The Ledger, every show

“If we could take a look inside their metrics, I think what we would see is a bunch of flyby users. In their mouths. Like they're kind of sprinkling the Gemini bucket everywhere. And I'm, I've like literally clicked on it accidentally multiple times. And so my …”

“But I would say that less than 10% of companies we see are taking this hard stance, but I would say they are probably the ones that are farthest along getting the most adoption and are seeing the most results of the ones that are taking those hard stances.”

“Once you figure out kind of that core, that thing that's working, it's almost always in a venture scale company, the better thing to do Is to focus your firepower, your limited attention, your limited capital, your limited talent on fueling that thing as fast …”

“And so it's amazing to see something like cursor overtake market share of something like GitHub co-pilot in nine months or less, right? Like that, that's how fast it happened.”

“My prediction of the new distribution platform will be chat GPT. In some ways that people probably already think it's happening in some ways that it won't.”

“There's going to be what they do with like a chat GPT search experience, but I think the bigger thing will be whatever they do with launching a third party platform on top of chat GPT. There's a bunch of signals that they're about to that they're about to laun…”

“And what's going to happen is that if you don't do it, your competitors are going to certainly go to the new platform and your customer expectations change and you have to rise to those customers' expectations. Like they're going to start expecting you to be i…”

“My hypothesis, and I think there's a lot more consensus around this now than there might have even been three months ago, is that the moat is really about, is about context and memory. You know, these models you know, by themselves, if you compare them side by…”

“I think the window is very small for them. If chat GPT plays their cards right, because they clearly have the escape velocity right now. And if they just keep pressing that advantage and in the right way, I think it's going to be very hard for Google to counte…”

“All of this AI tooling is going to give these like super ICs, these captain level ICs, even more leverage in solving problems and their creation abilities as part of that. And so I think in the future, what we're going to see, and I'm not the first one to say …”

“I think a lot of people are taught to always reduce, reduce, reduce friction, but actually oftentimes the right thing to do is to add the right amount of friction to, you know, create, create those experiences and those right engagement metrics down funnel”

“If you want to gain traction around something, you often should be looking at what everybody is doing, and then try, and the purpose of looking at what everybody is doing is not to necessarily understand Those best practices so that you can repeat them. Your g…”

“And I think you can see this now too, with all the AI stuff is like, you see a new, like gravity, everybody's kind of trending towards a similar set of things. And I think the real winners are gonna be the ones who kind of look at that and be like, actually, w…”

“Money does not help that company grow that much, right? The things that are helping that product grow are its organic viral in content loops, right?”

“Product market fit is not enough to build a venture scale business, meaning like a hundred million plus, I kind of pick a number out, a hundred million plus in revenue within some you know, reasonable time period.”

“We cannot mold channels to products. We have to mold the product to the channel, right?”

“There's these situations like open AI where they kind of captured lightning in a bottle. I wouldn't attribute amazing growth strategy or growth talent there. I would attribute that to amazing technology. Talent and product talent, but I think those two things …”

“Shopify probably has the best talent density at the moment. Luke Levesque is basically, like, Probably one of the most amazing recruiters I know, and he's built the talent density there that I would easily say is probably the highest talent density team like a…”

“Building a great product is one of those things that's necessary but not sufficient. And actually the separation is between those that build really great distribution.”

“And so that's the key is like, they close it down by doing one of two, by one of a few things. They either shut it down entirely. Two, they develop their own first party applications to absorb the highest use cases. Or three, they artificially depress the orga…”

“They're playing you. So you need to play them. Like that felt like that, that might be a little sadistic or something, but that is business.”

“So many companies got completely killed during you know, the crash of the Facebook social platform. Apple's 30% tax, you know, basically destroyed a bunch of types of types of applications and business models because it just, you couldn't, you feel like it was…”

“The data that DD published clearly showed that both the retention curves which I know you and I have both written about at, you know, at exhaustion level off at significant portions higher than all the other platforms. As well as those retention curves have be…”

“There's all sorts of signals that They're about to launch a third party platform. They've been hiring for a bunch of roles. I've seen multiple postings on like product manager, engineering roles, all that kind of stuff for, you know, quote unquote agent platfo…”

“My hypothesis of who's best Positioned, but is not executing on it right now would actually be Apple because through the devices, they basically can see everything. So they have the ultimate view into your context, right?”

