¶ Intro / Opening
All right, we're live. Gokul, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks. Thank you. Great to be here and excited for this conversation. I've been looking forward to it. Me too. I listened to your roundtable in the Supra community a while back.
was just like, couldn't stop paying attention. Like I was taking a bunch of notes and I told Mark, like we got to try to get Gokula to come on the podcast one day and here we are. So I'm really excited about it. And one of the things that got us particularly excited about this conversation is there is currently a very undeniable trend in the product management world where a lot of people who are coming out of the Zerp era the last 10 or so years, working their way into...
management roles like GPMs, directors, VPs, chief product officers, where the scope was kind of like overseeing more people are now finding themselves really excited. to go into individual contributor roles, IC roles, especially where there's an expectation to roll their sleeves up and get all up in the latest AI technology and the craft. And you wrote a post about...
why you think this is a great time to go into the IC role. What do you think is special about this moment and why did you write that? Yeah, I think it's actually like most things. Everything is sparked for me. Most things are sparked by a conversation. I always think one conversation with somebody is a data point, one point, but then two or three, you can start connecting the dots.
When multiple people in my orbit, people I had worked with before, asked me for references, they were leading teams before, leading, they were managers of managers before, and now they're interviewing for an IC role at an AI company. I was like, what's going on here? And talking to them. and pondering on it i think it is actually a very good thing and sensible thing for almost everyone to consider becoming an ic in the age of ai as i call it even temporarily because
The leverage equation has changed fundamentally. I think AI tools like we've seen, whether it's coding tools, whether it's writing, whether it's synthesizing, analysis, all have made individual contributors. much more productive. I mean, maybe 10X may be too strong, but multiples were productive. So a single IC, I mean, you earlier...
We were managers managing a team of, say, 10 people. They were managing another 10 people. So maybe you could manage 100, 200 people. But you could become an IC that does the work of 10 people if you build a set of agents that are productive and that... are trained. And so I think the leverage equation, so I think the gap between a high performing IC and a manager has narrowed in terms of output. So on one side, you can get significant leverage as an IC.
and get the work done of a team by just managing a team of agents. Second, I feel if you've never worked in an AI environment before, you are basically not going to be accepted as credible. If you want to work in an AI native company, which most of us will be one way or the other working in an AI native company 10 years from now. So if your career is only two years more to go, it doesn't matter. Do what you need to do.
But if you want to work for 10 to 20 years, it's silly to not think about the long term and have your next role be something that really gives you the skills to succeed. And if you already manage people, that's not going anywhere. What you need to do. is get closer to the work. And credibility comes many times. Obviously, a lot of credibility is from strategy, but increasingly, I think, in the age of year, because of this leverage, everything is going to be flattened.
So you're probably going to be managing more and more ICs or agents instead of managers. So ICs value frontline managers who've done the work before. So if you're a manager who can roll up your sleeves and... deliver results directly or you've shown that you can done the work, you will be able to connect with your team better and even understand how to manage them better, as all of us know. So I feel on one side, you are getting more leverage from these agents.
understanding the work, and you can be much more productive compared to what you were as an IC before. But second, from a credibility point of view, if you ever want to be a manager, again, if you want to be a manager in an AI native company, AI native companies, CEOs are coming to me and saying, The hardest role to hire today is head of product. Why? Because they are not able to, they cannot just go and pick an assembly line fashion, a product leader who worked at a...
Google or Facebook or whatever the case is, because those people, they grew up in an era where they didn't use AI. I mean, I grew up in an era where AI was more machine learning, predictive AI. Not generative AI. I should say AI, I mean generative AI. Actually, obviously there's classification AI and predictive AI. What do you tell those founders? Do you find yourself starting to repeat any heuristics or patterns that...
might be good to follow when it comes to finding that person yes promote from within promote from within many times i think founders try to get ahead of product too early first let me make this statement they try to get ahead of product too early instead of just getting
¶ What founders get wrong when hiring Heads of Product too early
I'm like, why do you need to have a product? You only have two PMs. You want them to manage two PMs? Get a senior PM who's basically worked for two or three years in an AI native company. Get them to come and do the work.
as an individual contributor, first of all. And then slowly, you have now three PMs and then see which of those you can maybe promote to be a manager. But again, you really need that. You need a manager. Why can't you manage them? So I always push them. Well, I've never managed PMs.
It's okay. PMs, the best PMs are actually self-managed. They should create more leverage for you and you learn how to do it. I always feel as a founder, you also need to know how to manage different functions yourself first so that you know who to hire. Many times you hire people without knowing what you want. I think CFO, VP of sales, all of these roles, if you've never managed AEs before, you start focusing on the wrong things. So I've had a founder who's fired, unfortunately.
CFO, CMO, CRO, CPO. I think there was one more, five. Because he hired wrong. Then he fired them. Then he had to do their job for six months. And that's how he learned who he should hire. And then he hired the right person. So I don't think you can, yeah. I'm curious if when you talk to those founders about, hey, like maybe hire that senior PM, are there any new like...
competencies that you're telling them to focus on when hiring them? Or maybe like any existing ones that you think are way more important today than maybe they were like, let's say three years ago. Yeah, I think judgment is always good news is judgment, which is always a huge part of the product manager's role, which is...
Any one of us given a product probably within half an hour could come up with a number, like maybe a hundred ideas on how to make the product better. The judgment is which of those ideas. actually moves the company forward, moves the product forward, solves the customer's pain better than everything else. So how do you sequence them? And then how do you influence the rest of the org to then be aligned that this is the right thing to do? So judgment and influence.
are things that you can't easily outsource to machines. That said, execution is where you start seeing AI really change, where I think fundamentally you want to go from, I think Google... Microsoft had this waterfall model back in the 80s when program managers was, I could say, invented at Microsoft. Google in the 2000s made the product manager role a much more agile document with a PRD which was constantly iterated.
along with the engineering team. But now the document itself has moved and shifted, where instead of a long document of any kind, you have a very short context-setting document plus a prototype. So you want somebody who understands how to execute with engineers using these AI tools and someone who can, if need be. take on some of the roles, take a design system that the company already has and create a new prototype or take and basically show what is to be built, not through words.
but through pictures in a very fast way and prototype. So I think you want to show execution. Execution is basically what is changing. And the roles, I think, of analysts, I always feel there are four roles which are not engineering. Analyst, designer. Product manager. There's one more. Actually, and front-end engineer, you could say. Back-end engineer is slightly different. Those four, I think, will eventually converge into two. So I think you need a PM who can take on at least...
one or two of these other roles. Why do you say two? Two, because I do think front-end engineer, I think into one just seems a hard thing for a team, for one person with four different roles. I think two people doing four roles. seems more manageable and feasible. Maybe it becomes one as the tools become better. I always found that I always underestimate technological progress. So it might be that in five days, it could be one. But I feel...
