44) YC’s “sandwich incident” (55:44) How to use memes for marketing (58:55) Chris’ 100+ page Google Slide meme library (1:01:46) His top three favorite meme templates (1:03:48) His favorite proprietary trade secret at X (1:05:03) Turning down jobs at Coinbase and WhatsApp — — — — Twitter jobs: https://twitter.com/jobs — — — — Where to find Chris Twitter: https://twitter.com/ChrisJBakke LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bakk3/ Where to find Turner: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TurnerNovak LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/turnernovak/ Newsletter: https://www.thespl.it/
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