Vlad Loktev
22 statements across 1 episodes · 10 bullish · 4 bearish · 1 people on the record · first statement Sep 1, 2024 by Vlad Loktev · said 2 times in 1 episodes since 2025 · across every show →
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Everything said about Vlad Loktev, oldest first
Sep 1, 2024
Founder spikes and complementary hiring drive Loktev's venture investing evaluations
“So even now, like as an investor, when I look for, when I talk to founders, the first question, like in my head is like, what is this founder spike on? And how is that spike relevant to the problem that they're tackling today? And how well does this founder hi…”
Sep 1, 2024 negative
Scaling teams often fall into the trap of focusing on external dependencies
“What I've seen as an organization scales, people transition from saying, I can do X. And they transition to saying, Can the other team do Y so that I can do X? And I think that's a very dangerous place to be because at the end of the day, like you just need to…”
Sep 1, 2024
Impact in hypergrowth companies depends heavily on daily psychological self-regulation
“Oftentimes it's about also like being able to be impactful at a company that is in hyperscale and is growing quickly. A lot of it is actually just psychological. So it's not like there are these like core skills that sure, like you gotta have some baseline ski…”
Sep 1, 2024
Employees not working on top company priorities should find different jobs
“If you find yourself in a situation where you're not working on a top priority of the company, like you should probably get a different job because it's at the end of the day, you're spending so much of yourself and so much time at your job. You might as well …”
Sep 1, 2024 positive
Airbnb required back-of-the-envelope impact math for every single product project
“Every single project that we worked on at Airbnb We did back of the envelope math with assumptions. To help us understand the impact that something would have. And you needed to at least, now those assumptions could be completely crazy and could be very challe…”
Sep 1, 2024
Prioritize inquiry over advocacy during difficult workplace conversations
“So in the beginning, dial up inquiry. And then once you, the person who you're talking to feels heard and you actually have absorbed information and maybe you changed your mind. Maybe not though. That's when you begin to advocate. So oftentimes you just come i…”
Sep 1, 2024 positive
Leaders should spend 10% more energy explaining the rationale behind decisions
“It's actually so, so helpful if you take like, 10% more energy and time to now bring everyone along around why a certain thing was decided, because it's gonna help them just themselves make better decisions because then now they have a lot more context about h…”
Sep 1, 2024 negative
Disagreements over strategic vision must be squashed immediately
“The second is when there is disagreement on a strategic decision, or maybe even part of the vision... You got to squash that immediately. You cannot let that fire burn because it can spread. I guess if I followed the analogy, like it could become a wildfire. A…”
Sep 1, 2024 positive
Mission alignment and raw horsepower matter more than domain expertise
“Basically, mission over domain expertise, mission over skills. I think that if you have like a raw, like that raw horsepower, and you're deeply, like, you just love the mission so much, you can build whatever skills are necessary for the job.”
Sep 1, 2024 negative
Product leaders with heavy outside engagements are major hiring red flags
“When I was actually hiring product leaders and there's some product leaders would do Lots of different engagements outside of the company, whether it's investing, advising, speaking, attending conference, all those things. And they were huge red flags to me be…”
Sep 1, 2024 positive
Sep 1, 2024 positive
Leaders should intentionally introduce chaos to force creative product breakthroughs
“A big lesson for me is that chaos is good. And chaos is actually great. And sometimes you want to create chaos in an organization to push the organization to think creatively and to actually like make leaps in, in product development.”
Sep 1, 2024 positive
Employees with grounded conviction should not self-censor or hesitate to challenge leadership
“If you have a strong view after you've really grounded yourself in the truth and you feel like you've done your homework and you've asked all the questions, if you still disagree, if you still feel like we're going in the wrong direction, don't be afraid to po…”
Sep 1, 2024 positive
Leaders must let non-essential fires burn to focus on top priorities
“You just need to let go of things that are not important because if you have 20 different things that you're equally engaged on, it just means you don't actually know what is most important. And so my motto has always been let fires burn. You gotta be okay wit…”
Sep 1, 2024
Great teams are built by assembling complementary skill spikes rather than generalists
“Instead, what I've learned over time is instead of trying to find people that are good at everything, you need to look for people who spike on specific things and then add them to a team with different spikes. So there's no single person that is like spikes on…”
Sep 1, 2024 positive
Leaders in fast-growing companies need direct reports to surface uncomfortable realities
“Large companies, things are growing. Lots of things are happening as a leader. You miss so many things. And so Hearing actually what's happening and the reality of what you're dealing with. It was just so, so helpful.”
Sep 1, 2024
PMs should prepare meeting questions instead of bullet points defending a view
“Don't come in cuz people usually like when they prepare for a meeting, I've seen many PMs do this and you prepare with like, here's my view. And here are the bullets that support my view. And that's the wrong way to approach it. I think what you want to go int…”
Sep 1, 2024 positive
10x goals are valuable for testing creative extremes, not hitting targets
“The reality is it's not about hitting the goal. It's about thinking how to hit the goal and going through the journey of that creative journey of like, what does the world need to look like for this to be true? This like crazy goal to be true. Like, how should…”
Sep 1, 2024 positive
Sep 1, 2024
Loktev explicitly warned Airbnb candidates about chaotic pivots and weekend work
“It's like the anti-sell, sell where I will share the worst day or what I think you will think as a candidate, what the worst day would be at Airbnb, and then still ask you if you want to join the team. And I would basically tell people, we're going to work day…”
Sep 1, 2024 negative
Allowing major timelines to slip sets a dangerous organizational precedent
“Once timelines slip, you basically establish precedent that timelines are not as important and timelines can always slip. So you never wanna set the precedent that timeline slip. So that to me was when there was a major project and the timeline was significant…”