Even two, because designers, you do need somebody who has an eye for design. So I think as a product manager, you need to think about your superpower. There are different, as you know, there are different archetypes of product managers depending on where they come from.
¶ How product execution is evolving: prototypes over PRDs
They are marketer product managers, analyst product managers, engineer product managers, etc. And so depending on where you came from, you actually already have the skill set needed. to become one of those other or designer product manager. So if you're a designer who became a PM, guess what? Now you can be both a designer and a PM together. If you're an analyst who became a PM, guess what? You can now be an analyst and a PM.
And a front-end engineer. There's nothing stopping that designer from also being the front-end engineer right now. Those three, exactly. So those three, I think. And you then have, for multiple pods, maybe one dedicated designer. You're no longer a dedicated designer per pod.
who's setting the design systems, making sure everything works together and you do a design review and make sure, but you can then run without having a dedicated design resource per pod or dedicated front engine per pod or dedicated analyst per pod.
So I think that's what you're going to see. You're going to see more sharing of these crucial resources across multiple pods. But then the PM is the pinch hitter who's basically coming in and doing a bunch of different roles. The worry I have, of course, is that...
The other reason maybe that maybe it should not be one is one of the roles of the PF is to constantly be the voice of the customer, as you know. So the more time you're spending on execution, the number one thing that... your stakeholders ask you as a pm and expect of you says you know customers you know you have the most obviously you want everyone else but you need to be talking to customers understand their pain points better than anyone else in the company and so if you
spend too much time on the execution piece. And this is the fine art, I think, PMs. I was not a very quantitative PM when I came from an engineering background because the tools weren't there in the early 2000s when I started. I spent a lot of my time talking to customers. I feel now... pms of today are so good at an analysis that they have lost the fine art many people lamented there was a fine art of talking to customers they just get a lot of data points and then
analyze reviews and think reviews are basically just getting to reviews. This is what people just went on the app store, tells me what to build versus going and interviewing and really getting them to tell stories about what their experiences were.
really extracting stuff. I think that is a lost art and I worry that the more people spend time on execution, they're going to lose the art of actually talking to customers and extracting what really matters, what the pain point is without leading them on, all of those things. Yeah, PM should do. What's your... I think another word that I hear in the LinkedIn sphere or in product circles is like, okay, yeah, taste is going to be very important. I think that's just another...
word for judgment, in my opinion. The other one is kind of related to what you were just saying about being close to the customer is maybe product people owning a little bit more of that go-to-market. that business side of things. And I'm curious, like, what are your thoughts there? Do you think that's realistic? I know I look at your career and I feel like, you know, you started a product, you were a founder, but then you've kind of.
picked up more business responsibilities along the way. So how do you think about that go-to-market motion now with AI? I think product people should not necessarily, I don't know if they should own go-to-market in their entirety, but any product manager who wants to advance in their career. They have to think about customer outcomes. I think about 10 years ago, I got this. I basically, when I joined Square to lead PDE, one of the things I realized is that we were celebrating.
launches. And so I think many product teams and engineering teams celebrate launch as a metric. We launched something, hurrah, but we basically made a statement, strong statement that we are not going to celebrate launch anymore. Launch is not success. And so I think what that means is you have to have customer outcomes that you define clearly and that basically constitutes success. So I think as soon as you start thinking about outcomes.
There is a business element to it because the customer outcomes that you come up with, and customer outcomes are not necessarily business outcomes. There is a slight but crucial delineation. Customer outcomes are behavior changes of a customer.
No business outcome happens without customers changing behavior. Customer change behavior from being not a customer to being a customer or from being a churn customer to being a resuscitated customer, being a sporadic customer, being a loyal customer. Those are all or using a certain thing.
not using a certain thing or vice versa. All of these are changes that hopefully you can then tie back to a business metric. So I think the number one goal of a product, a good product leader or product manager is to figure out
What are the right customer outcomes that map cleanly to business outcomes? And then to figure out what are the things we can build that can move those, what are the different choices we have to move a certain customer outcome? And then obviously prioritize between those, what is the highest?
We use ice or rice or whatever the case is to figure out what's the thing I can move that can move the customer outcome. As soon as I'm thinking about that, if you can do that well, the company is so happy. Why? Because every feature, everything you launch.
is not just launched in a vacuum, it is launched because, and that acts as some customer outcome. And why is that important? Because the customer outcomes moves the business outcomes. I tell my CEO, many CEOs, they don't know how to engage with their product teams properly.
i say the only question you need to ask is why you need to ask your product is why are you shipping this feature if they cannot tell you what customer outcome or what this thing is going to change if they don't have a clear hypothesis you need to shut it down you need to stop them from shipping because Don't think of, I think, especially in the AI era, a lot of teams think of shipping fast with high velocity as some marker of success. I think it's just the opposite. If you ship too many things.
It's basically, you don't have enough time to even create a hypothesis. You're drowning your customers in slop, in lots of features. And the best products cut features instead of adding features. Like I said, we all can brainstorm 100 features, but look at the best products we use.
Like this product, it has minimal features. One of the things about great products is that they should be usable without needing a manual. I always admired about Square, the point of sale before I ever joined it, that the product... Point of sale is something a barista has to be trained in for several days before square. Even today, if you go to a thing, you can see people training. I was at the SF airport the other day and someone was training. Here's what you do. Here's how you take.
that means that the product is not good enough for someone to use. Square, you just download the thing from the app store and start using it. And I was Facebook, Facebook cafe about 10 years, 12 years ago had a square point of sale. And I was talking to the baristas and they were like,
Man, we were at prior cafes. We would always have to go through a multi-day training on the point of sale. This one, no one trained me. I just started using it. So one of the acid tests for your product is can your customer accomplish their goal?
without someone having to train them through it. Anyway, all that goes to say that customer outcomes are the number one thing that the product team needs to own. And if you're launching a feature without a clear sense of customer outcome, the CEO needs to have the...
guts to step up and shut it down. It doesn't matter if your engineering is clamoring for it, a product team. What is the outcome? And that should be the number one thing you put on your document. Like I said, there's a short document.
What is this outcome that you're hoping to accomplish? Customer outcome. I don't care about revenue, etc. What is the customer behavior change? Like I say, if a feature has shipped and no customer behavior has changed, did the feature really ship as like the tree in a forest? I don't think so. I think it's a useless feature and we should cut it out if you can't articulate what customer behavior changed. Dodash was the best at it. It was excellent because they always, even today,
I've never heard of, in fact, you could argue that a feature launch is a really bad thing because it kind of assumes a feature is launching. But every feature, as you know, is an experiment to prove a hypothesis around a customer behavior. And so if that's the case.
