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Back to Inside the AI Startup Making Customer Support 65% Cheaper, with Jesse Zhang.

When Does Office Politics Start?

Jesse Zhang says office politics starts as soon as there is a team. He has always been allergic to it, and at Decagon they try to stamp it out aggressively as soon as it appears. He hopes the company stays fairly apolitical, and when politics does show up they push back hard.

Someone who says they should own work another person already owns gets a direct question back: should they not worry about their own work, since there is already plenty to do? An early engineer came to him with feedback on a coworker based on something they saw and started telling the story. He stopped the engineer immediately and told him to go tell the person. The alternatives were for Zhang to deliver the message on the engineer's behalf, or for the engineer to sit on it and let it fester.

He does not think it is possible to avoid politics entirely. Sending the feedback straight to the coworker is how a complaint stays between the people involved instead of becoming a side channel leadership has to carry.

Grokipedia·Decagon

Transcript

Inside the AI Startup Making Customer Support 65% Cheaper ·

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More from this episode

  1. When Did Decagon's New Office Feel Too Big?Jesse Zhang felt Decagon's new office was too big the moment the team moved in.
  2. How Did Decagon Grow From 50 to 500 People?Jesse Zhang says Decagon went from roughly 50 or 60 people to 500 in about the last year, close to a 10x jump. A year ago the headcount was something like 50.
  3. Why Does Jesse Zhang Call Saturday Wife Day?Jesse Zhang keeps Saturday as wife day because he and his co-founder are in every day except Saturday, and that one day has to stay free of work.
  4. Why Is Zero to One Harder Than Scaling?Jesse Zhang says the zero-to-one phase is by far the hardest stage of a company, and he calls it awful.
  5. How Did Decagon Exit the Idea Maze in Three Weeks?Jesse Zhang says Decagon got out of the idea maze in roughly three weeks, maybe a bit longer.
  6. How Many People Have Left Decagon to Start Companies?Jesse Zhang says very few people have left Decagon, a few have gone to start their own companies, and even in a downturn it will still be pretty easy to start…
  7. How Does Decagon's AI Customer Support Work?Jesse Zhang says Decagon's customer support AI is built, tested, and monitored inside the product, so the customer owns the results and the process.
  8. Should I Know My Co-founder for Five Years?Jesse Zhang says wanting the same things out of life matters more than knowing a co-founder for five years.
  9. Can 200 People Eat Dinner Together?Jesse Zhang says a team of 200 people cannot eat dinner together anymore. Catering has one clear value: everyone eats at the same time.

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