some people are naturally have pirate tendencies and other folks have natural kind of Explorer tendencies. And the definition of the difference is basically if you're a pirate, you're generally looking at the world where whatever it is that somebody else has, you basically want to. So if you're a founder and you're looking at a product in the market and it has a feature you're like, hey, I want that feature in my product to, and then you'll just go kind of copy it now when an Explorer looks at their product and other products in the market and explorers probably gonna look at that product and just say, oh, I don't think it's that good, I have a better way to do it. And I'm gonna

go do that. We are creators, we build what isn't there tomorrow we honor our craft hours, we know what we're worth. Therefore one thing I love about what you do is you break everything down into like frameworks and one that you shared was the Pirate versus Explorer. I'd love to start their sort of talking about that framework.

Yeah, I think I came up with this, watching how different founders react to things and, and the different approaches that they have to building their businesses. And I feel like part of it is a set of sort of, you can map it to like personality traits, you can map it to kind of triggers and reactions to things. And so I came up with this concept that where it's like some, some people are naturally have pirate tendencies and other folks have natural kind of Explorer tendencies and the definition of the difference is basically, if you're, if you're a pirate, you're generally looking at the world where whatever it is that somebody else has, you basically want to. So if you're a founder and you're looking at a product in the market and it has a feature, you're like, hey, I want that feature in my product too,

and then you'll just go kind of copy it and that's kind of very sort of bland. Hopefully clear way to think about what a pirate thinks now when an explorer looks at sort of their product and other products in the market and explorers probably gonna look at that product and just say, oh, I don't think it's that good, I have a better way to do it and I'm gonna go do that. And so it's kind of like on a spectrum of like a pirate wants to see what's out there in order to copy it. An explorer wants to see what's out there in order to sort of go against it and do the opposite and that, that's sort of the extreme viewpoints. And I think like if you're starting out, you want to figure out what gets you more energy, you know, whether the mentality of they're doing it, why can't I have it, I should just copy it, or the mentality of they're doing it, it must be crap or I think it's crap,

I'm gonna do it better and they're very different ways of thinking about the world and that's sort of the analogy and I like to take it from a product standpoint just cause it's just much more clear that way because usually we're ripping, ripping off other people's products, you know, quite a bit in markets today, especially software, but almost anything, right? And we're less so ripping off things in kind of other parts because it's just harder to rip those things off.

Do you have some examples of maybe like well known Ceos, like fit different categories for

one of them? Yeah. So I think like when you, when you look at innovation, innovation can happen either way. So you look at like I would say a business like google's, I would say early on they were definitely in the, we can do it better, we can do it different. And came up with the idea that everyone should be finding stuff on the internet through this little search box. Right. Other products had search boxes, but I don't think their intention was ever let's go copy the search box that all these other people have or let's go copy the directory that yahoo has, they never thought of it like that. They wanted to find their own unique positioning. Not necessarily even by looking at those other things literally just by thinking about, you know,

and and figuring out what they think is best, then you have the way a lot of software markets evolve. And I think a good example of this is like customer relationship management. So the crm market where you have, like hubspot who launched their Crm some years ago now, and they said it's a free Crm, but when you look at it, it has components of many other Crm and there isn't really anything original about it, except they, even, this is not original, but they touted as like, it's a fully free, 100% free crm, that's more of a market maneuver, not necessarily innovative thing for them to do,

it's just a business model and something they believe they had to do, but they literally copied so many of the things out there feature by feature and built an experience out of that, and that's how they and a lot of this also, you know, I used to think it depends on the market you're in and things like that. I think it more depends on your point of view of how do you, how you want to go about this? And oftentimes, when I talk to folks who are starting out or even thinking about doing things, even if you're like doing things like I'm gonna have a side gig or I'm gonna be a freelancer, I'm gonna be a maker and make some stuff there in one of those two arenas and kind of extremists one way or another, but oftentimes don't realize it, and the murky middle on that isn't really what I would say anyone falls into. I think your skewed one way or another, that doesn't mean that you stay there. I think the best businesses are actually able to navigate both types of sort of mental models if you want to call it that or both types of approaches very seamlessly. I think that's part of the challenge of scaling right at some point, whatever strategy you're using isn't gonna work anymore.

One of the things I realized when I heard that first was, I was like, oh, I'm definitely an explorer, which is why I've had challenges scaling. I'm just like, as you're sort of like thinking of scaling or building a team for yourself first of all, like where do you think you are in that? And then do you hire differently depending on stages or sort of like how you're building a team?

Yeah, everything I've built today has been focused on an Explorer Explorer model. So, and I would say everything that I built that has some level of success, but like success is like kind of nebulous. So I don't really look at it like that. So I built a business called crazy Egg product called Crazy Egg. It still exists today as a business. It's self funded, We created heat maps for where people are clicking on a page. We were literally the first company, if not one of the first companies to do it. We were definitely the first company to popular, Right. That was very different than what existed in the market before we came along, there was no such thing as a heat map for your website or for your web pages. And then with kiss metrics,

my sort of second SAS business, which was also in the analytics space, we didn't copy anything that existed. And in fact we tried to invent a new way to do, basically look at analytics from, from the standpoint of funnels, which is kind of a very common report and analytics tools and we just literally reinvented not just the funnel itself and how to view it, which we, we, we actually popularized the left to right funnel and the ability to like add steps to your funnel, you know, for the user journey and stuff like that. And then even tying it to actual users, not just visitors and their with their email address to be able to see, you know what a person went through in their whole journey, which to me,

I'm just laughing because like this all sounds ridiculous to me because now this is the norm when you look at a lot of analytics tools except google analytics, but anything like that's like kind of beyond that when when we were doing this stuff, none of this was the norm. And so I think another example is like Apple being bold and saying, hey, there's no keyboard on this phone and that's going to be okay, don't worry. Right. And if you look at all the articles from back in the day, nobody thought that phone would be successful because it had no keyboard. That was the number one reason. Well like look where we are now. And same with like, you know, you look at the folks at base camp, so 37 signals is what they used to be.

They launched a very opinionated email product recently and I have an account, it's only 100 bucks a year. They give you a 14 day trial. I can see them getting millions and millions of people using, hey dot com as their email and paying 100 bucks a year because the fee is low in my opinion. And the opinionated version of their software basically is not something where you would look at another email tool and say, we're going to have the tools, we're gonna have the same features as those email tools. In fact every email tool has an inbox, they have in them box and that that implies important inbox or important box. Everyone else just to inbox, just stuff coming in. And so like they've made these deliberate decisions. They've always been explorers in my mind, but their marketing and this is my point about like you kind of need both over time. Their marketing is very pirate marketing.

They even said, pick a fight as one of their marketing strategies in in their book and they say do that. And you know, like, I think when you look at what they're doing today with that concept, it is completely a sort of I would put that on the pirate side in terms of their marketing because they're attacking folks, they're saying you got that, that's ours now, we're going to go take it from you because it's like beef marketing, right? And then you have on the other end, when you look at their product, there's no beef marketing in that product. The product is fully like, we're doing it different and if you're into that, cool,

check us out, use it. If you're not into it, you check it out and you don't like it. Guess what? We're cool. Like here it is, here, here's our sort of restaurant, here's our dishes, they're gonna be like nothing you've ever had anywhere else. And if you're into it, cool. And if you eat it once or try it out and you don't like it, you know what, cool,

we're not trying to make you happy unless you like it. And if you like it. Cool, so there's no happiness there unless you like it. Otherwise you're like, cool, this is, I'm allergic to this, I'm out, right? And I might never try it again. The

cool thing is I can feel your excitement when you talk about the product, what was it that you tweeted a few days ago that something about very few times when you try a new product you feel like like slapped in the face and it's so opinionated and they put everything into it.

Yeah, they just basically like, yeah, what I was saying is like, you're just, you're just slapped in the face with this idea that like they must have had a lot of conviction on the way that they wanted to do it to the point where it's infectious, right? And and that's hard to get right. I don't actually think it's easy to be an explorer and and feel like you're accomplishing what you want to because you're basically starting with innovation when you're an explorer, you're not starting with what already exists out there and that's just a different skill set in a different mindset. I admire folks that can do both. I think the folks at base camp can do both, but they don't necessarily do both on the product. Product is always like very different from what I can tell

on the product standpoint. Where do you think that I've seen, you talk so much about the importance of self awareness, where do you think that conviction and mindset comes from? Or or maybe like what are tools that you've used to find that?

