Quotes

"It's a terrible outcome to wake up one day and be late career and feel trapped because you have a certain lifestyle or certain expectations of the people around you — and you look at yourself in the mirror and you're not happy going in there."

"A big misconception is that advice-seeking is really one-sided. The reminder is that it feels really good to help someone. It feels really good to be heard."

"These loops are more about looking around the corner and seeing if there's anything you missed in terms of the integrity of your decision-making process."

"The external scorecard of what people think you should do is very much in opposition to what I actually want to do. Even though it might be objectively better depending on which scorecard you use, I would actually be less happy."

"Onboarding is the only part of your product experience that a hundred percent of people are ever going to touch. Good luck getting a hundred percent feature adoption of anything else in your product, right?"

"Your brand is the promise that you're making and your product experience is your delivery of that promise. And those two things have to be in lockstep with each other, or you're going to have mismatched expectations and some really disappointed customers."

"The goal of the competency model is not to find a unicorn human being that is an 11 out of 10 on every one of these things, because frankly, that person doesn't exist."

"You're investing your time. There is no way to get more time. We're all on a finite clock. You can always get more money."

"I actually think if you're doing it right, sometimes conversion should actually decrease a little bit... a lot of those people were probably not the right people for your product, which means they wouldn't have been engaged customers, they probably would have churned."

"Start by assuming you no longer have product market fit, because you had product market fit in a different market. It's a different market now, so you have to start over."

"If you just assume you need to launch a new channel to fix this problem, you're going to be wrong, because your entire customer base changed, not just the next 10% of customers that you're looking for."

"When I'm exhausted, I'll still show up to work, I'll still execute... if I can take an improv class, it's going to be a blast. If I'm depressed, I won't go to that improv class. I'll just cancel it."

"Adaptability goes down really fast [when burnt out]. That's just a key ingredient to doing this job well, is adaptability and flexibility and exploration. And if you're losing that, it's probably not because you've gotten bad at it."

"The product, it is the company now. And the marketing is integrated with literally every single piece of it."

"The algorithms don't understand long term effects often, nor do they understand how people might respond to it, nor do they understand your intent for the product. That is our job."

"There are probably techno utopians who would say, feed all data to the algorithm, give it an objective, and it will do the right thing. And I was like, yeah, the reason that falls down is the algorithms don't understand long term effects often."

"There's no silver bullets, just many lead bullets. And a few massive cannonballs every now and then."

"The data isn't going to give you the answer. It'll just tell you how bad."

"When you recognise that you get business value from [diversity], then it all of a sudden becomes something that you look out for and you take care of. That's it."

"Growth as the job is to connect users to the value of your product. Growth sometimes gets this reputation that it's just pure metrics hacking."

"User retention is gold for consumer subscription companies. If you don't retain your users, then a lot of the onus is on getting them to pay on day one."

"What if we actually sampled a number of different paid suggestions and interspersed them to free users across their writing? All of a sudden, people were seeing Grammarly as a much more powerful tool than they were before and our upgrade rates nearly doubled just through this change."

"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."

"When you lose a game, user retention is 10% worse than when you win a game."

"Our impact and our business goals are in service of our mission, which is to seek the truth and help people understand the world, not the other way around."

"For us news is the sun in the sense that it's why we exist. It is what gives us our brand heritage and reputation. It's what instills trust."

"When I was at Facebook... all we could do was train pieces of information based on an engagement outcome. We couldn't actually train it based on the quality of that piece of information itself."

"It was a moment where we just had to come out and really tell the world, 'We're mid integration. We're really not trying to communicate more than Wordle being a fun diversion from the news. Here's what happened, and why.'"

"Impact for us is growing subscribers, but it's also when a deeply reported story triggers an important policy change or a new law."

"LLMs are magical duct tape. They're formed principally by the distilled intuition of all of society into a thing that operates between a cost structure between human and plain old computing."

"You're designing your products assuming that this thing will be squishy and not fully accurate and fully work. 5% of the time it punches the user in the face — even if you get it down to 99% of the time it's fine, that's not a viable product."

"Kayfabe is a word that comes from professional wrestling. It means a thing that everybody knows is fake and yet everybody acts like is real. And I think it's one of the defining forces within an organisation, any organisation."

"The builder mindset can't possibly create more value than the effort that you put into it. What I look for instead are things that can be gardened, things that can grow on their own — farming for miracles."

"Taste is the most important thing. Differentiate from what the LLM would have written if given the same prompt. How distinctive is what you have to say."

"Codex is a bit like this really smart intern that refuses to read Slack and doesn't check Datadog or Century unless you ask it to."

"The current underappreciated limiting factor is literally human typing speed or human multitasking speed."

"Even if we had no more progress today with models — which is absolutely not the case — but even if we had no more progress, we are way behind on product. There's so much more product to build."

"It turns out the best way for models to use computers is simply to write code. And so we're kind of getting to this idea where if you want to build any agent, maybe you should be building a coding agent."

"If I could only choose one thing to understand, it would be really meaningful understanding of the problems that a certain customer has."

"On the other side of that upset can often be a whole new possibility and a whole new revelation, and actually a lot of joy and freedom. I think that we forget about all the other possibilities that come out of difficult conversations."

"She said, 'Thank you so much for telling me that. I wish someone had told me that 15 years ago. I think I could have had a different career.'"

"I need you to fix this within the next 30 days. Otherwise, I'm sorry to say, we're going to have to find a way to part ways because I can't keep this going with you."

"They're trying now to be the leader who everyone loves. But what really needs to happen very often is, we need to drive towards results. Ultimately, that leads to the demise of your company."

"If you get six people at the end of a meeting to write down 'what did we decide here?' you will get six different answers, even though we're in the same meeting."

"Fascinating, you have to tell me more why you think that. She saw this schism and rather than reacting as if it was a threat, she reacted with the most genuine and profound curiosity." — Boz on Ami"

"You can only make bad decisions. The only problems you'll see are ones that are fundamentally unsolvable because otherwise, someone would've solved it before they got to you. All you're doing is choosing which branch of suboptimal you're going to put your name on."

"Execution eats strategy for breakfast. If you have perfect strategy but poor execution, you don't win — and what's even worse is you've learned nothing."

"Strategy has to actually change our behaviour as a team to create better customer outcomes. If we come out with a shiny five-year plan but change nothing about the products we're building, what was the point?"

"Don't shrink yourself, ever. Whenever you run into a problem, just add more to the things you can do, the tools you have, the way you can express yourself."

"In growth, I think it's really important that you just need to be okay leaving money on the table. And that's a core principle for us as a growth team."

"Freedom through constraints — when you have a bunch of constraints applied on you, whether that's in personal life or at work, I think that it can bring a lot of freedom because it just frees up all this excess choice."

"True freedom in life is learning how to be content when you don't get what you want."

"I feel like I'm playing for Real Madrid at times. I look around, I'm like, 'Man, I'm playing for Madrid.'"

"We are very comfortable forgoing metric impact in order to prioritise safety, in order to protect our brand, in order to hold a high quality bar and to maintain a great user experience."

"Communication is the job. The only way you have impact is through the artifacts you create and the things you verbalize."

"Your worst behavior is always going to come out when you think you're under identity threat."

"You're never as good as they say you are when you're winning, and you're never as bad as they say you are when you're losing."

"You know more than the critics do... That doesn't mean ignore them, because they have a different perspective and you need to understand it. Even if the totality is less than what you know, it may contain parts that you do not know."

"You don't want to work at a company that, when times are tough, kills all future growth and just shores up in the core business. That's a company that's just committing itself to dying at some point."

"Fish where the fish are. You want to walk off into the forest and find a small fishing hole with lots of fish and very little competition."

"It's like having the world's most reliable employee who costs $200 a month and works 24/7."

"Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life."

"No amount of money or success or attention or anything else had done what this little tiny yellow pill could do for my mental state."

"I was sitting in the sauna stressed about business problems. Our revenue was $15 million back then. Now we're at almost 300 million and I'm still stressed about the same things."

"As my career reached its pinnacle — from a professional, from a financial perspective, I was at my highest — but when it came to other aspects of my life, I was arguably at my lowest or close to my lowest."

"I learned very early on that if I wanted to feel good, I needed to achieve, and that if I wanted to love myself and be considered lovable by others, I needed to achieve."

"These adaptations, which were initially beneficial to you and to your life, they reverse course in a sense, and they become detrimental to your present state and your future development."

"When those are suffering or when they're really out of whack, it's undeniable that there is something that is detrimental to your wellbeing that's going on right now, and your body is telling you, 'Stop. Something needs to change.'"

"The world will ask you who you are, and if you don't know, it'll tell you."

"The traditional structure — you have a problem, a pain, I have a solution, a treatment, and I'm going to tell you why it's better — I call this the arrogant doctor. It kind of sets you up for bragging."

"This structure really is about defining a movement and that's very different from, 'Hey, I'm going to solve your problem.'"

"We're not just saying, 'Hey, the world is changing.' The very concise naming is really key. In making it compact you're losing completeness, but it's not a problem."

"He said, 'You know what? In hindsight we probably could have called it strawberry intelligence. It didn't matter. It was really the story that sort of mattered.'"

"Having a shit draft is a million times more valuable than having all these great ideas. But it's also really painful."

"When people say 'I want someone that's strategic,' what they're really saying is 'I want someone that can come up with and articulate a compelling and simple why behind the decisions and the direction of the company and product.'"

"It's not about making the right decision, it's about making the decision."

"Reward the learning versus the outcome. That's what I try to focus on — if we're constantly learning, it is okay if we make bad decisions."

"Everyone has something to teach and everyone has something to learn. That helps not only how you interact with other people, but also combat imposter syndrome."

"The mindset that you bring to your work is actually the most important thing over anything else that you can do."

"It's so incredibly necessary in improving decision quality to take what's implicit and make it explicit. It's not that intuition is crap — your intuition is sometimes right. If you don't make it explicit, then you don't get to find out when it's wrong."

"The only thing that's ever supposed to happen in a meeting is the discussion part."

"There is no such thing as a long feedback loop. The feedback loop is as long as you choose it to be."

"By the time you're actually even thinking about quitting, it's probably already past the time that you ought to have quit."

"He couldn't see Slack until he quit Glitch. And that is a true cost that he would've born of continuing with Glitch. If he had continued with Glitch, Slack would not be something that we're all using today."

"Strategy is really just an integrated set of choices that outline how you're going to win in whatever marketplace you choose."

"A good product strategy answers: what's your winning aspiration? Where are you going to play? What are the markets, segments, personas? And how are you going to win with your target audience?"

"We only commit to dates for the work that's right in front of us — not a project six months out when we haven't done enough discovery to have a real clear understanding of estimation."

"The most impactful thing we did early on was to hone in on our product strategy — specifically, what's the actual market we're going after? Because without that clarity, prioritisation is nearly impossible."

"There are only three reasons why things do not happen the way you want them to happen as a leader: that person can't do — a capability issue; they won't do — a motivation or alignment issue; or they were not set up to do — which is really your problem."

"You have to think about users on modern internet as having three attributes: they are lazy, they are vain, and they are selfish."

"Product managers are in the business of influence. Users are doing something and now we want them to do something else. We are full-stack influencers — not only external influencers."

"Most experiments should be thought experiments. They should not even be tried out because they're obviously going to fail. If you had smart people who could do meta-thinking, a lot of experiments would just not even be run."

"Work backwards from an amazing future. First creatively imagine a future, then work backwards from that, and be paranoid that everything is going to go wrong — and make sure it all comes together."

"Positioning defines how your product is the best in the world at delivering some value that a well-defined set of companies care a lot about."

"Really great positioning just feels obvious. You pitch it to people and they're like, 'Well, of course that's it. What else could it be?'"

"We lose about 40% of our deals to no decision — which actually means we lost to the spreadsheet, we lost to pen and paper, we lost to interns. If we're not positioning well against that, we're never going to get the customer to come off of it."

"Your trick in the positioning is to be able to articulate: why are we the best kind of solution for this particular type of customer? That's it. If you could nail that, then you sell lots of stuff."

"I can't write the messaging until I understand who's the message for and what's our value against who. Positioning is the foundation. Practically everything in marketing and sales flows downstream from that."

"40 to 60% of B2B purchase processes end in no decision. The majority of those is they couldn't figure out how to make a choice confidently. So what they did was just go to their boss and say, 'Now's not a good time. Let's delay it.'"

"If a customer is indecisive, throwing FOMO into the mix makes it worse. They're already stressed out and you're just putting more stress on them. What does work is giving them the tools to make the decision — teaching them how to buy."

"The buyer is 80% of the way through their buying journey by the time they talk to your sales rep — yeah, maybe. But they might be 80% of the way to saying, 'Nope, I'm not buying nothing.'"

"Nobody gets fired for picking Salesforce. If you're the challenger, you've got to get over all of this inertia tilting towards the status quo — because picking the leader is just so easy, it's the lowest-risk decision."

"We eat, sleep and breathe this market. We know it inside out. But we've got this idea that we shouldn't talk about the other guys. What B2B buyers actually want in a sales interaction is perspectives on the market and help weighing their options."

"Every sentence you write in a paper should be backed with a citation — we applied this principle to force accuracy and reduce hallucinations."

"Google provides a list of links; Perplexity focuses on direct answers — eliminating ad-based link prominence that conflicts with truthful answering."

"RAG is an open book exam — decoupling memorisation from reasoning, enabling accurate answers without requiring massive pre-training."

"Perplexity on flight wifi should match desktop performance standards."

"Cracking verified reasoning loops with sandbox environments could enable intelligence explosion through compounding improvements."

"It's almost always easier to just make it harder to do the thing right before your step in the funnel to increase your conversion rate. Instead of trying to convert more people, you just want more people to get to the step — because that will always hurt your conversion rate, but it may give you more people on the outside."

"30 to 40% of experiments showing short-term lift have no long-term GMV impact. We've been running against KPIs — KPIs are basically banned — and it allows us to be better in the short term and just get a lot smarter."

"The way we think about churn is really going back to Shopify's mission: increase the amount of entrepreneurship on the internet. Many businesses will fail — but the folks who do go on to be successful will make that entire cohort extremely successful."

"The technical architecture determines strategy in a technology company even more than the what and who you're building for. If you build the right technical how, you set yourself up to have a platform that can be adaptable and flexible."

"You either need metrics as accountability — the most common way — or an extremely strong founder with strong opinions on what good is. If you have one of those two, you can make it work. The worst case is just building a bunch of cool stuff in a haphazard way."

"A bad name with a really great company with great company strategy, great marketing is going to be great over time. And a good name is just going to help you, but I don't think a bad name is going to kill a good company."

