Hiring & Teams

“The founders of that company were looking for what I would call a silver bullet strategy to their growth challenges. And what they really needed was to create a strategy to add on new growth loops and a system for how to execute against that strategy.”

“I saw some of the highest performers just being people that had very high agency, had that clock speed, had that energy. They didn't necessarily need to have deep experience on that matter. Sometimes experience could be a crutch, especially in this world where the grounds are shifting so fast with AI. A lot of your learned habits actually need to be intentionally discarded.”

“I was just, again, surprised or even shocked when I arrived at the level of individual drive and autonomy that everyone here has. So I think the way that OpenAI runs, you can't read this or listen to a podcast and be like, 'I'm just going to deploy this to my company.' Maybe this is a harsh thing to say, but I think very few companies have the talent caliber to be able to do that.”

“My business partner says, 'There are no problems. There is only people problems.' As long as I'm surrounded by great smart people, I feel fine. But when we have a bad actor, a psycho or narcissist, all bets are off. I spend 20% of my time just filtering people carefully and ensuring we work with people we enjoy.”

“When Kahneman took hiring from completely unstructured to structured decision rubrics, the hit rate went from 50% to 65%. That's pretty huge. The problem is nobody does it. If you do it, the answer is quite a bit. But nobody does it.”

“When I think about folks who are looking to get into product management, I think there's really two paths. One is more formal in nature. There are associate product manager programs out there at many scaled companies. I think you can actually find APM programs even at smaller, earlier stage companies than big tech.”

“Doing a bit of everything. Being a generalist is I think much more important than it used to be. If I'm putting together a product team today, I would obsess about getting as many skill sets as possible for each person I hire. They should know architecting, design, product taste, how to talk to users.”

“The secret sauce is more of how good of a cross-functional team player are they. I almost view them like a true quarterback. Because marketing technology lives between so many departments, it plays that role of having to call plays and pull on different departments.”