So what they do and self proclaimed, they said this the other day on twitter is they build a version one, that's what they want and then they iterated from there and so they're so opinionated that they're just gonna build what they want first because I think they believe, and they've always said this that that's the best way for them to start while the best way, and I think that's good for an explorer and the best way for like a pirate to start would probably go copy something that already exists kind of in the market. So to me kind of like that, that's it. Like that, that's the explanation Yeah.

In terms of self awareness, like are there other tools or frameworks that you've used or discovered that have been helpful for you?

You know, that's why I brought brought up my example right now, like I think it's like, you can tell when someone's self aware because they're able to very clearly articulate why they're doing something and how they're doing it and that's all. Self awareness really is, it's like, are you aware of your crap, right? Are you aware of like the trade offs, are you aware of what you're doing? I don't think there's any frameworks for it. I think there's it's more like being able to see yourself the way that other people might see you and being able to understand whether that's not even just the way you want to be perceived, but the way that you feel like is genuine to you. So self awareness to me is a lot a lot about like being genuine to yourself about what you are and what you're doing and you can't really do that very easily if you're sitting there and saying I'm gonna be like somebody else because then inherently you're not yourself. So the self and self awareness doesn't exist if you're doing that now. It's self awareness in itself. If you're able to identify that,

oh, I want to be like that person I want what that person has or what have you, right? So I think self awareness has has a pretty strong spectrum when it comes to people. And and you can easily tell if someone's self aware by that example I gave of like the folks at base camp saying, well this is why we did it the way we did it, right? And so self awareness starts with understanding the why behind like your actions or your approaches and hence like why, like I will come up with these frameworks because what I'm trying to trying to do just like everybody else is just understand the world through my own lens. And so that's really about understanding myself. And so when you think about it that way, it's like, I don't know if there's a framework or a way to way to speak of this. I think there's a lot of people that say things like, you know, go ask your,

you know, you know, five of your friends, like what what you know what you're all about and this and that that's fine, like those are tools, those are still not frameworks for me, a framework would be an ability to basically view yourself from many different perspectives and that's self awareness to me and being able to say, okay well how does this person view me, how does this other person view me, How does this other person? Because at the end of the day, how I view myself is not how anyone else views me. And so the self awareness come from like, am I aware of myself the way that other folks view me in order to just understand that even if like I can't change it. And so I think a lot of the things people suggest would be to me too much work, like it's a lot of work to go ask somebody hey,

what do you think about me? Right. And that's what a lot of the approaches to self awareness and things like that suggest, which like I said, not bad, it's just a lot of work and you can't do it all the time. I'd rather have a process that where I've internalized this idea that when I say something when I do something, you know inherently, like I just want to understand how I'm coming off that helps with writing, that helps with marketing, that helps with your interpersonal relationships. So there's a number of things that can help with if you can figure out like how coming across now, what happens though when you basically come across in a way that was unexpected because someone reacted in a certain way, like you made somebody mad, that's when really the rubber meets the road on the whole self awareness thing because it's like, what do you do at that point?

Do you go seek more information from these people? Do you run away? Do you try to get defensive? So this, so so I think defensiveness is a sign that you might not be self aware in that moment, right? Especially when someone else is like coming at you about something in an unexpected way, even if it's positive, right? This is not just about negative stuff now. Like when you think about that and just keep going with some of those thoughts, what ends up happening is you kind of start hitting on this idea that like maybe I shouldn't care what other people think. And the self awareness in itself is just this idea that like I don't need to care what they think because whatever they're thinking has to do with them, not not me. And so that almost puts my whole thesis on self awareness like kind of on judgment right? Which is like,

well you just said, hey, self awareness is about understanding how other people perceive you well. Well yeah it still is. But the difference is if you can understand how they perceive you, then you can make the determination yourself whether you give a crap or not. And that's what I'm talking about. Yeah, even if it's through their own lens, it's like, that's the whole point. So it's like by being aware of the other, you're actually more aware of yourself and then you can make way more conscious decisions about who you piss off, who you interact with, how you interact with other people. Because the end of the day,

like your you internally, whatever is going on, that's not going on for anyone else, it's just going on for you. And so everything you see in the world, every every reaction you even have yourself is some perception that's personal, something inside of you, not something outside of you. And I think those are the concepts that like are really tough to grok because that's not how we grew up. We grew up valuing what other people think and that's not what I'm saying. It's more understanding how you're coming across so that you can just improve yourself because we end up having to interact with the world, We end up having to interact with other people.

Yeah, one of my favorite books that you told me about was the courage to be just like, that sort of talk about this. First of all, it sounds like you're you're thinking about this a lot, right? Like thinking about like how you're coming across and all, what have you changed through that. Like, that's in the last few

years. Yeah. So I actually don't think about it a lot

interesting.

I prefer when I find ways to subconsciously be able to basically embed something that I value. So like paul which you're you're recording and it's gonna turn into a podcast. All I really care about is is what I'm saying, valuable enough for it to be said. But am I thinking about every word that I say? No, not at all. Right. I'm just very focused on the fact that like there are takes opinions, frameworks, ways of thinking that I know are uncommon and not very well. Like they're not shared. So part of it is like the courage to be disliked in that book. I think almost everyone should read it unless they feel like they don't care if other people like them. That's the only exception I have. And there are those people like, and that's cool.

Like if that's you, that's good, like, like more power to you because the book tries to teach you that right in its own in its own way and that's like, you know, the principles that it applies. So the existence we have today the afford since we have many of us for like not having to worry about a lot of things makes it so that we end up worrying about trivial things and that's not what I want for myself. So no, I'm not sitting here thinking, oh, am I valuable? You know, is this does this make any sense? I'm just thinking like, am I sharing what I think other people would get value from and if I'm thinking about it too much? I think I'm doing myself and them a disservice.

I like what you said, just like, it needs to sort of just get embedded into the subconscious so that you're not always thinking about it.

Yeah. And I think the way to do that is is what a lot of people called meta cognition where you're actually thinking about thinking. So if you have enough interactions with people after the interaction, all you have to do is, like, have almost like a what was good, what was bad about it? What could I have done better? You don't have to write it down unless you want to. It isn't even about going back to it, it's just about taking that moment and just saying, just doing almost like a quick postmortem or retrospective, whatever you wanna call it on what just happened. And eventually you just embed that thinking into what you're doing and then it becomes almost real time. So, one way to think about it in a really dorky way would be like, can I make this happen in real time?

And if I can't make it happen in real time, what's it gonna take for me to build the muscle so that it's just embedded and happens. I don't have to think about it anymore. It's just like this, it's like, you shouldn't have to think about being a nice person to be a nice person, you're either a nice person or you're not. That is absolutely true, but how do you become a nice person if that's what you want? Well you become a nice person by thinking about basically was that interaction? How did I come across in it? That goes back to my original point. It's like if you value like working in this world, like like being in this world and interacting with others, then you actually want to provide a great experience, not just for yourself,

but for others too. And you don't do that by like thinking about it all the time. You do it by by finding ways to embed those sort of values if you wanna call it that or those ways of being without having to sit there and be like, wow, how do I do this, what am I doing? And a lot of it is like practice a lot of it is just like realizing that like the best things in the world about people are the things that they don't even recognize about themselves that comes from these things being embedded and a lot of times like we picked them up during childhood and now and you know, later on we're like wait, that wasn't us, you know, it was it was something we picked up from parents or whatever that wasn't even them, it was just our interpretation at that time. So I think like as we sort of grow up and as things happen, our whole interpretations of things change and the way to like start valuing yourself more and sort of not having to do so much work is just to basically simply review the things that are happening that you are repeatedly doing and with the lens of like how could it have been done better considering whatever my personal goals are. And a lot of times that's like that's the key, cause it's like if my personal goal is to extract as much value as possible from every interaction for myself,

then when I review it, I'll look at it like that and that's no judgment, that's fine, right? Like if that's what you want, right? Even for myself, like I found ways to do things like that, if that's what my goal is just by reviewing my interaction against some kind of benchmark that I have and eventually it happens in real time. So like if I'm talking right now and there's something I said that I'm like, I don't quite understand it. You know, I'm still working it out. I might even just say, hey, this is something I'm still working out,

let's just let's just talk about it together because I really value your ability to help me think about this thing, right? And then I just call it out like that while a lot of other people would say it in a way as if it's truth or it's their belief or it's already like set in stone when I truly believe one nobody knows anything and to nothing is set in stone and when you think of the world like that, then you're always thinking about constant improvement and making things better and that, that's what I want. That's the world I want to live in where people are thinking

about making things better. It's almost like going off that like that people sort of expect to have this level of certainty, especially when you do podcast because they want to like appear right or like appear like, like they know everything.

