The secret superpower that Nvidia, Shopify and Microsoft all share

Why leadership quality is the most underrated driver of shareholder value

At the heart of every durable company is a certain kind of leadership. It’s usually the difference between a business that slips into mediocrity and one that, like Madonna, keeps reinventing itself to stay relevant and ambitious.

Over the coming weeks, we’ll publish a series of notes on the leaders we find most remarkable today. This first piece outlines the framework and mental models behind how we form those views.

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Why leadership matters

A comment from Shopify’s Tobi Lütke in his recent Acquired interview stuck with me: “consensus is always the absence of leadership.” His point was that consensus-driven decisions tend to focus on avoiding downside rather than pursuing upside, which naturally leads to middling outcomes—often a six or seven out of ten.

Leaders, by contrast, step in and take the reins. They make the hard calls—the ones that may be unpopular in the moment but often prove to be the best long-term bets. The people who can do this well tend to combine control, alignment, and a clear sense of direction, all qualities we look for in the leaders of the businesses we invest in.

While founders often embody these qualities, we think “re-founders” can have an equivalent impact. These are leaders who steer a company in a fundamentally new direction—so much so that the organisation feels rebuilt from first principles. They secure genuine buy-in from both the board and the team, and they operate with the same clarity and authority as a founder. Satya Nadella is the clearest example in recent memory.

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From left to right: Tobi Lütke (Shopify), Jensen Huang (Nvidia), Satya Nadella (Microsoft)

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The 6 factors we view as critical to long-term value creation

Before diving into individual leaders, it’s helpful to outline the traits we consistently see in those who build durable, compounding value. We group them into six factors, starting with the most foundational: control.

1. Control

The ability to make unconventional decisions without being slowed or vetoed by boards, committees, or internal politics.

Category-defining companies are usually built by CEOs with unilateral decision rights — the room to try something that looks wrong in the moment and obvious in hindsight.

2. Vision

A coherent, durable, long-range mission that shapes everything: product priorities, hiring, culture, capital allocation, and how the company speaks to the world.

Long-term compounding works only when a CEO sees further than the market and acts on that view consistently.

3. Skin in the Game

Leaders who are economically and reputationally aligned with long-term value creation behave differently.

You want decision-makers who win when shareholders win — and who feel the downside alongside them when they miss.

4. Operator Depth

High-context leaders stay close to product, engineering, hiring, customer issues, and day-to-day execution.

Over time, they build an internal model of the business that enables faster, cleaner decisions. Low-context leaders outsource this understanding to layers of management — and mediocrity accumulates.

5. Intellectual Leadership

The ability to generate insight, articulate mental models, and shape a field’s direction.

Companies tend to absorb the CEO’s thinking style; the best CEOs end up out-innovating their competitors’ strategy teams.

6. Compounding Skill

The rate at which a CEO learns — ideally faster than the market, faster than the board, and faster than competitors.

Compounding leaders pivot quickly, integrate feedback without ego defensiveness, and expand their scope of competence over time.

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These six factors form the backbone of how we think about exceptional leadership and long-term value creation. From here, we’ll use this framework to examine a range of leaders who bring these ideas to life in very different ways.

In the coming weeks, we’ll explore a handful of the leaders we admire most. Those examples will make the ideas here far more concrete — so it’s worth keeping an eye out.

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