Like you do, experiment should always be run on a subset of the population, on a control group. And so here's the experiment we're running. So I think that's the mindset orientation that needs to be there. These are experimenters. These are hypotheses we have. And then you should ask, why is this hypothesis there? Why do you think this experiment, why is this hypothesis, what data do you have? This hypothesis is even valid before you start doing the work. So there's some probably data based on.
customer interviews based on what we've seen, behaviors, etc. But at least you're putting it on paper. Then you run the experiment. You're not subjecting the entirety of your customer base to this experiment.
subjecting 5% to 10%, whatever statistically significant population is, and then you see the behavior change. If it's meaningful, then you roll it out over a period of days. But if it's not meaningful, then you still have... then you need to go back and try to understand okay what is the root cause and you you are obligated as a product person or product team to understand why did this we had these assumptions that this running the experiment
will satisfy this hypothesis or prove this hypothesis. Why? Why did it not happen? And you need to get to that root cause. You can't be lazy and say, I'm going to abandon this line of thinking and move on. So you need to spend time. That's how you build trust with your stakeholders.
following it through, understanding, look, we had this assumption, oh, this is not true. You need to get to the root cause. The Japanese are asking five why's or something like that. You can't just, I'm going to throw the experiment away and move on to the next experiment. You've got to follow it through a few times. Sometimes iteration leads to the best insights.
We're actually putting together a guide right now on DoorDash's PM interview process. And what was really interesting to me coming from the meta world is in a product sense interview, the PM candidate's ability in a DoorDash setting.
To really get to the root causes and to unpack the problems that they want to solve and to really pinpoint the root causes and come up with a very specific solution or a set of solutions for a very clear root cause seems to be something that is very valued in the DoorDash interview process. And I was ordering some DoorDash last night and I was just like thinking about that conversation I had recently for the guide.
We ordered some dinner and there's like a, there's such clear behavioral triggers in the, in the product. Like I ordered dinner and then I have like 10 minutes to add some ice cream from a place that I really love ordering ice cream from. And it forces a question of like. Do we have ice cream in the fridge? We actually don't have ice cream in the fridge. Sounds like this is pretty easy to add, right? So like I can just hit a button and bam, like that delivery is going to come.
And it's going to also come with ice cream. And so it's like, I can see that maniacal focus on like behavioral change come through in the product. And I kind of wish more products made me. you know emotionally driven to to do things that i want to do right that's right i think uh yeah some products do it really well i think i think and it needs it needs intention you can't just get it without intending to and you need to have the culture
I think the customer has to be put first because, like you said, if customer behaviors change, everything else, business model, monetization, all of those things will take care of themselves. But you have to be able to change customer behaviors. One of the biggest...
dangers that companies have. I think especially SaaS or business B2B companies, they think of revenue booked as a primary metric. And I think it is a very good metric, but it's a lagging indicator. The leading indicator has to be usage of the product. Because we all know Salesforce instances and other old school software companies where people don't use the product and they've booked revenue or customers have booked revenue, but no one's using the product.
There's some stat for one of the large companies that half of the licenses are just unused at most companies. They just buy it because they think it should be. So even there, if founders don't understand how people are using the product and are using it on a... It could be daily, it could be weekly. And that should be a trigger. If they're not using it, it's probably going to be a churn customer. And so you can't just use revenue as the indicator of success in B2B SaaS products. Yeah.
By the way, I love the point that you made that a good product should be able to be used without a manual or instructions. And I feel like this lesson is very important in today's age when almost like building is getting commoditized. Everyone's like, cool. This thing that used to take three months, now I can do it in a sprint. And then I think that's eventually going to lead to all these Frankenstein products that people are quickly reacting to big customer features and now the prioritization.
question is getting easier because it's taking less time. So I think that's going to be, I have a feeling that's going to be a lesson that people are going to have, a painful lesson that people are going to have to relearn. So I'm glad you mentioned that. I'm curious to like, so like that kind of, I love the hypothesis validating.
almost like playbook to follow here to make sure that you're actually creating customer outcomes. But I'm curious, for a company that maybe doesn't have the statistical power, like DoorDash or Uber, how do you recommend founders going 0 to 1 to really...
test those customer outcomes when you know you just maybe have like two pilots or three pilots and and you know not quality you know evidence one of the great things about ai is that it allows you to i think most ai software companies one of the beautiful things about software today is that unlike earlier days, earlier eras when software was a tool used by human, AI actually
does the work of humans. We've discussed this just now. I mean, does the work of designers, junior designers, mostly junior humans, young humans with much experience, but they're slowly ramping up. So I think what I'm looking for, for example, when I'm looking at investing in companies is... have you driven economic value to your customers? And what that means is, have you basically replaced or basically caused them to not hire a certain type of human being after they've started using it?
or some other kind of economic value. That's obviously a cost-driven argument. The other one is revenue-driven argument, which is have you somehow increase the revenue of these companies? So for example, there's a company I met which is doing sales coaching.
and a very young company. And they found that essentially, and then what you can do is you can do A-B testing on your customer's behavior because it's mostly, in most cases, it's B2B. Obviously, it's B2C, but even B2C. But B2B, you basically...
can very clearly say you can take a cohort of sales agents, you can put your sales coaching, you can apply your sales coaching to them, and then you can see whether those agents are much more productive compared to the broader pool based on your sales coaching, for example.
so i think you need to you can structure an experiment within your customers if you're selling to enterprises where you're using it or you can either case i think you have to figure out ultimately is your product driving value and when you structure
When you structure your product as an experiment within the customer, you can then see pre-post. Because if you can't get your customer to articulate the value that you've delivered to them, I think you're going to... not be a successful product because again value delivery comes before revenue and monetization i always again i tell founders if you can show if the customer can pad it back exactly what you've told me as a potential investor if i can talk to them and they say the same thing i know
that they're going to ultimately pay, expand, renew, be an advocate, etc. If they're not able to articulate value, none of those things are going to happen. uh even if they are paying today they'll probably churn the pilot is not going to go through they're not going to expand etc so your number one job as a founder is to figure out how your customer is getting value and is able to clearly articulate the value they're getting
Sometimes it could be a different kind of value. I got my resume photo, like a photo app could be like, I got my photo. ready for linkedin better i took a quick selfie and i it helped me get my photo ready cleanly and i now feel proud putting my headshot up but it took i have to go to photo studio and spend 400 i can do it for like 10 so that's a clear economic time saving and and cost saving
there it's that's what i think like it's so why i'm so excited about like outcome based pricing because it's it's beautiful because it aligns the incentives of the customer with incentives of the company but i'm surprised i we didn't see it We didn't see it more often. I know some new companies are doing it, but I feel like we're kind of in this prime age where...
It's like we're in a transition period, right? From like seat-based pricing or something like that into more of an outcome-based pricing model. And we're all still sorting it out to some degree. Right. There's usage based pricing, which if usage is associated with outcome, it's a proxy maybe for it. But I agree with you, Mark. I don't see the outcome based pricing as often as I probably want.