Yeah. And like I'm willing to be misunderstood. I don't care like you don't understand it. Ask me for clarification, right? Help me communicate it if you, if you do understand it cool. You know, do I really care if you understand it or not? Maybe you know, because I'm here, I'm wasting your time. You're listening to this crap, right? Like that I'm saying. But at the end of the day, like my only goal is to shed light on things at least for myself when I speak on these things that are just not being said,

right? And those are, those are the things that are fun for me. Those are the things where I think I learned the most when I hear something that like is not uncommon because all the common stuff today, you can google and you and you absolutely better do that right versus asking someone a bunch of questions, you can just find out from google because I think that's a waste of time personally. So I'd rather say things that like are are much different and really true to like things that in a lot of venues I might not be able to say because that wasn't

the context more recently, some of my favorite episodes to do, like you can listen and record is when you hear someone like figure things out like together instead of like just repeating the same stuff over and over

again. Because then you also, it also sheds light on how the person thinks and you don't, you don't get that if they're just making statements about like statements to answers just to answer your question sort of thing and thinking that, oh, I'm going to look good if I say this

or that, I love how meta we always get in our conversations like this. So, so switching gears a bit and talking about things that haven't really been talking about in your journey, I think like almost 20 years now, right? Building companies since a CS what kind of ups and downs um have you gone through our notice when you're trying to build?

I think the ups and downs that that I've seen people go through, including myself are very personal and so it might look like, oh, you know, this thing failed or this problem happened, but I think like when you think about ups and downs, most majority of the ups and downs are a matter of perspective on whether they were good or bad and there's a common way to think about most things that happen in your life, in a more positive way, which is like, you know, just think to yourself, did you learn something and what was it that you learned? And you know, oftentimes like again, back to the whole reviewing things, like if you just review what you did and why it failed, then you'll automatically like be able to figure out what you learned,

then then it won't be seen, it won't even be seen to you as such a big failure. The thing that people want to be able to sort of feel is the feeling that they're, they accomplished what they wanted to, but often times they don't even just decide, hey, this is what I want to accomplish beforehand. And so what ends up happening is if you know that you're gonna have to review it and you're gonna have to do a retrospective or a post mortem on what you did, then you'll start up front determining well, what am I trying to get out of this and that that completely changes like how you think about failure and success. And so what happens most of the time is like this understanding doesn't exist when you start something, you think, oh I'm starting something, it's gonna work. No, you're starting something you're gonna learn and eventually it might work,

but it's only gonna work because you kept learning and compounding your learnings. So you know, you asked me about failure and like what I see, I think it's very personal because like everybody gets triggered for different reasons to understand, kind of like to have a feeling about something. So like if I tell you, hey and I've written a lot about some of my failures and stuff like that, but like I couldn't get to a good understanding of that failure without reviewing it and looking at it from many different perspectives. Mind other people involved in the outside world, even potentially if it's relevant things that people said, right, get a good like solid factual unbiased view on it. That's one of the hardest things to do because we're all biased by our own experiences everybody, right? So I think failure, I'm not one to like go to the extreme like yo failure should be celebrated, although I'm not even good at celebrating things that are, most people don't consider failure, but that's a different story. I think

on the celebration thing that that's an interesting point. Like anything that is, you're not good at celebrating.

I didn't grow up with tons of celebration around me. I didn't grow up with someone who got excited about birthdays or anything like that. It's sort of embedded in that way, right? Can I get excited about things Absolutely like you just said that earlier, right? Hey, you're really excited about this thing, right? Yeah. I can get excited about things all day long, but do I celebrate them? I don't know, I wouldn't say I'm one of those people who who does that and I think some people around me want that not just for me, but for us, like, in our businesses, and so I do my best to, like, figure out like what are moments of that and remind them of that, but I'm not doing it for myself.

One thing I noticed in that, Yeah, what you said is, and I think I do the same, which is like almost celebrating stuff that others are doing more than stuff that you're doing yourself.

Yeah. For whatever reason, that's your automatic response, that's your like, natural tendency. So, you know, I don't think the whole perspective of I failed or the whole perspective of I made a mistake is actually as relevant as like we make it out to be. And the reason I say that is like, the majority of the time, whatever you did or whatever you think you did right now, and you're feeling about what happened right now in some amount of time, regardless of what you do, you're not gonna feel the same about it and and that's the reality of like life, you know, if I were to go to an extreme tell you one of my sort of core tenants and frameworks that I've pretty much embedded is this idea. And I think you and I have talked about this in private before,

but it's this idea that it was all a dream and what I mean by that is this feeling that I have constantly that even what happened a minute ago, even though it was recorded didn't really happen because there is my perspective on it, on what I said, There's your perspective on it, which because we're in a conversation when you repeat something back to me or or ask me a question, I get an understanding of what you thought about it, but I still don't know what you're thinking in your head, right? And then there's every single person who's listening to this and their perspective on it, which means it was a dream. What's the definition of a dream is some artificial existence that was made up. So in reality, if you if you go to an extreme here, our collective experiences don't exist, but there is no collective experience. There's only an individualistic experience, which means we're all dreaming because there's no shared experience that we're like even the same dinner party and even if you were in the same exact conversations and heard the same exact things doesn't land the same

way in your mind, it's all our subjective interpretations of what happened,

right? And and so when you start thinking about things like that and you embed that in your life, you're just like nothing's really that important to put so much emotion behind that. It causes you stress more than in that exact moment that you were in. And a lot of people have different triggers and drivers for their psyche. So for me, the one thing I know about myself in relation to this is if I'm angry or frustrated, there is something in my life I'm not happy about. It isn't even if I think it's about somebody else and what they did, it's not, it's about something that is inside of me that has triggered me about that thing or whatever. And sometimes I can't even find the thing I have to root cause it. So it's like almost root cause analysis on your feelings. Example, an example would be like, hey, let's say I was,

you know, talking to somebody on my team and they're saying they said something and it made me angry, right? I see this all the time. And other people too. And it wouldn't be something I could tell them, but I notice it and if I were to like, do what I mentioned that I do, which is like, think about the interaction. What I often find is that I'm not mad about the thing that I think I'm mad about when I'm talking to them in that moment. It's more of identifying, oh, they said I can't do that. And I don't like it when anyone tells me I can't like me that you can't do that, he like,

I don't like, that doesn't work for me, right? And that has it. That's a trigger for me. But where is that trigger coming from? It's not because of them. They might have just said something. They can say whatever they want, right? It's something inside of myself that got me to react in a, in a way that was negative. Right? And so the way I think about it is if I can let it go and say, okay, well whatever their intentions were,

let's assume they were positive. In fact, why is it even my problem what their intentions were and really think about what am I caught up on and for me, usually if someone says that to me and I'm triggered by it, it comes from at the court, like initially like the real root causes, I was given a tremendous amount of freedom growing up and it was pretty extreme. And it made me not really want to take any kind of orders from anybody because my parents didn't give me any kind of rules or scheme or hold me accountable to those two things that, you know, I maybe should have been held accountable to. So I made lots of mistakes and I learned as I made mistakes. So in a way if I play that out a lot of times when I think, and this is just, I think because I don't think anyone's trying to tell me what to do, but when I think someone's trying to tell me what to do, I'm losing some amount of freedom,

that's my sort of rationale, but I had to figure that out. And so then I think of it, I'm like, wait, why did that make me angry? Oh, I'm losing this freedom of thought and freedom of thinking, that's not their intention. They're trying to give me advice or just kind of give me give me some answer to a question I had. So then I go back and I think about, okay, what do I need to say? What's the best response? The best responses that hey don't tell me what to do. The best response is more like,

hey, this is how I'm thinking about that, this is legit how I'm thinking about that now, what would you do? Right, So it's usually some kind of misunderstanding that, you know, has to do with me getting triggered and then I lose sight of the real sort of topic at hand because I was triggered and then I got lost in it, right? And so another good example of this that I found to be extremely valuable for me is once I realized that like there's some people who can like they'll ask me, hey how are you doing? And most people I can give an answer that's like good enough and I'm okay, there's some people in my life when they ask me that I take the question more seriously and it's because if there is something that they can help me with, I respect them, I trust them, I want their help with it.

