Find your tension.
See how practitioners walked through it.

if we had one, it would be me

we don't have a chief product officer title, but if we had one, it would be me. I wouldn't have a chief product officer. I think the CEO should be basically the chief product officer of a product or tech company.

we're not going to have divisional leaders

we said, we're not going to have divisional leaders. We're going to have design, engineering, product which turned to product marketing and marketing and communications and sales and operations, all the functions of a startup.

reassigned them as program managers

I created this new function called product marketing... I took a lot of product managers, I reassigned them as program managers.

leaders are in the details

I basically got involved in every single detail. And I basically told leaders that leaders are in the details.

if A is better than B, then we're stuck with B

if we do an AB test, there has to be a hypothesis. If we don't have a hypothesis and A is better than B, then we're stuck with B.

80% passes, 20% running the ball

You should probably be doing 80% passes, 20% running the ball down the field.

fewer more senior people

we're going to have fewer employees. We're going to have fewer more senior people. There's a great saying that the best way to slow a project down is add more people to it.

way too many founders apologize

way too many founders apologize for how they want to run the company. They basically find some midpoint between how they want to run a company and how the people they lead want to run the company.

necessary, but not sufficient

building a great product is one of those things that's necessary, but not sufficient, and actually the separation is between those that build really great distribution.

you have to choose one and go all in

The key question for startups is totally different. You don't have the luxury to spread your chips. You have to go all in.

no opting out of the game

It ends up being a prisoner's dilemma, which is, there is no opting out of the game.

better to be early

it's better to be early, know that you need to figure out an exit strategy and figure out that exit strategy along the way.

immediately think about how to exit

Once you enter the game, then you immediately need to move to starting to think about how do you exit the game.

retention and depth of engagement

the better signal is retention and depth of engagement of the users on this platform than it is pure user level like MAU.

form really hard constraints

the thing that is actually moving the needle are the companies that are defining incredibly hard constraints.

exit folks

Others have set a hard deadline. They're either going to make the transformation by X date or we're going to exit folks. Cultures thrive on density.

wartime company

I said, we need to become a wartime company. If we don't fight for this, we are dead. I jumped hard on AI, but I also restarted the culture.

We're doing service, forget all the other stuff

Strategically we were all over the place and I said, "We're doing service." Forget all the other stuff.

Sorry, this is what we're doing

I said, "Sorry, this is what we're doing." So, I was very dictatorial in that respect.

a sharp knife to cut out the parts

I rewrote the values designed to be a sharp knife to cut out the parts of the company that I just knew wouldn't be effective.

pricing should come from value and not from costs

if someone is not prepared to pay 99 cent for us to rapidly and elegantly perfectly and excellently solve their customer's problem, we need to wrap this up.

got really frugal in ways I never thought I would

I cut a lot of costs aggressively. Canned a bunch of different projects. We had this big glorious office we were about to fit out and I'm like, we're about to hit negative growth territory, stop it.

I don't know of a great company that doesn't work that way

If I don't, I get fired and I should get fired. If my big, brave, unilateral decisions put us in the toilet, then I have to take responsibility for that also.

hire a kid because you're in the wrong job, buddy

if founders of previous generation companies are themselves not willing to roll up their sleeves and get into it and work as hard as the kids, hire a kid.