Yeah, I feel like usage is the lounge. Yeah, I think it's exactly the right. The seed-based, usage-based, and outcome-based. And the more you can clearly get attribution. So it all depends on how much attribution you can get. The more you can attribute the outcome to your... to your product easier it is to go to outcome base i mean there is a reason that google never went to cost per conversion why the only thing they can control is a click they can drive to you
But what if your website is really poorly designed? What if all of those things are bad? It's up to you to take the qualified click and then convert it to a customer. Even though you ideally want to go to outcome base, you have to understand, is everything under your control? If it is not under your control, if the outcome is not, if it's determined by someone else, someone else using it, then you can't. You should basically stop.
The outcome should be what you can deliver. It could be a lead. It could be a click. It could be something that's marketing setting, whatever it is you can deliver. I think therefore customer support, automated customer support is a place where I think we are seeing it because there.
there is much more control because it's going on autopilot mode for the most part. Yeah, like the dollar per resolve ticket is something I think is starting to emerge as kind of like a baseline for paying for an outcome, right? Exactly. FIN, Sierra, et cetera, all of them are going to outcome.
I think Intercom is doing that, yeah. Exactly. Or something like Cursor, they're not going to write the code and be responsible. It's not like they're not going to charge, here's an engineer's salary or something like that. Here's an engineer. Yeah. I think once, I mean, but Devon, that model...
is more uh you know cognition factory ai that i think that's more suitable but cursor is more of an id used by engineers while you have an autonomous engineer so they are using different modalities so they are pricing in different ways you're like you said
almost everything starts as seed based you get more confidence in the product working you better understand the context you better understand what are the things you can control and you start moving to towards outcomes so you are going to see but I think ultimately a product has to, and a founder has to be aware of what they control and what they cannot go to outcome base if they don't control the outcome. So this is super interesting and I, not to.
Not to bring us back because I really enjoy this tangent, but I'm thinking about all these things that are important in a product leader, you know, like the focus on outcomes, the customer empathy, the curiosity of talking to customers. pricing, like understanding pricing and understanding how to align incentive structures between the company and the customer. So kind of going back to our earlier point around, maybe if you look back, Okul, on some of the most successful
relationships between some of these CEOs and founders that you've coached and advised and invested in and these product leaders that they've hired. Are there any signals to you? How do you know that there's sparks, that there's magic there? I'm guessing one product leader is not going to be the right hire for like a different CEO. Like there's like some chemistry that has to happen. Do you think it's like.
the philosophical alignment on the importance of the kind of things we're talking about here. Like if they're on the same page about that, then that's like a really good predictor of, of that. I actually successful relationship. Yeah. It's a, I think again, the.
The chief product officer role or head of product role is maybe the hardest role for many CEOs to hire because the product is something most product-oriented CEOs have held near and dear to their heart. They are de facto the chief product officer. So I've seen almost every situation I've seen a CPO hired. They have unfortunately left the company within the first three months. It's because they don't know. I think they think they need a CPO. What they need is somebody.
who's maybe one level junior, to still not fully take over the reins of the product from them, but to essentially report to them and take over the execution and still be a thought partner. So increasingly, I say... Don't hire a CPO. Find somebody who you can groom and coach who can, over the next two years, become a CPO. Find someone who can be a manager of PMs. And therefore, it all comes on, again, back to the first principle. Do you have already someone in your product team?
who's already a manager or director. And I can't tell you how many times this has happened where at least three or four times I've seen the CPU has left. And then they're like, you know what? I already had this great product director who now thought that they were in line to be the CPU in a year or two.
recently brought over someone on top of them. Now they're thinking of leaving. So now they're going back to them and saying, hey, actually, now there's a path. I realized the error of my ways. I think you're amazing. Let's work with you and let's basically see if there's a path for you to become CPU in the next year. I always feel, I think in the case of, there's a saying that a good engineer, a bad engineer basically costs you one bad engineer, bad PM.
costs you basically 10 engineers' work, basically, because their leverage is so high, both for good and bad. And so I think, and a bad head of product who's not a good fit with you and your way of thinking, how you want to run product, how you want product to be run. It basically could cost you the company or cost you every single engine you have. It's like a bone that's stuck in the throat of the company.
It's impossible to breathe when there's like that kind of blockage. These are somewhat one-way door decisions. I mean, exec decisions are one-way door decisions. They cause a tremendous amount of pain to reverse. And so the same is true for board members. So these are all...
decisions that you need to almost make i almost say like can't you can you add them as an advisor to start with get them as an advisor to your company work with them for a few months work with them for a few months see how they think around different different get them to engage with your team get them to engage with other execs as an advisor, and then bring them on. I think these are so hard to suss out in a somewhat artificial, time-constrained interview process.
This is true for investor entrepreneur. Also, as an entrepreneur, you want to bring an investor on your board, a founder, vice versa. This is a relation that could last a decade. You're going to make that decision after two weeks of pitching someone. That is a tough thing. It's like.
Marrying someone, right? I mean, it's as long a decision, you know, it's like a multi-decade relationship in some cases. What's the shortest that you've worked with a company as like an advisor, friend, or been kind of in the sphere before joining a board? you're on a bunch of these boards like what's the shortest you found that that could take probably six months i think yeah six months i think uh coinbase it was 2019 late 2019 and i joined the board
in mid-2020, so six or seven months. At Pinterest, I had known Ben Silverman for 15 years before I joined the board. And at Trade Desk, I had known Jeff Green for 10 plus years before I joined the board. So those are decades. With Coinbase, I knew of the company well, but I had not known Brian and Emily and team. And I knew some of the board members well. But yeah, it was about six to nine months, basically. Yeah.
The same is true for boards, I think. I always tell founders, never, ever, ever invite someone to join the board up front. Always work with them for a few months, a few quarters. as an advisor see if they can add value see they have get together with have them attend a couple of board meetings as an advisor that's what i did i attended a couple of coinbase board meetings just as an advisor informal advisor that too just to see if it's both sides is a good fit or not
and then join. If you're enjoying this conversation, please check out the links in the show notes to support the podcast. Mark and I do this out of love, but to keep it going, we also need your support. Thanks, and now back to the episode. Yeah, where my head is going also kind of back in the beginning is, you know, you clearly are someone who.
has really good judgment, has made really good decisions of not only where you work, but you were early at Google, you were early at Facebook, you're in some great boards, you've invested in some amazing companies. So you clearly have figured something out. And I'm curious now, maybe like if you put yourself in the shoes of like that product leader, right? Like maybe that who's like in this like crossroads of like, hey, should I continue climbing the ladder?
to CPO, or maybe should I go back to that AI native company? That's really cool. I'm curious, one, how would you think about what company to join? And how would you think about that? And then two, Assuming you go back to IC, what mindset would you have going into that role? Is it, hey, I'm trying to learn as much as possible. I'm trying to...
do my tour of duty for a couple of years and then get back into the management track? Can you walk me through how would you make that decision? First of all, I think let's talk about the company choice.
