The Exchanges

Q aggressive storm. And products go through aggressive storms and they don't always hit. And when we chatted before, you said there were 10 main reasons why products maybe don't hit. So I want to take these in kind of three and then ask subsequent questions because I'm too interested not to. So if we start with the first three, what are the first three reasons why products don't hit, Brian?

A Right. There's a lot of reasons products succeed, but let's first dive into why products fail. And the number one reason why products fail is because they're too complicated. And I think one thing that people who design products for a living take for granted is that consumers are very busy people. They have these routines. They wake up at a certain time. They go to work at a certain time. They spend time with their friends on weekends and being able to wedge a product into their life in a very simplistic fashion is incredibly hard to do. So anytime you present a customer with any complexity, it's going to hurt you and you're going to see attrition. And so one of the reasons why I think most products Fail out of the gate is because they are too complicated. Second thing that I like to talk about is how people spread products. Most products are still spread through word of mouth, and one of the most important sort of tests that I use is what I call, how does the friend explain it? What I mean by that is, what you tell a customer your product does is not interesting. That's not relevant. What's relevant is what someone who uses your product tells another person. How do they explain it? Why are they imbued with Some passion to go tell a friend, like, you gotta try Uber, or you gotta get on Tinder, this is so interesting, or look at this app called Instagram, you know, these beautif…

AI assessment note: “the number one reason why products fail is because they're too complicated.”

Q Not at all, but I want to start with a little bit about you. So tell me, Brian, how did you make your way into the world of startups? How did Tinder really come about? And then how did it get to where you are today? I'd love to hear that in a swift three to four minutes.

A So, you know, my path into startups was directly out of college, and when most of my friends went to investment banks and law school and all these places where you have to wear suits and act professional, I had found a brilliant technologist that I partnered up with. His name was Dan Gold, and we decided that we wanted to dedicate our lives to building product and to really trying to think about how to use technology in an impactful way. This was the early days of Web to O. The technology community at large was not Fully formed. So many of the things that we did were essentially trial and error, and that led us to start a company that we sold to Fox Interactive Media in 2006. So it was an exit for me, which was great. It was 25 years old. And, you know, after that, I basically dedicated the rest of my life to building product. I was lucky enough to meet Sean Rad, who was the founder of Tinder while he was still in college. And I always admired his entrepreneur skill and also his Focus on user experience, and so we'd started a company together, and after that, he had shown me a couple of early ideas around Tinder, and I was really, really interested in the power of the idea, but at that point, it wasn't launched, and soon thereafter, I got word from Sean how well it was doing, and so kept talking, and kind of in a strange course of events, he ended up buying my company, and so t…

AI assessment note: “my path into startups was directly out of college”

Q aggressive storm. And products go through aggressive storms and they don't always hit. And when we chatted before, you said there were 10 main reasons why products maybe don't hit. So I want to take these in kind of three and then ask subsequent questions because I'm too interested not to. So if we start with the first three, what are the first three reasons why products don't hit, Brian?

A Right. There's a lot of reasons products succeed, but let's first dive into why products fail. And the number one reason why products fail is because they're too complicated. And I think one thing that people who design products for a living take for granted is that consumers are very busy people. They have these routines. They wake up at a certain time. They go to work at a certain time. They spend time with their friends on weekends and being able to wedge a product into their life in a very simplistic fashion is incredibly hard to do. So anytime you present a customer with any complexity, it's going to hurt you and you're going to see attrition. And so one of the reasons why I think most products Fail out of the gate is because they are too complicated. Second thing that I like to talk about is how people spread products. Most products are still spread through word of mouth, and one of the most important sort of tests that I use is what I call, how does the friend explain it? What I mean by that is, what you tell a customer your product does is not interesting. That's not relevant. What's relevant is what someone who uses your product tells another person. How do they explain it? Why are they imbued with Some passion to go tell a friend, like, you gotta try Uber, or you gotta get on Tinder, this is so interesting, or look at this app called Instagram, you know, these beautif…

AI assessment note: “the number one reason why products fail is because they're too complicated”

Q Not at all, but I want to start with a little bit about you. So tell me, Brian, how did you make your way into the world of startups? How did Tinder really come about? And then how did it get to where you are today? I'd love to hear that in a swift three to four minutes.

