Twitch founder Emmett Shear on how to resolve product roadmap disagreements Emmett argues that disagreement on what to build is actually quite rare after everyone has talked to users and looked at the data. Most disagreements in startups arise because people like to come up with product ideas without talking to users first: “You talk to your users first, and then you have ideas about your product. Almost everyone does it in the opposite order” He continues: “If you find yourself thinking: ‘I’m going to go talk to my users to validate my product idea’, you’ve gone horribly off the rails…If you haven’t talked to users and you haven’t looked at data, you don’t get to have an opinion about the product. The person who has actually done the work gets to have the opinion. You can have ideas, but they get to make the call.” In the rare case where both people have really talked to users and looked at the data and still disagree on what to build, it’s best to just have someone who is in charge (e.g. CEO). Don’t avoid conflict—talk and argue about it. But then let the decision maker make the call—otherwise decision making will just be way too slow. Reddit cofounder Steve Huffman adds to this: “I find myself saying one of two things a lot: (1) I don’t want to argue about it if we can just test it, and (2) I’m very willing to be surprised on this.” Video source: @StanfordOnline (2017)

Elad Gil: “The best companies are almost always incredibly capital efficient” Elad observes that a lot of the biggest companies in the world (e.g. Apple, Google, Amazon, eBay, etc.) didn’t raise a lot of money and were very capital efficient: “I think there’s two reasons for that. One is because people are willing to pay them a lot of money for their product because it’s important to them. It’s a sign of product/market fit. And then two is the people are actually running the company thoughtfully and efficiently and asking: when do I need to add people or not? When do I need to spend money or not? And so it’s just a different mindset. It’s actually very important to build something long-term and sustainable.” This is important to keep in mind in a world where founders use metrics like capital raised or employee headcount to compare themselves to other founders. And if you’re not capital efficient, you should ask why. As Elad puts it: “If nobody’s willing to pay for something that you’re building, maybe it’s not worth building. Unless it’s a consumer product. Then it’s a different story.” Video source: @southpkcommons (2023)

Ben Silbermann explains how Pinterest found product/market fit Ben recalls somebody asking him what his “big plan” for Pinterest was. He responded: “I just want to go somewhere and see somebody that I don’t know using something that I made and have it be kind of useful. That is what I thought was really exciting.” With Pinterest Ben decided to build something simple that he would use personally. He also learned an important lesson from the failed iPhone app he tried to build before Pinterest: “Even though we had all these great features we were cramming in, we weren’t great at one thing. There wasn’t one thing that was special about it. People talk a lot about a minimum viable product or when you should ship something, and my advice is you should ship when you have one thing that you’re proud of. Like one thing that is worthy of someone’s time.” Ben continues: “That could take you a long time and it could take you not very long at all. But if it’s not worth their time to check out, you’re not going to get good feedback on whether it’s good or not. They’re going to see it and be like: This is crap [which you already knew].” The one thing Pinterest was going to be great at was making collections look really cool: “If it didn’t look cool, then no one is going to make a collection because they don’t want to show their friends because this thing they just made looks really lame.” After launching the first version of Pinterest in November 2009, the founders emailed all of their friends and family to tell them about it and basically no one responded. After four months of pushing it out to every single person they knew, they only had 3,000 accounts (this is signups, not active users), which was pretty bad. But there were a few people—Ben included—that really loved it. And instead of immediately changing the product, Ben thought: “Maybe I can just find more people like me.” So they started to have meetups and reached out to bloggers: “The thing about it that really worked was we found this little group of people that were interested in the same thing, and we showed them how the service could be helpful to them.” They started with a few people that really loved the product and gradually grew that number over time. Today, Pinterest is valued at almost $30 billion. Video source: @ycombinator (2012)

Jack Dorsey on what he learned about culture from 49ers coach Bill Walsh When Bill Walsh joined the 49ers, they were the worst team in the NFL. Within three years, they were Super Bowl Champions. In his book, The Score Takes Care of Itself, he writes: “Winners act like winners before they’re winners…The culture precedes positive results. It doesn’t get tacked on as an afterthought on your way to the victory stand. Champions behave like champions before they’re champions; they have a winning standard of performance before their winners.” And he provides six guidelines for establishing a standard of performance: 1. Start with a comprehensive recognition of reverence for and identification of the specific actions and attitudes relevant to your team’s performance and production. 2. Be clarion clear in communicating your expectation of high effort and execution of your Standard of Performance. Like water, many decent individuals will seek lower ground if left to their own inclinations. In most cases you are the one who inspires and demands they go upward rather than settle for the comfort of doing what comes easily. Push them beyond their comfort zone; expect them to give extra effort. 3. Let all know that you expect them to possess the highest level of expertise in their area of responsibility. 4. Beyond standards and methodology, teach your beliefs, values, and philosophy. An organism is not an inanimate object. It is a living organism that you must nurture, guide, and strengthen. 5. Teach “connection and extension.” An organization filled with individuals who are “independent contractors” unattached to one another is a team with little interior cohesion and strength. 6. Make the expectations and metrics of competence that you demand in action and attitudes from personnel the new reality of your organization. You must provide the model for that new standard in your own actions and attitude. Twitter and Square founder Jack Dorsey encourages anyone thinking about leading teams or building a company to read this book: “What’s important about this is that as you start building a team, you need to set expectations around how people need to perform in the company—how people need to act in the company. And these can be very simple things, but without that, you are rutterless—you will react to the outside. And if you react to the outside, you are building someone else’s roadmap and you’re building someone else’s dream instead of your own.” Video source: @ycombinator (2013)