¶ How to evaluate which company to join: mission, trajectory, talent density, founder courage
The number one thing you should look for is clarity of mission. In other words, does a company have a mission that resonates with you personally? It's basically around alignment with your own, what you enjoy doing on a day-to-day basis. You have to look beyond the... sexiness of working at this company to say on a day-to-day basis are you going to build do you believe in what this company is building first and foremost forget all the day-to-day do you believe what this company is building
Do you feel this pain? And as a product person, I hope that you've gone out and talked to potential customers of this company or you are a customer yourself and understand what the company is doing. And so you understand the product viscerally. If you've never written code. before and you want to go join cursor as a pm that might not be a good fit you're just like
Seeing from the outset of the company, you don't viscerally understand what the pain is. So is it aligned with what you believe in? Do you believe in what the company is doing? If you don't believe it, you won't give it your all. So that's first. Is the mission clear to you? Do you understand and believe in what they're doing?
One quick question there. Like, I feel like some companies actually have a genuine mission. Some others don't. Like, they're just like, I think that's what we're supposed to say. But I'm like, you know, like, you know, we're helping X thrive, right? And I'm like... How are you doing that? Maybe not even mission. Maybe the better way to say it is, do you believe in the pain that the product is solving? Do you believe that this pain is real?
This pain is visceral. This pain is something that you yourself would be excited in going and being part of over the next X years. And you feel like you'd be excited. I think one interesting tell is if a company is building a product, say for accountants.
and you actually have never sat with accountants, accountants can be quite, they're a unique kind of person or HVACs, for example, right? HVAC companies. If you join a company and your job is to talk to HVAC companies every day, will you be able to do that on a... So you owe it to yourself to go and spend some time with HVAC companies beforehand and see would you like to do this on a daily basis for the next X years.
or even be an IT consultant. I always say, go and be an IT consultant to an HVAC company before you start a company servicing those companies. So it's not necessarily right. Highfalutin words like mission are hard to understand pragmatically, but it's simply...
Is the product something you believe in? Is the product something that you care about? Is the product customer of this product someone you care about and you feel like you can be in that audience for four years, five years, six years? Second, I think... You have to, I think maybe the best way to say is trajectory over status. I think you can't look at the company or your own role as it exists today.
Is this company on a good trajectory? I think one of the worst career decisions I ever saw made was 20 years ago when a friend of mine chose VP of product at Yahoo over product manager role at Google. And it seems crazy in retrospect, but... In 2001, Yahoo was king of, I mean, they were a hundred billion plus dollar company. Google was extremely young, not clear. They had excellent technology and they offered one was a PM role. They were just one of the first PMs.
or VP of product. And they chose VP of product. It was a very rational decision, but they were not looking at trajectory of the company. And so I think you've got to look at trajectory of anything, of your career. Once a company is in a good trajectory, I think... Is it growing fast? Does it have momentum? And I think you have to behave like a venture capitalist almost in some ways because you are ultimately investing your career into this company and it's an irreversible decision.
What is the trajectory of each company? When a company has plateaued in its trajectory, you're basically going to see the pie flat or shrinking and everyone fighting over things. If the company is growing, the pie always expands and i can't tell you how many of how many of like just good people just have just by being at a fast growing company
You just get promoted. You get more responsibility. You get more impact. You work on more interesting things because people are not fighting over a fixed or diminishing pie. No one has time to fight. Everyone's busy doing stuff. And so... You want a company that's expanding, that's growing, and not flat or shrinking, broadly speaking. And that expansion can be on many dimensions. Top-line revenue is probably one dimension. Customer growth, customer count is another dimension.
You know, cachet could be another one which is hard to quantify. You know, even how many of you say customers and revenue are probably the right ones. But in general, you want the trajectory to be strong and growing. I think over a flat company, I think.
Now, again, it depends on where in your career you are. Are you harvesting? I call it the sowing stage of your career and the harvesting stage. If you're in your harvesting stage, which is, I think, the last five to 10 years of your career, you might just say, look.
I don't give a crap about all this. I just want to make the most money possible. And there are people who say that. Let's get more specific because I think it's helpful to have almost like a persona as we think about this decision. So let's imagine. someone who's experienced some success in their career, they're not ready to retire. Let's say that they've got at least another 15, 20 years of productive work ahead of them. They like working, but maybe they haven't had like that massive.
home run right and they're looking at these companies then they really want this next one ideally to be a big win okay so maybe that's like one of the lenses that we we could kind of put on as we evaluate this and i think the big win is a good There are many ways to quantify a big win. There's a financial big win, but there's also a career big win and a network big win and a skills big win. There are many, many different ways. And I think the first...
The latter three are actually much more important than the first one. The first one will happen if you're in a good company. That's a reality. It may not happen in a massive way. Sometimes it'll happen. If you're in a good company, it is going to go public. I've been lucky to be part of four different IPOs. And I was like a... pretty junior i see when i joined google it was a very solid win and the reality is if you're a good company which is growing fast you're going to have a good win but
you're going to have a great win in terms of network. So what are the other things to think about in terms of trajectory? One is talent density. I think if you're thinking of a company like Ramp, Ramp actually, at its core, is doing something boring, which is like corporate credit cards. But they have incredible talent density.
So I think if you look at, there were a lot of studies, maybe I, maybe it was on your thing, Ben, I saw somewhere, like I think the number of entrepreneurs coming out of RAM is extremely high compared to one out of every X PMs is becoming a founder. so that that's a good signal of talent is another one talent density you want to be around people where there are people going to go off and do great things after this company and so i think that's a great signal because guess what
One of the primary reasons I'm at Facebook is because I worked with many of my colleagues at Google, went on to Facebook, including Sheryl Sandberg, who then pulled me on to Facebook, who advocated for me to join Facebook. And basically, I joined Facebook. And so I'm very...
It was because of Google that I ended up joining Facebook. And because of Google that I ended up joining Square. Because one of my colleagues at Google, Ajit, he told Jack Dorsey that Google is one of the best product people he's worked with. And then they reached out to me to recruit me over to Square. so when you work at a talent density talent dense place you basically have and you do a good job there you have advocates then
We're going to go out into the world and work at other great companies, and they're going to pull you. And every role from there on, you're going to be going. I always think of roles as vertical, horizontal, or diagonal. You're going to go into diagonal. So vertical is when you're going in the same.
in the same in the same path like you're a product manager you become a group product manager that's vertical horizontal is when you go into a different you're going from pm to becoming a designer engineer diagonal is the best where you're growing but you're doing multiple domains and you're rising up So moving from being a product leader at Facebook to being a head of product design and engineering is an interesting diagonal road.
moving from being a product design engineering leader to being your GM is another interesting diagonal role. You're like running multiple functions. And ultimately in your career, you do want to, there's a great book by Ram Charan that is, I forgot what it's called. It's about career progression. You first start as an IC.