A So, you know, my path into startups was directly out of college, and when most of my friends went to investment banks and law school and all these places where you have to wear suits and act professional, I had found a brilliant technologist that I partnered up with. His name was Dan Gold, and we decided that we wanted to dedicate our lives to building product and to really trying to think about how to use technology in an impactful way. This was the early days of Web to O. The technology community at large was not Fully formed. So many of the things that we did were essentially trial and error, and that led us to start a company that we sold to Fox Interactive Media in 2006. So it was an exit for me, which was great. It was 25 years old. And, you know, after that, I basically dedicated the rest of my life to building product. I was lucky enough to meet Sean Rad, who was the founder of Tinder while he was still in college. And I always admired his entrepreneur skill and also his Focus on user experience, and so we'd started a company together, and after that, he had shown me a couple of early ideas around Tinder, and I was really, really interested in the power of the idea, but at that point, it wasn't launched, and soon thereafter, I got word from Sean how well it was doing, and so kept talking, and kind of in a strange course of events, he ended up buying my company, and so t…

AI assessment note: “my path into startups was directly out of college”

Q day that said, one of the biggest dangers is actually forcing a new user experience that doesn't already exist, or a new user behavior, sorry, that doesn't already exist. My question was, Is that not just market creation? Is that not what the best have done in Snapchat's ephemeral messaging and how we engage with filters maybe? How do you think about kind of market creation versus forcing existing behaviors?

A So I fundamentally do not believe in quote unquote new behaviors. Humans have been around for 200,000 years. We're wired a certain way. We have an incentive system that has developed over many, many thousands of years in our brains, and I fundamentally dismiss The idea there are new behaviors. I think you can unlock certain behaviors and technology has this beautiful, beautiful wedge into this infinite world. And so at times it feels like there are quote unquote new behaviors created. For example, I was in a debate on Twitter about Uber and someone said, well, Uber is a new behavior. Lyft is a new behavior. And I still dismiss that notion for many years would call a taxi or hail a taxi. It just so happens. Now we have this beautiful portal, this interface. Where you can tap a button, and then the taxi comes. One of the things that I've made a ton of mistakes, you know, in my career, is trying to sort of create these new behaviors, and it's just too much work, and it's too hard. It's much better to find existing behaviors, and extend them, and amplify them.

AI assessment note: “I fundamentally do not believe in quote unquote new behaviors.”

Q Brian, I want to finish today on the next five years for you and the very exciting plans ahead. What's in store?

A So, I'm still incredibly passionate about my life's mission, which is building these Really interesting, fun, useful products, and so that doesn't change. Hopefully, I'll still have the skills and the wherewithal to continue to do that, and I plan to do that. The other thing that I've been spending a ton of time with is a program called Spearhead, which I'm running now. Spearhead is sort of the brainchild of Naval Ravikant and Jeff Bagman, and the idea is funding entrepreneurs. We think fundamentally venture capital is in the middle of an incredible renaissance, and one of those is the idea that on the ground floor, seed stage, pre-seed, Pre-idea. Founders will have the ability to fund founders. So each year, twice a year, we select 15 people, and we give them up to a million dollars to invest in the best and brightest. And so I've been spending a ton of time there. We've made over 80 investments thus far, and it's just been an incredible program, an incredible ride, seeing how these incredible founders are finding these beautiful ideas in these really important large markets. So that's where I've been spending most of my time.

AI assessment note: “I've been spending a ton of time with a program called Spearhead”

Q So I have a couple of things to unpack there before we move on to the others. If we start on the first, you said about being too complex. I totally agree in terms of kind of feature creep as it's often called, but what's your biggest advice then to founders? Who are trying to retain that sympathy, and how do you advise them in terms of maintaining that mindset?