"Your brand is who people think you are. Developing a brand strategy is what do you want to be? What do you want people to think you are? And what are you going to do to help shape that perception?"

"I don't care about mission and vision. I just want one thing because people can only remember one thing and it's your purpose and it's why you do what you do."

"You have a positioning problem if I ask 10 of your customers or 10 of your employees what the company does or what the product does. And I get multiple answers."

"Whatever time it takes you actually is going to save you so much time down the road... your web copy almost writes itself, if you get this all done right."

"These are these living organisms that just get better with the more interactions that happen. I think this is the new IP of every single company — products that think and live and learn."

"We're approaching this world in which the marginal cost of the good output is approaching zero. We're going to see exponential demand for productivity and outputs. The way that you scale to that is with agents. When all of that happens, the org chart starts to become the work chart. You just don't need as many layers."

"It's all about the loop, not the lane."

"You have to actually build for the slope instead of the snapshot of where you are."

"Optimism is a renewable resource."

"Tools are just meant to solve problems."

"It's build and buy now. So, you buy the tool to get 90% of the way there and then you build the cool thing on top with the other 10%."

"From 2010 to 2020, we had the golden years of deterministic matching... You can't do that anymore. So, what that means is these ad networks are becoming more complex, sophisticated, and interesting, right at the same time that it's harder for marketers to really understand how they're spending money."

"The ideal world is that you actually are growing as a business making more money, hiring more people, acquiring more users, and your total cost of tooling per person goes down. That's like the dream."

"The company will outlast you, hopefully. You will not be the last growth manager unless the company fails. So, I tend to take a little bit of a different approach than most, which is like I think you should always be thinking about the future."

"Being different is not enough... Being better is not enough... It has to be better than what exists today in a way that matters to the end user."

"When you're hiring you pick the people, but they pick when."

"There was something around a small, tightly-knit senior team super focused on a problem. The smallness means just like, less prior miscommunication, and then the tightly-knit means a lot more trust."

"Everybody wants something. And most of the time it's not something you have to give, or you can connect them to. But, if it is something that you have to give, or you can connect them to, it's criminal not to, actually."

"You can't avoid the details, you just have to get into them. And if you don't, you can still do well but it's actually more than likely fortune than skill."

"People and teams don't actually reach their goals. They fall to the level of their systems."

"The anti-pattern is identify, justify, execute — where you identify something, someone says 'this would be great to build,' and you go pull data to go justify why that would be great to build. First you have to really understand from first principles what is actually going on."

"This is the irony of growth — people think growth is overnight success and it's not. It is a lot of short wins and short-term execution for a longer-term gain."

"People don't leave a job, they leave a manager — because the manager is the one that has a lot of the power to fix a lot of these variables."

"If you want to build world-class products, if you want to build product that can scale around the world, you have to be inclusive of so many voices. You have to build that skill to acknowledge and learn from and to live in tension with different voices."

"It's not officially actually a category until there's more companies that do that."

"Rather than changing the category to something else... we were just going to spend all of our resources to make this whole category much more valuable to the users, to companies."

"When you're generating a new category, you're also needing to educate buyers that there is a category that they can now budget for and why they should allocate budget for that."

"The more the brand is interchangeable with the people at the company and the company itself, the stronger it is, the more authentic it is."

"I almost didn't join because it was called RealtimeBoard."

"The worst thing that you do as a leader is you hesitate on the next decision."

"If everybody agrees with the decision, then you didn't add any value because they would've done that without you. So the only value you ever add is when you make a decision that most people don't like."

"The job is fundamentally a leadership job and it's a tricky leadership job because nobody is actually reporting to you."

"We're investing in strength, not lack of weakness. I want to know how good, are they world-class? Do they have a world-class strength? And can that beat anybody?"

"Back in the '80s, that same phrase was used, but it was thin wrapper around an RDBMS... companies like Salesforce were basically just a thin wrapper."

"Being able to identify the various micro and macro loops, how they're all connected, being able to document them in a qualitative model to communicate a shared understanding of how you grow, it's really powerful."

"It's not just logging in. It's not even just finding vulnerabilities, it's fixing vulnerabilities."

"If you think about experimentation, it's not about delivering outcomes it's about generating learnings that the organisation can leverage effectively to deliver outcomes."

"A JavaScript developer just won't care if you support Golang or Rust, but will absolutely care if a key feature like automated package upgrades just isn't available for their ecosystem."

"You're never going to have a shortage of ideas in a high performing growth team. So, knowing where to focus amidst that kind of sea of ideas is a really important role of the strategy."

"Liquidity is how marketplaces win. It's this measure of your ability to match buyers and sellers efficiently, it's how quickly and efficiently people can find what they're looking for on your platform."

"People who build marketplaces tend to want to give a lot of control to the users... the mistake is that you unknowingly fragment your supply in a way that has a much more meaningful impact on the health of your marketplace than you suspect."

"It's not like, 'Hey, it's Ben from Lyft. Hop on the road, please.' It's like, 'Hey, my name is James and I'm a fellow driver as well.' Those guys were outperforming our very best trained salespeople."

"To me, my answer would tend to be... you have two product market fits essentially. You want to make sure that you have a compelling enough value proposition on both sides of the marketplace."

"Entrepreneurship has been a very humbling journey. I think the zero to one is way harder than anything I've done so far... you take for granted that the problem space has already been validated."

"If we served customers well, if we prioritized customers and delivered for them, things like sales, things like revenue and active customers... would follow. So therefore, when we're making a decision, we're going to start with what's best for the customer and then come backward from there."

"You want to create a product funnel, not a product tunnel. With a funnel, meaning lots of things at the top, fewer things at the bottom. The tunnel means that everything that comes in is also going to come out the other side."

"The disagree part is about bringing forth new information, new data, new point of view that would be contrary to the current direction... you're obligated to do it all the way up the chain if necessary, if it's an important issue and people are not hearing your point of view."

"Most people confuse speed with velocity, and the difference between the two is that velocity has both speed and a vector to it, meaning there's some specific destination. Slow is smooth and smooth is fast."

"The amount of time you're going to put into the hiring process may seem like a lot, but if you hire the wrong person, that amount of time you're going to have to deal with managing that person is going to be a lot more."

"Design is trying to imagine the future you want to live in and then take the steps to make it real."

"Saying a company is design-led does not mean it's designer-led."

"Almost everyone living in a modern economy now is going to have hundreds of interactions with a phone or with a computer... we have an obligation as product people to put that emotional energy back into people's lives."

"You should wait as long as possible to draw a picture... as soon as you draw a picture that looks even remotely real, everybody gravitated towards that and said, 'Oh, that's the thing.'"

"I've never seen somebody graft design on after the fact. It's there at the beginning in the root DNA or doesn't exist."

"People hire products, they don't buy them, they hire them to make progress in their life."

"A struggling moment causes demand. Struggling moments and opportunities all exist before there's a product."

"Bitchin' ain't switchin'. Just because people bitch about something doesn't mean they're going to do anything about it."

"Context makes the irrational rational. The moment you hear a story and you go, 'I can't believe that,' nine times out of ten it's because you don't have the rest of the story."

"Choose what to suck at and figure out the trade-offs that you need to make and make sure that your trade-offs map the trade-offs of the customer."

"The moment you stop making progress in your career is the moment you start looking for another job."

"When you're in a startup, it changes who you are. The moment you get out of that environment, you need to take the time to reset your mind and your body. The moment you are comfortable doing nothing, you know who you are again."

"You're asking for features of people — five years experience, you've got an MBA. Those are all features of people. Talk about the experiences you want people to have when they come into your company."

"I can actually pay people less if I give them better experiences. Most people, they think they have to pay more money, over 50% of people who got new jobs didn't get more money."

"The things I suck at — my disability created a super ability. Improving your weakness actually ruins your superpower."

"Writing externally was a better way to influence internally what was happening. It built my trust battery with Tobi."

"I figured out everything in those posts at the exact moment I wrote them. The writing process itself allowed me to solidify those mental models. I wasn't ahead of the game — I was figuring it out as I wrote."

"Your job is to help teams ship the right thing at the right time in the right way."

"The most important thing to figure out when you're dealing with any decision is how important that decision is. Spend all your time on those very few important decisions. For all others, just go with your gut or delegate."

"Do a legitimate side hustle, found a company on the side. It humbles you. It reminds you of how hard it is to build software and how many people it takes to do that well."

"If the model is the product, then the eval is the product requirement document."

"Models are only as good as their evals."

"If it's difficult to sell the marginal customer, you're not going to be able to grow a huge business. What you actually need to find is the customer that's surprisingly easy to sell into."

"The narrative in AI over the last three years has almost entirely been one of job displacement... very few companies and people have talked about this new category of jobs that's being created."

"Companies and people that are going to succeed are those that lean into this narrative of abundance — of how do we do so much more — rather than fighting back against it."

"Building a great product is one of those things that's necessary, but not sufficient. The separation is between those that build really great distribution."

"It ends up being a prisoner's dilemma. There is no opting out of the game."

"The broad trend is that the cycles seem to be getting shorter and shorter, so you actually have a smaller amount of time to play the game."

"For startups, you don't have the luxury to spread your chips. You have to choose one and go all in. It's a totally different ballgame."

"Your output is constrained by the slowest part of your system. If you just accelerate one part of the system, you're just going to move the bottleneck to another part."

"Way too many founders apologize for how they want to run the company. They find some midpoint between how they want to run a company and how the people they lead want to run the company. That's a good way to make everyone miserable. What everyone really wants is clarity."

"There's a difference between micromanagement, which is telling people exactly what to do, and being in the details. If you don't know the details, how do you know people are doing a good job?"

"You can't build a product unless you know how to talk about the product. You can't be an expert in making the product unless you're also an expert in the market of it."

"The health of an organization — one simple heuristic: how close is engineering and marketing? At a lot of companies they're in different universes."

"The more I got involved in the details, the more time I have on my hands. That's a paradox. But once we turned the corner, suddenly everyone started rowing the same direction. Before, I'd get ten surprises and nine were bad. Now I get ten surprises and nine are good."

"Starting a company has never been easier, scaling one into a durable high impact organization has never been harder."

"When you have to eat a shit sandwich, don't nibble."

"If you want to kill a plant, have two people water it."

"The thing about being a founder/CEO is there is no one there to rescue you. Your parents aren't going to rescue you, your VC is not going to rescue you. That kind of hits you when you hit your first crisis."

"There's a massive tax in optionality when you can move this fast and try a lot of things."

"Product is finding the kernel of truth in a sea of ambiguity and signals."

"Uber always had this mentality... a twin turbine jet plane where you can fly the plane on one engine for a little bit if you need to, but it's operating most efficiently and effectively if both are working together."

"When you reflect the stress onto your teams, everybody tenses up... it counterintuitively doesn't produce better outcomes."

"The only mistake is thinking you'll get an answer in a month when you won't, and then pretending you do."

"If you can't run a canonical A/B test, how might you otherwise increase your conviction in the solution that you're building?"

"Finding joy in the other things of building a team, passing on your experience, helping other people do great writing or great product building or great engineering is really what giving away your Lego is about."

"The words that we literally got out of years of testing were, 'I didn't know I could be a designer.' And that was what we managed to do through several rounds of refinement on the onboarding process."

"You can't just SEO the hell out of something that is a terrible experience. So tying that experience at the end of the SEO journey is just as important as the technicalities of SEO itself."

"It needs to spark joy and delight in people and just pure excitement. It can't just be like, 'Oh, yeah, this is a useful tool for me.' It needs to light up their eyes."

"You don't need to create an LLM because it's a commodity thing now. There's a bunch of providers who can do it way better and have way more resources to do it with than you do."

"When you take the people that are part of the project team out of the creative loop entirely, they're going to find that creative outlet somewhere else and it's actually kind of bad for the product."

"Engineers notoriously, notoriously, notoriously, massively underestimate the migration time for old system to new system and that causes a lot of problems."

"Don't stop being a hands-on technical until you feel like it's in your bones. You feel like you've got mastery."

"Management really is a service job. You are serving the team, you are serving the company. Your job is to help make things better and that usually doesn't mean that you're making all the decisions."

"Platforms are products, ultimately. You should be thinking about how do I create coherent offerings that make this company more productive?"

"It doesn't matter how nice the user experience is, how great the marketing is, how much demand you can generate if when someone opens that app, there are no cars available."

"We call it internally the hamster wheel of content creation. You get on because you love it and then how do you get off."

"There is something to churning out consistent quality work and putting it out there for your audience to consume and respond and react to that goes a long way. It's almost like the 10,000 hours."

"Fans are actually really happy to be a patron of the arts and they look at it as like a badge of honour."

"The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time is now."

"The way that you think about product market fit, you have to think about content market fit. Who is my audience? What is it that they need to get promoted? What is it that they need to avoid failure? Can you create some type of content product that is going to address this for them?"

"True discovery is when you have intent to find out more. You've heard about it so many times or you've been intrigued by something that someone has told you to the extent that you're actually going to take the step of now learning about it."

"If you grow to something like, 'Oh we have 5,000 ambassadors,' which feels really good to say on a website, the conversation is actually very muted. People feel like they're speaking to an auditorium whenever they say anything."

"Painkillers always win. Can your content be a painkiller? Can it help people out of situations that are causing them a lot of pain? Can it help people stop being so confused or can it make them even feel less alone in their experience?"

"One of the worst things you can do is say, let's cut this off at the knees if it's not generating ROI."

"Hypergrowth is actually pretty simple: you need an amazing product that people want to talk about, you need to be riding the lightning by hiring ahead of your stage, and you need to be on a massive market wave."

"Atlassian had the lowest sales and marketing spend relative to R&D of any public software company. The whole thesis was: if a customer can reach value without talking to a human, let them."

"CMOs get fired because they're not tied to revenue. You have to define your revenue contribution framework on day one and report against it every single month."

"Careers are waves. If you can identify the next wave and get on it early, it multiplies everything else you do. The wave matters more than the company."

"More Yoda, less Wonder Woman. The more senior you get, the more your job is to help others see the answer, not to be the one who has all the answers."

"Stay on your side of the net. Stick with the two realities you know, because we get in trouble the minute we start thinking we know the other person's reality."

"Anger is a distancing emotion and there are other emotions that are connecting. What a disservice to not help people understand that."

"AFOG: Another F-ing Opportunity for Growth. When something has gone wrong, my first question is always: what did you learn? Because there's always a lesson."

"In the absence of data, people make shit up. If you don't want people to make shit up about you, you're better off disclosing more — then you'll have more control over your self-definition."

"It's possible to say almost anything to almost anyone if you have the necessary skills. We're shifting probabilities of success — we're not guaranteeing anything."