Then you become a manager of ICs in your function. But then the goal is to become a multifunction, multidisciplinary manager. You manage multifunction and then ultimately you manage P&L. as a gm or ceo of a company how do ceos i mean ceos or not i mean sundar was a pm was a good friend as an icpm and then he basically took that path and now you know he's the ceo of a of a large company where was i though
Because we were talking about mission alignment being the first thing, the second thing being trajectory over status, and then we were just unpacking, double-clicking into trajectory. Talent density is the third thing. I think I interviewed with a company called D.E. Shaw, one of the first companies. interviewed with very, very long ago. They're a hedge fund, right? Hedge fund, hedge fund, yeah, out of...
my graduate program in computer science. The reason I interviewed with them is they had published an article in Dr. Dobbs' journal, which was an old school hacking thing, which I used to read, saying hackers wanted. And they didn't even put their name there. They said hackers wanted. If you think you're really good at what you do.
Here's the email address to send your resume to. Good marketing. Yeah. Who would resist that? So I said, I think I'm good. So I sent it. And then I went in and it was the toughest interview I'd ever been in. And I thought I had failed that interview.
I thought there's no way. And then when I got a job offer, there's nothing I could do but to accept because it was such an interview. And the same thing happened with Google. I thought there's no way I'm passing it. Every stage, I thought I failed the interview. Every stage. The phone interview, I was like, this is it. There's no way. Wow, you come in.
Wow. And then I failed. I talked to Marissa and Susan and so on. I thought I'd failed the interview. They gave me an offer. So I think when your interview process is so strong that you feel like you failed and that every person you meet is basically the smartest person you've ever met.
that's the kind of company you want to join where you're not the smartest person in the room because truly that's the talent density you're looking you know that they're going to hire amazing people everyone who's passed this interview and gone on you want to work with those people and then founder i think i cannot stress
deeply enough i was very lucky to have an interview with larry page towards the end and it was just mind-blowing and so and i've somehow been lucky to meet with the founder of every company i worked at before i have taken the job so I think you're getting a chance to understand what their vision of the world is and their greatest. And I always feel one interesting thing to look for in founders is how dissatisfied they are. They are kind of somewhat always unhappy.
with the state of the world. And sometimes you don't realize this till later, but they just never, they're not, they never tell you the company is doing well. They're like, here are the things that are wrong with the company. And reading their interviews, et cetera, you kind of.
Never hear that much chest pounding. Maybe you hear an earnings call, but at least when you hear interviews, you're like, here are the things we can do better. And you want someone like that. I think even as an investor, I truly always look at founders who, as soon as you say, as a founder becomes.
complacent not even complacent they're happy with the way things are that's at the beginning of the end you have to have founders i mean if you still look at interviews with mark with zuck you basically see This guy still is like thinks that he's the underdog, right? Even though Facebook is one of the top 10 most valuable companies. And that's his superpower. That's his secret.
He also looks like he's having so much fun. I don't think I've seen anyone look like they have that much fun in my life as much as he's having. And, you know, he would do those like weekly Q and A's even, you know, after you left when I was there and still talk to the company for like a whole hour every week. And, you know, it's kind of hard to fake energy and excitement. I think that consistently and.
I agree with you. He's probably dissatisfied, but also, because as you were talking, I was like, there also has to be something that's exciting about that founder. They can't just be this grumpy, everything's broken all the time. They're showing your vision, which is so clear. You're like...
I'm going to follow this founder. I'm going to walk through a bed of coals to follow this person. And so when they talk to you, when you say, what are you building? They're not just, when I talked to Tony Hsu, which was many years ago, he said, we're going to reinvent local commerce. I'm like, you're just a food delivery company who else is what is order no way and turns out he was right i mean over a period of years systematically it's again a 10 15 20 30 50 year vision and so
You know, that's the thing. That's why founder CEOs are so awesome, I feel, because they can think they're truly the folks who can think extremely long term. While any executive, however good they are, it is just hard for them because they're beholden to shareholders and board and so on. they are beholden to take more short-term decisions. I always used to feel when we used to do product reviews with Larry and Sergey that they were the biggest risk-takers and all of us...
were much less risk-takers than them. They would just say these strong things and we would be like, but that would put the company at risk. And the biggest thing that Google did, which I thought was... Google actually promised more cash and guarantees than they had on their balance sheet to AOL when they made the first guarantee to AOL. And of course, the reason they did that was AOL was a bigger property than Google back then. So advertisers wanted to advertise on AOL instead of Google.
So instead of building your own ad platform, why don't we build the ad platform for you? So come to Google and then Google AdWords runs on AOL, but we will guarantee you more money than you would ever make.
So basically by guaranteeing that money more than the amount of cash that Google had, they basically ultimately made the advertisers come to them, which of course was the beginning of AdWords. They were able to build all that auction. So I think that's a company betting move, essentially betting that.
More cash you're guaranteeing. It's almost like you could argue open AI is doing some of that stuff. They're essentially spending more money than they have or in theory could even have over the next decade. They've already made that many deals.
It sounds like courage, almost like courage is like another big one there as well. You have to be brave. You want to follow a leader who's making bold bets. You want to follow a leader who's swinging for the fences. Yes, some of those bets might go wrong, but you know that... They want to build a meaningful and massive company. That's a great way to frame it. Courage. Ben, keep us honest. I know we have a second question, but I actually do want to go back. Mission, trajectory.
I think those four things. Ben, we have the second part of the question around which mindset he would go into. But before we do that, I do want to go back into one thing. that I think is actually really important is the trajectory over status. So I actually have a really hard time with that one right now, especially with tools like, let's call it like the prototyping tools or a lot of these AI tools, right? They're like going from zero to like...
nine figures in record times. And I'm looking at that as like, wow, that's an incredible trajectory. At the same time, I talk to people and they're like, oh, like one month I'm using this tool, the next month I'm using this tool. So it's like, it's like. Can you trust that trajectory? Does that matter? Is that a question worth asking? Is Lovable one of the companies you have in mind as we're talking through this? I personally think it's a great company to work at. Why?
Because I always say, what's the worst thing that could happen? I think you're basically going to learn a bunch of great skills. In one or two years, it's going to be clear if the trajectory is durable or not. Hopefully it is for their sake. If it's not, guess what? You worked at Lovable.
Building a product that's used by millions of people, a true AI native product, you improved it dramatically. And in two years, guess what? You can probably go to any other company. And by that time, maybe some of the durability stuff will be clear.
