The Wisdom Wall

“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, um, drag on that process.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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, with the other way.”

“The analytical approach will get you a lot of, like, doubles and triples. Um, 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 make this bet in that direction.”

“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.”

“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. Um, being the best means nothing.”

“the angle I think is really fruitful within a company, is sell something else to your same buyer. And you, 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 that Target something wholly new altogether.”

“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.”

“Yeah, I think you, 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 they could benefit from and things that they can borrow…”

“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 ways for doing the thing that they are so great at.”

“Also, another, like, factor that can hide folks, like, make them really diamonds in the rough, is that, um, 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 look at this, there's certainly some small signals that…”

“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.”

“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.”

“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, and they were starting a startup in some ways. Like you're being a lot more hands-on than a board is. The most important tool is like a QBR.”

“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 business.”

“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 set of questions, like, what features follow that are great…”

“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 software without context”

“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.”

“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.”