"The goal of your kindle strategies, these non-scalable hacks — they only exist to unlock the fire strategies, to unlock the things that could take you to millions of users."

"Don't start on chapter six of the story, but also don't start with a textbook on the English language either. You want to find the last point in your story that would be completely obvious to the person you're telling the story to, and then go from there."

"User expectations just continue to go up every day. If you're not continually pushing to make your product better, your user experience better, your latency better, then you're eventually — not necessarily tomorrow, but maybe in a year, maybe in five years — you might find yourself fall out of product market fit entirely."

"If you're not an executive, whatever you're working on, you're basically writing and telling a story. And when you talk to an exec about that story, you have to start with chapter one — what part of the company strategy are you working on? What metrics are you trying to improve? What assumptions are you making?"

"The goal of business operations is to not exist. If you've shown you've done a really great job at rooting out inefficiencies, every part of the company's going to want you to do some other job — because you've done such a good job eliminating the need for it."

"At Reforge, we're building frameworks that are tools in a toolkit. You pull them out when relevant. They're not a coloring book to stay inside the lines of." "The job is not to follow the process. The job is not to learn every framework possible. The job is to figure out how to add value to customers that translates into value to the business." "During existential threats, it's like when Nassim Taleb says, 'The only rational reaction is overreaction.' Unless you have a real viable reason to assume otherwise, you got to assume the disruptor is right and base your strategy on them playing an optimal game." "Founders will put a lot of new leaders in that delegate bucket too quickly. It's like, 'Ah, they got it. They know more than me,' when founders actually know the right answer and should just tell them." "If what your plan is is to use paid acquisition on top of a freemium model to get a percentage of people to convert, and hopefully, stick around forever, I'd pivot right now. I just cannot see it working."

"There was a perception that some people were intrinsically really good at strategy and others were not — almost as if there was a strategy gene you needed to be born with. I have news for you: anybody can build product strategy through a clear understanding of what it is and a friendly, repeatable playbook."

"Strategy is selecting the frequency to achieve resonance between the product and the market. When you get close to that frequency, you see tremendous impact."

"Intrinsically, strategy has no business value. It's a document with a few words. It starts accumulating value as you generate business impact and results — and that happens when you test strategy with execution."

"Imagine how frustrating it is to keep bringing fruit to a reviewer who keeps rejecting it. Imagine if you'd just asked: 'Do you even like fruits?' That's the fruit story — ask leaders what they want before you build the strategy."

"The roadmap is built from a combination of small-S and big-S work — like building a bridge from both sides of a river. Both tributaries ultimately merge into one."

"When you have older brains connecting the dots, younger team members being really fast and focused, it's brilliant. People won't notice your wrinkles as much as they'll notice your energy."

"In my part of France, a confidant is somebody who gives you confidence. Maybe that's what a mentor can be — a confidant, someone who helps you find your roadmap to success."

"Culture is what happens around here when the boss is not around. The more distributed a company, the more culture is important — and more difficult."

"Despair equals suffering minus meaning. Suffering is a constant — it's the first noble truth of Buddhism. If you have more meaning, you have less despair."

"Your painful life lessons are the raw material for your future wisdom. When you're in the midst of a really challenging time, you are developing your future wisdom."

"A question that gets asked a lot is, 'How do we keep up to date with the latest AI news?' Why? Why do you need to keep up to date with the latest AI news? If you talk to the users, understand what they want or don't want, look into the feedback — then you can actually improve the application way, way, way more."

"I do ask people to ask their managers: 'Would you rather give everyone on the team very expensive coding agent subscriptions, or get an extra headcount?' Almost every one of the managers will say headcount."

"I think of language modelling as a way of encoding statistical information about language. If I say 'my favourite colour is', then you would say that should be another colour. The word blue would be much more likely to appear — because statistically, blue is more likely to follow 'my favourite colour is'."

"I think eval is really, really fun because it's extremely creative. I was looking at different evals people built and it was like, 'Wow.' It's not dry at all. It's just super, super, super fun."

"If you ask me to give a song a score, I'm not a musician — I don't know. Maybe six out of ten. But if you ask me, here are two songs, which one would you prefer to play for the birthday party? I can answer that. Comparisons are a lot easier."

"The goal isn't to be someone's interesting podcast. The goal is to be someone's favourite podcast."

"There are four million podcasts. Only a hundred and fifty thousand are active. Just releasing ten episodes puts you in the top four percent. Most people give up before they find out if it works."

"State your intent before you pitch the wild idea. If people understand why you want something, they don't have to assume the worst."

"Optimise for slugging average, not batting average. A few big swings that connect matter more than a long streak of safe, incremental wins."

"Andy Rachleff's definition of product–market fit is exponential organic growth. That's a very high bar. Most good product work is below that bar — and that's still worth doing."

"Every problem is our problem. That attitude of radical accountability and ownership helped us find opportunities that maybe the business wasn't explicitly asking us to solve — but we could triangulate why it might be important. When you do that, we look hungry, so let's keep feeding us."

"Product-led growth at its highest level is taking a go-to-market approach where your product's job is to grow revenue and you use humans as a backstop — not the other way around."

"If you're hitting more than 30 or 40% of your growth experiments, you're thinking too small. You need resilience because 70 to 80% of the time you're not putting numbers on the board."

"Give value before you extract value. That was at the core of inbound marketing at its inception, and it's just taking a different form with PLG."

"Mentors are great, but calling them mentors sells what they were very short. The people who changed my career were sponsors and advocates — willing to put up social and professional capital to bet on me."

"The real essence of this job is that you wake up on behalf of someone else to solve a problem for them, and you have to do it well enough that they give you something back in return. I always call it a certificate of appreciation."

"Just because somebody can use your product doesn't mean that they will buy it. Just because they can use it doesn't mean they will choose it. Just because they can use it doesn't mean that they will actually use it."

"If I can't find a certain number of people that have this problem, my goodness, it might not be a problem worth solving. I have never had a product failure using this technique."

"Doing product management is the product manager's job, but getting better at product management is the manager's job, is the coach's job."

"The best place to learn how to be a VP is when you're not a VP, because that's where you practice being a VP. When you become a VP, you have done those things before."

"OKRs are more of a vitamin, they're not a medicine. If you take OKRs thinking they'll fix everything that's wrong with you — that's not going to happen. It's just going to reveal everything that's wrong with your company."

"The question is: what am I doing this week to get to the outcome I really want? If you can answer that every Monday, you're doing OKRs. Everything else is just ceremony."

"If during the day you meet one asshole, he's probably an asshole. But if all day long you meet nobody but assholes, you might be the asshole. If your entire company is confused, you might be the one who is not being clear."

"People do not value celebrations enough. The simple act of getting together and saying, 'What was the most awesome thing that happened this week?' makes people feel like they're part of something really special."

"Product sense is intuition, intuition is compressed experience, compressed experience comes from having lots of experience. Intuition is overvalued and under-exists."

"Speaking as a former PM, I would not ever give up spending time with customers and watching their pain. That's how I fell in love with product."

"I can count on one hand the companies who have blocked their product managers from speaking to customers, and those companies are not product companies. They might say they do, but they don't."

"There's knowing something's coming and then there's knowing what to do with it. Those are two completely different things."

"Get into this role if you're comfortable letting go of things and moving on to something that is well worth your time. The company's going to change. Something's going to need to be automated. We're going to need to cut something else."

"Companies cannot care for people — people care for people. The representation of what is acceptable in an environment is by the leaders."

"Nobody legendary ever competed in an existing category and won. We all know who Bob Marley is. We don't know who the seventeenth greatest reggae musician is. The category makes the product, the category makes the brand, the category makes the company."

"Problems create categories. You can't attack an incumbent category queen unless you frame, name, and claim a new or different problem. When the existing problem is well understood and the existing solution is well understood, there's no need for a new solution."

"New languaging creates new thinking. A demarcation point in language creates a demarcation point in thinking, which can create a demarcation point in perceived value. She who changes or creates net new value perceptions wins."

"I'd rather matter for one week a year than be irrelevant for the rest of the year."

"The greatest entrepreneurs are visitors from the future telling us how it's going to be. The reason many of them are so irascible is that the present not already being the future they see makes them insane."

"You can't optimise your way to product market fit. I don't care at the early stages if something's optimised by 5% from an email. That doesn't fundamentally tell me if something's working or not."

"If I could have written it myself, it's not good enough."

"Nobody wants to talk about collaboration. You just want it to work. You care about the tool, and that the tool's working well."

"You're putting yourself on the line when you spread a product within your organisation. Just using it isn't enough to get someone over that stage of going from user to champion — that love thing becomes important."

"Consistent pressure over time. You're not going to get everything done. It's not going to happen immediately. You just have to keep working at it and not giving up."

"If you're not sure who the decision maker is, one, it's probably you. I'd rather you act that way than not, because you're going to slow the whole company down."

"Be a force for positive momentum, and it will be actually a real career maker."

"Product management: so much accountability, so little authority. Such a hard job."

"Never think that one communication — meaning an email or an all hands — reaches the audience. Use different channels. Some people read emails, some people watch videos, some people attend the meeting. Repeat."

"Most of management is actually exploring with someone. It is being curious. It is saying: I have seen this pattern of your work. Have you seen this pattern?"

"Do not treat metric gathering as entertainment. Real news is information that changes what you do in the real world. And if you don't change what you're doing, what you are doing is just getting entertainment."

"Please don't track your KPIs. Please track your user journeys and experiences."

"What's better than having zero is definitely 30."

"Every idea is so cheap at that scale. You could do things that don't scale dramatically better with 30 people than at 100 if you're testing."

"If you have friends and family, that better be near close to 80% no matter what, because if you can't even convince the people who care about you to use the product, it probably isn't going to solve the job for anyone else."

"One of my mantras is just don't die. Just keep your startup going. Just keep going."

"A good pivot is like going home. It's warmer, it's closer to something that you're an expert at."

"By definition it is only a tarpit if it seems like it's not."

"Growth and growth hacking and doing all this analytics, A/B testing stuff, is a total waste of time for very early startups."

"The underlying theme is that rationally the founder should have given up at some point."

"If you think about running a marketplace, you're basically like a gardener. You have to have a very light touch. If you're building a SaaS business, you're a construction worker." "50% of the value you get from it is simply building the model. It forces you to understand it." "If you are successful at aggregating the demand in your industry, you will have the winning marketplace. Demand is the currency." "I would always take depth over breadth in a marketplace. Share of wallet is basically a measure of depth rather than breadth." "Until you have a liquid marketplace, really nothing else matters."

"We received a gift from our competitors. They showed us that it's possible. Use your competition, know it, and take it, and set ambitious goals, and believe in yourself, and you can do amazing things."

"A great PM basically for me is someone that is relentless until he gets this impact, until he validates that this impact is in place."

"We really want everyone's brains in the challenge and not just one centralised brain and a lot of working hands."

"We really wanted the goal that you really understand from the first minute that if you work the same way, you cannot achieve it, even if you sleep in the office. So you need to change dramatically how you think."

"What got me to this phase is not necessarily what's going to make me successful in the next phase."

"We are rapidly running out of truly convincing blockers, truly compelling reasons why this will not happen in the next few years."

"I am optimistic about meaning. I worry about economics and the concentration of power. That's actually what I worry about more, the abuse of power."

"If you have a strong pre-trained model, I feel like you're halfway to anywhere in terms of the intelligence space."

"I think containing bad models is a much worse solution than having good models."

"The worst enemy of those who want real accountability is badly designed regulation."

"Debugging is 80% of professional programming. The writing is the easy part."

"Task Manager started as a side project — something I built for myself to kill frozen processes. I never expected it to ship."

"Write clean code now. You won't come back and clean it up later. Nobody does."

"A meaningful assert is a contract. It tells the next person who reads the code what you believe is true at that moment."

"Your brand name, nothing's going to be used more often or for longer than that name. Design will change, messaging will change, products will change, but that name is there."

"If your team is comfortable with the name, chances are you don't have the name yet."

"You don't want to make a statement here. You want to start a story."

"There is no power in comfort, not in the marketplace."

"Stop evaluating. Suspend judgment and speculate. That's my number one advice to people trying to do this on their own."

"Almost anything that you talk about is a value. You need to have a practice behind that. The value becomes real for everyone only when there's a predictable, regular thing that ladders up to it."

"Only when that original alpha group was super, super happy with the product did we then think it might be ready to go to a broader audience. That is just how we build product at Stripe."

"There is more code in the jobs that serve the Stripe API to handle edge cases than in the actual main flow. Most people wouldn't do that, but this is very frequently something users tell me delights them about the product."

"I'm always working hard to delegate sometimes a little bit more than I'm comfortable with, because that's the only way to really operate at significant scale."

"If you talk to people that actually have worked with someone before, you're probably benefiting from thousands of hours of direct experience. We take references very seriously."

"Most people don't treat their career like a product. They don't have a spec. They don't have milestones. They don't have success metrics. They just drift."

"I reframe self-promotion as: I'm educating my manager about my team's great work. The goal is identical. The framing unlocks the action."

"The most successful people I've coached are not those with the easiest paths. They are the ones who turned their stumbling blocks into stepping stones."

"Mark told me directly I would never have the role I most wanted. My response was to take the job I had and turn it into the job I wanted. That became Marketplace."

"Diagnose before you treat. You only have the new-person card for one to two months — use it."

"Proteins fold in milliseconds in our bodies, so somehow physics solves this problem that we've now also solved computationally."

"It's harder to come up with a conjecture, a really good conjecture than it is to solve it."

"Any pattern that can be generated or found in nature can be efficiently discovered and modeled by a classical learning algorithm."

"My estimate is sort of 50% chance by in the next five years, so by 2030 let's say." [on AGI]"

"It isn't kind of a jagged intelligence." [on what AGI must not be]"

"We find engineering teams that are very, very AI forward are reporting about eight to 10 hours saved per week... this is the worst it will ever be."

"A lot of engineers think that code quality is important to building a successful product. The two have nothing to do with each other."

"Conway's Law can be really, really powerful... it's the law that basically says you ship your org structure."

"All these LLMs are sitting idle overnight and on weekends, while humans aren't there. There's no need for that. They should be working all the time."

"If you're not waking up in the morning feeling energized about what you're going to do that day in your professional life, then change something."

"I could become passively okay at management with some training, with some coaching. I don't want to spend any years of my life becoming passively okay at something."

"You need to be right about something that other people think you're wrong about for a very long time. And you just have to be right."

"Simplicity is worth fighting for. And it requires fighting for. It does not happen — the universe is working against you."

"Every company builds two products: one is the product they build for their customers, and the other is a product they build for their team. That's what culture is — it's the product you build for your team."

