Straight Answers

“Is it peers? What helps somebody get better at the quality and, and, um, yeah, the quality of these sorts of documents?”

answered: “What you bring to the table is one of the most misunderstood attributes”

“Do you have an Apple vision pro strategy? Amazing.”

answered: “my other one, which is very self-serving because they are a client... is perplexity”

“What went wrong there? Do you think there was a path to Quibi having worked out any big lessons that you took away from that experience that you bring with you?”

answered: “The kind of miraculous thing about Quibi for me was it relit my enthusiasm”

“And then is there like an example of a feature or product that went through this that you could share? If nothing comes to mind, that's okay.”

answered: “The inflection points are The kickoff, which is that going broad”

“What does Paul Graham do all day? Okay.”

answered: “if I can create some kind of like viral video, put it on Hacker News”

“It's hard to do that within a company. Is there anything you do with meetings, with leadership, with the way you operate that kind of spreads this way of thinking within the org?”

answered: “when I go to Kyoto, I like to go to some of these amazing Zen”

“Is that something you advise against? Is that strategy that you've seen work?”

answered: “Product market fit is a huge thing. Um, we've run into some of this”

“What have you found as impact that comes from doing this like a before and after? What kind of difference do you see having done this on a team?”

answered: “one of the things that has shifted and has caught some people by surprise”

“And when is it too early? Do you have any insights into that phase?”

answered: “understanding and being intentional about your early acquisition growth loops, I think is an essential”

“Speaking of difficult and squishy, uh, I'm guessing that one of the biggest challenges that people you work with face and one of those recurring themes is imposter syndrome, people having imposter syndrome, something definitely I went through and it comes up a lot on this podcast. What do you, what do you really advise your clients, uh, to, to do when they're feeling imposter syndrome?”

answered: “as I'm interrogating my, my own inner Emotional state right now. I'm feeling”

“Achieving the value, achieving the scaling, um, goals that the company had. So it's really about helping them focus on what they were hired for.”

answered: “So what's your biggest pitch to a product manager starting to hear about product ops”

“What were signs maybe looking back that you didn't necessarily have the trust that you thought you did or you should have had?”

answered: “the thing I traded off the most was that, that product context”

“Okay. What did you take away from that experience that kind of informed what works and doesn't work in presentations?”

answered: “Presentations used to be 35 millimeter slides in an old carousel.”

“So there's kind of two parts to this, just like when people are using Devon today, say in the net like this year, how, how is the act of being an engineer and building changing for those companies? What does that look like?”

answered: “I think of AI in general as, yeah, I mean, computers are obviously getting”

“Okay, two more questions. What's maybe the most counterintuitive thing you've learned so far building Devon that maybe goes against startup wisdom, common startup wisdom?”

answered: “There's kind of the, the, the really common things which you hear all the time”

“Was that something you actively thought about? And was that a big part of the, the impact there?”

answered: “the only thing I'd add to what you said in terms of the ingredients, it was also just like storytelling”

“I know this is, you've written books, I guess there's courses, there's all kinds of things. If you could give people a couple tips of like how to get better at this and what skills to focus on, what's kind of a quick piece of advice you could share there.”

answered: “I should have answered when you asked me like what motivated me to get spicy”

“And I'm not going to accept just we keep a high bar or we just spend a lot of time on hiring. I'm curious, just like, what is it that you all do that you think that other companies don't do that's maybe unique to the way Stripe finds and hires?”

answered: “I think it makes sense to kind of zoom out for a second because it's material here.”

“That, you know, Stripe is really good at this, right? Especially from the early days that great documentation justifies all sorts of second order effects that then will lead us to this first order effect you're, you're asking about.”

answered: “I was going to go one direction, but I want to talk about this real quick”

“People are like, oh, A-B test, the future. Uh, thoughts?”

answered: “just to add to the previous question a little bit is, why is there this debate”

“You always event, either you try it and it just doesn't work, or it eventually just peters out. I guess, any thoughts on just, like, what are signs that your product has a chance to work PL, product-led growth, versus you're just, just go straight to sales immediately and don't even worry about this?”

answered: “So let's start with the opposite of your question”

“Obviously, product is a core part of it, and it all works together and all these things. But I guess just any advice for founders that are very product-oriented and maybe are hesitant to lean into sales?”

answered: “Yeah, I would say we're not sales-led. Well, I think let's just use Agent Force”

“What's something you've changed in the way that you all operate? That's been relatively minor in terms of how hard it was to change, but that had a tremendous impact on your ability to execute as a team or a company.”

answered: “I'm kind of sidestepping the question a little bit, but it is the”

“Love that one. Favorite interview question that you like to ask folks?”

answered: “So I'm gonna change this up on you. It's less about, uh, interview questions.”

“Am I thinking about reactions in the right way? How do I actually, uh, go a bit deeper, faster, build trust faster, uh, be more direct?”

answered: “I have so many questions here... Let me just ask about that, I guess.”

“I'm close. They don't suffer fools.”

answered: “Let me zoom out a bit and I want to move on to a different topic”

“Oh, this makes a lot of sense to be open and find the patch to my bug. And here we go.”

answered: “This fractal of topics, uh, continues to grow. I'm trying to contain it.”