At that point, you've learned a bunch of great skills. You've worked with a bunch of great people. I think actually it's a great thing to work at a lovable accursor if you care about that mission. If you feel like... I would actually absolutely, if I were in that role, I would absolutely take...
a company because it is a well-known company the reality is what matters working at a well-known company i can't tell you how much power there is to work at a well-known company if you worked at a company like
I heard the name of ERP yesterday, which is apparently bigger than NetSuite. It's owned by a large B firm. I'd never heard of it. It's like doing hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, you know, maybe a billion dollars in revenue, but I'd never heard of it. And if someone told me they were to PM there, I would have...
And if I see a stack of resumes, like many times that's what happens, right? You see a PM who worked at Lovable and you see a PM who did some AI stuff at this PRP company, which is like a PE-owned thing. I would just take the PM from Lovable.
it's more likely you've heard of them. And I can't tell you how much it's bias, but the reality is human now. Now you could argue that AI is going to not have the bias, but there is a hiring manager on the other side. When you see a PM working lovable, you know that they have basically... They have worked at an engaging product used by millions of people, and they've worked with a great founder. They've probably been close to company building and done all of these things.
you can't really put a price on that density is probably to emerge there yeah okay just just one quick follow-up on that and then we can go to the second part which is Reading between the lines, I haven't heard you in anything I think we've talked about so far, Gokul, talk about how one of the top three things you care about.
either as a as an employee joining a company or as an investor looking at an investment being a moat like it sounds like and i'm not i'm not saying you don't care about that but like where would you place something like that in this in this discussion like how important is it i think lots are built over time and they
¶ Should you optimize for company moats early on? Gokul's contrarian take
I think moats are built over time. So early stage companies won't have moats. You can have theoretical, everyone can articulate some moat or the other, but the reality is the best moat is if you're building excellent products. and keeping your product keeps getting deeper and deeper over time so you're owning critical workflows ultimately the best mode is a brand right if you think about i think many of these companies
You could argue that Bing at some point did claim that they were very close to Google in terms of quality. But Google became such a verb that we just went to Google, despite... despite there being other alternatives. And I think the same is true. I think great founders and great companies build moats over time. These moats are not obvious. It was not obvious, Google, that building Chrome would even be a possibility. We all say it as a moat, but...
For the first seven years, there was no Chrome. And we had to compete without it. So I think as a company goes more successful, great founders do build an array of things around the core jewel to build a moat. But so I don't think it's something you can... plan over time it just comes if you have good people good talent that's what that's what Sundar's you know top accomplishment was he built Chrome that's incredible and but that was a project that came out of
If Google didn't have the talent density, they would not have been able to build a browser from ground up. I don't think that moat is something you should consider even as a... Because great companies build their own moats over time. It's almost like this core takes care of itself. If all the other factors that you mentioned are true, eventually you'll build a mode. Yeah. Being able to ship fast, good people, they will figure out modes over time. Yeah. You need something that's worth defending.
in order to have a vote. Great, great statement. Yes, exactly. Exactly right. Exactly. Okay, so, so yeah, let's, let's, let's start, let's wrap, let's wrap with, so, okay, so.
Gokul is this candidate that we're talking about. You're determined to go into this, call it super icy kind of role in a very hot company that's... checked all the boxes for you and um like love the founder love the mission want to talk to customers all day in the space i think it's going to be a very talent dense place for me to grow mark was the question kind of like how do you approach coming in to the role and
Crushing it? What is your mindset? What mindset do you have in? Are you thinking, hey, I'm just trying to learn as much as possible? Do you have a... kind of goal in mind of like here like what is the thing that you're prioritizing is it like yeah like learning is it like making it back to that management role like yeah how would you start that role and with what mindset i think if you have experience
at companies i mean versus a fresh grad hopefully the one thing you come up with is never be afraid of taking on work that other i think success comes by taking on stuff that others are afraid to take on And so I remember before I joined Google, I was at a hardware company. I was a product manager at a hardware company one and a half years. It was the hardest product manager I've ever done because hardware companies have this thing called Bill of Materials, a bomb.
as you might know which is like cogs and it's not just like software it is literally you have to source all these it was an optical amplifier company it was an extremely hard technical product but also we had cisco as a customer and cisco forced me to basically And I was an early peer in my career. It's crazy. They forced me to give a price for them because they guaranteed a certain volume. And they said, oh, what's your price out two or three years out?
And we had projected a bomb would go down and it would be gross margin positive. We gave them a price. They said, we want the price today for that. So basically, they forced me to give a price without any clear volume indication, which would vary gross margin negative for the next two or three years. And so I felt really, I just really stuck in my psyche for a while. And it just stayed with me. And so when I got the offer from Google and I was going there, the day first day, I told myself,
Anything tough comes up in this world, in Google, I didn't know what was expected of me. Whatever comes up, remember the toughest time you had as this thing. Nothing is going to be tougher than that. Just raise your hand. Always be enthusiastic and energetic. I cannot tell you.
How much enthusiasm, energy, and willing to do stuff, take stuff off your manager's plate that basically they don't want on it. I think number one thing for success is figuring out what does your manager, how to give leverage to your manager. I think many people don't understand this. How to take stuff off their plate and be the kind of person you're constantly keeping them in the loop, but just getting stuff done.
Being the kind of person that gets stuff done at good meritocratic companies goes a long way. So figuring out what your superpower is and making sure you're putting yourself in a place where you're getting stuff done on that dimension and having a very strong...
I think the more naysayer you are, if you're always questioning things, I think you get known as a person who's impeding progress. So you've got to use that carefully and thoughtfully. But once things are decided, a decision, and I always feel that there are...
two-way draw decisions and one-way draw decisions. With two-way draw decisions, the most important thing is figure out how to quickly set up a framework with a hypothesis and experiment, run it quickly, get the data, and then figure out if it's worth, instead of trying to argue for six weeks about whether to make decision or not.
With one way, clearly there's only a few one-way door decisions. And so those are you have to take time arguing. So really it's not worth too much time arguing. Let's just like run the experiment fast as articulate the goal of the experiment to prove something, run it fast. get the data and see what. So really focus on speed. I think AdSense, which is a product I was known for, which is a product I built at Google, that thing launched in three months from zero, three and a half months.
which was the fastest ever Google product. And so that really, I just focus on cutting through crap. and just launching it. I think Sergey suddenly came in and reduced our, we were going to launch in September. He said, I want you to launch in June. So he cut it from six months to three months. At that point, we were like, okay, what do we cut?
So I became really adept at just cutting stuff to launch. I didn't even argue. I think we argued a little bit, but we said, no, this is what it is. Okay. It was actually a great thing because it forced us to launch something and get it out there. So being known for speed, being known for moving fast. being known for having good judgment and getting stuff done, taking a high-level directive, figuring it out. And I think many of these chaotic early places...