"Success is making the people who believed in you look brilliant."

"Shopify exists at a scale running on Ruby on Rails without static typing. That's the argument."

"GDPR's cookie banners are a monument to good intentions leading straight to hell."

"Learning to program is like learning guitar. You have to physically practise. Letting AI type for you shortcuts the loop that builds genuine understanding."

"Matz asked: does this make the programmer happy? That's not a soft question. That's the question."

"If something is 99% done, it's closer to 0% rather than 100%."

"By forcing everyone to build a product that people will love, we kind of cut out this part of uncertainty. We can cut down the product in terms of functionality to just most critical features, but we will never compromise on the quality and UX and the aesthetics."

"Revolut values way more raw intellect and this unquenched hunger to build things rather than experience."

"If you want to join a company, try to choose the one that has the highest entrepreneurial spirit and that will allow you to work as closer to a mode of a founder as you possibly can."

"Great product owners are very hands-on. They don't think of themselves as managers who just give tasks to people and wait them to complete it. They just go and get things done."

"The most effective stories are the ones that we tell ourselves. They may or may not be true; our brain doesn't know the difference. Once you can really understand that, you may as well leverage it to be that hero."

"When superheroes discover what their superpowers actually are, they wreak havoc and they make a mess, and it's uncomfortable. And even Superman tries to get rid of his superpowers. It's hard to know what you're really great at."

"Pull your superpowers out of your stories from your past, your present, and then eventually figure out how to apply them and transpose them to your future."

"Find out who you are and do it on purpose."

"Isn't that interesting?"

"Perfect is creepy. Only non-humans can ever be perfect. And what defines kind of the human condition is that we want to do well and we mess up over and over again."

"We feel people's intention, not just their intervention. So the same intervention will be felt completely different based on our mindset."

"The quickest way to have an unproductive conversation is to lose sight of the fact that someone's good inside. If I'm talking about someone's behavior and they think you're actually saying they're not a smart, good, moral person — you're not even talking about the behavior anymore."

"You inherently cannot be judgmental when you're curious. And when you're judgmental about something, you're inherently not curious about it."

"Optimising for happiness in childhood is the quickest way to build anxiety and fragility in adulthood. Hard stop."

"Microsoft did not kill us. We killed ourselves."

"I was too busy firing to aim. And then I thought I would do my aiming on vacations and things like that. But no, I need to get off the treadmill every now and then."

"As a civilization, we're going to hopefully in five or ten years be like, 'Man, we took this crazy detour where we basically hooked up that brain power to this thing that was just burning off half of it as friction with our tools.' That was dumb."

"Every time you move up a league, your reward is a stronger and better opponent and potentially more unlevel playing field. All you can control is how you respond."

"Success plants the seeds of failure in terms of complacency, entitlement, or taking your eye off of what got you to be successful in the first place."

"We're no longer in this era of good enough is fine. Good enough is not enough. It's mediocre. If you want to win in the game of software, you need to differentiate through design. Craft matters."

"You can't constrain by always sorting descending by TAM. You have to go from strength to strength and do what is right."

"A lot of people can basically match a framework. Not many people can create the framework. The 0.01% skill is to be a true taste-maker — to interpolate between the different directions people have explored historically, or expand into something brand new."

"If you tweet about Figma, write into support, post on our forum, or talk to me at an event — I'm looking for your feedback. I see it all as a gift."

"On the individual side you can see AI as a path for you to learn and grow and explore the world and human consciousness, or you can use it to do your homework. Obviously I've got a point of view on which one's better."

"Intuition is like a hypothesis generator. You're constantly generating these hypotheses and others are generating hypotheses as well. And you then take these hypotheses, put them forward, debate them, try to find data to support them or negate them, and then winnow it down into what is our working hypothesis."

"Keep the simple things simple. Make the complex things possible."

"One plus one does not equal three, it sometimes equals one and a half. The more that you add and the more you continue to put in something, the more complex it gets and the worse it gets."

"Get it out as fast as you possibly can. Everything they tell you about making sure that you get a product out really quickly is totally true. The faster you get it out, the more feedback you get."

"When people give you advice, they're not giving you advice, they're giving themselves advice in your shoes."

"Data processing, data filtering, data quality is the number one determinant of model quality."

"DeepSeek went below CUDA with extremely low level programming — manually scheduling GPU cores and creating custom communication protocols."

"Export controls aim to limit inference-scale AI deployment in China rather than prevent model training entirely. You can't cut everything off."

"We may already possess AGI capabilities but lack deployment scale — practical, economy-transforming AGI costs $5 to $20 per query for complex reasoning tasks."

"Export controls paradoxically guarantee China will win long-term if current manufacturing trends continue — restrictions push China toward domestic semiconductor independence."

"I do not believe in being liked. I believe in being loved. Love is the choice to extend yourself for the spiritual growth of oneself or another. When you are extending yourself, you're not always nice. It sometimes is having hard conversations."

"Product management is clarity and conviction."

"If I could put all the research into ChatGPT and it could spit out a PRD, then you haven't done your job."

"The vision needs to be in a vacuum from the limitations of today, because the limitations of today might not be the limitations of tomorrow."

"You are like, I open up my phone, I love Spotify. What is it about this thing I love? Try to articulate that. That's how product sense is refined."

"I think that the very first pyramids in Peru were about trash management. Everybody piled up their trash in the middle of town and it stunk. And somebody said, 'If we just bury this thing with dirt, it won't smell anymore.'"

"Every paradigm shifting idea that humans have ever had began as heresy and lunacy. That guy was crazy up to the second. He was brilliant."

"It's a daily choice we make not to be savages."

"There were shepherds who always knew where it was. Just nobody asked them."

"Hallucinogens are poisoning us. They're killing us. It's a near death state — and people of the Americas believed that taking this mighty dose of poison was helping you enter that other world for a period of time."

"Process, by definition, is variance reducing. You're introducing it because you worry that the variance in your org is too high. The cost is, while you are reducing the standard and bringing folks up to the average, you're also bringing other folks down to the average."

"Values — you can't really tell people what to value. Everyone has their own value set. But you can tell people, 'Hey, here's how we operate.' Operating principles is actually better."

"I don't think you can be a good writer unless you're a clear thinker. And if you couldn't write well, it was actually pretty hard to be successful at Stripe."

"Micro pessimists, macro optimists. In the long term, we expect the curve to go up. But on day-to-day decisions, we're quite critical: how do we make sure this thing works?"

"No one wakes up in the morning and thinks, 'Yeah, today I want to work on boring, incremental stuff.' But most teams do end up working on pretty incremental stuff. What is it that's stopping folks from thinking bigger?"

"The worst thing that you can do is to say, 'I'm going to do product-led sales and I'm going to do it in marketing.' Recipe for disaster. You'll be failure mode within six months because product has to take accountability over selling of the product itself."

"Self-serve monetisation has a cap of about $10,000. Product-led sales converts the usage that you've generated via self-serve into a sales opportunity and attaches a salesperson to close a much larger contract."

"If you have a freemium product, I guarantee you 75% of your customers are not aware of what you're selling. Only focusing on monetisation awareness can give you incredible output on driving monetisation."

"Nobody cares about your terms of use pages unless they're considering an enterprise deal. If you see anybody from an account land on your terms of use pages, reach out to that person. More likely than not, you have a buyer on the hook."

"End user does not equal enterprise buyer. That organic demand ends up plateauing very shortly because you cannot just make enterprise buyers happen from your users."

"Growth can amplify great product-market fit and help you grow faster once you are already growing. But if you are slowing down, growth is going to be absolutely helpless." "Copying competition is the fastest way to mediocrity. You'll never be a leader if you copied somebody else." "Algorithm can giveth, but algorithm can also taketh away at any point. You have no control because you don't own those channels." "If every single one of your initiatives on growth is an experiment, that is a problem. It's almost like a disease, a paralyzing disease." "Full-time jobs are not the best way to monetize the skill that you have. It's one of the packages that everybody should evaluate, but too many people blindly default to that package."

"To be ahead of competitors is not optimisation of the problem, it's reinvention of the solution. I usually spend maybe 5% innovating on growth. Right now, I'm spending 95% innovating on growth, and only 5% on optimisation."

"The only way to create a word of mouth loop is just to blow their socks off."

"Product market fit as a concept is no longer what it used to be. Every company basically has to recapture product market fit every three months."

"If you asked me what's your organic marketing strategy five years ago, I would've said SEO. If you ask me right now, it's all about social: what is my CEO posting, what is my team posting, what is my creator economy doing."

"Why would we prevent a person who wants to do all of the marketing and activating for us from using us? We're like, take it, how much do you need?"

"Think of SEO as a product. The product managers are the people that should be thinking about this SEO question because it's a product question."

"If you can't answer the question about what it is that someone's going to do a search on, then don't do SEO."

"Up until AI Overviews, whoever won on that long form piece of content would get that first click. But now that doesn't exist anymore."

"This is a user that's doing their own self-discovery journey. This is what is the thing they're looking for, and how do we position this product in a way that they're going to find it?"

"We can't really have any of the other aspects of the culture, including candor, learning, seeking excellence and improvement, freedom and responsibility, if you don't start with high talent density."

"The dedication piece really isn't about long working hours. It's more about how much I care about excellence. I hold myself to a very high standard."

"No one comes to Netflix as a perfect human being and stays a perfect human being the whole time. In order to keep that bar high, you have to be willing to have those very uncomfortable conversations."

"Our job is not to tell the story that someone wants to hear with the data — it's for us to have our own perspective about things. That uplevels the whole organisation because it means we're able to be truth tellers."

"Something good happens every day." — Elizabeth's mother's advice on enjoying the small things rather than getting caught up in the busyness."

"No one ever gets this tactical in PR. There's just so much theoretical conversation and examining the big blunders, but at the end of the day, if you're a startup that wants to get coverage for your company, you need to know actually the steps to take to do it."

"Cold outreach done well is just as effective [as warm introductions]. Any good reporter is not going to be making their editorial decisions based on who their friends are."

"If you want to position it as category creating — creating these little marketing phrases — that's fine if it works on the sales side, but on the PR side, I would never have put that in a pitch."

"You can get so in the weeds with your own messaging that you want to set up this massive problem statement, you want to make it a huge trend story. But if you're very straightforward and you're pattern matching, it's generally actually going to work."

"Strong opinions loosely held — you can still be really opinionated in life, but that doesn't mean you always are going to be right."

"Forget the product marketing, content, partner, demand and growth — forget all of it. Just think of marketing as: you need a fuel and you need an engine."

"If our goal is to write 10 blog posts this month — no, that's not a goal, that's maybe a tactic. The goal should be traffic and the conversion rate from that traffic, or the signups that come from that."

"Business model really dictates what marketing does in a big way. Having the right business model experience is almost more important than having industry experience or experience with that audience."

"Product led growth is a misnomer. Product led growth really means not as much sales — which means product plus marketing."

"Marketers are often good at communicating with the audience — they're not good at communicating internally. You need to educate people about what marketing does, because marketing often has a bad reputation."

"You don't have a choice. AI is going to disrupt in the most aggressive violent ways. If you're not in it, you're about to get kicked out of all of it."

"I always believe that pricing should come from value and not from costs. The cost is our problem."

"The professional CEOs are typically told, don't mess things up, and the founders are bored if they're not taking the risk of messing things up from time to time."

"If you want to compete and enjoy success in this age, which means you need to be doing AI, that is the price."

"Great, great therapy — and it has to be great — is a recipe for brilliant leadership in my opinion."

"Their very success became a liability because the more golden the goose, the greater the temptation to butcher."

"It is always too early until it's too late."

"If you're willing to be principled in your decision making, you will get these unexpected rewards. But most leaders, when asked to defend their principles, can't do it because they've been taught ROI-based thinking."

"Companies that claim to be mission driven, most of them are just mission hopeful. It's bullshit. It's just like candy coating on top of an extractive engine."

"The most consequential decisions that will affect any organisation's life are almost by definition made when no manager is present. Only the invisible leader is present."

"People act like having a startup fail is the worst thing that can happen to you. And man, that's not even in the top 10."

"If you're asking whether you should pivot or not you probably know the answer already."

"The number one lesson of the scientific method is if you can't fail, you can't learn."

"Write out the list of features that are necessary in your MVP. Cut it in half and cut it in half again and build that."

"Nothing real can be threatened, and nothing unreal exists."

"It was kind of like, Bolt's this overnight success, seven years in the making."

"Until you see pull, just people pulling the product out of your hands, you don't want to be spending money. You should be like, default, no."

"Sonnet was really the first model that flipped the equation."

"PMs are going to be 'writing code', quote, unquote, instead of just writing a JIRA ticket and waiting for a developer to do it."

"Just having less people, and more context per head. That's just been how we do it, and we feel very strongly about it."

"What your manager should do and $4 will get you a cup of coffee at Starbucks."

"Managers help those who help them. It's just human nature."

"An owner never says that's not my job."

"You don't need very many good ideas to be seen as tremendously inventive."

"If I can get away with publicly failing one of the richest and most famous inventors on earth, and then get promoted and finish my career at Amazon very successfully, you can dig out of any hole."

"Anything can be optimised. You just need to understand the underlying systems and the rules of the game."

"Google's slice of the pie stays the same. The pie gets bigger."

"For Answer Engine Optimisation, definitely do AEO, and only do citation optimisation and long tail. Don't do any of the mid-SEO stuff — early-stage companies can win quickly."

"Most best practices, most blog posts are not correct. The reason is because people don't do analysis. Somebody will say something and then it will get repeated, and then it becomes best practice and no one ever did an analysis."

"There's more AI-generated content on the internet than human-generated content — which is disturbing."

"The brain is like a college campus that has different departments in it. Most people rely on their history department way too much."

"It's critical to ask what kind of experience am I? Not how good am I at my job, how much do I know, how critical am I to this process, but am I a miserable experience? If the answer is yes, don't worry too much about the other pieces yet. You got to fix that first."

"Mission, vision, values: if it was an airline, you would not allow any family to fly on that airline. It does not arrive at most of its intended destinations."

"We should have a bias to impact, not a bias to action. We shouldn't just do stuff, we should have an effect that has the result of value creation."

"You will never get a gamma idea from a beta mind."

"If you want to have a good idea, you have to have lots of ideas."

"15 years ago, we essentially learned that software is not a moat, which is something that everyone is discovering today with AI."

"I think people don't spend nearly enough time thinking about distribution and figuring out distribution."

"Humanity is far more important than the technological developments, largely because humanity dictates how technology is adopted."

"You have two ears and one mouth. Use them in that proportion."

