• YouTube sold to Google in 2006 for $1.65 billion, with cofounders Chad Hurley and Steven Chen splitting over $650 million worth of stock shares. And while their wealth increased exponentially with the acquisition, estimates put today’s value of YouTube at $550 billion—a 333x increase. Few could imagine YouTube’s eventual media dominance at the time, making it a classic example of the high-stakes decisions founders must weigh. 

YouTube may have started as a site to share home videos, but now it’s one of the most powerful platforms in the world: From entertainment to advertising, it’s spawned billion-dollar careers and birthed a global creator economy, turning individuals like MrBeast into household names.

But when its founders sold the popular video platform to Google for $1.65 billion in fall 2006, not even they could have predicted just how massive it would become—or how much more they could have made.

At the time of sale, each cofounder—Chad Hurley, Steven Chen and Jawed Karim—received millions of dollars worth of stock: Hurley, YouTube’s CEO at the time, received shares worth some $345 million by the time the Securities and Exchange Commission documents were released a few months later, according to The New York Times. Chen its CTO received some $326 million worth and Jawed Karim, who left the venture early to go back to school, got $64 million worth.

“This is great,” Hurley said in a video posted when the sale was announced. “Two kings have gotten together. The king of search, the king of video have gotten together. We’re going to have it our way.”

YouTube’s sale price to Google is just a fraction of its estimated $550 billion value today, according to a MoffettNathanson research note reported by Variety. That’s a 333x increase (unadjusted for inflation) from nearly two decades prior. While it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly, had Hurley and Chen received the same percentage of the sale today as they did in 2006, each could have walked away with more than $100 billion each.

Hindsight is 20/20 when it comes to selling

Last year, YouTube brought in some $54.2 billion in revenue, and this year, it is expected to surpass Disney to become the largest media company by revenue in the world, Variety reported. YouTube’s record-setting successes highlight how Google was able to overcome issues that the video platform’s founders struggled with early on—including operating losses and copyright lawsuits—and its paid off dividends.

But YouTube’s masterminds are far from the only business leaders that have seen their company soar after exchanging ownership.

During the first two weeks of Apple’s existence, the company’s lesser-known third cofounder Ronald Wayne checked out and sold his 10% stake—netting him $800 at the time, plus $1,500 to forfeit any claim to the company for good. However, his 10% share could now be worth between $75 billion and $300 billion, thanks to the company’s now $3.2 trillion market cap.

These stories also exist outside of tech. For example, the founder of iconic pasta brand Chef Boyardee sold the company in 1946 for $6 million. Over the decades, the company exponentially grew its operations, expanding to multiple lines of canned and microwavable goods. And just this year, the brand, including its over 500-person strong factory, was sold to private equity for $600 million—a 10,000% increase in value.

And in the case of Chef Boyardee and YouTube, it’s unclear whether such massive growth would have been achieved without the backing of larger corporate owners. For the founders, it means weighing up selling early and leaving future billions on the table—or holding on and risking the company never reaching its full potential.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is an artificial intelligence pioneer, but the billionaire founder remains a big believer in physical note-taking. It’s a practice he leans on while trying to solve complex business problems, saying he’s “not found anything better to do than to sit down and make myself write it out.” Note-taking is something that fellow titans like Bill Gates and Richard Branson also embrace.

Technology has slowly made taking physical notes a thing of the past, to the delight of Gen Z who have long embraced jotting down ideas on their phone or leaning on voice memos.

However, its complete demise may not happen anytime soon, at least if OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has anything to say about it. Despite being the leader of the company behind productivity-enhancing chatbot ChatGPT, the billionaire remains a staunch believer in writing physical notes. Especially when the going gets tough.

“I think of writing as externalized thinking. I still, if I have a very hard problem, or if I feel a little bit confused about something, have not found anything better to do than to sit down and make myself write it out,” Altman said on the How I Write podcast.

“I’m a big believer of, I take a bunch of notes, and then I clearly rip them out so I can look at multiple pages at the same time, and I can crumple them up and throw them on the floor when I’m done.”

Note-taking is a practice that Altman maintains has helped him become a better thinker while building his $300 billion AI giant—and as well as wanting to crumple the notes up after, he has some more highly specific requirements when it comes to his note-taking habits.

Sam Altman’s note-taking habits

Altman said this week at the Federal Reserve that he keeps his notes private as a way to organize his thoughts—but his process is far from just scribbling. His note-taking practice is rather meticulous, and it centers on having the right supplies. This includes having a pocket-size spiral notebook with a hard front and back and that can lie flat on a table, he told podcast host David Perell. The paper also must feel good to write on.

His pen choice is specific, too: either the Uniball Micro 0.5 mm or the “Muji 0.36 or 0.37 in dark blue ink” (though he may be referring to the Muji 0.38).

Only then can he get to work thinking through tough ideas. Each time he sits down to write, he comes away shocked at the power of this seemingly simple exercise.

