Tara Seshan
Product Lead, OpenAI · 1 appearance on the record.
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operatorexecutivefounder@tarstarr ↗LinkedIn ↗substack.com/@taraseshan ↗
Tara Seshan leads product for ChatGPT Work and Codex at OpenAI. She previously served as Head of Product at Watershed and led product for Stripe Billing and Stripe Treasury.
29statements → 7claims → 1claims resolved → 3.93/5average certainty → 2/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated →
1 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 1 not yet assessed 5 not checkable as stated how the 7 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
1 prediction · 6 assertions · 1 opinion · 20 insights · 1 disclosure · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 7 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is resolved, 1 is not yet assessed, and 5 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Tara argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Their most notable supported claim
Seshan: Amber Feng and Christina Cordova built Stripe Connect's initial multi-party version
“And then we had started exploring this thing called Connect where Amber Feng and Christina Cordova had built an initial version of this, like, multi-party payments idea that Someone like Shopify or someone like Lyft could be able to route payments in multiple …”
How they sound: not measured why? →
We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Tara Seshan on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.
Everything Tara Seshan said on In Depth that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Seshan predicts every public company will require carbon accounting in 10 years
“In 10 years, every public company will need to do some level of carbon accounting and have a decarbonization plan to underscore that.”
Seshan: Overfunding early product bets creates coordination drag and slows progress
“Actually in that early stage of, Trying to establish something. Actually having more resourcing holds you back, as counterintuitively as that seems. Like, more people to bring along versus people who you're ideating with actually create drag on that process.”
Patrick Collison required new Stripe products to plausibly add $10B in enterprise value
“When Stripe got larger and larger, the question became not only why now, but like, what's the opportunity on the table for this idea? Like, this has to be an idea where we could eventually work it out to Patrick's, you know, sort of bar was, is this gonna add,…”
Seshan: High-potential hires generate more value than experienced, prestigious candidates
“Hungry and high potential person who's dedicated to growing quickly can build more value for the business than a statusy or experienced person who is less high potential.”
Seshan: Most Smart People Lack the Drive to Finish Projects
“Like, most smart people are actually terrible at having the drives or follow through to take the thing over the finish line, drag it through.”
Seshan: Unseating incumbents requires 10x quality, but retention products just need baseline utility
“You have to be tenx better at that phase than whatever they had before versus we just didn't, we just need to not suck with the other way.”
Seshan: Analytical expansion yields doubles, but product home runs require intuition
“The analytical approach will get you a lot of, like, doubles and triples. But I think the home runs really come from this, like, intuitive call for, like, how do I think the market is going to work? How do I think the world is going to work? And, like, let me …”
Seshan: Companies should not launch new products early just to build muscle
“I mean, I think it's, it would be hard to say that folks should do this early for the sake of building the muscle alone, just because cost of doing it is quite high.”
Seshan: Judging new bets by core business yardsticks causes them to fail
“One of the most common reasons for this not working within companies is that people judge the net new bet by the same yardstick that the rest of the company is judged on. And that is not just an executive decision. It cascades all the way down.”
Seshan: Building the 'Best Product' Matters Less Than Target User Fit
“Everyone always, like, overestimates the impact of, like, specific features and being the best product. Like, being the best product is not an answer. You have to be, like, the right product for your target user. Being the best means nothing.”
Seshan: Multi-product startups succeed more often by selling to existing buyers
“The angle I think is really fruitful within a company, is sell something else to your same buyer. And you kind of know that user and you know their needs. You're much more likely to succeed by giving them an additional product than trying to launch a product t…”
Seshan: Bottom-up ideation yields three to four good ideas per fifty
“Initially, there'll be, like, 50 bad ideas on the table for those types of ancillary products, and probably, like, three or four good ones, and so you want to be able to bottoms-up identify what are those three to four good ones.”
Seshan: Zero-to-one teams should have two to four engineers and zero dependencies
“Yeah, I think you want the team to be really self-sufficient. So you want the team to not have to reach outside of itself to borrow expertise from other parts of the organization. Like certainly within the organization, there are parts of the code base that th…”
Seshan: High-potential hires fail most often from organizational mismatch
“Honestly, that's the most common failure mode with this kind of thing, where you hire someone who you do see glimmers of greatness in them, but they're just not great in the way the organization needs, and the organization, like, Oregon rejects them in some wa…”
Seshan: Promotions in low-quality orgs signal diamond-in-the-rough talent
“Also, another, like, factor that can hide folks, like, make them really diamonds in the rough, is that they might do high-quality work in a low-quality org, so they might be doing a lot of great stuff in a place that just doesn't, that isn't great. When you lo…”
Seshan: Stripe's core business model relies on retaining scaling customers
“The whole engine of Stripe's business is your users should not grow, grow off you. Like as they scale, you make more money. And they make more money.”
Seshan: Building products to prevent churn is easier than winning net-new buyers
“It's like always easier in a lot of ways to do the prevent churn off of you versus win someone out of the gate.”
Seshan: Treat internal net-new product teams like startups acting as their board
“With net new bets, especially ones that have a, their own go-to market, selling to a new buyer, selling differently, almost want to treat the team as if you were their board and they were starting a startup in some ways.
Like you're being a lot more hands-on t…”
Seshan: Incubation teams instinctively underemphasize compatibility with the core business
“The team's instinct is almost always going to be like, hey, we're building our new thing.
And we have so many important questions to solve about whether people care about fraud management or not.
They're going to under emphasize the compatibility with the core…”
Seshan: Defining the target user is the most important product strategy choice
“Your target user is the most important question, full stop for your product area. Like that is the best strategy choice you can make. And so if you cannot clearly outline to me who your target user is and why, and therefore like You know, as you go through my …”
Seshan: Early software versions are inherently bad and require user context to evaluate
“Like, software is never done, and software is always bad in the first version of it, and so with the assumption that you are looking at a bad piece of software because it's the first version that someone's built, it is very hard to evaluate a bad piece of soft…”
Seshan: Product development must flow from research to model to product
“The best product stems from a very, very strong mental model of the domain and the users. Like, and UXR can help you get to such a model and validate it along the way, but it's important to view the sort Syllogism as UXR model product, not UXR to product.”
Seshan: Product teams should enter user interviews with default skepticism
“Go into the, that meeting expecting the user to sell you on the product rather you selling them. Like your default skepticism should be so high that the user is actually trying to convince you that this thing is necessary.”
Seshan: Amber Feng and Christina Cordova built Stripe Connect's initial multi-party version
“And then we had started exploring this thing called Connect where Amber Feng and Christina Cordova had built an initial version of this, like, multi-party payments idea that Someone like Shopify or someone like Lyft could be able to route payments in multiple …”
Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| Lessons from Stripe on adding new products | Tara Seshan (Watershed, Stripe) | Jun 22, 2023 | 42m |