And so those people, if they ask me that they might not get a response for a while because I don't necessarily know how I feel for them to answer them. But most of the time if you if you ask me right now, how I feel, not that I don't respect your help, I don't think you can help me, but you can't help me in the way that these other people can I would just give you an answer, it would be good enough and I'd be happy with it. But I think it took a long time for those people and myself to understand that like look, I value your opinion so much and your ability to help me with whatever problems I'm having that. Like if you ask me that I'm not going to have an answer for you until I feel like I do and that's gonna have to be okay because of a good reason. It's because I value your help so much. Where does that come from and all that. There's a lot of different places we can unpack that this isn't about me, but the reason I shared that is because I think when you start getting an understanding on that level about yourself, everything starts changing for how you can sort of help people,

help you and that's really what we're all trying to do. You know, we are trying to help each other one way or another, even if, you know we come across as selfish because we all are anyway, we're self interested right? Rightfully so, I mean we're individuals, so I think it's about really, really thinking through a lot of this stuff if you want to improve yourself and improve your own mental health, because like a lot of these things can drive you crazy and I think like the impact you can have on yourself and self improvement in your mental health by understanding what triggers you and why and digging into it is tremendous and you you don't need much to do that, you don't need like a book, you don't need anything, you just need to be, you need to develop that self awareness so that you can look at actions as an observer instead of as a participant and then really start basically unraveling kind of why you react in a negative way when you do. So the simple thing for me is like if I'm triggered, which implies a negative thing, so let's just keep it at that, I just want to find out why and I really want to find out why and I want to make sure that what I find out and discover has like I know when I got it when it has nothing to do with the other person or what

they said or did, it's not about sort of like what's happening in the moment, it actually probably goes back way way back.

Yeah, like for me sometimes it's like when someone says something now, it's actually about what they said a while ago, you know, because we all have like the system that we create in our heads about how to interact with every individual we interact with, it's just an automated system in a way and that system is always at work and every interaction you have with somebody else is impacting that system's ability to be unbiased and non judgmental. And so it's all about basically finding a path to being as nonjudgmental mostly about yourself in any moment that you can be and when you can do that, I think you start really having the freedom of thought and the freedom to like do the things the way you want to do them versus the way you think you need to do them for somebody else.

Yeah, I think that's such a huge part of going back to sort of the explorer vs pirate side. I think a huge part of Explorer is is getting the freedom where you can do things because you're thinking of them and it's not connected to the expectation of how they should be done or how others wanted to do

it. Yeah, and a pirate doesn't even have that problem. They don't even think about what you just said. It's not even a consideration, they're already so self interested. I think in a very compelling way in my opinion that they spend their energy on themselves. And it's really weird when you think about it that way because if you were a pirate, you basically wouldn't be able to understand why it's a problem to copy something. Like it's not in your D. N. A. It's almost like a foregone conclusion that yeah, you wanna be successful. You copy things that exist that are out there. What's the big deal? And explorers like wait wait wait hold on.

That means I didn't discover it. That means it's not mine. And then the pirates like what do you mean? It's your code, it's your design, it's yours, it's yours. What do you mean? Just cause it was theirs doesn't mean it's not yours, right? And so like like like that's that's like the difference, right? And when you can find that difference for yourself. I think a lot of the decisions you've made in the past, lost a lot of decisions you make in the future. At least you'll have awareness,

right? Because I think like the pirate wouldn't even articulate the question The way I asked you, what are other things like because you've mentored so many founders right over the last 20 years. What are other things you wish founders knew around sort of this like it's a broad question around this topic of mental health. And I think even like if you talk about like South Asian culture, there's such a massive like taboo against talking about it, right? Like there's like the, it's all in your head kind of thing. So what are things, other things you wish founders knew?

I think like you usually start something because of some irrational desire or reason that you can't even explain and then things happen and it's a confluence of events that lead to you know, whatever position you're in right now that you might not even realize. So what I noticed founders unable to do is is reasonably attribute their current state for their business or lack of execution, lack of success in whatever way they want to think about it. They have a hard time attributing it to their own actions, which I know sounds weird but the whole idea of like you know I failed at this or this didn't work out is an attribution error because the thing is like if you, if you are doing things, you have the ability to change them if you did things in the past, you have an ability to change those, change whatever it is that you did and do it differently if you think that because you did it a certain way it failed. But that means you have to really understand at least for yourself why did something work and why did it fail that you were trying to do. That's the thing, it's like the more prescriptive you are about the things you're doing, why you're doing them understanding that upfront for your business, the better you can keep it as close to business as possible and not personal. And that impersonal nous is the exact opposite that's required for the start in the first place. But that skill set of not taking things personally and basically in personalizing it is really key.

So for example, just recently I wrote a blog post based on a ton of research we did at my company. It was the last of this type of research I plan on ever doing and posting publicly because I just think the world is shifted to a place where researching other companies using qualitative methods like surveying, which is what I did is not as valued as it used to be in the world when I was doing it earlier because because of many different reasons. So I did a survey about zoom and they're just terminology and startup land called product market fit. And I know it's terminology that's very confusing for people and they don't understand it. So what I wrote after our analysis is zoom doesn't have product market fit. So literally it's like why zoom doesn't have product market fit was the title. And I've written stuff where like you know, I'm truthful, I base it on data and then the way I title it, some people could consider it Clickbait, right? This one, I've never seen the reaction like this where like more people than normal considered a Clickbait. But if you read my article,

I'm right, like I don't, it's not even, I think I'm right. I made the argument. If you don't agree with my argument and you want to break it down, you can. But everyone that's argued with it is breaking it down. Not on the merits of the things that I said, they're they're doing it based on some perspective they have that has nothing to do with the data that I shared. And I have tested people on this because I just watched the reactions and somebody came, came at me pretty hard on linkedin with like this whole paragraph on on someone sharing that link and be like blah, blah, blah. And I just message them and I said, because I didn't take it personally,

I didn't know how to message them at first and they're a very old acquaintance of mine. And then I messaged the person and I'm like, hey, I appreciate your comment. You know, and you're saying some crap about it, right? I'm sorry. It like the headline like triggered you, this is the last time I'm actually doing one of these posts and I wanted to go out with a bang. And so debating the titles this title made the most sense. And then he he actually wrote a whole paragraph back saying, oh well here's where I think the world is. And so my reaction is because of where I think the world is and in the world, meaning titles are Clickbait. E In short,

basically what he said is I think it sucks that you had to title it like that for your great content to get attention. And that's what I'm angry about. But none of that. None of that came out in the comment that he said initially, you know why he was triggered,

right?

And someone even tweeted that, oh, you know, I'll read this later. But to me, I love how much tech twitter is triggered by your title and I'm like, cool. But if you disagree, tell me based on the data and the evidence that I have in my content, right? Because I did the best I could to address anyone's concerns about the inaccuracy of what I'm saying. But nobody was really doing that because in today's world you don't get past that headline.

Yeah. Most people probably just like didn't even read it. They saw the title and I think, I think the twitters in this thing where if you respond, they give you an alert if you haven't actually like clicked

an article or something. Yeah, they're starting to do that, right? It's fascinating. Right? So the reason I bring that up is like, that's not my problem. Like he proved that like it had nothing to do with my article. It only had to do with his own perspective of the world, but yet he came at it and just said all this crap, you know, and all I had to do was not take it personal and just hit him up and be like, yo you said all this crap cool, like here's where I'm coming from. And then he laid it out for me and I'm like, okay, that makes sense. But that's on him. That's his trigger. He didn't have to write that comment because it's devoid of any value basically except for him venting.

Yeah. And I'm so glad that you mentioned this because I think like things like this aren't talked about, but I think like think of like a new writer that starts and maybe they published that post and they don't have like your years of experience and they start getting this hate, they're gonna be like, oh, I'm never gonna write again because people don't like my content right, when it's nothing

about them. And that's not true like that that content has gotten in terms of people not liking that content has gotten more traffic than we've gotten in a while on any of our post. And we weren't even trying that hard literally like even the title, like we had like 10 options and we're like, well this one is genuine to what we wrote. So that's the title. So it's not like we even thought of like this is a Clickbait title, it's like what's the best title that represents the content because what you're supposed to do when you write at least best practices, you come up with the title after you write it, you know, especially when you're writing about research that you've done that's data back because when you write it, you're actually analyzing it and that's what we did. It wasn't even as intentional as other people might think it was. It was just like what we believe to be true.