“I find it astonishing how much writing just for yourself … helps clarify what you actually think, helps sharpen stuff in a way that for me—and I think for a lot of other people—is somehow impossible to do, just like thinking carefully on a long hike,” he said on the How I Write podcast.

“It’s harder to hide really messy thinking when you have to actually write it down and stare at it.”

And while business leaders may prioritize clear communication first and foremost—Altman said that clear thinking is even more important—and one of the best ways to achieve that is by writing things down.

“Clear communication is very much less important, and very much downstream, of actually clear thinking … Unclear communication is a symptom of unfocused thinking, for the most part.”

Fortune reached out to OpenAI for comment.

The habit shared by billionaires like Bill Gates and Richard Branson 

Sam Altman isn’t alone in his analog approach—his habits are also shared by many fellow billionaires, including Bill Gates and Richard Branson.

The Microsoft cofounder said he believes handwritten notes are key for information processing.

“You won’t catch me in a meeting without a legal pad and pen in hand—and I take tons of notes in the margins while I read,” Gates posted on LinkedIn last year.

Similarly, Branson, the cofounder of Virgin Group, said it’s hard to find him without a way to write down his thoughts.

“I go through dozens of notebooks every year and write down everything that occurs to me each day. Some of the ideas contained inside end up turning into reality, and some don’t—but they are all noteworthy,” he wrote in a 2017 blog post.

“An idea not written down is an idea lost. When inspiration calls, you’ve got to capture it.”

Without note-taking, his companies would not be the same, he added. 

And while he admitted he isn’t opposed to digital notes, what matters most is that some form of note-taking is happening: “It doesn’t matter how you record your notes—as long as you do.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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• Nvidia’s billionaire CEO Jensen Huang admits his work-life balance is nonexistent. As the boss of the most valuable company in the world, he works nearly every hour of the day, seven days a week. Even when he takes time to rest or relax, work is always on his mind: “When I’m not working, I’m thinking about working,” he says.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang might be the hardest-working executive in the world. After all, his $4.2 trillion tech company now tops the list of the most valuable companies (for context, Meta and Amazon combined’s valuation is $4.1 trillion).

However, leading his company to greatness has meant that work-life balance has had to take a major backseat; in fact, for Huang, every waking moment is dedicated to work.

“I work from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep. I work seven days a week,” Huang said in an interview with Stripe’s CEO Patrick Collison last year, that’s currently going viral once again.

“When I’m not working, I’m thinking about working… I sit through movies, but I don’t remember them because I’m thinking about work.”

While it may sound hardcore, Huang’s leadership has helped Nvidia’s stock become one of the hottest commodities—with the share price skyrocketing 1,600% in the last five years. But not all his hours on the clock are answering emails or sitting through meetings; the 62-year-old often spends his time as a leader envisioning the future. 

“Sometimes you’re imagining the future. And, boy, if we did this and that. It’s working, you’re fantasizing, you’re dreaming,” he said.

One of his biggest dreams is that every part of his company will use AI aggressively—which will not only help scale the business to even greater heights but also give him and his workers some added flexibility.

“I want to turn NVIDIA into a one giant AI,” Jensen said to Collison. 

“How great would that be? And then I’ll have work-life balance.”

Nvidia employees hardcore grind to the top

Working beyond the 9-to-5 is a norm that more than just Huang endures. 

According to accounts from multiple former employees, there were expectations to be on the work grind seven days a week—with work piling up until one or two in the morning, Bloomberg reports. Other workers, especially in the engineering department, had even longer work hours. And in meetings, the pressure would often get so high that shouting matches would reportedly occur, according to Bloomberg.

However, with high pay packages at the growing company, the anonymous workers said they felt it difficult to leave. 

Huang himself has admitted that he’s not the easiest boss to have. In a 60 Minutes interview last year, he said that working at Nvidia shouldn’t come with the expectation of ease.

“If you want to do extraordinary things, it shouldn’t be easy,” he said.

Nvidia declined Fortune’s request for comment.

Work-life balance goes out the window on the path to success

Having to forgo work-life balance in exchange for scaling a business is not something that’s exclusive to the tech industry—leaders of all industries have admitted that working as much as possible will translate to results.

Lior Lewensztain, founder and CEO of fruit bar and snack company, That’s It Nutrition, previously told Fortune that work-life balance remains an elusive perk—even after building a multi-million-dollar business.

“Even if I am on vacation, you’re on 24 hours a day. You never can really leave,” said Lewensztain.

And it’s something even world leaders like former President Barack Obama have echoed: “If you want to be excellent at anything—sports, music, business, politics—there’s going to be times of your life when you’re out of balance, where you’re just working and you’re single-minded,” he said on The Pivot Podcast.

When searching for a career, billionaire cofounder of Scale AI Lucy Gao, encourages Gen Z to pick one that doesn’t make you crave time off.

“I would say that if you feel the need for work-life balance, maybe you’re not in the right work,” she told Fortune.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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