You need 2 types of people to keep early-stage startups from stagnating:
- someone who’ll shamelessly sell the product before it’s fully ready to be sold
- someone who’s embarrassed by this and will push to improve the product faster
Figma acquisition shows how hard it is to turn money into software. You'd think for $20B you could build something as good as Figma yourself, but you can't. Software is art.
My favorite part of this practice is the last question is “What are we doing wrong?”, followed by a prod similar to “No, really. Something is broken. What is the most broken thing you’ve seen?”
Bugs get filed in substantially real time where appropriate.
Or take HEY. HEY has tens of thousands of paying customers. For us that's a win. For Google/Gmail it would be a huge failure. They need a whole lot more to make something worth it. We need a whole lot less to make it a spectacular success. HEY has tens of thousands of users. Gmail has a billion. So are we "losing" to Gmail? Or are HEY and Gmail... See more