When you said that this is one of the last ones you're doing because content like that isn't valued. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Yeah. We used to be in a world in startup land where like if somebody did something and research a company or use the methodology. People were excited to learn from it and that's been always my intention when I write these things and they take a lot of work and effort in time. And that style of content is either like I think that the gentleman that made the comment that I responded to kind of said it best and he's like he basically said, I hate that you had to use that kind of title for this content to get attention. He nails it. That's it right there. It's like I had to use a Clickbait title that got people to read in order for them to even read something that I thought was valuable enough to do a Clickbait title on? So they read it right? But again, my intention was that people read it. My intention isn't to make people angry and it's a dude, it's about a company, it's about zoom like what's the big deal, right? You know? So

I think one like we're moving towards just sort of this like skimming culture and content. That's what I'm really curious like what happens with podcasting as we come out of this pandemic because we're really just like people just want a quick hit and just want to skim and that's

it. I don't know, you know, I know my read time on it and I know how long it should take you to read it right? The read time is really high and so I don't know what to say. You know, the bounce rate is pretty low, the read time is pretty high. So then it's really just the people who don't read it that have something to say about it and they're not getting the value. But for me it's like, it's not worth my time if that sentiment is just gonna keep happening right? And I'm gonna have to like make the titles more sensational in order to get even anybody to pay attention to it and read it and part of it is like people write titles and don't back up what they wrote in the content. That is not what I did, right? I wrote a title based on the fact that I backed it up in the content, I have not seen, I've seen like maybe a few people go at it in a reasonable way,

right? Where they're like, okay, this is these are the arguments, but really it's not anyone to the depth that I would have expected if you want to disagree with it. And so at that point it's like, okay, where do I put, what, what style of content should I be creating in order to basically achieve my own goals with the content? Right. And this kind of content doesn't achieve the goal I want. Like it used to which is really just to educate people about the way to do this type of research, the way to do this type of analysis on a business and that none of that. I have gotten like I've gotten a bunch of that, but I haven't gotten it the way that I would have liked for this exact content. So it's almost like the narrative the title took over the content versus the substance of the content itself, which is I think to your point about kind of where we're at right now. So I'd rather write something where like if it's got a title like that or you know, appears to be Clickbait e or whatever it has some other purpose than trying to educate people in the way that I used to,

one thing that you mentioned, I think it's really important to highlight two is the fact that they can also be the case where like the people who are the loudest are just like yelling, but there's actually people reading and like, but they're just not saying anything. And like as a content creator, you like sometimes forget that. It's interesting to like I've been thinking or learning a lot about how the different like algorithms work and even the algorithms and all these platforms. What I realize is they value consistency more than the quality of the content. They also like would rather reward you for just saying something every week than actually like taking the time to produce something that's quality

that being said. Like what I found is like if it's great content, it will get lots of spread. Like that's not, it's not that big of a deal. It might not get as much reach as if, you know, you're consistent or something, but you generally like we're still humans sharing stuff that we think is compelling, right? Even if we're just skimming it because sometimes like you get an impression of the substance of something just by skimming it and then sharing it. So I think I think there's a, there's an interesting sort of study there to do that I'm not going to do and I hope somebody does someday around like how this has changed over time, we might realize it actually hasn't changed as much as we think it has, what really just happened is that there's more people on the internet

that are shouting last question, sort of like the mental health before we switch to more products stuff. Are there other as you sort of like, you're running and building your company's tips around self care that you practice that farmers can learn from?

Yeah, I think like, startups, whether you're working in one that's sort of early stage, even later stage sometimes these days or you started one or considering it, everyone has their own different sort of tactics for managing uncertainty and the feeling of uncertainty. And that's why, you know, the old adage of like, you know, it's like a roller coaster and this and that actually isn't. You're just trying to create something from nothing and and and the emotions are running wild because it's a look at it this way. If you were trained in school to work with uncertainty and learn how to deal with uncertainty building, creating certainty out of uncertainty, you probably wouldn't think it's a roller coaster because you would already be used to it, You wouldn't even have that like, framework and mental model about it.

So, I mean, instantly when you think about it like that, you're like, oh, why is it a roller coaster for me right now then because you're just not used to it. So the only advice that really has freaking get used to it and get, you know, like get over it too because that's how what's gonna move your business forward is when you get over the fact that this is an emotional roller coaster or every day, like I have, like up and down emotions and I'm not saying I'm over it. I'm just saying that like, just get over it, like, get used to it. Like,

embrace it. Like, learn to love it or please go do something else because you shouldn't be doing it then and that's fine. Like, like not, I don't think people should start companies to be honest with you. I think there are great reasons to start a company. I wish more people would start a company, but I do not think people should start companies for their own mental health. We're not taught, we don't grow up learning how to do that. That's not what we're taught in school. That's not what like, you know, our parents teach us most parents, even if they started their own things by the time they have kids and all this other stuff like things are just different for them,

but you're even then you're not teaching your kids how to do that because they are taught in school almost the exact opposite of that. They're taught how to deal with certainty and that's not the world we live in anymore because a lot of the problems that people had that were essential to life, we don't have anymore. And so we make all these fake problems up out of this need for, like, just like making things feel like they're stable and now more than ever with the times that we're in and all the uncertainty in the world between the virus and protests across the globe and who knows when the third thing is gonna hit, you know, that causes even more havoc on our, on our minds and causes us to do all kinds of things that we never imagined. Like I think the average person is having to deal with uncertainty the way a founder at least mentally deals with uncertainty.

Yeah, I think what you said on like there's this sort of like that like everyone should start a business. I agree. I think it's unless you're compelled to do it, most people shouldn't.

Yeah, there's side gate just freelancing, there's all that. I mean like you could do all that. I'm not here to judge that, right? And like I said, I would love for more companies to be started. I think it's a great thing that being said, like I don't I don't think everyone should do it. I don't think it's something it's something you want to do if you if you if you find a way to thrive in that uncertainty, if you find a way to manage it otherwise you're gonna drive yourself crazy every day. I don't wish that upon

anybody. I agree. So one of my favorite quotes is from Black Master talks about how like if you're trying to solve any problem, you have to start with the universe. I think it's sort of like my opposite of that is like you have to start with the person, which is why we spend so much time on, like you like learning about that and self awareness, switch gears to like more around like product development. Because really like one of the things that you're known for is creating frameworks for making amazing products. I was listening to a different talk that you did when you talked about jozef II and how like when you started, like it was like a series of like field experiments and now you've gotten to the point where you said like, you know exactly what people do to find documents online, which is a use case you're solving for. So what is sort of like as a framework, like what does that process look like for you when you start to develop a product?

There's two ways, just, just going back to the start of this convo, right? There's sort of the Pirates way and there's explorers way and so the pirates way,

let's go with the explorers

way. Sure. I think if you're exploring like your you tend to be somebody full of ideas and you tend to have ideas of like what new things need to exist in the world these days, there's barely any new things. So how do you figure that out? Right? Like, like really like legit, like you can look on product hunt for any idea, you end up having, you'll probably find something similar really quickly so that, that sort of takes away almost the wind from your sails if you're really focused on being unique, so kind of got to get over that, I think that's one thing and the second thing is like, what I truly believe is like any idea is just some hypothetical solution to a problem and so then it's, it's just about basically spending time to figure out if your solution to the problem is the right problem to solve first of all. So,

so that means you need to figure out what problem are you trying to solve with that solution and then just spend all your time figuring out what the best solution is for the problems that you discover that people have. So the combination there is, it's like mapping solutions to really painful problems and they could be solutions that you believe are right. And like the folks at base camp, if you have the afforded to like build stuff just for yourself, as long as you feel like there's a big enough market for that, that's one way to do it. I rarely see that work successfully in startup land as much as I see this idea of like spending time to understand other people's problems, even if like you think you have the problem so that you can understand if other people have that problem too and some folks like the folks at base camp are just really good at understanding almost intuitively that yes, other people have this problem too and enough other people were like we should waste our time building it, we should spend our time building it. So the thing that I would suggest to everybody, even if you are in in a pirate sort of mode is really make sure that like the problems you're solving are ones that people actually want solved. And more importantly than that. I think we've gone from a world of like building like things people want to absolutely focused on building things people absolutely need and that's because attention people's attention is lower than ever for anything. And so when you have it you need to grab it and and and provide as much value as you possibly can and you don't really do that by building something where there's like luke a lukewarm reception to it,

