Insight
Peng: Joining startups too early as a product leader creates founder friction
“The thing that I actually warn both founders and product operators against is joining as a product leader too early in a company. And what I mean by that is there's kind of three layers of product. There's product vision, there's product strategy, and there's …”
Insight
Peng: Linear succeeded by prioritizing engineers over product managers
“Most of these issue tracking tools go for PMs first. Right. It's like, you're the manager, you're the planner, you're planning the development, the roadmap, the cycle, all this kind of stuff. That's the target customer. And the fact that they kind of flipped t…”
Insight
Peng: Pre-PMF startups should track specific product actions instead of NPS
“So pre-product market fit, the strong advice to pick a number that represents customer happiness. And I recommend not using MPS. I recommend using a metric that's specifically an action in your product.”
Insight
Platforms can add performance marketing engines without diluting community magic
“You can preserve the magic of the community while also building a performance marketing engine and those two can coexist, and you don't have to Dilute the former to get the latter”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Instagram SMB ads experienced a 60% monthly customer churn rate
“For every 10 customers that tried the product, six of them the next month would go away.”
Insight
Vickie Peng: Nobody Ever Permanently Maintains Product-Market Fit
“Nobody ever actually gets and keeps product market fit. It is an ongoing battle or an ongoing journey that nobody ever really just conquers and says, okay, I'm done.”
Insight
Peng: Overcoming customer habit inertia is harder than beating market competition
“Breaking people's habits could in many cases be way harder than kind of standing out amongst competition.”
Disclosure
Sequoia's product team wrote a four-page manifesto to keep using Linear
“We adopted linear here at Sequoia with my team. And we actually had another issue tracking tool that we also, you know, had licenses for. Some teams use this, some teams use that, but EPD solely use linear. And we were being, there was a threat of us consolida…”
Insight
Peng: Founders almost always overestimate how much product is needed to learn
“You are almost always going to overestimate the amount that you need to build to actually learn the thing that you want to learn.”
Insight
Product leaders must build internal and external belief alongside the product
“And I think I really learned the biggest lesson I learned there was There's of course you build the product. You have to build a product that delights customers that actually delivers value, but you also, your job is also to build belief as a product leader an…”
Insight
Peng: Founders underestimate the power of storytelling compared to product building
“And people over, maybe not overestimate the building of the product, but they underestimate the power of the story and the building of that story.”
Insight
Peng: Differentiation fails if customers cannot repeat it in one sentence
“But I think differentiation in the customer's voice. It's one thing for you to be able to say why your data lake is better than the others, but if your customer can't parrot that back to you in one sentence, then you haven't done your job yet.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Polyvore ran its performance marketing engine on Google Spreadsheets for a year
“We started with a spreadsheet. So we ran our entire performance marketing engine off of a Google spreadsheet for not, this is not like two weeks just to get it live. We did, I think it was a full year that we ran it on a spreadsheet”
Insight
Vickie Peng: What drove Sequoia's first 50 years won't sustain its next 50
“Sequoia is 50, 50 plus year old firm. But what got us through the first 50 years isn't going to get us through the next 50. And there's gotta be something that provides the team, you know, the leverage and the amplification for what we need to do, which is fin…”
Insight
Vickie Peng: Great product missions must be customer-centric and decade-focused
“Ok, so there's two core things I think that make a great product mission. One is that it's customer centric. So it should describe what it changes for the customer and their world, how it changes the customer's world. Two is that it is a thing that you can ima…”
Insight
Vickie Peng: Diluting Enterprise Products for Small Businesses Doesn't Work
“Diluting this product for this person is not going to work. Even if that's the most efficient path, it is not the most effective path.”
Insight
Peng: Founders describe products orthogonally to how customers view them
“The number of times that I have seen a founder, you know, describe this is what my product does. This is what it is. This is, you know, the category we're in. This is the feature set we have. And then you go and ask the customer and say, how would you describe…”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Sequoia's Arc program teaches founders to operationally fake unbuilt features
“We actually do have this PMF this kind of scoping MVP framework that we teach during ARC that I teach during product week. And it talks about, there's three columns, of course, there's three pillars that we break it into. And the first is what does the product…”
Disclosure
Peng: Sequoia portfolio is evenly split across customer mindset archetypes
“When we actually look through our portfolio, I would say it was actually pretty representative across the different paths, surprisingly enough, hard fact is really comes through a lot, I would say actually, surprisingly so.”