Don't have much process. I remember writing a PRD for the first time, which was a really bad PRD. Very, very bad in 2003. Because I'd come from this hardware place. My PRD was very much in the technical details. It was really bad because it actually, even like talked about database schema and so on, which is kind of insane. But Jonathan, who was a VP of product, sent it out to the whole company at Google.
all of Google saying, this is how a PRD should be written. I was like, holy crap. I still have all this. And because Google had never had PRDs before, had never had PRDs before. So I think being known as someone who just gets stuff done because.
Just getting something out there, not being too precious about stuff, moving fast, getting stuff done and having enthusiasm and energy. They override everything else. The first three months of your career at any company is going to be how you're going to be remembered.
That if you do a good job in your first three to six months, you can, I shouldn't say you can coast, but you can carry it. It'll give you a lot of great stuff. If the first three to six months go badly, it is you've dug yourself into a hole, which is very hard to dig yourself out of. Is there something you see people think they should be doing in the first three to six months that you think is terrible advice or something that you think is something that like people you've managed?
have come in thinking they like this is an expectation in the beginning for example like the first 30 days like just learn right like do you believe that's bullshit or do you think it's actually a good idea to to take some time before you start to like i think the more you're a leader the more you should learn
That said, I think it is still very important in the first 30 to 60 days to have a win. I think if you're just in this, if you're not showing a win, people are constantly... judging or like have expectation that you're getting something done i think after 60 days if you not have something it could be that's why i think being an ic is good because you can actually jump in and get a feature launched check in a piece of code
Get a design done. Something that you can point back and say, I did this right, a PRD. Something. Change a process. Hopefully you can do something more than changing a process. So I do think you're right. It's important to learn, but it is equally important the first 60 days to do something that the organization can remember that, yes, this person is not just someone who's just sitting around.
attending a ton of meetings and speaking. That's fine for the first three, four weeks, but then the half-life from that patience, organization patience goes down. Yeah, there's a saying, just one last thought, Mark, and then feel free to land us. But Gokul, as you were just talking, there's a saying that came to mind, which was, I forget where I heard this, but basically, opportunity...
Opportunity shines where responsibility has been abdicated. I think it was something along those lines. And so to your point, when you hear these conversations happening, you just be like, I'll take it. I'll grab this. Run towards a vacuum.
where there's no, exactly, run towards a vacuum. AdSense, actually, they tried to hire PMs, but I didn't want to manage anyone or even have, I basically said, I'll be the billing PM. I'll be the front-end PM. I'll be the PM for like six different targeting PM, et cetera.
So slowly there were more people brought in and I managed the team. But for the longest time, because I was like, it will take time to hire somebody. Someone needs to do it. I'll be the PM. I'll be the PM. So I was literally working with. three or four or five different teams over time, engineering teams, as 1pm. And I think you're absolutely right. I love that statement. Opportunity shines where responsibility is abdicated. Yes, exactly.
But again, the first thing is you've got to do the core thing well. I think the other thing I do think it's important is if your manager has brought you in, do something. Make sure you're doing that really well. First and foremost, crushing it and then taking on more stuff.
Don't try to take on more stuff before. If you're not doing the core thing well, take on more stuff after your core thing is doing. Yeah, there's almost like an underlying theme of like... that you didn't explicitly mention it but like having like a low ego almost of like you know nothing is beneath me like i'll do whatever it takes that's what i told myself nothing is beneath me i literally said something some very similar anything they ask you to
Always have a smiley face to volunteer for the tough tasks and say, yes, yes, sir. Yes, ma'am. I got this. I got this. Ask for help. Don't be afraid. Don't be too proud to ask for help. Ask for help. That's the other thing people, I'm expected to do it myself. No. No, you're not. You have a team around you. You have a manager. You have peers. Ask them for help. How are things done here? How do I write a PRD? Show me some examples. Ask them for help.
Yeah. You're making me think of, I think it's like a term that Keith Raboy popularized around like barrels and like you want to become known as like a barrel, like someone who can, like when stuff goes into this person's world, it just like, boom, just happens. Right. And barrels doesn't mean you're doing.
it as a solo hero right many battles have great relationships across a company that allowed them to essentially leverage other people and get their knowledge and then get it done very few battles are just going to do it themselves in isolation yeah it seems like the way you build ammunition and like get ammunition together to fire but too much ammunition with not enough barrels nothing gets done either
But it seems like the way you build that social capital is by actually getting things done, being fun to work with. Exactly. having that contagious energy that people are like, oh, I want to be around this and whatever form it takes. And that's how you got pulled into Facebook, it sounds like, because Sheryl Sandler saw you as a... She had been in only three or four meetings before that, but I think she saw my energy.
She saw, basically, she heard about maybe our ability to get stuff done, etc. And yeah, that caused her to say that, yeah, Gokul should come and run ads at Facebook. This has been awesome. I just have so much respect for you, Gokul.
I feel like you still carry that energy of like high energy, low ego, even though you're like a total legend. Like you've done so many cool things. You know, a lot of people think it's about the content. I actually think it's about the same content. It's about presentation. I think.
Yeah, I think, why is my energy high? Because I think if you think about what our job is, we're basically talking and making, typing on a computer. Think about 50 years ago. We might be in a factory doing hard industrial work or 100 years ago at that point.
We have such an easy job compared, even today, I mean, we probably are in the 1% of the 1% of the 1% compared to, if you look at the 10 billion people, I mean, we are so lucky and privileged. How can, I know we have all these first world problems. How can we not be? energized with the life lifetimes as you know short as long as they are i mean we work on something we enjoy doing you know so i think these all these small irritants have to be put in the bigger context
And so we have to remind ourselves to be grateful. And when you are grateful, I think you get energy. Amen. I think this is a perfect place to end it. Two final questions for you, Gokul. One is where can people find you? And then how can our audience be helpful to you? Gokul R on G-O-K-U-L-R on X. And then just my name. It's actually the same content on LinkedIn and X. I have some content resonance, more on LinkedIn, some on X. So I just post on both.
Anyone and anybody who has interesting ideas, I'm an investor now. So I'm always looking to meet founders, even to just help them, even if you don't end up investing for some reason or the other. So if you have interesting ways that you're looking at the world. please ping me at, you can find my email address g-o-k-u-l-r at gmail.com. Happy to take emails and I'll be fairly responsive. I promise. Amazing. Thank you so much. This has been a real pleasure.
I've learned so much, and I'm excited to re-listen to this, actually. So this is great. And thank you, Mark. Thank you. This is amazing. I learned a lot, actually. I've taken some notes. I was typing as you were saying some things. Yeah, super grateful that we were able to make this happen. this is a wrap thanks everyone thank you guys
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