you do that by iterating, focusing and figuring out what is it that you can build that some amount of people love and how can you identify like what those problems are that those people have. It's not like I'm saying you build something for everybody, it's more what I'm saying is you have to identify two things. One the problem you're solving the problem and like how important it is to solve for people. So like is it a hair on fire problem is what a lot of people call it, Is it a painkiller? Not a vitamin is another way that people call it, and then the other aspect of it, which is often missed is who has that problem because there's many problems that people have, but not everyone has the same problems, so you need to really focus on the who behind the problem so that you can make sure like whatever you build ends up working for actual real people, not just some hypothetical audience, because it's just some generic analysis you did, or generic way to look at a problem. So I think we're in the world today because of how many people are online that it's more important than ever to really identify who has the problem, not just what the problem is, even if you're like in a really large market or even if you're copying somebody, you're not gonna necessarily have the same audience as some as another sort of company and so you have to figure out what your audience is that matters.

And I think in that like the classic mistake is where people try and be like, my audience is everyone I want to build for everyone when you figure out sort of like who your core audiences are there questions that you found that are like super useful. They can ask them to get a better idea of like the problems they have or or sort of the intensity of the problems,

the key there is just stories, what you're trying to do is get stories about from people about the behaviors related to the product that you're trying to solve. So the reason we understand at f y I everything about how people find documents, because we asked them for stories. And when was the last time you found a document? When was the last time you tried to find the document? Just tell us about that. And they're like, oh yeah, yesterday I was looking for this document, I did this and this and this other thing, right? And once you get enough of those stories, you actually have a very good idea of the behaviors around sort of the category that you're going after. Uh and then you get to figure out how do I make their lives easier by what

I'm producing. So it's almost like not even like looking at their words of like what they're saying, the problem is it's watching what they're doing and then as an explorer trying to improve that.

Yeah. And listening to their stories, because oftentimes you can't watch what they're doing necessarily, but you can, you can listen to their stories, you can get them to tell you the story instead of just tell you the problem. So if they say, hey, my number one problem with documents is finding them, then your simple way to think about it is tell me more. Then they tell you a bunch more Blah, Blah, Blah. And in that process, what you're trying to get is at least one story from each person you talk to ideally you're getting 3-5 stories from those people about like related to the problem that they said themselves. Because the thing is if they say there's a problem, there's always a story behind

it. And so like let's say like you've collected like hundreds of stories, what do you do as a process? But that is it more qualitative or quantitative or

I think it's a combination, right? If you have that many stories, you can quantitatively, you know, kind of put together how many people said the same thing, You can then also realistically put together like the idea of all the different stories and all the different ways people are trying to solve the problem, you're going after now and then basically analyzing that and then and then after that, and only after you've sort of categorized that, you can start thinking about solutions. Because the thing is if people, like people would say, oh I can't find the latest version of documents, there are a lot of possible implied solutions in that statement itself, most of them are just not very effective at f y I we found the effective one that actually has nothing to do with versioning. It has everything to do with us understanding the solution we came up with has everything to do with us understanding why they're looking for that version of the document and what they do to determine if that's the right version or not. Right?

So like okay, you can't find the right version. So a simple answer would be, oh, just tag add tags to the product, add a folder that says final version. The problem with that, the behavioral problem we discovered with that is that people are not good at keeping their folders up to date the second you have more than one person trying to create final versions of things. That whole system breaks unless everyone is following the rules. So then you need rules. Well how you gonna get everyone to follow the rules, how you get everyone to follow the same titling schema or tagging schema just not possible. Right? And then you end up having what I call a custodian problem. Someone in the organization or someone who you're working with ends up being the custodian. They might even be the cop,

right? So when we thought about it like that, we're like, well something's just wrong right with with these solutions that exist to that problem. And one other lens we usually take on product work is are we causing the customer to do more work or not? And we don't really want to cause the customer to do anywhere in our business at least. So we figured out and you'll have to like use a product or whoever's listening to have to use the product to figure out how we solved it, it might not even be obvious to you how we solved it. But the solution came from the fact that we learned everything we possibly could about how people were solving that one singular problem with finding documents, which is when they want the latest version. And it turns out that like when they want the latest version, the titles are not helpful. What ends up being helpful. It has to do with like how often the document has changed. Is that the latest like has this been document been changed the late, is that the latest version of the document and the latest version is based on recently?

So it's like was that the last one modified out of this list, things like that. And that has that doesn't take any work from them except us as a tool recognizing that that's how they do it and then supporting their ability to basically scan the listing of documents for what they're looking for. And that that was something that, you know, even when we look at all these other tools that are out there, whether they're new ones or like, you know, old ones, like the document tools themselves, they don't show the same data we do when you look at a document,

you know, one thing I love doing it this morning and and people should really just go check it out was that you show the recent collaborators and I was like, that makes so much sense because I always like, remember who I'm working on a document and like no other product shows

that Yeah, none. And it's because we discovered that's the way to solve the many different problems that we heard not the one problem. So that's why when you asked me like, how do you take that research and those stories? It's like, well, you can't just take a single story or even a single type of story that you heard about someone's behavior or people's behavior and say, we're gonna go solve it. You kind of have to feed your brain with all the stories and analyze them. And then just like kind of sit on it and be like, well brainstorm what solutions solve the most amount of problems at once. And that's how you actually build out a whole interface and a new product experience that doesn't exist. I mean, you just mentioned a key part of our product that like you have to get in there to see it and understand it. If I show it to you, this is one of the other problems with like new products in the market that haven't existed before. If I show it to you, you still might not get it,

you

might still look like why do they do that? But you just said it better than I could you. Like all my recent collaborators are here. That's like natural because I want to click on them and then I want to see all the stuff I have in common with them. And you know why we did that? Because what we kept hearing is like when I want to find a document and I'm struggling, I go ask somebody

where the document is. That that's true actually. Yeah.

And then if you dig deeper, we didn't just stop there. We dug deeper and said like, well, who are you asking? Why are you asking that person and not somebody else and all that kind of stuff? And that led to kind of the experience

we created. It's actually interesting now that you mention that how many times in the last few weeks I've been collaborating with people on zoom. And the first thing is, oh, can you send me a link to the document that we're going to work on? So this is a tangential question. I think like that really fits in. Um so I asked the some of the people in on deck, which we'll talk about for questions for you and this is from beneath. And I really like this question and it's, it's a little long. You've got a pretty strong product band. How much of what you work on instinct intuition and experience influenced. Um which is like, I want X to exist in the world versus a well defined problem. Pain point customers tell you it would appear everyone should do the ladder. But product folk off often index on the former when picking problems and ideas and sales on the ladder.

I just go back to what I said earlier, which is like every idea, every solution is a hypothetical idea or solution meant to solve a problem that somebody else have right? And that's it. And if you can internalize that, that should answer the question because it's like, I think it's neither. So if I have an intuition on a solution, I think I'm doing it wrong if I have an intuition on a problem and then I use my creativity at that point of solving the problem. That's where the rubber meets the road. So any product person who is going on intuition is completely misguided about how some of those famous inventors came up with solutions to their problems. Like look at like even like Nicola Tesla and thomas, Edison and all these people, all of the solutions they've come up with are based on lots loads and loads of experimentation and iteration and back then it was experimentation and iteration and even like is this even possible? Right? Like, like self driving cars right now,

right? Like what aspects like one by one solving problems that are in the nitty gritty of it. Like can you detect pedestrian, blah, blah, blah, right? Like, and you're just one by one solving those problems. I think all product development like that. And so what happens is if you have product folks who think they're going on intuition, they're actually just really good and especially if they're successful at it. They're just really good at intuitively knowing the problems, not intuitively knowing the solutions. That's the thing. Like even look at like I think a brilliant case study, would you go to hey dot com and just study how they talk about the problems they solve for you with their novel solution and you'll you'll kind of get what I mean because they are classic. Like we're solving our own problems and we think enough other people are gonna have this problem and if if they don't then we'll tweak the whole thing. We don't care right.