A It's something that I call holding the line. Your product, and you as a founder, you have to stand for something, and if you don't know what that is, your customer certainly won't know what that is either, and so when you stand for something, and you say, this is who we are, this is the product, and you put it in the marketplace, you have to hold the line. One of the interesting stories around Tinder was just Radical simplicity. It brought the online dating pretender. You had to fill out all these forms and menus, and you had to talk about future goals and whether you like long walks on the beach. And I remember very specifically, Sean saying all there is, is a profile photo. That's it. Yes or no. It's a binary decision that double opt-in and that profile photo created, you know, now an And I think what happens is people don't hold the line. They don't stand for something. And then what you get is Frankenstein. You got a product that does this, that does that. It's a, you know, Swiss army knife. And then you get into these traps where people can't explain it. They don't know how to use it. And then all of a sudden you have a failed product. Being able to stand for something really, really important is the key to getting something right, and it's incredibly hard to do, but when you get it, watch out.

AI assessment note: “It's something that I call holding the line. Your product, and you as a founder”

Q Hit me. What's the next one then? The failure of the next three.

A Another reason products fail is a failure to launch into a community. And right now, when you think about the beauty of the internet is all of these millions of micro communities out there. And there's Essentially, an early adopter for anything, for everything, and when I think about launching into a community, I think about a product that means something, that stands for something, and then goes and puts it in the hands of the people who appreciate it most. You should worship your early adopters. They're everything. They will take you to the highest of highs. They will show you the way. They will help explain the product to friends, and they will do your work for you, but you have to go find those people, and I think one thing is that that is a different skill set Than just building a product itself. There's a lot of marketing. There's a lot of PR. There's a lot of storytelling. And then there's a lot of effort that you have to go through that will find those customers and drop that product in their hands.

AI assessment note: “Another reason products fail is a failure to launch into a community.”

Q be it kind of the success of Tinder Gold, be it one of the angel investments, IPO-ing for, you know, multi-billion, do you appreciate those good times, or is there always, ah, but we can keep Tinder Gold at number one for three months, and then six months, and we can do more and more. Do you ever appreciate the moment, so to speak? That's the biggest challenge I have.

A What I dislike about capitalism personally the most is this idea of the hedonic treadmill. You just keep running, you keep running, you keep running it. If you're able to run at a 12 pace, you should be at 14. And so I have always espoused this idea of stopping and smelling the roses. And it seems cliche, but when you do have one of those enormous successes, or if it's a startup, it could be a small success. You have to shine a light on it. You have to enjoy it a little bit. You have to share it because there are so many hard times, and I feel very fortunate to have had many, many great times, and I try my best to kind of stop, ponder, and think about what were the inputs that got me there?

AI assessment note: “I have always espoused this idea of stopping and smelling the roses.”

Q Talk about seeing things differently, and before we do dive into the true love being product, I do have to ask, You mentioned kind of early successes there and selling your first company when you were 25, 26. You then saw the bubble bursting also, 2008 macro problems. How do you think that affected your mindset?

A You know, it didn't really impact my mindset. I'm usually thinking about the customer so aggressively, and I'm thinking about the promise to the customer so aggressively that these ups and downs in the market and the market cycles, they don't impact me as much. Clearly, you want to have capital. To weather these storms, and some of these storms are far more aggressive than others, but in general, the sinusoidal wave that is the market, it's never really impacted what I build. I still wake up in the morning and I think about the problem and I think about the solution. I think about simplification and design and all these other inputs that roll up into a beautiful product. And, you know, that is my obsession. That's my core focus point. And the market situation sort of, it will work itself out.

AI assessment note: “You know, it didn't really impact my mindset.”

Q So I have a couple of things to unpack there before we move on to the others. If we start on the first, you said about being too complex. I totally agree in terms of kind of feature creep as it's often called, but what's your biggest advice then to founders? Who are trying to retain that sympathy, and how do you advise them in terms of maintaining that mindset?

