A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:37:32 · Pablo Srugo, Astro Teller
[00:37:32] S2: Not even do it, by the way, just have a very clear, sharp story about it. [00:37:34] S0: Tell a really clear story about it and that seems like, yeah, sure, that seems fair. You're not asking me to have something in manufacturing and then a year later. We sit down and talk, and you don't have that story. Doesn't mean we have to kill the project, but the default is we're going to kill the project. So then I say to you, if you're working on this, look, I know you're excited about it, Pablo. I want to make the clean water for the world, too. But we pre agreed that this was kind of the monkey. You don't have a really good answer to this. Why would we continue it in the absence of that really good answer? What else have you learned that makes this worth us taking another shot at it? [00:38:12] S2: And that decision, by the way. Because I think that's important, is you and them agree, or just you have the veto right there. What is that structure like?
00:38:12 · Pablo Srugo, Astro Teller
[00:38:12] S2: And that decision, by the way. Because I think that's important, is you and them agree, or just you have the veto right there. What is that structure like? [00:38:19] S0: You'd be surprised, I have had to insist. I don't make up the kill criteria. I want you to make the kill criteria because I want you to own it, right? If you think that you're working on the teleporter and fundamentally you want the teleporter to win more badly than you want to be a great Xer, card counter of innovation. You and I are not on the same team, and then I'll probably kill the teleporter just on the basis of you as the lead not being on the same team with me. Once we agree that it's more important to find the truth than for you to keep the teleporter alive. You tell me, I want the truth, and so do you. We're trying to figure out how to maximize goodness that we can create for the world over the next one or two decades. Is this really that? Tell me a story. Tell me, get specific and if you do it right, which at least to some extent I think we have at X. There's a microcosm that makes it kind of uncomfortable to be salesy and partisan on the behalf of the thing that you're locally trying to work on. Because everyone else here just would think that was gross. But that's an expectation that you have to wire into the culture and constantly reinforce because that's not how the rest of the world works. [00:39:33] S2: And is that, you mentioned a year. Is that the standard or sometimes it's like a month? That kill criteria framework.
00:39:33 · Pablo Srugo, Astro Teller
[00:39:33] S2: And is that, you mentioned a year. Is that the standard or sometimes it's like a month? That kill criteria framework. [00:39:39] S0: Yeah, I mean there's a group here working on something super unlikely to work. Absolutely would change the world if it did, and they said, hey, we think we could try this in six months for like $100,000. And I said, you know what, the reward risk ratio here is good. And those two people who started this new project, are the two people who by themselves killed off the fusion project. They made a two hundred and fifty page slide deck about why we should close it down. I didn't do that, and so then they built their credibility that they're intellectually honest. So when they came with this pretty crazy sounding idea, I said, okay. Now, that was nine months ago. Project's not dead. After six months, we were starting to get some data. Shocker, it was inconclusive. Could be really good. We're still chasing it. It'll probably be a year and $200,000 till we really learn on that one. But that's okay. That's still pretty cheap if it's really a Waymo, Google Brain size thing. If it happens to work out, and of course, there would be a decade of work afterwards if it did work out. It's not like we would be done. But that's not the question. The question is, how much of the risk can you burn down cheaply? [00:40:50] S2: And this is a bit of an outside question, but I'm curious if you have any thoughts about it. Are people working in person? Are they working remote? Do you find that makes a difference to the speed of execution on these ideas?
00:40:50 · Pablo Srugo, Astro Teller
[00:40:50] S2: And this is a bit of an outside question, but I'm curious if you have any thoughts about it. Are people working in person? Are they working remote? Do you find that makes a difference to the speed of execution on these ideas? [00:41:00] S0: I try to be really open minded about a lot of things. So what I've said to Xers is, I just want us to be efficient. But this is a creativity factory, even more than it's a technology factory and so far, I've seen no evidence that we can be at our creative best when we're remote from each other. I think people work somewhat less hard, but they also work in much more siloed ways and creativity is usually not about my idea or your idea. It's about the sparks that happen when our ideas clash. That's where the real value is and our ideas won't clash effectively when we're all just typing in our bedrooms. So, of course, every Xer here will occasionally take some time at home. If you have heads down things you need to do, no reason to do a commute. But Xers spend the bulk of their time here, and I think that's pretty critical. Plus, it's just more fun. Commutes suck, but being together is more fun. I think it still nets to the positive, if you have a great work environment. [00:42:00] S2: This is the Product Market Fit Show. So I'll maybe end it and we can talk a little bit about this, especially because you've seen so many ideas. What is Product Market Fit to you? You mentioned moonshot market fit. So maybe talk about that, but what does real pull for an idea look like to you?
00:42:15 · Astro Teller
[00:42:15] S0: I think some people think of Product Market Fit as, are people paying me for it? That's a super low bar. Are the right kind of people paying me for it? That's a slightly higher bar. Are they paying me more for it than it costs for me to make the thing? That's a slightly higher bar. How expensive is it for me to find these people and talk them into buying it, as opposed to their coming and finding me? Where are we on the spectrum from hard push to easy pull? And that stuff matters, but if you're trying to live to fight another day. Maybe that basket of things is mostly it. There's some other stuff in product, like how easy is it for a distributor to explain this to somebody when you're not there? That's pretty important in a real finished product. But at X, we're focused more on things like, what are the acupressure points in the industry? Or if, for example, we have a moonshot for the electric grid. But you cannot make a fake little grid in your lab and learn anything. And you can't start by going to these grid operators and saying, give me all your data, I'm going to do a little thing for you. This is a national security thing for every country in the world. They're just not going to do it. We spent five years doing things that would help us deeply understand their problems. So that we could start helping them and the first couple of things we did weren't even the moonshot. It was just getting a rapport going so that we could, with the grid operators of the world, start to move their grid operations and planning, and optimization into the 21st century. But we put in five, six years of work that was not product focused but looked a little bit like product focus but it wasn't Product Market Fit. Because that's not what, we were actually trying to fit with the partners so that we could get into a rhythm with them. So that we could then build things that would solve their problems. That's an example of what feels like moonshot market fit to us. But feels much more expansive and complicated than just, did we make something people want? Do they pay enough for it? Are they pulling it from us? That feels like there's a danger in thinking in that somewhat more narrow way that maybe not everybody thinks. But if I ask you to get to the moon, and you show me that you're a foot closer to the moon every day, not interesting.
00:44:38 · Astro Teller, Pablo Srugo
There's probably a ladder to the moon and I worry that there's a bunch of Product Market Fit that is so siloed. It's just building a ladder to the moon. You might build a pretty tall ladder, but you're not going to get to the moon that way. [00:44:53] S2: So does that come down to finding the biggest part of the problem or something? I'm trying to maybe get more granularity on that. Is that how you think about it?