“The key question for startups is totally different. You don't have the luxury to spread your chips. Like you have to go all in. You have to choose one and go all in. You have scarce resources, scarce attention from the market. And so it's a totally different b…”

“It's better to be early. Know that you need to figure out an exit strategy and figure out that exit strategy along the way versus waiting and then being super late and then know what the exit strategy is.”

“And once you enter the game, then you immediately need to move to starting to think about how do you exit the game? Knowing once again, that, that, that last step is going to come at some point in the future, that there's going to be some closure for monetizat…”

“Most CEOs or most executives are incredibly disconnected from the actual AI adoption taking place in, in, inside their companies.”

“I think most people would be better served Just working in product visuals saying, ooh, how might we want the product or the user to experience the product a year from now and giving that to the team? That is way more meaningful, I think, for folks, those visu…”

“I actually think most of the meat that is actionable, that helps you define not only what to build from a product perspective, but how your growth motion and growth model should work is actually defined in the use case that you're going after and the different…”

“Most mentorship programs are extremely forced and not very fluid. You also tend to not share a common worker goal. You pay, you can pay mentors or coaches like by the hour, right? They're trying to achieve something different in their career than the path That…”

“I actually think most people, A lot of people don't understand what the machine is. And the reason is, is if you ask them to draw you a picture that answers how does the product grow, right? They'll either struggle to draw that picture or it'll like, it'll loo…”

“And those things are driven so much by virality that if you're not getting the viral loops working, well then hiring a different type of growth person, a marketing or some other thing, it doesn't fucking matter, right? Like you're dead in the water.”

“Loom is the example where I would probably wait till post product market fit to start to carve out like a dedicated product growth team, dedicated marketers, right?”

“Whereas the amplitude competitor is one where it's like, Hey, I need somebody dedicated on this from day one to drive some volume to understand whether or not what the hell we're building is even close to on the mark.”

“I think the tendency is to actually think something is going to saturate much more quickly than it actually does.”

“The philosophy behind it was, okay, we are going to start with multiple bets. We are going to treat each one of these bets like a new venture investment. We are going to seed fund this. And so they like made us come and they would pitch for our seed funding fo…”

“Sometimes more people, more money does not help you find things faster. It's about going through the natural stages with their natural constraints to find things along the way.”

“The things that don't change, right, that I don't think AI is going to really help you with that much is understanding, like, all of these qualitative underpinnings of your product, of your use case, of your problem, of your natural frequency, and then the psy…”

“Growth boils down to four things, which is you find an arbitrage opportunity. You use that to spark some type of compounding system, some type of growth loop. You optimize the crap out of that system, and then you repeat that, but don't wait too late, right? L…”

“My biggest mistake at HubSpot was a little bit of what we touched on before, which is that I was in love with, like, the virality and other things that we had going with the early product, but there was a disconnect with the core target market of the core busi…”

“Well, I mean, it's hard to not say Twitter right now from a vulnerability perspective.”

“These two things don't actually happen at once. Usually you get the technology shift, then you get the distribution shift a little bit later.”

“All of these dynamics you in, in all the history, they either end up in monopolies or duopolies, right? And so the stakes are really large. And so the competition is fierce.”

“And I think we could all agree that we are in that Mode. You know, right now we've got open AI battling with Claude, battling with Gemini in Google with whatever meta comes out with their new team, you know, so on and so forth. Like, and there's huge amounts o…”

“And then they recently just did this with personal profiles too, which is they really boosted distribution for individuals to create content for that platform. They then introduced the thought leader ad format, a way to monetize those in those individual posts…”

“And the key part about this too, is it the broad trend is that the cycles seem to be getting shorter and shorter and shorter and shorter. So you actually have a smaller amount of time to play the game.”