Innovation

“First is the rest of the company needs to see what you're doing as being core and critical to the mission. It can't seem like these guys are just playing off in a corner on something that isn't related to what we are doing every day. Because I think that leads to some of the resentment because you can imagine any team internally is fighting for resources.”

“Don't build for today, build for six months from now, build for a year from now. And the things that aren't quite working that are working 20% of the time, will start working 100% of the time. That's really what made Claude Code a success.”

“Amazon was actually equally focused on process innovation. In many cases, we stood on other people's shoulders. That was what all great companies should do. That's why we wrote the book - we would like to allow people to stand on Amazon's shoulders to learn what we learned.”

“I believe that innovation or product is a conflict sport. It's where you have to have arguments in order to be better. And every time you have an argument it gets better. And the moment that they try to make me better at harmony, the reality is you actually strip away my superpower of actually being able to innovate.”

“One of my favorite takeaways is taking the things that are the biggest swings and prioritizing those first in terms of product discovery. If you constantly put those off in favor of the lower risk or more predictable smaller swings, how are you ever going to truly innovate and get to the next level.”

“Think of these prototypes as concept cars. The interesting thing about concept cars is they're never commercialized. They're often produced for inspiration, and to potentially take some small nuggets that you can run with. Then you start doing research with users, you answer key questions, and you uncover certain elements that resonate with people.”

“Andy always talks about slugging average, not batting average. He's like, 'I don't care if you hit the ball every time. If one in 10 times you hit a home run that's better than someone who hits it three out of 10 times but gets out a lot.'”

“Problems create categories, and you either have to solve a new problem, or reframe, name and claim an existing problem in a very different way. If you reframe the existing problem such that people see it in a different way, that's when they'll be open to a new solution. You can't take an existing problem with an existing solution, launch exactly the same shit, tell the world it's better and have the world embrace it. Because the problem makes the solution the other way around.”