"You can't do homework. You can't do exercises. You can't do fake stuff. You have to work on real products at real companies with real customers, with real data to get better at product management." "The real acceleration happens from doing it and getting more reps. You have to actually execute and deliver great products, and you have to do it over, and over, and over again." "What matters is the end result, the end product, the end feeling. What's in your strategy doc isn't that important. It's actually just an input into the end experience that you're trying to deliver for customers." "Impact is what you do, multiplied by your ability to show that work and communicate it. You have to have not just impact on the customers, but also on the organisation." "At the leadership level, the baseline is: I believe this is the outcome we need to get to by this time, and this is what it's going to take. You find yourself victim of the circumstances instead of owning the situation."

"'If you do the hard path and it doesn't work, actually you still win because you've now done something hard.' 'Pair programming is the most underutilized management tool in engineering, bar none.' 'What if you just did more per minute?' 'Everything you know is wrong.' 'We have a Delete Code Club. We can always almost find a million-plus lines of code to delete, which is insane.'"

"'The only moat in human data is access to an audience.' 'The models have gotten so good that the generalists are no longer needed. What they really need is experts.' 'There will never be a time like this. I've never seen anything like it. I doubt I'll ever feel anything like this in business again where there's unlimited demand.' 'Leave nothing to chance. How do you make sure that three months from now, six months, you have no regrets? Get on the plane to go talk to a customer, make the late night push, check the data six times over again.' 'Being AI native and having your Iron Man suit on and understanding how to leverage these tools is like young people are at a huge advantage.'"

"'Our engineering goal is every engineer should ship a marketable product every week.' 'These are all features that every competitor knows about... it's not going to be a game changer in terms of winning against your competition. So we have a second roadmap which we think of as a secret roadmap.' 'As a startup, your job is to take on technical debt because that is how you operate faster than a bigger company.' 'If nobody complains, it's almost red flag.' 'The easiest way to be the best is to be the first.'"

"'Any second you spend planning is a second you don't spend doing.' 'Every support ticket is a failure of our product.' 'If you're able to write things clearly, you're able to think through things clearly.' 'I actually think velocity is a way to potentially avoid burnout.' 'Talent wants to join companies that ship fast.'"

"'Big enough to matter, small enough to lead, and a good fit with your crown jewels.' 'Pragmatists need references and they will not accept a visionary as a reference, and they don't have any peers that have tried it yet.' 'Shut the God damn laptop. Just don't open it.' 'In the bowling alley, it's never about you.' 'You're a scarce resource, so don't waste it.'"

"Superhuman AI will create TikTok that you actually can't look away from — with a hundred humanities worth of intelligence generating content."

"Everything running in the universe is computation."

"AI will almost surely kill everyone — but through human misuse, not AI malevolence. The risk is the little red button, not the AI itself."

"AI accelerators are fundamentally software rather than hardware problems. AMD makes competitive silicon — the gap is open-source culture and driver quality."

"NVIDIA dominance risks nationalisation. The goal of Tiny Corp is to decentralise computational power."

"'I fixed it by telling people you're going to get this every week. Now I have to do it. I just have no choice.' 'When I wrote a really good article that resonated with people, I saw myself getting a raise. This is just something you don't get in corporate.' 'I have this benefit that everyone left blogging for YouTube and TikTok. Fewer people write, because people find it hard. You can take advantage of these shifts.' 'Set goals that you can control. Setting a goal that I want a successful newsletter with 20,000 subscribers is a goal where you're not in charge.' 'I never thought I would turn this into a business, but it always felt rewarding. Never even thought it was an opportunity.'"

"Recurring revenue businesses, you cannot think about marketing and growth and the business overall as ending at acquisition. Otherwise, you're not in business anymore." "We didn't even touch anything after the signup experience. We hadn't even gotten there and the trial-to-paid conversion rate increased 40% — just because a more qualified, better fit customer was coming through the door." "It was the story of how I met and fell in love with your product — a documentary of being out in the world, finding it, realising that this might actually solve a problem, getting enough value to convince them to keep going to full value realisation." "You want to reflect them back to them. That is what is going to show them that you understand the problem that they have and that your product has exactly what it is that they need." "I've never been in a scenario like this where a founder has not learned something new from their research and been able to leverage it in a way that makes their product experience better."

"Product strategy is about finding ways to delight customers in hard-to-copy, margin-enhancing ways. Any strategy is just a hypothesis — and most of them fail."

"We put a happy family on the couch on the non-member sign-up page. I said, 'Great, HB — but I'll bet my paycheck that within a week Blockbuster is going to put a happy family on their couch too.' That's the problem with easy-to-copy."

"Customers said they wanted their new release DVDs faster. We ran the A/B test. The retention improvement was 4.5% to 4.45%. The value was $1M. The inventory cost was $5M. Never substitute stated preference for observed behaviour."

"SWAG — stupid wild-ass guess. Take a rapid position, share it one-to-one with people who know more than you, iterate, then present. Don't hire a consulting company to do it."

"The number one source of misalignment I discover among startups is unresolved disagreement about whether Growth, Engagement, or Monetisation comes first. Get the leaders in a room and force-rank them."

"Paid growth is almost like an addiction — as much as you're able to limit it in the beginning, the better. Once you have those users coming in because of paid ads, you can't cut it off because you still need that growth." "Retention, I don't think of it in terms of 'I must retain this user.' It's: is this thing valuable or not? Either it's providing real value or it's not. If it's providing real value, people stick around. It's as simple as that." "By paying for Duolingo, you're making language learning accessible to millions of people. That actually improved the metric. People cared enough to make the payment." "Countries are different, but it's more important to realise that people like to think they're different and like to think their countries are different because it makes them feel special. We're all special — but this is not necessarily it." "Communication isn't about being able to convey a message. It's about being able to convey a message in a way that the listener receives it, and understands it, and remembers it."

"Great careers are not built by grinding promotions linearly. They are built by knowing a lot of people, doing great work so they want you on their teams, and waiting for serendipity and then seizing it."

"Engineers are by far the most expensive resources in the company. If you're not caring for and feeding this team — not leveraging this amazing, expensive resource — that's a crime."

"If a feature is shipped but doesn't change customer behaviour at all, is it really a feature? It's like a tree falling in the forest."

"A bad PM can really screw up the work of 10 engineers. So it's much more important to hire a good PM than a good engineer — the leverage of a bad PM is just that much higher."

"My rule of thumb: when they search your name on Google, if your LinkedIn profile is the first result, you've done something wrong. What should come up is an article you wrote, a tweet you published, someone mentioning you for what you stand for."

"'Life is suffering. So figure out something worth suffering for.' 'Everything you want is on the other side of worse first.' '"Not now" will turn into "not ever", because not now is just another way of saying I'm not going to do it.' 'Don't ask what the world needs. Ask instead what makes you come alive, because what the world needs most is for you to come alive.' 'Ninety per cent of people never even know what they want. The first magic is just knowing what you want.'"

"'Hire painfully slowly.' 'Give them one egg, someone can catch it; give them too many eggs, they're going to drop it.' 'I think every founder today has a chance to innovate on org design.' 'You're honestly just trying to increase your luck surface area as much as possible.' 'Our first ten employees, all ten of them are still here today, five years later.'"

"Rome always wins because even if they lose battles, they go to the Italian allies and half citizens and raise new armies."

"More Romans died at Cannae than Americans in 20 years in Vietnam. More than Gettysburg's three-day death toll."

"Pyrrhus, a Greek mercenary, defeats Rome three times, but Rome keeps raising new armies. He says fighting Rome is like fighting a hydra."

"Roman law is most significant legacy on modern world. Something like 90% of world uses legal system directly or indirectly derived from Roman."

"Othering others is morally corrosive thing to do."

"Restricting your speech back propagates to restricting your thoughts."

"If your information is sufficiently de-localised, it is protected from that local fault — the same principle applies to decentralised AI development."

"Every developer should have access to AI systems, can understand how to work with them — open-source AI parity prevents monopolistic dominance."

"The human techno-capital memetic machine should hyperstitiously engineer its own growth through market-driven acceleration."

"P(doom) calculations are sloppy — neural bias toward negative futures distorts estimates; physics principles show growth-optimised systems dominate."

"If I drill down what makes companies fail, it's quite simple. They don't talk to users, which means they don't find product-market fit. And if they don't find product-market fit, nothing else really matters."

"People confuse external validation with the thing that matters the most, which is talking to customers and learning what matters."

"Strategy kind of assumes that you can do multiple things at the same time, which small startups cannot. They can just do one thing at a time. So execution is the thing that matters."

"The worst thing that can happen to a startup is not that people hate what you're doing — it's that they're completely indifferent to what you're doing."

"This decision has been made — we are going to stop doing the things we're doing and change our entire energy system. The question is how it's going to happen."

"'I think what we're entering now is we're going from curation to recommendation to generation. I suspect it will be as big of a shift that you will eventually have to rethink your products.' 'If you don't understand the performance of your machine learning, you can't design for it.' 'If you put autonomy very far towards the leaves of the organisation, there is a fair chance that you're just going to produce heat. You're going to have a hundred squads with a hundred strategies running in a hundred directions.' 'You have to believe in things 100% until the data says no, and then you believe in something else 100%. That sounds easy. It's very hard to do.' 'We have historically used the word art and magic for anything that we couldn't yet explain. Intelligence and creativity was art and magic until it was statistics in an LLM.'"

"Buffett talks about a castle and a moat. The moat is the barrier — but that's only half of it. You also need the castle. Power requires both the benefit and the barrier."

"Operational excellence is a treadmill. You have to run it, you can never stop running it — but it doesn't get you anywhere your competitors can't also get."

"Network effects are common. Network economies are rare. Uber and Lyft both have network effects. Neither has network economies."

"Data scale economies are almost always a chimera. The learning curve flattens. After a threshold, more data stops making the model materially better."

"The biggest impact of AI will not be from the model providers or the AI-native startups. It will be from the reconfiguration of established companies — the same way electricity didn't matter most for power plants, it mattered most for the factories that rewired themselves around it."

"'People are used to looking for certain particular titles, and they didn't start realising other people could do this job.' 'I've actually never seen a great PM who's in the centre of it. I find the great PMs live on the edges.' 'When you start moulding the clay, people want to come and help. When you start building something cool, people gravitate to it.' 'A product that turns a moment of annoyance into a moment of joy — it's not that you solved a pain point. It's an unreasonable experience.' 'People who gravitate to the really hard problems, who know those problems are hard, have a very special gift. It is hard to replicate that passion.'"

"'Reteaming is inevitable. We might as well get better at it because we're going to have to deal with it.' 'It could be like having a new job within our same company. It could extend the lifespan of the amazing employee in your company.' 'The company of today is not the company it was a year ago. The people turn over and change, what we work on turns over and change.' 'You can really create not only products that people love, but companies that people love and want to be at.' 'Appreciate it when you're on a team and you love it and it's amazing because these are our lives and we have to have gratitude and appreciate what we have because naturally things evolve and change.'"

"PLG I always say is actually fundamentally DLG, data-led growth. When you give away your free product, what you want to get in exchange are two things: a broader reach, and an understanding of the usage behaviour of those free users. If you don't have a foundation of data, you are giving away your free product for nothing."

"PLG is a motion. It's cross-functional by nature. It's not just a product team or growth team."

"Doing growth is always about finding leverage. If you can find the area that with relatively small investment gives you the biggest results, that can create such momentum and empower you through future experiments."

"In data you are only isolating correlation. You are not proving causation. You just saw people who are doing this are more likely to convert. Experimentation is the step where you finally validate that."

"Do is better than show is better than tell. Remove all the frictions, give users a warm start, give them some sample template or sample thing they can play with immediately — and supplement with email to bring them back if they leave."

"'The misconception is I'll feel better and then I'll act. The thing that therapists try to teach people is I will act and then I will feel better.' 'You come up thinking you're the protagonist. But in the story of work, you are probably not the protagonist.' 'The reward loop needs to be powerful, it needs to be immediate, and it needs to be emotional, so that when this person does the thing that you want them to do, they feel like a million bucks.' 'I would really love it if more people were like, "Screw it. I'm going to do something that's probably going to fail and it's important and it's worth doing and I'm going to do it well."' 'If they didn't have the part of the song that sucked, the cool part wouldn't be as cool.'"

"'If you were literally founding a new company from scratch with the same mission, how would you execute on that mission using a fully AI native approach? If you can't, then you should find a buyer and then if you really care about this mission, go and start the next carnation of it.' 'It's actually now also hard to taste the soup without participating in at least some part of creating the soup.' 'We have what I call the fast thinking group... we want to just ship a bunch of new capabilities on a near weekly basis. And each of them should be truly awesome value. You should drop your jaw, how awesome it is to use this new capability in Airtable. And then separately, we have the slow thinking group, and that's not meant to be better or worse. It's literally like you need fast and slow thinking in the common sense to operate as a human.' 'I think for a completely novel product experience or form factor, you should actually not start with evals and you should start with vibes. Meaning you need to go and just test in a much more open-ended way.' 'There's a strong advantage to any of those three roles who can kind of cross over into the other two... you need to get decently good at all three. There's just a minimum baseline of if you're any one of those roles, you need to be minimally good at the other two.'"

"Given the same skill, intelligence, and resources, a product manager with a great innate ability to prioritise is going to generate 5× the impact of someone without that skill."

"Trust is the currency of a product manager and a product leader. If you want more resources, if your leadership doesn't trust you to use those resources well, you're probably not going to get them."

"If you forget about politics, forget about promotion — if you simply wake up every day trying to have the biggest impact you can, how you do every part of your day, that's a really good guiding light."

"You don't have a problem paragraph — maybe that's because there isn't really a problem."

"The most common sign you're not working backwards: you're talking about the ingredients in the pantry — two technologies, two services you could combine — and what's enabled if you put them together. That's not working backwards."

"'Copilot is a copilot, it is not a pilot. And I keep on saying that sentence again and again.' 'Most developers span less than 25, some say less than 20% of their time writing in code. So if we're able to give them half an hour back, one, they can write more code. Second, they can have a break and take a breath so we don't burn them out and they're more happy. Third, we give them more time for collaboration and creative thinking, so that sparks innovation.' 'Time is not quantifiable as a success metrics because you can write really bad code really fast.' 'If you try to structure innovation, you're losing that organic spark that is humanity. Imagine that someone say you have 15 minutes a day to be creative. I don't think it's the pull. So it's encouraging that thinking more than structured.' 'The grounding principle was the developer needs to want to use this tool. And the more you add friction, the more you add churn, the more you add complexity, the developers will not want to use their tool.'"

"They didn't believe in ghosts, they took them for granted. And they didn't believe in the gods, they took them for granted. This is a different mechanism."