A It's something that I call holding the line. Your product, and you as a founder, you have to stand for something, and if you don't know what that is, your customer certainly won't know what that is either, and so when you stand for something, and you say, this is who we are, this is the product, and you put it in the marketplace, you have to hold the line. One of the interesting stories around Tinder was just Radical simplicity. It brought the online dating pretender. You had to fill out all these forms and menus, and you had to talk about future goals and whether you like long walks on the beach. And I remember very specifically, Sean saying all there is, is a profile photo. That's it. Yes or no. It's a binary decision that double opt-in and that profile photo created, you know, now an And I think what happens is people don't hold the line. They don't stand for something. And then what you get is Frankenstein. You got a product that does this, that does that. It's a, you know, Swiss army knife. And then you get into these traps where people can't explain it. They don't know how to use it. And then all of a sudden you have a failed product. Being able to stand for something really, really important is the key to getting something right, and it's incredibly hard to do, but when you get it, watch out.

AI assessment note: “It's something that I call holding the line. Your product, and you as a founder”

Q day that said, one of the biggest dangers is actually forcing a new user experience that doesn't already exist, or a new user behavior, sorry, that doesn't already exist. My question was, Is that not just market creation? Is that not what the best have done in Snapchat's ephemeral messaging and how we engage with filters maybe? How do you think about kind of market creation versus forcing existing behaviors?

A So I fundamentally do not believe in quote unquote new behaviors. Humans have been around for 200,000 years. We're wired a certain way. We have an incentive system that has developed over many, many thousands of years in our brains, and I fundamentally dismiss The idea there are new behaviors. I think you can unlock certain behaviors and technology has this beautiful, beautiful wedge into this infinite world. And so at times it feels like there are quote unquote new behaviors created. For example, I was in a debate on Twitter about Uber and someone said, well, Uber is a new behavior. Lyft is a new behavior. And I still dismiss that notion for many years would call a taxi or hail a taxi. It just so happens. Now we have this beautiful portal, this interface. Where you can tap a button, and then the taxi comes. One of the things that I've made a ton of mistakes, you know, in my career, is trying to sort of create these new behaviors, and it's just too much work, and it's too hard. It's much better to find existing behaviors, and extend them, and amplify them.

AI assessment note: “I fundamentally dismiss The idea there are new behaviors.”

Q Hit me. What's the next one then? The failure of the next three.

A Another reason products fail is a failure to launch into a community. And right now, when you think about the beauty of the internet is all of these millions of micro communities out there. And there's Essentially, an early adopter for anything, for everything, and when I think about launching into a community, I think about a product that means something, that stands for something, and then goes and puts it in the hands of the people who appreciate it most. You should worship your early adopters. They're everything. They will take you to the highest of highs. They will show you the way. They will help explain the product to friends, and they will do your work for you, but you have to go find those people, and I think one thing is that that is a different skill set Than just building a product itself. There's a lot of marketing. There's a lot of PR. There's a lot of storytelling. And then there's a lot of effort that you have to go through that will find those customers and drop that product in their hands.

AI assessment note: “Another reason products fail is a failure to launch into a community.”

Q be it kind of the success of Tinder Gold, be it one of the angel investments, IPO-ing for, you know, multi-billion, do you appreciate those good times, or is there always, ah, but we can keep Tinder Gold at number one for three months, and then six months, and we can do more and more. Do you ever appreciate the moment, so to speak? That's the biggest challenge I have.

A What I dislike about capitalism personally the most is this idea of the hedonic treadmill. You just keep running, you keep running, you keep running it. If you're able to run at a 12 pace, you should be at 14. And so I have always espoused this idea of stopping and smelling the roses. And it seems cliche, but when you do have one of those enormous successes, or if it's a startup, it could be a small success. You have to shine a light on it. You have to enjoy it a little bit. You have to share it because there are so many hard times, and I feel very fortunate to have had many, many great times, and I try my best to kind of stop, ponder, and think about what were the inputs that got me there?

AI assessment note: “I have always espoused this idea of stopping and smelling the roses.”

Q you were talking about it, I was trying to wrap my brain thinking of an entirely new behavior. You said that, though, about kind of just being too hard, and you know, having built the community in the show, I know how hard community building is, And I want to start on the next three. What are the next three reasons as to why products maybe don't hit the mark?