It's almost like it's not an either or it's a sequential thing where you start with the problem and then it's the intuition that comes into

play. Yeah. You save your creativity for the solution. Don't push your creativity on the problems because that that's what a lot of people do. They mix up problem and solution. That's why I let that question even exists and is relevant because there's just a lot of myths around this. Like there's like the stupid myth that like Apple doesn't do any customer research. That's the furthest thing from the truth. We just don't know or hear about the research they do. In fact we are all the guinea pigs. Think about the first iphone without any apps. Think about steve jobs saying no, no way. Hell no, no apps what

where we at now now we're at D. H. H. Outing at them for taking the tax on the apps. Another tangential question from american. I love his regular when it comes to product here is to know how he deals with confirmation bias when it comes to user research. Especially because of all the amount of research that you do.

Lots of user testing. Lots of prototyping before building products. So it's just basically measure twice cut once. One of our values that our company probably just should be that because in most of the things we do we're measuring twice, cutting once. So what that basically means is like if you want to address confirmation bias then find many different data points to prove out your bias right? One way or another that's one another way is like if you're focused on stories from people and you talk to enough people there's no bias there. It's what people are saying. It's what people are saying about their experience. If you dive in deep you find the real ways that you should be solving problems. It's just by diving in deep right? And making sure that confirmation bias isn't even like a problem. Right? I appreciate the question. I think like that happens when you don't have enough information to be convicted or you don't have enough experience or intuition to be convicted but if you're gonna go on the intuition which I think is totally reasonable. You want to make sure it's informed enough.

I also hear like one of things I hear and that was like, I think like, I don't know, I'm curious how much of this just sort of like comes from this, like maybe like fear that people have in terms of like talking to people because I think a lot of times now people just don't go talk to users enough remember watching an interview, but the ceo of Wealthfront and like they were they were about to make this like product change and he's an established entrepreneurs just like picked up the phone and started calling customers and talking to them. Why do you think a lot of founders don't

do that? They don't know any better. That's it. Still no any better. If you don't know now, you know, just go do it. Like it's a muscle, it's something you have to learn. I mean think about steve jobs, answering support emails right? When people are answering emails, when people email him, no matter what they're about and explaining his, you know what he thinks, right? Like that's the only way to do this is figure out how to get good at that.

Like, there's no other option. I'm sorry, like people not doing it is like an age old problem, this is not new by now. I don't think you should. I don't think there's any excuses just with stories like even I think it was Andy Radcliffe who did that at Wealthfront. Yeah, I mean he's like pretty like well known and veteran sort of investor before he took over the company. Um and like of course he's going to do that. Why wouldn't you do that? Isn't that the only way to really figure out whether whatever you're thinking is right or wrong? So you talk to people about it right? You talk to the people that matter, the people that are going to use your product already using it. Yeah, it just, it becomes this almost like absurd obvious thing at some point for you if you've sort of built enough stuff or if you've read enough stuff about

building stuff. I think like if people are listening, like if that's the one thing they take away from this, we just like go talk to your listeners if you have a podcast or customers, that's enough. Last week I spent a little time on just gonna know like how important issues like the importance of community. So we met 10 years ago at some of our where we just met for coffee and I've seen you do that for you probably met like thousands of founders just there. Right? So a few questions like one, like I'm just like why you do that?

I don't do it anymore. I did it at a time when I don't think there was as much information about starting companies on the internet And my time was worthy of being spent that way. You know, now, it's like, I don't want to be mean about it, but like, a lot of the things that people ask about, you can google and find in a way that you couldn't 10 years ago, 15 years ago, whatever. And so my time talking to a founder is both less valuable to me because it's valuable to me if I can help somebody in a way that they can't get helped pretty much any other way. That's how I think about it. Or for them, they don't value my time in the same way, either because of the same thing and so it's just not worth it anymore. And I just did it when I thought that was a way I could be really helpful these days getting on a podcast,

like, this is probably way more impactful than than a one on one conversation with the founder, right? And I'm saying that because it's not just about the impact I have on them, it's more about what I think they should be doing, which is not talking to me, right? Even though I'm sure I can add value to anyone that comes to me because I've always been like that. I don't think it's best use of their time, right? Like, this is like, even when people like someone DM me today and they're like, do you? So and so product I'm like, yeah,

I do, and then ask me a bunch of other questions about it. Like, I'm building a similar product and I'm like, cool, so you wanna check it out? I'm like sure now, like he's like, hey, go do this and do this thing and I'm gonna have to message him back like I can't do that much work. And so like it's like, go ask someone who's actually gonna be a user of your product, not me. Because like my opinion as a product person, all that. The number one feedback I'll give someone if they tell me try my product or anything is straight up.

Like go talk to someone that's gonna use it cause that's not me right and go talk to them. Like don't talk to me about it. I'm not gonna be helpful. You don't want to hear what I have to say everything I have to say. You can find by googling, you want to know how to talk to your customers, google it. Maybe you'll find one of my pieces of content or someone I know or whatever. Maybe you won't write, it doesn't matter. You can find that information yourself. It's not even, don't bother me. It's more like use your don't waste your time. Use your time in a more valuable way, you know? Because that's what I'm doing,

Just do some sort of work before to show that you've actually done something before just asking. Yeah,

but even then I'm likely to send you a link to something, you know, because like you shouldn't, you really shouldn't be asking me, it's all out there, even if you did your homework, it's unlikely that I can add value beyond what you can find yourself.

If you look at all those conversations you had, and he was like, what do you wish for things? Like, because I'm sure that a lot of the questions were like very common, right? Like the same sort of questions, what's something that you wish founders had actually asked

you about more? My usual thing is like a lot of founders asked me about what I did and they used to do that and I have talked about this a bunch, but you know, just don't ask me about what I did, Tell me about what your situation is. Give me the context and then what you really want for me is how would I think about the situation you're in? Not what did I do when I was in that situation? Because whatever I did when I was in that situation is not what you're gonna need, that's not, it's not gonna help you. But everyone starts, well not everyone, the majority of people start with, oh, when you were raising money, how'd you do it? Well,

when I was raising money, it was a long time ago when I was raising money, it was me, wasn't you for whatever, whatever that means, right? So then I was I would I would then usually respond with like, well like, what's going on with you, are you thinking of raising money, you know? And then they'd snap out of it, you know out of the mode that I don't want them in and then they start talking about themselves because that's what I care about. I don't if I'm meeting with somebody in the whole context is I'm offering my time for that for giving them advice. Were giving them thoughts like they should fully focus on like what their context is because they really want to know how I think about their problems. They don't really want to know about how I solve my problems

because it's so context dependent,

that's the only thing that's really like increased which is everything's become more context dependent. And I was on that back then and I'm still on that. And even to the point of like like I said if someone asked me for advice these days, like I really just want to tell most people just google it like just google it. Like you're wasting your time by asking me that's slower than you googling it and finding the best answer for you. And I think the world has just changed in that in that right? Right? And like the other problem with it now is like there's so much advice and information out there with so many different perspectives which I think is beautiful whatever I say at this point, like it might not resonate with you or you might come back and tell me like the worst is like when I say something they're like oh yeah so and so said that in so and so video or so and so said that to me like the other day and I'm like why did you ask me the question then? Right? Like like straight up why do you ask me the question? You can get many different answers like online if you just look and apparently already have. So why do you ask me to? I think you already have your answer.

What do you think that is

a confirmation that they want to make sure they're making the right decision. It's only it's purely they want to make sure they're making the right decision. And so when I do that I never go to somebody and say oh that's what so and so told me to or oh that's what I watched the video because it's not valuable in the conversation one bit. It's valuable to confirm the person that's asking the thing. It's making the right decision for them but it's not valuable. It's not useful. So if I'm asking multiple people about the same thing, I'm likely to get similar answers. But why am I doing it for me? I'm doing it because I want all the perspectives so I can make a much more informed decision. But does that mean that every time I meet with someone I tell them about all the other answers I got no. Because it's not useful to anyone in my mind. Am I thinking that? Yes. Am I logging it? Yeah. Am I taking notes and trying to figure out where the directional advice is?

