High Stakes Decision Making

"There is no such thing as a long feedback loop. And the way you choose to shorten the feedback loop is to say, what are the things that are correlated with the outcome that I eventually desire?"

"So a pre-mortem, it's great only if you set up kill criteria. Commit to actions that you're going to take if you see those signals."

"The biggest mistake that you make, the worst thing that you do as a leader, there's things in your control and there's things out of your control and hesitation, that's generally the most destructive. And I go through all the ways that it's destructive, but it's extremely bad. And the thing that causes you to hesitate is both decisions are horrible."

"If you're not sure who the decision maker is, one, it's probably you. And I'd rather you act that way than not because you're going to like slow the whole company down. Follow a process and get it done, and don't forget to actually make a decision."

"A, we understood that you need to constantly think, especially at these phases, how would you transform completely the product in the next three months? And if you can't answer that and you say, 'Listen, I'm doing so much.' But you can't point this exact thing, you have a focus problem in my eyes."

"The biggest challenge was that in crypto there's just so much uncertainty in general, simple questions like, is Ethereum going to be a thing, are the subject of debate. And no one actually at the time had an answer to that question. Lots of really strong opinions and so you have to be able to have those debates because lots is going on, but then you have to be able to come out of those conversations with a clear kind of company point of view that you're all shooting toward."

"Our general mindset is in two months, there's going to be a better model and it's going to blow away whatever the current set of limitations are. And we say this to developers too. If you're building and the product that you're building is kind of right on the edge of the capabilities of the models, keep going because you're doing something right. Give it another couple months and the models are going to be great, and suddenly the product that you have that just barely worked is really going to sing."

"We are going to run out of product for the babies that are on Bobbie today. We have about six days before we get to a place where we won't be able to serve those who've already made a commitment to Bobbie. She's like, 'So we need to turn off our site and stop growing the business.'"

"It's not because I'm magician or a genius, it's because when someone's in fear, they're gripped. They can't see reality, their brain is making very exaggerated predictions. Whereas when someone is not in fear, and I'm not because it's not my situation, I am not gripped and therefore, my brain isn't making exaggerated predictions. And so, we make this bet once I win, then all of a sudden the CEO realizes, oh my God, there's something to this, fear gives bad advice."

"So the way I think about setting up a plan when you have limited visibility and some major headwinds is setting up a really conservative plan and then having milestones, short term milestones that unlock the ability to lean into growth and spend based on hitting those targets."

"Another example of a principle is minimizing waste. It aligns with how we think about product development, which is, we want to know, is the work we're doing adding value to the customer and the business? And so something that isn't working out a lot of times in product development we're wrong. And so being able to say, 'No, this is no longer valuable, we need to move on to the next thing,' has been something that's served us really well."