A Another reason why products fail to hit the mark is out of fear. I think a lot of founders are consumed by fear because they're worried about what people will say and what people will think of the company and what people will say about the product on Twitter. And it takes a tremendous amount of courage to launch something that is different. That is new. That is inspiring. If you think about Snapchat for a second, you think about the idea of ephemerality. It took a lot of courage to launch that feature. So many people said, why would I ever need that? The idea, even the construct of something that exploded or went away made no sense to people. But at some level, there was this part of the product that made tons of sense to a certain cohort, which was young kids. And, you know, I look at a product decision like that, and I say, wow, that took risk. That took courage. And so one of the things that I think founders have to focus on is they have to be both empathetic, but also have this ability, this innate ability to understand risk and be able to calculate when to use it and when not to.

AI assessment note: “Another reason why products fail to hit the mark is out of fear.”

Q on. I do have to ask, is one of your Tinder colleagues, Jeff Morris Jr. was on the show, and he said, I apply an investor's mindset to every product decision I make. So combining the two worlds that you really excel in, both product and angel investing, I'd love to hear, how have you found the transferability of skill and mindset, maybe across both product and angel investing today?

A It's a good question. I don't necessarily bring my investor hat when I'm building product. For me, product is a very personal experience. It's something that is more art than science, and when I sit down to think about a product, the center of it is the user, and at the center of the experience is the promise to the customer. I think a lot about how to deliver that promise in the simplest way possible, and so when I'm looking at companies, I obviously bias towards beautiful and useful products and really amazing founders, but it's not the same mindset for me. The product experience Is almost like art, and when I think about the customer, when I think about the promise to the customer, when I think about all the tools that we have to deliver that, it's almost like a zen-like experience, and of course, there are moments where it's incredibly frustrating, and you have to walk away, and you have to take a long, long break, but when you come back to it, you see it differently, but for me, my first love, and potentially, I think, my only true love is product.

AI assessment note: “I don't necessarily bring my investor hat when I'm building product.”

Q on. I do have to ask, is one of your Tinder colleagues, Jeff Morris Jr. was on the show, and he said, I apply an investor's mindset to every product decision I make. So combining the two worlds that you really excel in, both product and angel investing, I'd love to hear, how have you found the transferability of skill and mindset, maybe across both product and angel investing today?

A It's a good question. I don't necessarily bring my investor hat when I'm building product. For me, product is a very personal experience. It's something that is more art than science, and when I sit down to think about a product, the center of it is the user, and at the center of the experience is the promise to the customer. I think a lot about how to deliver that promise in the simplest way possible, and so when I'm looking at companies, I obviously bias towards beautiful and useful products and really amazing founders, but it's not the same mindset for me. The product experience Is almost like art, and when I think about the customer, when I think about the promise to the customer, when I think about all the tools that we have to deliver that, it's almost like a zen-like experience, and of course, there are moments where it's incredibly frustrating, and you have to walk away, and you have to take a long, long break, but when you come back to it, you see it differently, but for me, my first love, and potentially, I think, my only true love is product.

AI assessment note: “I don't necessarily bring my investor hat when I'm building product.”

Q No, I do totally agree. Can I ask, how do you think about kind of cultivating and moving the up the S curve from early adopters to the kind of early minority slash majority as you progress up? And how do you think that can be based into product really allow for the smooth transition from, you know, your early adopter to the early majority?

A You would always hope the transition is smooth as you start to scale, but in reality, you always are going to alienate some of your earliest customers, and it's a really painful process. It's something that every company that has achieved scale will tell you they've gone through, and it's something that, you know, when I look at a product and I can see it sort of slowly moving up that curve, and you look at, for example, Bitcoin today, this incredibly small, amazingly passionate community, and now Bitcoin is sort of like this thing that millions of people are interested in, so it's not just the early adopters elephant. And so some of those folks are going to feel alienated, and they're going to talk about the good old days, but this is sort of the nature of the beast, being able to do it in sort of a fashion that doesn't destroy the company. It's really, really hard to do, and it's also emotionally taxing, because when you build a product, you launch it into a community, and people love it, and then as it scales, people start to say, oh, it's no longer cool, or oh, you know, I remember that product. It was so special when. These are really hard things to deal with as a developer of something, but You have to weather the storm. You have to keep going, and you have to believe that the product will, over time, improve, and sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't, and we've seen, y…

AI assessment note: “in reality, you always are going to alienate some of your earliest customers”

Q Can I ask, how do you learn that? I mean, is there a kind of methodology in terms of your mindset as to how you can embrace, think about, and analyze risk when it comes to product itself?

