Gabriel Weinberg is the founder and CEO of DuckDuckGo, the privacy-focused search engine that now handles billions of queries annually — and promises not to tell anyone what you were searching for.

Beyond building one of Google’s biggest competitors, the MIT-trained physicist is also the co-author of several influential business books—Traction, The Great Race, and Super Thinking. Gabriel joined me on the latest episode of How Success Happens to share his unconventional journey from founding DuckDuckGo in his basement in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, to leading a company with over 130 employees, all while maintaining his commitment to user privacy and thoughtful execution over flashy ideas. And patience.

“We used to invest in the basic research and science that led to inventing things to make better jobs and better products and to make us live longer,” he says, citing advances of the 1950s and ’60s. “Progress at that point was thought of by lots of people as a positive thing,” he notes, “But nowadays, when you think about tech and progress, people think about ‘Black Mirror’ and dystopian sci-fi. Culturally, we’re not at a place to accept it.”

You can watch the entire conversation above or listen here, and check out three powerful insights from our conversation below:

Subscribe to How Success Happens to get a dose of inspiration twice a week! Apple | Spotify | YouTube

Execution Beats Ideas Every Time

Gabriel doesn’t buy into the myth that finding the perfect idea is the hardest part of entrepreneurship. “There have been so many debates over the years of, ‘like, ‘Oh, I just need an idea to get started,'” he told me. “And the idea is really not the thing that’s holding people back. It’s really the execution.” His advice? Stop waiting for lightning to strike. The real differentiator is showing up every day and moving your vision forward, even when progress feels incremental. 
Takeaway: If you have an idea that bothers you enough to want to solve it, start building—the execution will separate you from everyone else still waiting for inspiration.

Subscribe to the How Success Happens newsletter for more great leadership tips!

Marketing Deserves Half Your Time

As a technical founder, Gabriel learned a crucial lesson the hard way: great products die without distribution. “So many companies die with actually good products because they just don’t know how to get them in the hands of customers,” he explained. This realization led him to co-write Traction, where he advocates applying the scientific method to marketing—setting measurable goals and testing channels systematically rather than relying on wishful narratives. “When starting out, you really should be spending half your time thinking about the distribution strategy.” 
Takeaway: Before you build another feature, ask yourself: What’s my concrete plan to get this in front of 100, then 1,000, then 10,000 customers?

The “One Must” Productivity Framework

When I asked Gabriel how he manages to run a company, write books, and pursue policy advocacy, he shared DuckDuckGo’s internal system called the “One Must.” Every morning, team members identify the single most important thing they must accomplish that day. “It’s basically trying to combat procrastination and figure out like, what is that one thing that’ll help progress whatever you’re trying to do the most,” Gabriel said. “And then it’s often a hard thing, so you don’t generally want to do it, but it’s writing it down, committing to doing it, and then trying to make progress on that thing before you get to all the other random stuff.” 
Takeaway: Tomorrow morning, before checking email or Slack, write down your “One Must”—the single task that will move your most important project forward—and do it first.

Three Interesting Facts About Gabriel Weinberg:

• Gabriel sold his first company, The Names Database, to Classmates.com for approximately $10 million before launching DuckDuckGo.
• He was connecting to the internet even before the World Wide Web existed, using protocols like Gopher and BBS (Bulletin Board Systems) as a teenager.
• DuckDuckGo started as a one-person operation in 2008 and remained that way for four years before Gabriel hired his first employee in 2011—the company now has over 130 team members.

About How Success Happens

Each episode of How Success Happens shares the inspiring, entertaining, and unexpected journeys that influential leaders in business, the arts, and sports traveled on their way to becoming household names. It’s a reminder that behind every big-time career, there is a person who persisted in the face of self-doubt, failure, and anything else that got thrown in their way.

Subscribe now: Apple | Spotify | YouTube