Scaling

“We always start with expert editorial judgment to curate the most important and interesting stories. But on top of that, we're training algorithms on specific data sets, like editorial importance scores that actually come from our journalists. What that allows us to do is actually scale editorial judgment to a large group of readers.”

“You don't want to come to a product review for every single decision. Instead, what you want is to come to a product review with one decision, but the goal of that decision is to walk out with principles about how to make these decisions in the future so that you don't have to come to product review.”

“There's a big difference between a business and a job. If the business can get big enough where you can have employees, you can just focus on sales or digital marketing or whatever aspect of the business you love. Lean into what I call lazy leadership - how do I get away from things I hate as quickly as possible?”

“There are many scaling laws when you build AI systems. This one is about when you put in more work, the product reliably gets better. We painstakingly identify places where it gets stuck and address them, tune the entire system quantitatively with a very fast feedback loop to improve it in the areas where it got stuck.”

“One of those sections in the cultural onboarding is on giving away your Lego. You need to think about who you're going to bring in to help you. Finding joy in building a team, passing on your experience, helping other people do great writing or great product building or great engineering is what giving away your Lego is about.”

“What I've seen and I've heard a lot of friends at many companies complain about is this idea that everybody is doing one-on-ones with everyone else. So the manager is doing one-on-ones with their team. They're also doing one-on-ones with all of their peers. They're doing one-on-ones with all of their stakeholders. It's just not a scalable approach.”

“When you start scaling the company, it's the first time that founders run into what got you here won't get you there. What got you to product-market fit was iterating on product and doing things that don't scale. Guess what? You found a product that works. Don't do that anymore. Make it scale. Don't come up with new products. You found the one that works.”

“You do things that don't scale and then you do things that do scale. And it's so powerful when you discover how to do things that don't scale, when you actually know. Because the power of technology is just the beauty of what it can do at scale.”