A This is the art of product, the ability to understand how to pivot off a certain feature and How to pivot off a certain emotion when something is working, when something is not working. And some of this is like anything else. The more repetition, the more you've seen, the better you get at understanding how to address risk. But the other thing that I would say is that when you're holding the line, when you really are passionate about something, you believe in something bigger than just a feature. Some of these questions work themselves out. You don't have to have these sit downs where you look at the entire constitution of the feature and say, what is this? And do we believe this or do we not believe this? When you stand for something bigger, some of these decisions start to fall into place. So I will say this. It's very, very rare for people to have this amazing ability to always address risk. But when you see it, you had to wrap your arms around these people and you've got to give them as much line as possible because these are the people that are going to take your company to a special place.

AI assessment note: “The more repetition, the more you've seen, the better you get”

Q the element that you said earlier was also about potentially as you scale the product and losing some of that early adopter support because of the features that you include with scale. Another one of the comments you said was they don't take feature risk being as a main reason why products fail. How do you think about feature risk and what's a calculated risk and maybe what's an irrational?

A So feature risk is a very, very interesting part of product development and feature risk is also heavily correlated with To the DNA of the product culture. So certain product cultures are willing to take risks. Others are not. And it also depends on the scale of the company and the larger companies, more bureaucracy, more people trying to protect themselves, less risk, smaller companies, everyone's shooting for the moon, more risk. And so I think one of the things that we always think about is creating a culture, a product culture that will embrace these risks and will push people to try new things. And when we think about why we don't take certain risks, most of these things, most of it comes down to fear. People are afraid that they're going to mess up, afraid they're going to be laughed at, afraid that a colleague is not going to think it's a good move, afraid in general, just because fear is a very powerful emotion. And when you can remove fear, and when you can create a culture that puts sort of risk-taking at the center, but calculated risk-taking, you don't want to do things that would obviously jeopardize the business at large, but that to me is a really, really important piece of a great product culture, and one that isn't talked about a lot.

AI assessment note: “calculated risk-taking, you don't want to do things that would obviously jeopardize the business”

Q the element that you said earlier was also about potentially as you scale the product and losing some of that early adopter support because of the features that you include with scale. Another one of the comments you said was they don't take feature risk being as a main reason why products fail. How do you think about feature risk and what's a calculated risk and maybe what's an irrational?

A So feature risk is a very, very interesting part of product development and feature risk is also heavily correlated with To the DNA of the product culture. So certain product cultures are willing to take risks. Others are not. And it also depends on the scale of the company and the larger companies, more bureaucracy, more people trying to protect themselves, less risk, smaller companies, everyone's shooting for the moon, more risk. And so I think one of the things that we always think about is creating a culture, a product culture that will embrace these risks and will push people to try new things. And when we think about why we don't take certain risks, most of these things, most of it comes down to fear. People are afraid that they're going to mess up, afraid they're going to be laughed at, afraid that a colleague is not going to think it's a good move, afraid in general, just because fear is a very powerful emotion. And when you can remove fear, and when you can create a culture that puts sort of risk-taking at the center, but calculated risk-taking, you don't want to do things that would obviously jeopardize the business at large, but that to me is a really, really important piece of a great product culture, and one that isn't talked about a lot.

AI assessment note: “calculated risk-taking, you don't want to do things that would obviously jeopardize the business”

Q No, I do totally agree. Can I ask, how do you think about kind of cultivating and moving the up the S curve from early adopters to the kind of early minority slash majority as you progress up? And how do you think that can be based into product really allow for the smooth transition from, you know, your early adopter to the early majority?