Absolutely. But to each individual, it's a disservice to them to tell them about what someone else says. Unless it's relevant in helping them like help you. So, it is relevant when you say, look, this is my favorite convo is actually someone comes to me like, like I'm getting conflicting advice. That's like I wish more people would come at me like that because I mean all right, let me tell you how to think about this conflicting advice you're getting And then they have a framework. They have a framework on how to deal with conflicting advice. Right? So, that's what I wish more people would come to come to me with which is like if they want to tell me about what other people have said, Tell me first. Don't wait till I tell you what I think. Tell me you're getting conflicting advice. I'd rather help you with you getting conflicting advice than repeat something

you've already heard. Feel like that should be in a podcast in itself with like people coming to you with these and then you're offering the framework to think about that because then people actually

learn from it. That's where that's where I found most people learn the most is when like, people come to me and say I'm getting conflicting advice. I'm really good at helping people with that and getting them an answer. That makes sense for them because conflicting advice I think is the bane of our existence on the internet these days.

That's really interesting that you also think about like that's where you're the most useful interesting question on that actually. Um what are things people can do to be able to make you be more helpful to them? Like, like

I'll tell you the blunt truth right now, I don't want to be helpful to anyone else. I really don't. That's not. I used to wake up every day and think about that. I don't have any interest in being helpful to anybody else at this point in that way. So the way I want to be helpful to people is just by being an example of what I am, who I am. And I think that's what I've learned and involved into on that is like that's how I can be most helpful. The way I do that these days is by like getting on things like this that have much more like longevity than a one on one conversation. So if you want a one on one conversation with me, it's rare. It's rare now that you're actually gonna get it unless I already know you or you give me a really compelling reason. And it's not it's not that I don't want to help you. It's that I don't wake up every day trying to think about that. I used to wake up every day and think about it because it was what I was doing at the time right now. I'm doing something else.

I'm trying to build my own business and me helping another startup founder has very low value for me, it might have high value in the world and that's totally cool. I used to do that a lot. That's one reason, like, you know, I am where I am in my life, so it's not that it's not valuable, but it's not my time to do that anymore. And so I think like, I love your question, but I'm not trying to help you like that, that's the bottom line, right? I mean if you want my help, like listen to this kind of stuff I talk about almost every podcast.

I do I say something very different than the last one regardless of if someone asked me the same question or not, in fact, this is a real, I think twist for people, but it's like if we had this conversation an hour earlier, six hours earlier, six hours later, one month from now. Tomorrow, it would be very different because I don't have anything prepared. You even asked me like, what should we talk about? You know, and you had some very good ways of trying to get that out of me and my response didn't really answer your questions even though I was trying to be nice to you and I was like, dude, like just ask me whatever the heck you want.

I think it answered the question in terms of the main thing I look for and that is I want to make sure the conversation is different. So when you talk about no,

no, no, no complaints, it was the best is the best thing you could have done. I have no complaints about it. I'm just saying like for me particularly, I have very little agenda when I get on this stuff and I just want to be as valuable as I can be to the audience, just like I would if I met you one on one, but if I meet you one on one, my ideas are only spreading to you and whoever you share them with. If you feel like sharing them and sure that might be a more intimate connection with you, I might build up a friendship with you, like we have and things like that, that being said, it's not what I'm into right now, I'm not trying to make more friends in that way. I'm happy to help people,

but it has to be extremely convenient to me, like, like this is right, and that's why I keep doing it because I enjoy it, but I don't enjoy the one on one Help anymore. And part of the reason is what we already described right? There's a lot of content out there more than ever. There are people, I don't I don't think anyone smarter than anyone else by the way, I was a whole another concept for me, like I don't even know what that means and I'm sure Ellen musk is smarter than most of us in that construct. But in the construct of like people smarter than me have ship to say about it or whatever, nah, it's just like there's so much information on the internet, you just need to figure out what resonates with you and go after that kind of information, right?

And like that's it. And so talking to an individual whether they're me Elon musk, Jeff Bezos, whoever the heck it is about your business and your problems is only marginally useful to you. Compared to the amount of variation of ideas you can get just by googling

things. But by the way, the last like 10 minutes people just re listen to that, they will get better at how to ask. I think it is what you said, a lot of it is about confirmation. I remember that time. Last question. Um I was like, we're recording this in the middle of a pandemic and like, like you said we're going,

it's not just the pandemic. There's there's rioting, there's protesters, there's like I just wanna be clear like if it was just a pandemic

that would be different.

We we we've got like two major extreme surprises in the world and surprises meaning things that are causing people to to think different, do different things stand up for themselves in different ways. Speak up be at home, right? So I just want to clarify just real quick like this is unheard of, we're dealing with multiple things at once in a way that globally we're dealing with them. I mean I am blown away about the global protests and that this is this is now global. Not because I think it's not right not because I think that like you know it shouldn't be happening, it's because it's freaking global. So we have two things that are happening that are global right now anyway, I'll stop with that but I just wanted to double down on that before you go into whatever you're gonna

get into. I agree that actually makes a question better like because usually I always like what's next for you? Yeah I think like even like defining what everything

I wouldn't even be able to tell you even outside of these circumstances.

So what do you think about the future? So like where

do we go from here? Yeah. So what I said earlier and how I thought about this in the early days of the pandemic before kind of things got even more I would say worse and more uncertain is like I was going a day at a time one day at a time then I was able to go a week at a time and I got to a month at a time and then guess what happened back to a day

at a time.

So I think, I think during uncertainty the best thing you can do is change your cadence of decision making to be shorter. So like at some point during the early pandemic and when shelter in place started getting kicked in, we started learning about this, it was literally an hour at a time because you were just inundated with the news with the early sort of videos coming out and I say videos now and communications and what people are thinking and saying about sort of the, you know, black lives Matter movement and kind of what's going on in the world around all of that. It was an hour at a time and then when you can breathe a little bit more so to speak because there's a little more certainty you go a day at a time and again, I went from those hours for the first few days of the pandemic, two days at a time and then in a few weeks I got to okay a week at a time and then I barely got to a month at a time like, okay, I can plan out about a month things feel like, you know, we understand the uncertainty, I wouldn't say we can manage it or certain, but we understand it and we're kind of used to something, the next thing happened,

right? You kind of thrown back into it or at least I was, and I see everyone else being thrown back into and there's another thing that's top of mind and I think the sad part of this in a lot of ways for me was like the thing that we just cared about that not we got over, but we got to have a little bit of breathing room, it's still there. And then there's this other thing, right? Depending on what you believe, it's either going to get worse and I don't know right like that, then you have this. So now all of a sudden at this exact point in time that we're talking, you know, I'm sure this will be released later. But the point in time we're talking, we've got two things going on, both of them are pretty high up on the list of like attention and newsworthy,

so to speak, by the news outlets. I mean that like I'm back to like a data time and if something changes, it'll be an hour at a time. I don't think we're going back to for me a week at a time or a month at a time for quite some time because there's no, some of the, some of the things that are happening in the world today are sort of compounding on each other and then you have the compounding of things that are unrelated like the whole, but then they become related, right? So all these protests and rioting and people collecting together in theory is going to exacerbate sort of the pandemic situation and the spread of it in theory, right? And it doesn't matter what you believe. You know like it doesn't matter what I believe or what anyone is listening

will

believe. This is just what happened. Right? This is factual the facts. I know are we were we were supposed to stay at hope and then something happened that caused us all not to stay at home and then now we have to what's gonna happen we probably have to stay at home again is the likely scenario because we did it before and we did it for the same reasons that we now are going to have to do it again. Which is we were dense right? And we were we were in populated areas and then and then you have the whole thing about masks and gloves and you know, all the research and data and then this drug and that drug. I mean how could you even be able to decide what's gonna happen next week for you and you can't,

yep. And I think connecting sort of like two things that we talked about before which is the piece on mental health and what you were saying about being an example. I think you just sharing that is so important because I think we're in a culture where like founders are expected to kind of like, like everything good, all this right? Like, like hearing like someone like you like you. Like I'm taking data time. I think that in itself will be so useful for founders just as an example.

Yeah, everything's not good. Everything's messed up and there's more uncertainty for your startup or whatever you're doing than ever in your companies, even if you're not a startup and that's where we're at. So in a way like founders and folks who kind of are in to like managing uncertainty and having to live with it are definitely better suited at this moment for leading teams and like helping other people in whatever ways they can. So that's that's

where we're at. Yeah, I think that's the perfect place to end. Thanks for the wide ranging conversation and I love how we always go meta,

that's what you wanted. You got what you wanted.

Thank you.

My pleasure.

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