“It's a classic trick that Hollywood uses all the time. Why don't we use it in our own products?”

answered: “So let me pull on that thread a little bit about just consumer products”

“Just broadly, why is it so hard in your experience to start new products, go zero to one within large companies? What have you seen are kind of the biggest challenges and hurdles generally?”

answered: “So on the opportunity side, so Atlassian, uh, we have a thousand customers.”

“So maybe just to close out that thread, when you talk to founders, what advice do you give them along these lines?”

answered: “the first thing I tell founders is like, you should take my advice with a grain of salt.”

“You obviously have these very, uh, infamous, famous elements of a good strategy, something you call the kernel. Can you just talk through those pieces?”

answered: “when I used to teach strategy for many years at Harvard”

“It's called The Infinite Staircase, which is essentially a guide to living a good life and a meaningful life. Is there any, is there maybe one piece of advice you could share with folks of just how to live a better life, a more meaningful life, happier life?”

answered: “The purpose of that book was twofold. One was, so I was looking around”

“Uh, which is probably okay. Maybe some higher intelligence is simulating the most interesting time in history.”

answered: “if I had to share a closing thoughts to wrap up all of this research”

“How do you feel about where they're going? Just kind of competing in this very competitive space, uh, in coding agents.”

answered: “for our team though, we're just focused on solving the problems that users have”

“What's the, what's the story there by the way? Yeah.”

answered: “Various regulators did not like the deal and, uh, had arguments against it. No need to go into those”

“They don't really know how to get their name out, how to get people to pay attention. Just looking back at that success, I guess, just any lessons from what you did right to get the word Salesforce out, to get people to pay attention at all to what you were doing?”

answered: “we have that challenge today. We're introducing a huge new product called AgentForce”

“So maybe just to close out that thread, when you talk to founders, what advice do you give them along these lines?”

answered: “the first thing I tell founders is like, you should take my advice with a grain of salt.”

“Before we get into how to learn to do this better and more of why this is so important, is there an example from your career where you did this really badly or you didn't ask what you want?”

answered: “we'll eventually get into the story of how I was fired from Slack. But”

“This was something a lot of people talked about where managers became ICs. Is there anything more there that you've learned of just how to adjust the org to be more efficient?”

answered: “this goes back to the boom times of COVID when it looked like”

“Wasn't there a value of no, of toe stepping, encouraging toe stepping, something like that?”

answered: “Let builders build, uh, toe stepping. There, there, there were a number of values”

“Is there any tools you recommend? I imagine this is a lot of people are thinking, is there like a way to block footer and.”

answered: “that's a perfect lead into step number four. So we talked about step number”

“So this is contrarian corner. I'd love to hear your kind of perspective on just why is it that we're not as hooked on social media and technology as people think.”

answered: “So let me explain what hook was for compared to indistractable.”

“How do you think about for just finding that balance? And is, I don't know, is there an example of just like, here's a really ambitious goal and Or maybe the question is just how do you find the balance of ambitious, but not just like impossible?”

answered: “We also use designs as a way to motivate teams.”

“Do you think it's, as you said, just early and people will realize, oh wow, we need a lot more designers. What do you think is going on?”

answered: “The other thing I wanted to talk about too, is like the difference between PM”

“So the product making it easy and even just like telling you here's something you could do feels like an important part. Is that roughly what you're describing?”

answered: “I think so. I think, um, there's some really interesting graphs in the original scaling law”

“Has that ever happened? What are the odds that might happen?”

answered: “A couple of things about power, right? So if you have the ability to say no”

“I know you have a kid and one of my most, my favorite lenses into how people think and what they value is what they're teaching their kids, what they're steering their kids towards. Are there specific skills or I don't even careers that you're steering your kid towards?”

answered: “we actually homeschool, and so we... think a lot about this. Um, so I think”

“Which models are you finding most, uh, useful, uh, in, in the work? Like, I don't know, is there anything surprising about, oh wow, this model's actually really good at this, and this is really bad at that?”

answered: “there isn't necessarily even a quote unquote best model”

“And I know there's no silver bullet for increasing virality, but everyone's always wondering, how do I increase the virality of my product? So I'm curious, anything you could share, any tactics that you've seen work to increase the virality, especially of a B to B product?”

answered: “I want people to understand what virality is in the first place”

“The first question is just, what are a couple of books that you find yourself recommending most to other people? Could be along the lines of what you just described, or it could just be generally.”

answered: “I think the domain that are interesting the most is the complex system domain.”

“Stage. Any advice for someone to decide what stage is right for them?”

answered: “what I will tell you is that one thing to keep in mind right now”

“This was something a lot of people talked about where managers became ICs. Is there anything more there that you've learned of just how to adjust the org to be more efficient?”

answered: “we made significant shifts in how we operated the business, which was super painful”

“And it turns out that's what AI is the best at, the things that are verifiable and, and, you know, you know what success looks like. And so the question I think about now is just like, Which skills can you not just turn into a loop because the output is so hard to verify?”

answered: “a useful way to think about it is anytime the model's making a mistake”

“You might say we're going to, it's a tailwind or a headwind, you know, both are overcomable, but like having some awareness of the relationship between those things is good. Yeah.”

answered: “How do you actually, is this something you actually do?”