"I think the big mistake for mankind was the creation of monotheistic religions, because they brought evil into the world. Because if you believe in a monotheistic religion, that means I'm right and you're wrong if you don't."

"It's the most salient and important thing that came out of America in all its history, is the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary. There's only one rival to it for cultural importance, which is the electric guitar, of course."

"It wasn't two stories about the same thing. It was literary dependence. The one was locked into the other."

"Not expressible in Akkadian grammar are these modal verbs — could, might, should, ought. They can't be expressed grammatically. But it is impossible that it was such a magnificent literary language where they didn't have these subtleties."

"You come up with an idea, you believe in it, all the indications show it's good, maybe the early tests show it's good — then you just go all in. That's opinion-based development."

"There was not a single line of code written. It was just cooked up by the researchers and our designers. But it gave us some evidence to go and say, we should try and build this thing."

"It's connected to some theme — it's about AI, that makes it a good idea? Absolutely not. Thousands and thousands of terrible ideas are being implemented right now as we speak based on these themes."

"The metric is not how fast can we get the bits into production. It's how fast can we get the right bits to production. It's time to outcomes."

"If you decide upfront with low confidence that this particular idea must be launched, the roadmap can suffocate this entire process."

"People don't want to eat the broccoli but people like sugar. So give them the sugar, then hide the broccoli inside of it."

"Tools are extensions of us. And once they extend us, once we shape them, once we bring them to world, they can come back to shape us."

"Too much of yourself, then there's no users. Then you're just doing a research project. And too much for business, you're building a commodity."

"You can create progress through better abstractions and that thing compounds faster, can catch up to all the things you built much quicker than you ever thought."

"If you build in a Lego way inside Notion — in the code base or the product — the system works for you. If you're building non-Lego way, the system works against you."

"The Mongol, the horse and the bow were a perfect combination and it was the most lethal weapon known to the world before the modern era."

"He had no infantry and he had no baggage train, he had no backup commissary."

"It would fit in a stadium today in America."

"I would say in both negative and positive ways, it was the most important relationship of his adulthood aside from Börte."

"He risked everything, he was willing to die."

"A good strategy is all about connecting the dots — from the high-level business goal to the feature we're going to do. If there are missing assumptions, the strategy has missing dots."

"Anytime you have disagreements that feel torny or like a disagreement in values, that's a sign you actually have a disagreement in strategy — it's worth writing down your strategic principle and addressing the problem at that level."

"A roadmap in strategy is not a commitment. It's a way to double-check if your plan makes any sense at all. And what happens every time you do one — you realise the vision is a 30-year vision at the pace you're going."

"If you come in on day one saying your strategy is all wrong, it raises the question: why did you join my team if you didn't believe in my strategy?"

"Tell me about a recent project you're proud of. A lot of interviews don't give people enough chance to shine — to talk about something they did really well and hear what made it so good."

"'Going from a one to a two-day streak, huge jump in retention, two to three day streak, slightly less but still huge and it's up until day seven. Once you hit day seven, it flans out.' 'There's a point where you go too far and it's a one-way door, and all of a sudden those users, those 9 million users on one-year streaks don't care about their streak anymore. And that is, I don't know, retention PM perspective, that'd be an extinction level event for us.' 'The reason why users care about your streak so much is because Duolingo cares about the streaks so much.' 'Sometimes it's not the big beautiful feature that's going to drive the huge gains, sometimes it's just something simple as a few words.' 'You start to realize, what is the user that you're solving for? So, not only what is the habit that you're building for, but what is the level of commitment.'"

"'You should never be so sure of your worth that you wouldn't accept more.' 'Haste equals risk. The slower you go, the more opportunity you have to collect information so that you can build a compelling case.' 'You are at such a disadvantage. Meta negotiates thousands of times a day. You negotiate four or five times in your career. That's it. Thousands of times a day. This should also give you confidence to negotiate in the first place.' 'I don't want it to be overly complicated. What negotiation comes down to is information and timing. That's what creates power.' 'I\'m not asking you to take your pie and give them a bigger slice. I\'m asking for you to work with somebody to expand the pie so everybody gets bigger slices.'"

"'We\'re not trying to be incrementally better. We are trying to be fundamentally different. We want our customers to love us fanatically.' 'Good enough isn\'t good enough. Is it great enough?' 'Great execution multiplied by a poor strategy is a waste of everyone\'s time.' 'We may not be right, but at least we are clear.' 'Concentration is what builds wealth. Diversification is what preserves wealth. You\'re a startup — you\'re not trying to preserve anything.'"

"'You're up against a team of engineers who have been trying for years to make this thing as compelling as possible. And you're just one person trying not to check it.'"

"'Willpower never wins. The best strategy is to change the environment so that your default behaviour is the thing you actually want to do.'"

"'At the end of the day, if your Highlight happened, that's a win. Everything else is bonus. That one question changes the whole frame.'"

"'The busy bandwagon is real — there's a social expectation that you should always be reachable, always be reactive. Opting out of that takes deliberate design, not just intention.'"

"'Treat every day like a science experiment. If it didn't work, great — you learned something. Try a different hypothesis tomorrow.'"

"'When you are making a new product, people want to ignore it. People want to not pay attention to it. It\'s crucial that a product has a clear promise that is radically differentiated from the alternatives, and that promise is strong enough that you\'ll try it, and that the product delivers on that promise.' 'The more AI-generated or assisted they are, the more generic they tend to turn out. Going fast can actually slow you down in the long run.' 'Every new product has at its core a hypothesis. It\'s just usually not explicit. It\'s usually hidden, and different people on the team may have different ideas about what it is.' 'While you\'re outsourcing prototyping, don\'t outsource the thinking as well.' 'The act of building and starting to create something has a momentum of its own that can be hard to stop. And if you\'re headed in the wrong direction, you can spend a lot of time building and making progress — but if it\'s not progress in the right direction, it\'s actually hurting you.'"

"WWII's global nature — fought across deserts, oceans, jungles, and steppes — combined with profound human drama, makes it the defining catastrophe of modern history."

"Hitler wasn't a military genius. He adopted others' successful plans while being blinded by ideology. The ideology that was supposed to power Germany ultimately destroyed it."

"Goebbels — not Hitler — was the true genius of the Nazi regime. He understood that a cheap radio in every home was more powerful than any army."

"Ninety-two percent of Britons opposed war in 1938. Britain had no treaty obligation to Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain was not naive — he was constrained by democracy."

"Economic crisis, political division, and effective propaganda enabled totalitarianism. Patterns of human behaviour repeat even if specific circumstances don't."

"The value isn't in your roadmap, the value is in the roadmapping process. What you're actually doing is laying out your assumptions of the problems that you're solving." "The problem with the timeline is that as soon as you have a timeline, it turns it into a math chart sort of thing — everything that you do has a due date just by the format of the roadmap, which is painful. It's just wrong, because we don't have that." "You're not asking for any more leeway than your salesperson. You should be accountable for your experiments and how you're spending the money, but you shouldn't be accountable for saying what is going to work before you know what's going to work yet." "I think of culture as calcification. In order to fix it, you can kind of chip it off over time. You can't just fix it all in one go." "People in the audience are rooting for you. Whenever I see somebody who's struggling on stage, just give them a nod, a smile, clap them along — and hopefully they'll just pull through."

"Black holes are no thing. They're nothing. And that's the more profound aspect of the black hole."

"The singularity ends up in their future and they can no more avoid the singularity than they can avoid time coming their way."

"The discovery is going to come because somebody couldn't sleep at night and couldn't rest."

"The best scientists I know often ask the simplest questions. They're never going to lie to themselves that they understand something that they don't understand."

"You would see millennia pass on earth. You could see the evolution of the entire galaxy — one big bright flash of light. It's like a near-death experience, but it's definitely a total death experience."

"'Think about the gauntlet they went through to get to the product. They found you, clicked, didn't bounce, got to the pricing page, had the budget, bought it, went through onboarding — and after all of that, they're like, "No, bye." And you're going to believe them when they say it's because of the cost?'"

"'Your prices are way too low because you just guessed and you haven't changed them.'"

"'Cancellations automatically grow as you grow, even if you're doing everything right, but marketing doesn't. Marketing grows only as fast as you can improve marketing. That's why cancellations always overtake marketing.'"

"'If you don't know who the patsy is at the A/B testing table, it's you. If you don't have all the knowledge to run this correctly, most of your results are false positives.'"

"'Maybe the "you" in "if you're not growing, you're dying" is you the person, not you the company. If you're a shark, you've got to go.'"

"'Like with any of these major tech revolutions, the headlines tell one story and then on the ground, laying broadband means you need to dig up every single road in America to lay it. Someone's got to dig up the road.'"

"'You can build something that provides a lot of value, but if it's not the top thing that the customer is thinking about in their busy days, then you're just going to have a long road to a small town.'"

"'Why am I so lucky to have this insight? Why in a world of a million entrepreneurs who are thinking, who are smart, who are trying everything, why am I in the position where I likely have an insight that others do not?'"

"'Easy to learn, hard to master. That's my summary of AI adoption.'"

"'The end is never the end. You have to survive before you thrive, and most people just give up before they get their timing right, before they get the right insight with the customer.'"

"'The editor, the writer — they don't care about you. They care about their reader or their listener or their viewer. That's who they're serving, and if you can be of use to them in sharing the kinds of information they are looking to serve their audience, then you can get what you want.'"

"'You don't go out and raise money if you don't know what the money is for. You shouldn't go out and try to get press if you don't know what the press is for.'"

"'Success stories are not interesting. They're not interesting to anybody. What's useful is for you to hear how someone else faced challenges that you faced and got through them, so that you can see — aha, that's an interesting strategy to use for me.'"

"'Opportunity set B is what's available to you, even though nobody's asking you to do it. If you only focus on opportunity set A, then you are only qualified to do the things you're already doing.'"

"'What's the point of building something if you can't maintain it?'"

"'No one ever went broke making a profit.'"

"'Starting a business is actually way easier than staying in business. They should know that that's actually not the hard part. Literally tomorrow, I can start a new business. Staying is harder than starting.'"

"'An estimate is like how long do we think it's going to take? We instead have appetites. And our appetite for any individual feature is no more than six weeks. That's our budget we're willing to spend. Work expands to fill the time available.'"

"'The reason I think it's great for entrepreneurs to start bootstrapping is because they just have more practice making money. They get better and better and better at the fundamental skill you need to have to run a successful business, which is to make money.'"

"'I don't plan long-term because I want to do what I think, not what I thought. The further out you plan, the less you know about the decisions you're making. People end up doing things they don't want to do because they said they were going to do them.'"

"'The stress between product and sales is a good thing. It's a sign of a well-run B2B company when there is stress between product and sales. If there's no stress, you're not in enough deals.'"

"'Even the best salespeople never leave a meeting without a next step. Mediocre salespeople are terrible at this.'"

"'Free products are better software. Products that cannot offer a free edition cut corners because they don't have to be good at onboarding.'"

"'Who's your VP of Free? Because who's got a VP of Free? Do you know anybody that has a VP of Free? I know almost no one that has a VP of Free.'"

"'When I reflect on my career, I think I'm good, but not always kind. It's how I challenge myself all the time. Be kinder in that conversation. Anytime an employee fails, it's your fault. You hired them.'"

"'Pushback starts from a place of I need to disagree, I need to say no. It's a very negative mindset, purely based on the word that has come to label a behaviour that alternatively could be about how do I shift the direction on something, or how do I help the business actually succeed when I disagree with somebody about something.'"

"'Strict concision — fewer words means every word is 10 pounds in weight instead of one, and that means that the decisions you're making, the trade-offs are far more intentional.'"

"'Ladder is about moving up — more influence, more power, a higher title. Map is I just want to go wherever's interesting. I think of my career very similar to travel. I care more about living a really interesting life than a good or comfortable life.'"

"'A lot of people are very intentional in the micro — they think about their next job, their next title — but they're very unintentional about the macro. What's the big picture? What do I care about as an individual?'"

"'Understanding and defining what problem matters is the most important skill I've taken away. It can apply to a specific product we're building. It can apply to what a company's mission is. It affects pretty much everything.'"

"'The important thing is, is your code good? We care about excellent code. We don't care who you are. Like maybe you're a dog. I don't care, right? I don't care where you come from. I need to look at your code.'"

"'If we had to compromise our software, we would shut it down. This is clear.'"

"'FFmpeg has one hundred thousand lines of assembly for all the codecs.'"

"'If you're good in C, in FFmpeg, if you know how to write assembly, I assure you you're going to be one of the best programmers ever, even if you're working on writing TypeScript.'"

"'The airplane has been rebuilt whilst it's in the air.'"

"'The litmus test I have always given my sales team is if you are an account executive in my org and I put you in front of 10 engineers at our company, it should take them 10 minutes to figure out you aren't a product manager.'"

"'We buy a lot of things because of how we feel about them. The experience that you have of being sold to will increasingly differentiate a company and drive buying decisions if products are only different at the margin.'"

"'80% of customers buy to avoid pain or reduce risk as opposed to increase upside. We all love to talk about the art of the possible, but that's often a sale that's going to resonate with another founder. For everybody else, particularly enterprises, you're avoiding the risk of not making your revenue target next quarter.'"

"'Segmentation is not just a go-to-market thing. I really think it's a company thing. When a new product manager leaves the room, they should think, "I'm building a new back-end product — who is this targeted at? Do I have a point of view on where I'm trying to win and why?"'"

"'For the twenty years I've been in sales, sellers have always spent around 30 to 40 percent of their time in front of customers. With agents, we can finally get salespeople to 70 percent interacting with humans and have the rote work done by an agent.'"

"'There's three types of fun, fun for the player, fun for the designer, and fun for the computer.'"

"'My whole career and my family are thanks to EverQuest, so I think I won the game.'"

"'I literally threw away everything, I mean, in a dumpster. I used to keep copious notes, like journals, my writing journals, everything I ever read, every story idea. I probably had 20 volumes of just handwritten notes… all of my manuscripts, and I threw it all in the dumpster.'"

"'Ideas are easy. Ideas, you know, I can have 10 in 10 seconds… ideas are just infinite. At least on creative teams, you know, you have no shortage of ideas. What I call vision is the ability to not only take a great idea, but shepherd it into existence, and you're doing that through inspiration first and foremost.'"

"'Being a creative leader, you're in two modes. You're pushing or you're pulling, and whatever mode you're in is the exact opposite of the team.'"

"The install base defines an architecture. Everything else is secondary."

"Computing went from being a retrieval-based, file retrieval system...to now, AI computers are contextually aware, which means that it has to process and generate tokens in real time."