Steve Jobs explains the importance of both thinking and doing “The doers are the major thinkers. The people that really create the things that change this industry are both the thinker-doer in one person.” This is applicable outside of tech too, and he uses Leonardo DaVinci as an example: “Did Leonardo have a guy off to the side that was thinking five years into the future about what he would paint or the technology he would use to paint it? Of course not. Leonardo was the artist, but he also mixed his own paints. He also was a fairly good chemist. Knew about pigments. Knew about human anatomy. And combining all of those skills together—the art and the science, the thinking and the doing—is what resulted in the exceptional result… There is no difference in our industry. The people that have really made the contributions have been the thinkers and the doers.” Jobs speculates that one of the reasons people might mix this up is because it’s easy to take credit for the thinking: “It’s very easy for someone to say ‘I thought of this three years ago.’ But usually when you dig a little deeper you find that the people who really did it were also the people who worked through the hard intellectual problems.”

Andy Rachleff explains his product philosophy of “slugging percentage, not batting average” When Benchmark co-founder Andy Rachleff left venture capital to co-found Wealthfront, he brought one key idea with him. “Very few of the skills one learns in venture capital are appropriate to running a company,” Andy explains. “But the one thing that I brought with me was the belief in slugging percentage, not batting average… Almost every job in the world is evaluated on the percentage of time you’re correct. That’s irrelevant in venture capital… If you take very little risk, you can succeed most of the time, but with very little risk comes very little return.” When he taught at Stanford GSB, Andy would ask his students: “What do you call a venture capitalist who’s never lost money? Unemployed because I don’t want them as a partner because they’re unlikely to have any big wins. They have to take chances because it’s about the magnitude of the win, not the percentage of the time you succeed.” At Wealthfront, he wrote a product philosophy memo to instill this same idea in the company: “I want us to fail most of the time. We’re going to take a lot of shots on goal. We’re going to try a lot of products. Most of them are going to fail. And we want the ones that succeed to succeed big.” Video source: @twistartups @Jason (2019)

Marc Andreessen on the 5 personality traits of an innovator “When you’re talking about real innovators—people who actually do really creative, breakthrough work—I think you’re talking about a couple things:” 1. Very high in trait openness. “Just flat-out open to new ideas… And the nature of trait openness means you’re not just open to new ideas in one category—you’re open to many different kinds of new ideas… But of course, just being open is not sufficient because if you’re just open, you could just be curious and explore and spend your entire life reading, talking to people, but never actually create something.” 2. High level of conscientiousness. “You need somebody who’s really willing to apply themselves—typically over a period of many years to accomplish something great… For most of these people, it’s years and years of applied effort. You need somebody with an extreme willingness to basically defer gratification… Of course, this is why there aren’t many of these people—there aren’t many people who are high in openness and high in conscientiousness because to a certain extent, they’re opposed traits.” 3. High in disagreeableness. “If they’re not ornery, they’ll be talked out of their ideas… Because the reaction most people have to new ideas is ‘Oh, that’s dumb.’ So, somebody who’s too agreeable will be easily dissuaded to not pull on the thread anymore.” 4. High IQ. “They just need to be really smart because it’s hard to innovate in any category if you can’t synthesize large amounts of information quickly.” 5. Relatively low neuroticism. “If they’re too neurotic, they probably can’t handle the stress.” Video source: @hubermanlab (2023)

“No startup ever wins because their team is the best at attending internal meetings or approving expense reports.” - Zach Perret, co-founder of Plaid

Jeff Bezos: “word-of-mouth is more powerful than it has ever been before” In this 2012 interview, Bezos argues this development has dramatic implications for business strategy: “In the past, if you were making a product, the right business strategy was to put 70% of your attention, energy, and dollars into marketing the product and 30% into building a great product. So you could win with a mediocre product if you were a good enough marketer. And I think that is getting harder to do.” He continues: “The right way to respond to this if you’re a company is to say, I’m going to put the vast majority of my energy, attention, and dollars into building a great product or service. And put a smaller amount into shouting about it (marketing). Because I know if I build a great product or service, my customers will tell each other.”

Naval Ravikant’s advice to startup founders: “Stay small until you’ve figured out what’s working” “Stay small until you’ve figured out what’s working. Steve Blank, who teaches at Stanford and started Epiphany among many other companies, defines a startup very nicely. He says a startup is a search for a scalable and repeatable business model. And so what you’re really doing is you’re searching, and until you’ve found that business model that you can repeat and you can scale, you should stay very, very small and very, very cheap.”