A You would always hope the transition is smooth as you start to scale, but in reality, you always are going to alienate some of your earliest customers, and it's a really painful process. It's something that every company that has achieved scale will tell you they've gone through, and it's something that, you know, when I look at a product and I can see it sort of slowly moving up that curve, and you look at, for example, Bitcoin today, this incredibly small, amazingly passionate community, and now Bitcoin is sort of like this thing that millions of people are interested in, so it's not just the early adopters elephant. And so some of those folks are going to feel alienated, and they're going to talk about the good old days, but this is sort of the nature of the beast, being able to do it in sort of a fashion that doesn't destroy the company. It's really, really hard to do, and it's also emotionally taxing, because when you build a product, you launch it into a community, and people love it, and then as it scales, people start to say, oh, it's no longer cool, or oh, you know, I remember that product. It was so special when. These are really hard things to deal with as a developer of something, but You have to weather the storm. You have to keep going, and you have to believe that the product will, over time, improve, and sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't, and we've seen, y…

AI assessment note: “in reality, you always are going to alienate some of your earliest customers”

Q Speaking of when you get it there, you said another element, which was the importance of iteration and really rapidly having that high shipment cadence. I do have to ask, how do you know, though, how long is the right time to test for? How long is sufficient enough time to get good data versus we haven't got enough to actually validly credit whether this is actually worthy or not?

A We've talked a lot about holding a line and believing in something and standing up for something when you build a product, and when you hold the line and you're really, really standing for something, there's really two ways that you can accept data. One is qualitative, one is quantitative. Qualitative data is much easier to come by because you don't need a huge sample size, and what I mean by that is there are tons of tools available today to product designers, whether it be these rapid prototyping machines or framer, even sketch, just the ability to put something on a Screen and tape it to the wall or put it up on a big screen and have everyone look at it and say, yes, I understand this, or no, that doesn't make sense, or yes, that value proposition, or it's totally clear to me, that call to action, you know, that will take me to that next level. But I think one of the things that you've got to do is you've got to combine both. You've got to understand the emotion and what you're building and really be able to talk to people in a natural environment and see what's clicking. And then you also have to have the ability to analyze this data. But, you know, the data analysis on a quantitative level It's much more helpful at these big products that have scale. Because obviously, when we have millions of people using something, there's a lot of permutations, and you can, you know, th…

AI assessment note: “there's really two ways that you can accept data. One is qualitative, one is quantitative.”

Q Can I ask you a question? In terms of that fear element, we've discussed it quite a few times. How do you think about your relationship to fear, how it's changed over time, especially with products, and how that's scaled for you personally?

A There's a lot of discussion about building for yourself, and building for yourself sounds incredibly selfish, but it's not. Building for yourself means that you know what the best interest of that user is because it's you, and so one of the things that I've worked on throughout my career Is really trying to remove all of that stuff on the edges and get to the essence of why I'm building something and what's in it for me. Because generally speaking, if I can satisfy that condition, if I know why I'm building it, I know what's in it for me. I know what it does to my life or what it does for the reason, the rationale for using the product. It's probably going to work good for other people. And so you hear this all the time from great, you know, these great founder stories of Well, why did you build this? Well, I built it for myself. And the reason why that's so successful is because you know that user best. That doesn't necessarily mean that you can take that methodology and use it across the board in every single feature ever developed, but it means it's a starting place. I think it's a really powerful place to start.

AI assessment note: “There's a lot of discussion about building for yourself”

Q Can I ask you a question? In terms of that fear element, we've discussed it quite a few times. How do you think about your relationship to fear, how it's changed over time, especially with products, and how that's scaled for you personally?

A There's a lot of discussion about building for yourself, and building for yourself sounds incredibly selfish, but it's not. Building for yourself means that you know what the best interest of that user is because it's you, and so one of the things that I've worked on throughout my career Is really trying to remove all of that stuff on the edges and get to the essence of why I'm building something and what's in it for me. Because generally speaking, if I can satisfy that condition, if I know why I'm building it, I know what's in it for me. I know what it does to my life or what it does for the reason, the rationale for using the product. It's probably going to work good for other people. And so you hear this all the time from great, you know, these great founder stories of Well, why did you build this? Well, I built it for myself. And the reason why that's so successful is because you know that user best. That doesn't necessarily mean that you can take that methodology and use it across the board in every single feature ever developed, but it means it's a starting place. I think it's a really powerful place to start.

AI assessment note: “There's a lot of discussion about building for yourself”