"The goal of a company is to be the machinery, the mechanism, the system that produces the output."

"We need things to be as complex as necessary, but as simple as possible."

"When I believe it in my mind, you know how it is. You manifest a future and that future is so convincing, there's no way it won't happen."

"People would actually respect this idea of 'You've given me minimal lovable in five areas as opposed to minimal viable in 15 areas.'" "Understand why people love you, double down on that, and then whatever else you build around it — really go back to what's the core of our advantage." "Think about your trust as a bank. You're putting money in, and at some point you're going to take money out — you have to be thoughtful about how full your piggy bank is." "I would much rather have all the OKRs be red or yellow and we learned around why we missed it, than everything to be green. When everything's green, you're like: we definitely did not set ambitious enough OKRs." "If you don't ask for help, there's so many times where you're just going to be sitting there with your problems. Whatever you have in your mind is just not the global best thing."

"Almost every major result in mathematical logic is using in an abstract way the idea of diagonalization. It was really the start of so many other observations — Russell's paradox, the halting problem, the recursion theorem."

"No one shall cast us from the paradise that Cantor has created for us."

"If you have a theory that proves its own consistency, well, even an inconsistent theory would prove its own consistency. It's like the used-car salesman telling you, 'Oh, I'm trustworthy.'"

"Hilbert's programme tells us the fundamental nature of mathematics is rote computation — devoid of creative thinking or imagination, just turning the crank of the theorem enumeration machine. Gödel shows this is structurally impossible."

"There is a proof that every number is interesting. Suppose toward contradiction that there are boring numbers. Then there is a smallest boring number. But that is a super interesting property to have. Contradiction."

"The dysfunctional companies are all the same and the happy companies, the higher performing companies, can be very, very different." "You can have a bunch of geniuses in the room and if there's not coherent leadership and there's not coherent structure in what you're doing, they'll fail." "People trying to put tools in play out of context sometimes had worse effects than them just not doing it at all." "Skill is knowledge times practice mediated by your environment, the habits you form and the motivation that you have." "I meet some of these leaders and they feel beaten up by the advice industry. They feel beaten up that they can never be good enough."

"The longest possible game is to keep entropy at bay as long as possible, by doing interesting stuff."

"The opposite of free will is not determinism — it's compulsion."

"I don't want to have the best possible emotions. I want to have the most appropriate emotions."

"If you're at stage five, you're mostly worried that AI is not going to be enlightened fast enough — because you realise the game is not so much about intelligence, but about agency."

"LLMs are brute-forcing the problem of thought by trying to deepfake it. If you have enough data, the deepfake becomes indistinguishable from the actual phenomenon."

"You want to diagnose with data and treat with design. Data is not a tool that's going to tell you what you should build." "We need to dissolve the boundaries of these traditional roles and call ourselves builders. I'd love for us to get to the world where that's the title." "Every strength is its own weakness, and every weakness is a strength. There's no such thing as you're going to somehow get every dimension to be 100%." "A team that gets 1% better every week compared to a team that gets 1% better a month is going to outperform in a very short amount of time the team that doesn't get better. The best tool for us to get better is feedback." "Be like the willow tree — it can survive a lot of storms, but the branches are very flexible, and that's what allows it to be sturdy."

"Being in an uncomfortable situation, being in a position where you feel like, hey, do I really know how to do this? I've not been prepared for it — that's kind of coin sides with the fastest and most intense periods of growth in one's career."

"I always often say I'm the number one audience for my own writing because I'm the person who needs to really hear it the most."

"Focus on identifying the problem and making it really clear for the other person what the problem is. Sometimes we're all solvers and builders, and so you often get into: instead of talking about the problem, I'm just going to give you a solution."

"If you write because you're trying to work on a particular key skill — whether it is clarity of thinking, whether it's helping you work through some stuff that's complicated in your mind — then make it a goal, but make it an action goal. Make it like a word count goal."

"The better you understand your customers, I think the better you're going to be able to build a product. Your intuition is likely not going to carry you nearly as far if you're building a B2B product for a job you've never done yourself."

"You can inflict change on people, but if you want to do it with them, really trust is the key element there."

"Failure is not that you didn't drive revenue, failure is not learning."

"If the equation is fundamentally broken, no amount of iteration and execution can get you out of the failed outputs of the broken equation."

"I don't think you're a good PM if you haven't shipped something that's really shitty. You just haven't had enough reps, you haven't done it enough times."

"We are very encouraged in our lives, especially professionally, to talk about our A side all the time because that's what impresses people."

"You are a leader from day one in product management. You don't have any formal authority, but you're a leader. You're expected to lead." "Advice is not as powerful as you might think it is. It's a little bit like cotton candy. Doesn't have a lot of nutrition. You get a nice sugar high. You feel great, both sides feel happy, but then a couple weeks later, nothing's really changed." "I want to be the type of leader where, a decade later, people say, 'I would work with that guy again in a heartbeat.'" "Kodak invented the digital camera. It wasn't like people at Kodak were dumb. They didn't know digital was coming. No, they literally invented the digital camera. There just wasn't an environment created where the people who had that idea could step up and try." "You may recognize I can't be that authentic way of leader at this place or in this type of company, but I know how to find it and I'm going to go find it."

"A lot of marketing metrics tend to be vanity metrics about the number of clicks that you got, number of views, number of impressions. I think those are all bullshit numbers."

"The work of marketing ended up becoming creating this sort of use case epiphany where people could say, 'I had no idea ChatGPT can do that.'"

"It seems like there's a playbook for everything, there is a framework for everything, but the reality is you have to spend the hours and the time to really understand your customer."

"A brand is an expectation that you create within your audience."

"The delta between expectations and reality is the function for unhappiness. And so it is much easier to change expectations than it is reality."

"The Viking long ships could average 70 to 120 miles a day. They could hit a place, raid it, drag off whoever they wanted, and get away before you could get your army there. That's just absolutely terrifying."

"We have no king. We are all kings."

"Men die, but names live forever."

"The greatest real estate scam in history."

"By destroying the things they destroyed, they cleared the ground for something stronger to grow."

"An activation rate that falls in a lower percentage range, maybe for most companies five to 15%, is better than one that falls in a higher percentage range because it means that there's likely much higher correlation with long-term retention and you're really working hard to get most of your users to reach a state that they're not reaching today."

"Onboarding is that first really important choke point that from which downstream of onboarding so many important metrics and results flow for the business, from converting someone to a paid customer to closing a deal to growing how many people in an organisation are using your product."

"It's important that growth teams are agile and this means that north stars, key metrics, focus metrics will change, and if you're working on the same metric forever, there's probably some inefficiency in actually chasing the biggest impact for the business."

"Employees of a company build onboarding for customers, but they build what they think customers want rather than what customers actually want, and that manifests in an onboarding experience that's not very helpful."

"A north star metric should really be a measure of what you plan to do — the strategy you plan to deliver is delivering results for the business on the other side, rather than the other way around."

"The history is in the objects. It's kind of cool, right?"

"Ultimate randomness and ultimate complexity are indistinguishable until you can see structure in the randomness, so you can see copies."

"My biggest fear in a way is that life is everywhere, but we've become infinitely more lonely."

"What I love about being a scientist is sometimes I don't understand what people tell me."

"Selection produces intelligence. Kind of, I would go out on a limb and say that."

"The fact that we can deduce the existence of something that we don't directly see is really a tribute to people that we can do that. It's also something that tells you, you can't overly rely on your direct senses."

"It would be really weird if the only time things came into existence was when I saw them or I measured them. I could believe that the Middle East doesn't exist because I'm not there now. That would be kind of ridiculous."

"When they were building Fermilab, it was like — this won't defend the country, but it'll make it worth defending."

"We don't want to just discover the standard model, we want to know what the next step is."

"No matter how many times I see a sunset, I will always find it beautiful. I don't think I ever see a sunset as say whatever. It's just always beautiful."

"It's one of those weird disciplines where the right person at the right time can literally say a sentence that changes the trajectory of your company. You can't say that for a lot of different disciplines, but this is one of them."

"I don't think we've seen something as profound as what's coming. And you really need to get ready for it."

"You want your impact to be so big there's a slide in the next board deck trying to explain what happened."

"The best predictor of future performance is past performance. So I'm looking for what I call signs of excellence."

"It can happen on day one. If you have existing content, it could happen pretty early. If you have to build new parts of the site, it can take months. It's somewhere between three to twelve months."

"The good founders need to be able to dominate both market share and wallet share. It is not a choice. You need to get better at both."

"20% of what you build drives 80% of the willingness to pay. But the irony is that that 20% is the easiest thing to build often."

"The winners in AI will need to master monetization from day one. If you're bringing a lot of value to the table and you start training your customers to expect $20 a month, you've anchored yourself on a low price point — you're in trouble."

"Your reluctance to do a price increase is often internal and emotional — it's not external and logical."

"To stop churn, you need to attract customers who won't leave. Most companies will try to stop churn when someone says, 'I want to go.' It is too late."

"Like a litre is a measure of volume, price is a measure of value." "It's not just about product market fit, it is about achieving a product market pricing fit." "You cannot prioritize a product roadmap without having a willingness to pay conversation." "One size fits all — I would quickly correct them and say: one size fits none." "How you charge is way more important than how much you charge."

"AI is the philosopher's stone. We have a technology that transfers the most common thing in the world, which is sand, converted into the most rare thing in the world, which is thought."

"Everybody wants to talk about job loss, but really, what you want to look at is task loss. The job persists longer than the individual tasks."

"The additive effect of being good at two things is more than double. The additive effect of being good at three things is more than triple. You become a super relevant specialist in the combination of the domains."

"The remaining human workers are going to be at a premium, not at a discount."

"People who really want to improve themselves and develop their career should be spending every spare hour, in my view, at this point, talking to AI — 'All right, train me up.'"

"It is a lot easier to deliver output than it is to deliver outcomes." "Too many people in our industry view themselves as a victim of their company — they're stuck in a feature team and there's nothing they can do about it other than quit. I think that's not true. There is so much they can do." "On a real empowered product team, product manager is a creator, not a facilitator." "If you're thinking without writing, you just think you're thinking." "You don't get points for shipping, you get points for delivering the value."

"People don't buy the problem, they buy your solution. The real question is, do you solve it better than everybody else so that they buy you? And that's where you need to take time."

"In a real product team, you celebrate when you actually solve the problem, when you accomplish those results. That's why we say product teams are about outcomes, they're not about output."

"Once they stop doing real discovery, to me, it's just the beginning of the end."

"Only about 20% of those things will generate any positive return. So you think there's enough evidence out there that they would realise that was fatal, but I think it's a lot of arrogance because every executive thinks they're smarter than every other one."

"If you could change one thing in the industry, it would be everybody would have a decent manager that cared about their career and could help them get better at their job."

"If you were the CEO of this company, would you fully fund your own team?" "Low-impact work begets low-impact work. The more low-impact work you do, the harder it is to do high-impact work." "The product manager is responsible for the whole team thinking like a CEO." "The things you think you're fighting against are usually the things that are giving your work shape, if you let them be." "If you're doing product management really well, you never have to say yes and you never have to say no. You're giving people options and you're helping them understand the trade-offs."

"This product owner role did not emerge from product management as we know it today. It was a way to help the developers prioritise what to work on."

"Take Scrum away. You still need product management. Product owner doesn't exist without Scrum — that's not a thing. But you still need product managers, and that's why all product owners should be product managers."

"Every single person I have talked to who found success with SAFe — they ended up ripping it up and making it into something else. It's not actually SAFe by the book."

"We're talking about work about work, but we're not actually getting into what are we achieving here."

"If you cannot see what good looks like anywhere in your organisation, that's a red flag. Leaders need to look at their organisation and say, 'Do I have people with these skills interspersed around so that everybody can start to learn?'"

"Do you want to hire 10,000 product managers and let them all do these things off the side of their desk and then concentrate on strategic work 30% of the time, or do you want them concentrating on strategic work majority of the time and then help build a product operations team around them?"

"Product operations does not take away decision making rights from the product manager. It's there to inform them."

"It's really about helping the product managers focus on what they were actually hired for — the strategic work."

"We don't usually need another agile coach telling us how to run a standup. We need people to come in and help us figure out who's invited to these cross-functional roadmap reviews, what inputs do we need on there, and what decisions do we need to make coming out of it."

"If you try to serve everybody, you serve no one."

"If you don't feel like you're dumbing it down or oversimplifying, your onboarding is probably too complex."

"The easier you make it to come in, also the easier it can be to leave."

"It is very dangerous to say this specific metric is a North Star for every business."

"You need to have invites early and often so that you catch people who want to share it — for the people who would never participate in that, they can ignore it or skip it."

"No one has built Slack before."

"Fast is fun."

"Being even just a few months ahead makes your product much, much, much more useful in the rapidly evolving AI space."

"As models improve and generate larger changes, helping humans verify diffs becomes increasingly critical — the verification problem."

"Programming often requires rapid iteration and initial versions to clarify intent, making instant interactive models preferable to long-running autonomous agents for most work."

"Until we have formal verification for everything, explicit warnings in code help both humans and AI remember a function's criticality."

"There won't be a decisive winner — continuous cycling of releases occurs."

"Pre-training scaling isn't dead — merely less immediately attractive."

"Three scaling dimensions now exist: traditional pre-training scaling, reinforcement learning scaling, and inference-time compute. All continue working."

"Tool use — where LLMs perform web searches or call Python interpreters — directly addresses hallucinations. Rather than memorising information, models can search for facts or use calculators, ensuring reliability."

"You use models until they break, then explore alternatives. It mirrors how we choose text editors or browsers — default until functionality fails."

"The information mover is essentially going to become a dinosaur."

"The ones that were the best at working in the past, the ones that mastered the old game, find it the hardest to go through this reinvention stage."

"You might see a company shed 30,000 and hire 8,000, but the 8,000 people are going to all be AI first."

"Builders are going to have the time of their lives, but if you don't love building stuff, you're in trouble."

"Your brands don't matter as much as how modern you are in your ability to deliver product."

"When I think about career, I always think about not the next job, but the one after it. Maybe think about not your boss's job but your boss's boss's job and what do I need to think about to get there."

"The moment that the dogs accidentally touched the rabbit, they would never run again — because there was like, 'Well, what's next? I've achieved what I was looking for.' I think this happens a ton."

"Everyone focuses on your superpowers, but no one ever thinks about what shadows they create. The shadow of a superpower is the story of a lot of executives."

"You have to be invited in. You just can't walk through the threshold. No matter how senior the manager, you have to earn the right to be the person's manager."

"Master the story now. Understand the story. If the story sucks, you probably should be thinking through how to make the story not suck."

