The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 19 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Lieb: Prior domain experience is anti-correlated with top product performance
“In my experience, most of the really strong PMs that have emerged, say on the Google Photos team came from backgrounds with no experience in this domain really at all. Like you talked to some of them. In fact, I would say, I would probably go so far as to say …”
Lieb: Over-indexing on past team scale ruins product hires
“The number one failure mode when people hire product leaders is they over index on previous scale. How big of a team have you previously managed or tenure?”
Lieb: If you are unsure about product-market fit, you lack it
“If you don't know if you've got it or not, you don't is the simplest answer, right? It is a thing where something clicks and people just use your product or demand your product so much more than you could have ever fathomed. That is generally when you've got s…”
Lieb: Analytical product design prevents failure but caps upside
“Using science kind of bounds your variance of your outcomes. It makes sure you don't, like, totally blow it, but it also makes sure that you don't, like, find something that no one else would have found because you would never try it. And that's where I think …”
Lieb: Human gut instinct is the ultimate machine learning model
“I think your gut is the world's most sophisticated machine learning model ever created. It is like the best supercomputer we've got.”
Lieb: Early-stage startups shouldn't scale teams before finding product-market fit
“This is another meta mistake is people think like, oh, I like, I've raised my seed round. I have four million dollars. Like, let's go hire a team of 20 people. That's what I see all my cohorts cohort members doing. That's probably the wrong thing to do unless …”
Lieb: Joining remote meetings late intentionally builds team culture
“The technique that I found, like, the most successful, it's the simplest thing I could think of, is for every meeting that I was kind of, like, the top person in, I would just intentionally show up, like, five to seven minutes late. And I would, it creates thi…”
Lieb: Product managers should oversee design, engineering, and analytics
“I think the product manager role as defined by the world is way too pigeonholed. I think we should broaden the responsibilities of the PM role. I think they should be much more responsible for design, much more responsible for engineering, for analytics. Like,…”
Lieb: Founders must not delegate their startup's primary problem
“Generally, that is a very dangerous place to be where the founders or the CEO of the company is not working on the most important problem for the company's success.”
Lieb: Founders delegate sales and core roles too early
“You certainly need to make that trade off at some point, but I think most founders do it too early. They think they think like, oh, we have a product that like shows some glimmers of, you know, product market fit. Let's go hire a sales team. And that will be t…”
Lieb: Ambition is the single most important trait when hiring early PMs
“I would say at the early stage, the number one thing I would filter for initially for product people, and product people at an early stage company is a very broad set of skills. Like, you're kind of looking for people who can kind of do anything decently well.…”
Lieb: Over-indexing on scale or tenure is top product hiring mistake
“I would say like the number one failure mode when people hire product leaders is they over index on Either like previous scale, like how many, how big of a team have you previously managed? Or tenure, like how long have you been doing this? What experience do …”
Lieb: Modulating angel check sizes by success probability is counterproductive
“So if you modulate your check size based on like probability of success or like how big the market is or whatever, you'll probably be doing the exact opposite of what you should do.”
David Lieb: Concentrating generalist skills in few people yields extraordinary results
“And I think that's a skill, this like generalist skill that generally people don't have at big companies because they don't need to. There's experts at big companies that do everything, but I think magic happens when you bring all that stuff together in a very…”
Lieb: Great products are always built by tiny, obsessed teams
“If you look at like truly great products, pick any product that you use that you're like, that product is just really well done. Generally there are a very small set of people behind that product That really love it. That obsess over every single thing about i…”
Lieb: Startups should ship early to learn, while big companies need polished launches
“For most startups, the answer is you should probably ship something and learn something from someone. And then you can make it better. If you're a big company, you might need to make something like quite good before you want to launch it.”
Lieb: Cohort retention is the single most important early product metric
“I think that's the number one thing you should look at when you're building a new product is what is your cohort retention curve look like?”