"To get to recommendation, you're going to blow your users' socks off. You have to give them an experience they didn't know was previously possible."

"You can't split test your way to love."

"The thing that defines success is the speed at which you pick yourself up."

"We just had one list, which is the list of things you need to do to make customers happy, prioritised by impact on the really hard things. And if you do these really hard things, they have an incredible impact for customers, and hence on your growth and on your shareholder value."

"Unless you're doing something hard and new, it's kind of a waste of time."

"The problem is not our technology. The problem is our inability to deal with discomfort." "90% of the time that we get distracted, it's not because of what's happening outside of us — most distraction begins from within: boredom, loneliness, fatigue, uncertainty, anxiety." "You can't call something a distraction unless you know what it distracted you from." "Procrastination is an emotion regulation problem. It's not a character flaw. There's nothing wrong with you." "The time you plan to waste is not wasted time." — Dorothy Parker, cited by Nir Eyal"

"Build a great product that solves a sharp problem. This is the bedrock of virality."

"Virality is when your marketing is essentially done by your customers."

"If you understand the fundamentals, you'll be able to use frameworks in a much more productive way — because you'll adapt it to your stage, you'll adapt it to the problem."

"For a product to make a difference, it has to be at least two, three more X for people to say, 'This is offering enough value for me to maybe make a switch.'"

"There's more knowledge outside my head than inside it."

"This is a meteor coming towards you. This is going to radically transform society. And I think if people don't explore AI properly, it will leave them behind."

"I'd start with the thing your product does. What's the core premise behind it? Why do people use it? What problem does it solve for them? And then ask, 'Can AI do that?'"

"Don't bolt it on. Don't be like, 'Oh, we'll have a bunch of AI people.' Generally speaking, we're trying to have everyone learn about it."

"Sometimes, it would be a great product in a great market explained in a convoluted way. As a result, people are like, 'What? What are you talking about?' You don't get their attention. So, the story is really important, as important."

"To know where the boundary is, you've got to cross it. And crossing it is painful. But, if you don't cross it, you'll never know."

"'I watched my agent happily click the "I'm not a robot" button.'"

"'People talk about self-modifying software, I just built it and didn't even… I didn't even plan it so much. It just happened.'"

"'I actually think vibe coding is a slur.'"

"'I always tell people I do agentic engineering, and then maybe after 3:00 AM I switch to vibe coding, and then I have regrets on the next day.'"

"'The actual art of programming, it will stay there, but it's gonna be like knitting. People do that because they like it, not because it makes any sense.'"

"Getting promoted is way harder if you're not good in telling stories and rallying the team behind the shared goal. I would consider it a bit of a career staller if you don't get to a decent level of storytelling and to a decent level of public speaking."

"It's not a role, it's a career being in product — there are so many things to learn and so many things to get good at."

"You don't get the apps from other people's branches. You cannot really help them develop, but you could remind them of going to the gym."

"Consistency beats intensity. The smaller time investments on a weekly basis — that applies for the PM's time investment in learning new things and it applies to the product lead's investment in helping their people grow."

"Helping people to learn from each other by making room for that and giving them a bit of time to reflect and to share what they're learning — that's rather cheap. And it is still cheaper than sending everybody to trainings and conferences all the time, and it has a lot of ripple effects and network effects."

"Constraints probably make you happy. I went nomad for freedom and ended up depressed. The constraints are the point."

"Ship fast. The only real validation is a paying customer. Everything else is speculation."

"I just used PHP. It works. I'm not interested in what's fashionable."

"I processed every Photo AI order by hand first — download the photos, train the model, email the results. Only then did I automate it."

"What the marketplaces are selling you is taking the friction away. That's what you're paying them for." "A marketplace business never starts as a marketplace business." "Predicting is about picking up patterns, but making decisions, it's about thinking about these differences. You have to think causally." "Many of the changes that are most consequential create winners and losers. The question is always: do the winners matter more than the losers?" "Slow down. What I've found is we're so convinced that speed is the way you're going to find the right answer. But it can lead you astray."

"Don't call it strategy, call it an action agenda. Begin to try to identify the one or two key challenges that can actually be addressed and what are we going to do about it?"

"Strategy is a design for overcoming a high-stakes challenge. It's a mixture of policy and action designed to deal with a challenge."

"Focus is the fundamental source of power in strategy. Trying to do too many different things is defocusing."

"Strategy tends to be surprising when we see it work, and surprising because we don't expect it. We expect people to bumble around."

"He who forecasts the future lies, even if he tells the truth."

"Strategy is an integrated set of choices that compels desired customer action."

"I have never met this mythical beast called a great natural strategist. Great strategists have all one thing in common — they just practice."

"The ultimate way to compete to win is to never actually be forced to compete."

"There's no way to protect yourself if you're not one of those two — differentiated or low cost. You cannot bully Vanguard, you cannot bully Southwest, you cannot bully Lego."

"Water finds a way to flow. You can't hold back the tide — maybe you can for a while, but you can't forever. So you just have to figure out where the customers are going."

"If we create general superintelligences, I don't see a good outcome long-term for humanity."

"We're not dealing with cybersecurity. We're not going to get a new credit card, new humanity — if verification fails, there's no recovery."

"If you give MIRI 10 times the money, they don't output 10 times the safety — while capability gains remain linear with resources."

"You set up parameters for a model and you water this plant — you don't deliberately design specific behaviours. Emergent capabilities mean we're not in control."

"If five years from now, compute is available on a desktop to do it, regulation will not help."

"We are often humbled by how bad we are at predicting the outcome of experiments." "If the result looks too good to be true, hold the celebratory dinner. Investigate first. Nine out of ten times when we call Twyman's law, we find some flaw in the experiment." "If you go for something big, try it out, but be ready to fail 80% of the time." "The most common interpretation of P-value is incorrect. A P-value of 0.02 does not mean there is a 98% probability that the treatment is better than control." "If you're not running an experiment, 70% of the stuff you're shipping is hurting your business — or flat, which means you just introduced more code and maintenance overhead."

"Do you see yourself working on this for a decade? That's my rule of thumb — just do you see yourself working on this for a decade?" "An experiment is really not about success. Of course you want it to be successful, but the goal is not success. It's really to learn." "Momentum is reflexive in that high momentum leads to more high momentum. Low momentum leads to more low momentum — there's this energy that goes through companies." "Everyone has to wear this unfortunate mask — this face of confidence externally and internally as well — where people need to trust you." "If you're building for the tech community and it's not the type of company that needs a massive war chest to compete, there's a scenario where you might not need venture capital."

"We are not going to start something unless we can see the end from the beginning." "You can have the most beautiful rendering of the new bedroom with lamps coming out from the wall — but if you haven't checked if there's electricity in that wall, it's going to drastically change the cost and the time and everything." "If it's shaped well, you can usually describe it in less than ten moving pieces." "It's shaped if we can give this to a technical person and they say, 'Yeah, I know what to go build now.'" "The dominant failure case I see in the real world is always, again and again, not enough detail. Not too much."

"That was definitely the most painful professional experience of my life, and chaotic and shameful and upsetting and a bunch of other negative things."

"I think compute is going to be the currency of the future. I think it'll be maybe the most precious commodity in the world."

"The road to AGI should be a giant power struggle. The world should… Well, not should. I expect that to be the case."

"I think it kind of sucks." [on GPT-4, relative to what's coming]"

"I think this whole thing is unbecoming of a builder." [on Elon Musk's lawsuit]"

"Things only look emergent because we can't see time."

"The universe is far larger in time than it is in space, and this planet is one of the biggest things in the universe."

"Life is the physics of how the universe selects what gets to exist."

"A theory of everything is a theory of everything except those things that theorize."

"The definition of life cannot be the individual. It has to be these lineages because they're all connected, they're interwoven, and they're exchanging parts all the time."

"The short answer is the worlds don't exist in space. Space exists separately in each world."

"Einstein understood quantum mechanics as well as anyone, at least up through the 1930s. His philosophical objections to it are correct. He should actually have been taken much more seriously."

"I would be less surprised to find a quiescent alien artifact in our solar system than I would to catch a radio signal from an intelligent civilization."

"The singularity inside a black hole is not the middle of space but our future. It is a moment of time."

"Many-worlds does not multiply entities — it reduces them. You have fewer assumptions. You have one equation. You have one wave function evolving according to the Schrodinger equation. That's it."

"The question is, how would you feel if you could no longer use this product? What I'm trying to find are those people who say, 'I would be very disappointed' — that's a really powerful vein to dig into." "Just ignore the people who say they'd be somewhat disappointed. They're telling you it's a nice to have. If you start paying attention to what your somewhat-disappointed users are telling you, maybe you're going to dilute it for your must-have users." "Moving retention is usually much more a function of onboarding to the right user experience than it is about the tactical things that people try to do to improve retention." "Your biggest competition when you're really innovating is just being irrelevant. If you're deeply relevant to anyone, that gives you a much better chance of long-term success." "Customer acquisition is so hard that if you're not really efficient at converting and retaining and monetising people, you're going to really struggle on the customer acquisition side."

"Without Ukraine, the Soviet Union could not continue as a viable state."

"The historical Bandera spent most of his life in prison or exile. He was ultimately killed by the KGB. The mythologised Bandera deployed in contemporary politics bears little resemblance to that reality."

"Putin absorbed the KGB's institutional worldview directly — not as a metaphor, but as a lived professional formation. The surveillance state, the primacy of power over law, the framing of all political dissent as foreign sabotage."

"Ukraine's political tradition was formed through resistance to central authority. Russia's was formed through it. These are not superficial differences — they go back centuries."

"The eigenquestion — the simplest definition — it's the question that when answered also answers the most subsequent questions."

"I wanted no dollar signs in the share dialog. Every product has its moment of how it spreads for growth. Going back to YouTube, imagine you had to pay for people you shared with — nobody would ever share anything. But that's how basically every productivity product works."

"Great companies have a very small list of golden rituals. Number one, they're named. Number two, every employee knows them by their first Friday. Number three, they're templated."

"I generally value the reference check over interview signals. If I had to stack rank in interviews what is the best signal, the reference check is the top of the list. Those people, they worked with this person sometimes for years — their knowledge, what you're going to get out of 30 minutes of artificial scenarios, it's just never going to compare with what a good reference check will give you."

"We value consistency over comprehensiveness. We would much rather be on fewer phones with a more consistent experience than be on all of them with an inconsistent experience."

"Most doors that look like two-way doors are actually one-way doors. They are two-way doors at Bezos' level, but as a PM leader, for you, they are a one-way door, and that's making you busy."

"Thinking is cheap, so you should do more thinking, not less."

"Taste is about the ability to identify what is really good, without needing to see its results."

"If you have a real product strategy — a real one that everybody is aligned with — a lot of this nonsense we tend to do with annual planning actually goes away."

"If you identify your superpowers and work in accordance with them, you will do the best work of your life. You will love it, and you will be great at it, and you won't have that frustration."

"If you do a pre-mortem right, you will not have to do an ugly post-mortem. You might still do a post-mortem to learn, but odds are very high that it is not going to be a bad post-mortem."

"L tasks are the tasks that are bothering you the most because you are not doing them or because you're not doing them as well as you know you should."

"In a high leverage role you should stop doing work that simply provides a positive return on investment. You should start focusing on work that minimises opportunity cost."

"Most execution problems that I encounter in a high performing environment where everybody has the right intentions are actually not execution problems — they are either strategy problems or interpersonal problems or cultural problems."

"High agency is about finding a way to get what you want without waiting for conditions to be perfect or otherwise blaming the circumstances."

"Infinity absorbs a lot of sins."

"The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible."

"Mathematicians are one of the few people who really care about whether really 100% of all situations are covered. If something holds 99.99% of the time, that's good enough for most things."

"Mathematics is like trying to solve a computer game where there's unlimited cheat codes available. You can set the dimension to one, you can set the error term to zero. The way you should solve these problems is not in Iron Man mode — find the version of the problem that turns off nine of the ten difficulties and solve that."

"It's not just about taking a technique that is going to work and applying it, but you need to not take the techniques that don't work. Having these counterexamples for nearby problems saves you a lot of time because you're not wasting energy on things that you now know cannot possibly ever work."

"98% of people that write opportunities write them as solutions. The heart of good product is really getting comfortable in the problem space."

"Opportunities emerge from our customers' stories. If you're not collecting rich stories in your interviews, it's going to be really hard to identify opportunities."

"Everything in our backlog is a bet, everything. Whether we do discovery or not, everything is a bet. Discovery is helping us make a better bet."

"I don't know why product teams are suddenly held to a standard that nobody else is held to. Every human in business is making decisions with zero data. One is better than zero."

"If you've never worked on a well-functioning product trio, this breaks people's brains. But if you're working from a shared understanding, your disagreements go way down — and when you disagree, you recognise you don't have the best option yet."

"Work hard, get smart — not work smart, not hard. You can't know what smart looks like until you've put in the hours."

"Time in the saddle. That's it. There's no shortcut to knowing something."

"The breakthroughs are what hooked me — linked lists, recursion. When it clicks, it's unlike anything else."

"'These questions kind of get to the heart of it. The question is totally made up. No teleportation device exists, at least not yet. I find that people's ability to learn the method is significantly higher if it's low stakes.' 'There are Eigenquestions kind of everywhere. You could take any product out there... What is the question that really drives this answer?' 'What feedback will I be giving this person in their first performance review? It's an amazing question, because the person can't dodge it.' 'There's no way to answer that question without being genuinely opinionated. Because it starts with, "What is the thing that you think...?" When I break that wall, I'm testing, is this person authentic?' 'Tell me something you did that worked out, but not for the reason that you thought it would work... Are you a person who is reflective about the decisions you've made, and why they worked and why they did not?'"

"LLMs can do none of those or they can only do them in a very primitive way and they don't really understand the physical world."

"You're not trying to predict all the pixels, you're only trying to predict an abstract representation."

"The danger of concentration of power through proprietary AI systems [is] as much bigger danger than everything else."

"A lot of doomers are doomers because they don't think that people are fundamentally good."

"A lot of being a great product manager is being a great storyteller."

"There are certain insights that were memified to the point where someone like Travis or Dara would just cite this insight in the middle of a meeting — and you know that you've really done your job."

"The why is something that I really always hold the PM uniquely responsible for. If everyone has an understanding of why we're doing this, what problem we're solving, then people can make really great decisions. It's the only way you can really scale."

"There has to be an almost irrational, emotional response to your product — a love for it. First, it has to be cultivated internally. But then externally, too, if people are loving something to the point where they can sing it at the top of their lungs, that's a wonderful place to be."

"It's not just that they're championing for a tool, they're also championing for a new way of working."